Dev Diary – Temporal Hijinks Patch – Part 1
Greetings, fellow Sonatians!
We can barely contain our excitement for the upcoming Universe Reset! Brace yourselves for an array of incredible updates and features heading your way with the upcoming patch. Here’s just a taste of what’s to come:
After DGing received a Perilous Space expansion recently, we wanted to continue that trend and add another expansion into a familiar space. Kalthi Depths DGs are finally returning, and have been given a facelift, making them much more interesting than before!
There are 10 new DG bosses to fight and farm — enjoy 5 new ship blueprints alongside plenty of other new items to find. 11 variants of mob guards, some of which are brand new, some of which will be souped up versions of familiar foes from Perilous Space. These DGs have been tuned to be fairly difficult with rewards to match whether you’re farming it solo or together. This expansion even comes with brand new Platinum level Strontium-90 missions, making token acquisition scale into the late game.
The dev team have been in discussions about drop rates across Star Sonata for a few months now. Enkelin developed a tool that allows us to see the real time investment required to receive drops of specific rarities. Using this tool we’ve gone through many popular endgame zones and applied these rates to them as we can.
Empyrean, Ruined Sanctuary, Akuq’ba, Anomalous Passageway, Dragon’s Lair, Olympus, Zaphragi Emperor, and Bonnet have been adjusted so far, and more will be coming! This tool will allow us to make loot drops much more consistent going forward for newly introduced content zones as well.
Ruined Sanctuary has been given new drops including 3 new ships and many items alongside the previously mentioned loot buff.
This zone has also been made to be Star Sonata’s only duo (two player) instance, so you and a friend can go in and conquer these enemies together.
A few zones have been noticeably harder than they needed to be for a while now, and are being toned down to more appropriate levels for their target audiences.
These should be much more achievable now for aspiring players to finally be able to earn their own skills and loot, progressing naturally without relying on the help of much more powerful characters.
The AI empire HQs have been improved. There are now four unique and worthwhile galaxies that any wild space conqueror may want to look into taking next universe:
The idea behind this expansion to the AI empires was for these galaxies to each have a unique spin on what they offer. Instead of being generally good like an exotic galaxy, they specialize — being better than exotics in some areas but weaker at others
The Anatolian Expanse and the emperor system have been a hotly debated topic in the community. Generally, we agree that our current system is missing some of the key things that made our historical emperor contest and the politics around it exciting.
Our end goal is to bring back some of that intrigue and a bit more risk in the emperor contest than what we have now. However, Rome was not built in a day. We still want to retain having an emperor system in the meantime while we work on this goal. To support this, we’ve lined up some changes for the current system to address some of the biggest pain points, including benefitting smaller groups rather than rewarding only the biggest teams taking part in the system.
Emperor contests will now only take place once a universe, around the middle or a month into each universe. This should address various concerns around the constant slog that was being created by multiple contests per universe.
There will be rewards taken from the emperor team’s spoils and given to the top ten teams with influence above a certain threshold. More will be given to the teams higher on the leaderboard at the time that emperor is awarded. To support this, all teams entering the expanse will require a team HQ somewhere in the universe to receive that reward.
There are some other slight tweaks regarding the layers layout that should improve the experience as well. We’ve made three new galaxies that connect the arms in the layer and removed the gate guards and static turrets to make moving around the layer not unnecessarily cumbersome.
We hope these tweaks make engaging with the expanse clearer, more streamlined, and more rewarding for any pilots who are interested in a dynamic experience! Stay tuned in the future for greater iterations to how the Emperor’s Crown may be obtained!
We can barely contain our excitement for the upcoming Universe Reset! Brace yourselves for an array of incredible updates and features heading your way with the upcoming patch. Here’s just a taste of what’s to come:
Kalthi Depths DGs
After DGing received a Perilous Space expansion recently, we wanted to continue that trend and add another expansion into a familiar space. Kalthi Depths DGs are finally returning, and have been given a facelift, making them much more interesting than before!
There are 10 new DG bosses to fight and farm — enjoy 5 new ship blueprints alongside plenty of other new items to find. 11 variants of mob guards, some of which are brand new, some of which will be souped up versions of familiar foes from Perilous Space. These DGs have been tuned to be fairly difficult with rewards to match whether you’re farming it solo or together. This expansion even comes with brand new Platinum level Strontium-90 missions, making token acquisition scale into the late game.
New Loot Standards
The dev team have been in discussions about drop rates across Star Sonata for a few months now. Enkelin developed a tool that allows us to see the real time investment required to receive drops of specific rarities. Using this tool we’ve gone through many popular endgame zones and applied these rates to them as we can.
Empyrean, Ruined Sanctuary, Akuq’ba, Anomalous Passageway, Dragon’s Lair, Olympus, Zaphragi Emperor, and Bonnet have been adjusted so far, and more will be coming! This tool will allow us to make loot drops much more consistent going forward for newly introduced content zones as well.
Ruined Sanctuary Changes
Ruined Sanctuary has been given new drops including 3 new ships and many items alongside the previously mentioned loot buff.
This zone has also been made to be Star Sonata’s only duo (two player) instance, so you and a friend can go in and conquer these enemies together.
Skill Zone Rebalances
A few zones have been noticeably harder than they needed to be for a while now, and are being toned down to more appropriate levels for their target audiences.
Olympus has been rebalanced towards a medium-sized squad of tech 20 players.
Subspace Ubers and minibosses have been given the same treatment but for a squad of tech 21 players.
Empyreal Fleets and regular mobs have been toned down similarly for a squad of tech 22 players.
These should be much more achievable now for aspiring players to finally be able to earn their own skills and loot, progressing naturally without relying on the help of much more powerful characters.
AI Empire HQs
The AI empire HQs have been improved. There are now four unique and worthwhile galaxies that any wild space conqueror may want to look into taking next universe:
Scorpius, the mining galaxy.
Citadel, the tiered commodity galaxy and has centralized T0 extraction.
Paradise, the perfect colony galaxy.
Dorado has lots of T0s, but no metals!
The idea behind this expansion to the AI empires was for these galaxies to each have a unique spin on what they offer. Instead of being generally good like an exotic galaxy, they specialize — being better than exotics in some areas but weaker at others
Anatolian Expanse Tweaks
The Anatolian Expanse and the emperor system have been a hotly debated topic in the community. Generally, we agree that our current system is missing some of the key things that made our historical emperor contest and the politics around it exciting.
Our end goal is to bring back some of that intrigue and a bit more risk in the emperor contest than what we have now. However, Rome was not built in a day. We still want to retain having an emperor system in the meantime while we work on this goal. To support this, we’ve lined up some changes for the current system to address some of the biggest pain points, including benefitting smaller groups rather than rewarding only the biggest teams taking part in the system.
Emperor contests will now only take place once a universe, around the middle or a month into each universe. This should address various concerns around the constant slog that was being created by multiple contests per universe.
There will be rewards taken from the emperor team’s spoils and given to the top ten teams with influence above a certain threshold. More will be given to the teams higher on the leaderboard at the time that emperor is awarded. To support this, all teams entering the expanse will require a team HQ somewhere in the universe to receive that reward.
There are some other slight tweaks regarding the layers layout that should improve the experience as well. We’ve made three new galaxies that connect the arms in the layer and removed the gate guards and static turrets to make moving around the layer not unnecessarily cumbersome.
We hope these tweaks make engaging with the expanse clearer, more streamlined, and more rewarding for any pilots who are interested in a dynamic experience! Stay tuned in the future for greater iterations to how the Emperor’s Crown may be obtained!
