News about upcoming features - Mothership \ Mobile base focused gameplay

Hello! Sorry for no news from us for a long time. The game is not abandoned but in active development, as usual. We just reconsidering a lot of core features, game design elements and going to solve all of these issues which should be solved long time ago.

The biggest changes will be related to base building aspect and attempts to make learning curve much smoother.

We like base building, especially if base is moveable, because mobile base is cool.
So when we started development of Celestial Command we planned that at some point of gameplay, the player will be able to build huge ship which will act like mobile base, but this feature still not implemented and we are going to solve that with the next update.



Previously we had the next plan:

1. You start with simple small ships
   
2. You should build own space station within first hours of the gameplay
   
3. Somewhere after 10 hours of gameplay you will be able to build a capital ship and continue journey using it as a mobile base.
   

But turned out that such approach has a few problems:

1.
Construction of space station it is a complex task, it is not just a bunch of walls and door like in classic survival games. It is a large amount of different modules which should be built in specific combination and even positions.
When player starts the game first time he almost immediately encounter with such a complex task which is extremely unfriendly and should be changed. Also it just does not have sense because initial station always looks almost the same.

2.
Transition from station to moveable base is very unobvious. It is hard to understand when exactly it is possible or necessary and how gameplay will be changed. Also it means that previous station will be leaved behind or reconstructed? That sounds not too pleasant considering that station was a home for a long time.



So in order to solve these issues we decided to do the next thing:

• It will be unnecessary to build starting base manually, you will receive the base almost instantly within first hour of the game, and later you can upgrade or rebuild it as you wish.
  
• This will be not a station, but flagship, huge mobile base with its own role, so "build static space station phase" will be completely skipped and mobile base will be achieved much earlier, so new player will dive immediately into combat and mission tasks instead of complex attempts to build a station.
  

Let's think about, what is a "base" in survival game?

1. This is a place where you can store various items, so flagship will have large and cheap cargo storage
   
2. This is a place where located most "workbenches", so flagship will be the only place where production modules can be placed and used
   
3. This is just a protected place where you can go inside, close the "door" behind and be protected against dangerous environment outside, so we decided that flagship should be large enough to fit smaller ships inside its hangar bays. Another benefit from such approach - if you have several various ships of different design and colors, flagship itself will looks beautiful from outside view, since colorful small ships will be hidden inside its hangars.
   
4. Also the base is not a weapon itself, it should be protected. So it will be impossible to place weapons on the flagship at the beginning. However, at late game flagship can be upgraded and act not only like a carrier, but a battleship.
   

Also, since it will be not just a base, but mobile base, we want to implement another purpose for flagship - it will be the only way to travel on large distance, simply saying, warp drive can be installed only on flagship and it will move only a things which located inside its hangar bays.



Here is a simple analogy, flagship can be considered as large sail ship, locations in space - islands, smaller ships - individual characters. So characters is unable to move between islands without a sail ship.



All of these things should make an interesting difference between large flagship which acts like a mobile base and smaller frigates which purposes to perform combat, gathering and logistic operations.
We want to improve base building aspect long time ago and seems like this is exactly want we want to achieve.






Another aspect which will be heavy redesigned it is a crew system. Currently the system is quite overcomplicated, unobvious and sometimes tedious.

Micromanagement of different types of regular crew between different modules turned out an unnecessary feature, so instead, there will be only 1 type of regular crew, and it will be automatically distributed across entire ship.

The only purpose of crew system is to make ships "alive", and single type of regular crew will be enough to achieve that.



Instead of micromanagement of regular crew we want to focus on improvements in ships to ships combat aspect which is much more interesting and visually enjoyable.

Officers also will be redesigned. Currently there is an option to assign several officers to the same command module, but there is no point to assign "not a full stack of officers", so instead we decided to allow only one officer (captain) per ship, instead its skill tree will be much larger, so different captain may have different skills and specializations.

Each ship will be considered as single character, with its own portrait, name and specialization. Such approach should be especially good for co-op multiplayer.




We noticed an interesting thing - usually it is more fun to fight against enemies who are not similar to you. Who looks different and uses different tactics. That could be especially noticeable in various zombie games or similar games where you need to fight not against humans, but against some kind of creatures.

So, additionally to standard modular enemy ships, you also sometimes will encounter something very unusual.



But more details about that will be revealed later.




Since flagship with its warp drive will become the main method to travel between planets and systems, the role of warp gates will be changed.

Warp gates no longer provides a route trough entire galaxy, instead, it will provide transportation within the same system, it also will be a part of some missions where frigates (smaller ships) should perform some tasks in location where flagship can't arrive (because it can't fit inside a warp gate)





We plan to do that somewhere at January but not sure when exactly. We will keep you informed about progress and try to avoid such a long delays between news.

And also, Happy New Year! : )