Greetings Lords of Rigel,
We have two quality of life improvements this patch, along with more bug fixes and optimizations based on what you’ve reported.
This Patch:
• Range indicator in tactical: Weapons out of range of your target are marked in yellow. Destroyed weapon banks are marked in red.
• Filtering planetary shields in build queue.
• Adjustments to tutorial goals to make some of them more open ended.
Still in the works for EA1:
• Loading and saving build queues: You can build a custom pre-made queue with known buildings. These queues are in their own save file and should be able to be shared between games and players! If you load a queue and there’s unresearched buildings those get filtered out.
• Auto ship design generator: With the optimizations done on ship designer we’ll be adding in an “auto” button to have the AI generate a design of your selected size class.
Some other things we’ll be looking at will be default species color schemes, so suggestions and feedback are appreciated on what works and doesn’t work with the current species and their colors.
Additionally, this week we had some great feedback on suggested additional hotkeys. We’ll be working on implementing those over the coming patches. Again, more suggestions for actions for more hotkeys are appreciated!
As for this week’s deep dive:
Missiles!
Missiles in LoR are one of the main weapon types. You start the game with nuclear missiles and kinetic weapons which are direct fire or “beam” weapons. Missiles pack a punch, seek, but can be shot down by point defense and spoofed by ECM systems on a ship. Missiles also have limited ammo in combat, which is replenished at the end of a turn. There are a few linear upgrade warhead types: Nuclear, Fusion, Antimatter, and Singularity. Each type doing considerably more damage.
Missiles also have a number of special techs and modifications. Resolute guidance allows for missiles to track new targets after their primary target has been destroyed or has spoofed using ECM. Missiles can also have special modifications like MIRV (more damage from small warheads on impact), shields, heavy armor, and cloaking! Cloaked missiles are very hard to hit with point defense. There’s also combinations that can be done with techs and mods, such as tholon thrusters and FST missiles which make them much faster and able to penetrate PD quicker. ECCM and Adaptive Scanners on a ship can also be combined to break through the ECM of most ships. Emissions guidance (ENG) missiles will damage the engines of a ship once through armor, and can easily cause core breaches on ships making it one of the most powerful mods available. Better armor technologies and shield technologies increase the amount of damage missiles can take and how much damage is absorbed on a shielded missile, respectively. However, piling on too many mods can slow down refire rates, so think about using different sets of specialized missiles such as a volley of weaker FST nuclear missiles to take up point defense while specialized ENG missiles follow up.
Visually each missile technology type is color coded and matches the progression of bombs. Nuclear missiles are red, fusion are yellow-orange, antimatter are violet, and singularity light blue. Missiles have slight ambient lighting to improve visibility, and their engine glows are large for visibility so you can see their color and have a sense of how much damage is incoming.
Image 1. Fusion Missile Model
Image 2. Katraxi Point Defense
Image 3. Antimatter WarheadLet us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email:
[email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.
As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!
Image 1. Terran Planet Cloud System
Image 2. Ringworld Cloud System
Image 3. Dead Planet Cloud System
Image 4. Dead Planet Dust Volume
Image 5. Ocean Skybox Material