Faction Wars - Part 1! (Updated March 17)
Greetins Commanders!
After a long time, the first part of Faction Wars is finally here! :)
This part brings the basics to a faction resource based economy, which will be important later on specially for station management and the economy update.
This part works fine with old saves (although battles may take some time to appear), but will be optimized if you start a new game because the procedural galaxy generation is a bit different now.
Be advised this is only the first part of a big update, so expect bugs and fixes very soon. Also be sure to post your feedback here.
Enjoy!
- Laious
Faction Wars - Part 1
[h2]Introduction[/h2]
Individual Stations will often "create pressure" to attack nearby enemy sectors. Once enough pressure is made, the faction can decide to do so, if it has enough resources. This resources are like taxes paid by stations from time to time to its faction. Therefore, each station destroyed will slowly reduce the battle strength of that faction.
Once a battle starts, it will be shown as animated explosions in the Galaxy Map and will last for 20 (real life) minutes. If the player doesn't intervene, the outcome is simulated (for part 1 it will mostly ends in a "tie"). If the player gets in the sector, the battle will last until one side is victorious or the attackers withdraw its forces. The battle results can have an impact on each faction resources and in the player reputation, if he decides to take part in it (reputation for destroying a ship from a fleet is doubled).
Wars only occur in sectors level 10 or higher and different factions may attack the same sector at the same time.
For this part, the amount of wars going on is unclear, since it depends on the disposition of the galaxy, which is random.
[h2]features[/h2]
- Factions will occasionally send ships to hunt you. The more negative your reputation with them, more powerful the ships will be.
- Added Perk/Achievements: 'The Last Starfighter', 'Defender' and 'Legionary'
- Changed bonuses on 'Aggressive', 'Marauder' and 'Guardian Angel' perks.
- Dark Sectors (Pitch Black) are now only detected when in sensor range, but once it is spotted, its location is saved.
- Fixed labels and floating text being too small on 4K resolutions.
- Fixed 'Weaponry' skill bonus on burst weapons. It was being applied 'burst' times to each shot, instead of once. The skill bonus is now limited to 50% of weapon base damage, avoiding insanely high damage increases, which was very unbalanced. This only applies to weapons with more than 10 base damage.
- Fully exploring Asteroid Rush and Nebula sectors now give bonus XP.
- Reduced item drop chance from Elites to 50% instead of 100%, but increased base credit gained from all enemies.
- Enemy ships will now alternate fire between beam and projectile weapons when they have both types equipped. This will improve their aiming considerably, specially for heavy lasers on fixed hard points.
- Mercenaries from the same hideout will help each other when attacked.
- Faction ships in combat will ask for help from nearby allies.
- Ships will now spawn with green or red icon and label colors if they are from a friendly or hostile faction.
- Top speed reduced a bit overall, especially on bigger models.
[h2]Follow up fixes[/h2]
- Fixed random crashes caused by a Unity bug.
- Fixed (hopefully) other crashes.
- Fixed a bug that would prevent new fleets to spawn in the current sector, and then after a reload it would appear on top of the station. Now all fleets will spawn away from any station, giving the faction time to build defenses.
- Added option to turn on/off AI ship names, divided by relation.
- The defending faction in a war will spawn a few more ships to help, as soon as a fleet warps in.
- Attack fleets will move faster towards the target the farther they are from it.
- Fleets will move in attack formation and the minimap icon will properly point towards the target station.
- The explosion animations will properly disappear from a sector tile after the battle ends.
- Fixed BUG when activating attack drones without a target selected.
- Fixed quests from a station not being removed after it get destroyed.
- Quests to assault pirate hideouts are back available on most stations.
- Speed Boost Toggle option added (Caps Lock as default)
- Added new Steering Mode with A and D instead of mouse cursor (you can swap to it with CTRL at any time).
- Reduced strength of random enemy fleets spawned to hunt the player.
- Fixed sectors that would remain under control of a faction even after all stations getting destroyed.
- Updated help screen (F1) with keys for changing steering mode and toggle speed boost.
- 'Steering Mode' (CTRL) and 'Speed Booster Toggle' (CAPS LOCK) states are now saved.
- Max reputation gain from a quest is now 250 points.
- Fixed reputation gains from 'Keeping the Peace' quest. This quest will no longer be available in stations after the hideout has being destroyed.
- Fixed extra quests showing up when not intended.
- Complete Key rebinding solution in-game (gamepad support is only partial at the moment).