Developer FAQ with Matt Tobiason (12/14/18)

Lead Game Designer Matt Tobiason answers some of the most common questions about Dreadnought’s recent game update and plans for what’s coming up next!

A: On a general level, we felt that our Drain modules were not granular enough in their effects, and that at the same time Energy Generator trivialized their effects too much by overriding them.

More specifically, there were a lot of modules affecting energy that were part of various strategies that were nearly impossible to counter. Drain Pulse in particular was in and of itself pretty overpowered and only really had Energy Generator as a valid response. Energy Generator was also a fairly major component of a lot of ‘Heal Ball’ builds that we don’t especially want to encourage.

Q: Why were the Storm Missiles nerfed in the recent patch?

A: The problem we hit with Storm Missiles was that the combination of the missile count and the speed of the missiles simply overwhelmed existing anti-missile countermeasures, leaving targets with no real way to defend themselves.

Q: Nukes are really strong now! What's the counter?

A: Nukes in Dreadnought are essentially a way to punish the opposing team for clustering tightly to play defense. Once the enemy group gets hit with a nuke, your team can go on the offense against heavily damaged opponents. We increased the overall power of the ability simply because it wasn’t doing its job well enough, and at higher tiers of play it was getting severely overshadowed by Tartarus Missile.

Apart from direct counters to the ability, shields will generally go a long way toward getting you through a nuclear blast. Still, your best bet is to avoid bunching up and making your team a tempting target for trigger-happy Dreadnoughts!

Q: What are the goals of moving tier 4 out of Veteran with the tier change?

A: As players advance through tier 3 currently, it can be a bit of a slog because of the power mismatch between tier-3 and tier-4 ships. Our decision to rearrange the tiers in the way we are doing stems from two aspects of our progression:

• The power differential between tier-4 and tier-5 ships is significantly smaller than the differential between tier-3 and tier-4 ships. Tier-5 ships are definitely stronger, but the module selection is effectively the same. This means that tier-5 players can’t utilize tactics that a tier-4 player has absolutely no counter to, which we can’t say about the tier-3/tier-4 divide.
  
  
• Players spend a lot more time in tier-4 ships than tier-3 ships. Because players advance through tier-3 relatively quickly, the current fleet tier layout ends up creating matches that are mostly composed of tier-4 ships, with a small number of tier-3 ships mixed in. In our future version of the fleet tiers, although players with tier-4 ships in Legendary tier can easily land in matches composed entirely of other tier-4 ships, or of mostly tier-4 ships with a couple of tier-5 ships mixed in, the same is not true at all of players commanding tier-3 ships in today’s matchmaking pool.
  

Q: How is Battle Bonus being affected by the change to make tier 4 exclusively in Legendary?

A: Battle Bonus is receiving a very significant overhaul in our coming revamp of fleet tiers.

Currently, the effects of Battle Bonus are a flat bonus tied completely tied to the fleet tier. After we release this change, the effects of Battle Bonus will be tied to the ships equipped in your fleet. Basically, each ship in your fleet will increase your Battle Bonus. Higher-tier ships will provide much greater increases, so the bigger and more advanced your fleet is, the more rewards you’ll rake in from matches. The cost of refreshing Battle Bonus is going to be higher in each match than it is today, but the bonus percentage you can reach with an advanced fleet for that tier is also quite a bit higher.

In essence, some players want to diversify and pursue a lot of different ship lines at once, while others prefer to focus their efforts on pushing one ship forward as fast as they can. Our goals with this change are to make sure that neither group is being punished for their play style, and that even when players are ‘done’ with a fleet tier, it’s still worth dusting off their old ships from time to time in order to pull in a nice haul of credits.

Q: How is the current “Spider-Tank” / “Heal Ball” Metagame being addressed?

A: The Rupture modules that will be introduced soon, along with a variety of changes to the existing armor modules, are going to be the first steps in dealing with this problem. Stay tuned for more work going into this in the near future!

Q: Is there a plan for PTR servers, and if so, how does it look?

A: We’re all for implementing something along these lines, and we’re trying to determine the best way to approach this. We’ll let everyone know as soon as we’ve figured out the most valuable way to run this.

Q: Is there a plan to have new/more Officer Briefings in the game?

A: Absolutely! We’re in the process of defining a new set, though we’re not quite sure when we’ll have it ready for release.