Greetings Captain,
It has been a hectic four weeks with new content and full new diaries, and we are feeling the need to take a week's break from it to pick up steam again as this Experimental Branch will be the longest yet; thus far, we are only halfway done! So this week's diary will be a much leaner one, acting as an intermission. However, we still have some things to talk about, as we have been looking at making some changes under the hood.
First of all, the supply system is getting reworked with some changes to their movement behavior. The UI is also getting changed to use numbers to make it a lot easier to know exactly how much supply a base has at a glance.
The old pip based system was less informative than hoped for and caused confusion, so simplification is much needed here, especially now that you will directly be using supplies to rearm your squadron torpedoes.
The second thing is that our plans for using direct fire to subdue an enemy ship by destroying their guns never really panned out because the weapons that could do that reliably, explosive weapons, would already just sink them anyway. We couldn't just reduce the HP of these weapon parts as it would make explosive weapons better at destroying them without helping direct fire weapons as much.
Therefore, we settled on adding an explosive damage multiplier for these weapon parts. Somewhat counterintuitively, open topped, smaller turrets will now take less damage from explosions and not trigger secondary explosions themselves, but their HPs are reduced to make them more vulnerable to direct fire than before.
This, combined with the changes on AI targeting to focus fire turrets instead of center mass, should hopefully make it a viable if not optimal playstyle to swarm big ships with your squadron and go for a mission kill. Most closed turrets are also weakened while still being able to cause secondary explosions, meaning they are now more lucrative targets for destruction through direct fire.
At first, this rebalance is only going to be applied to major enemy warships to see how they feel before we fully commit to the change. So your feedback is welcome.
We're hoping these changes will encourage new gameplay. These changes will reach the Experimental Branch in one or more patches soon, possibly among other things.
Our regular Developer's Diary series will resume next week.
That's all for now,
Captain,
T.T.