Greetings Captain!
We greet you with another Developer's Diary, talking about various little improvements we've been working on these last two weeks. It will be another one of those short and sweet diaries that showcase progress in between the bigger diaries; nothing major, but progress nevertheless.
The first thing we'd like to show off is our new procedural generation system for docks. Docks will now be procedurally generated based on development level, location, and random chance. As you can see here on the gif, the length and the number of branches on the docks are both changeable, and there may or may not be defenses as well depending on how developed the base is. It's not much, but it's an improvement we felt we could do to keep bases from feeling the same each time.
Now, while the docks generation system is nice in itself, the real reason these changes were made was to be a stepping stone to adding docked vessels, which is an important part of the game as it enables the entire concept of port strikes. Depending on a variety of factors, such as the time of day or whether a convoy or task force is disembarking or gathering, sometimes the enemy ships will start the engagement docked and won't actually be able to move around. Their weapons will also be disabled for a certain amount of time, giving you the perfect opportunity for a port strike.
We hope that this mechanic will reward proper timing and scouting, and organically create windows of opportunity for your raider fleets to do what they are best at.
We also now have a message system, which will inform you of engagements happening around the map as well as impending threats and allied operations in an automatically scrolling format. Messages can be dismissed and can also pan the camera to where the engagement is about to happen/is happening if applicable. Overall, this should be a nice quality of life improvement and a way of keeping up situational awareness.
That's all for now, Captain!
T.T.