Combat is the core of our game. Whether you're fighting pirates, a corrupt manager, rival mining corps, , or even , most of our gameplay is combat. If you've played our demo, you've seen how our combat works at a basic level. The mix of turn based strategy and auto-battler we think is pretty unique, but it's also relatively simple.
And that's a good thing! That's an intentional thing. It's important we don't overload you with systems and options right up front so you can ease into the role of Commander. But it does leave the question of what more there will be.
New Options
Let's get the first and obvious one out of the way. A whole host of new tactics, upgrades, ships, weapons, and equipment will be available for you to discover and use. Combined with the new Science and Engineering systems (see our previous dev diaries), there's a huge amount of options and synergies available to your fleet.
Ship and Equipment Sizes
Wait, that scanner sure looks like it won't fit in any of your current ships. Well, that's because in chapter 2 you'll get access to your first medium ship. Having multiple ship and equipment sizes gives us a lot of design space to play with without overloading you with too many equipment slots to juggle. Even some small ships may have a medium slot available to them.
Equipment Abilities
As we added the science system we hit an interesting design problem. The gameplay of finding an interesting item with a new or unusual affix, reverse engineering it, and then adding that affix to your equipment felt fantastic. But it also meant that the 'best' items quickly became whatever had the highest raw stats. That's not great. We could make it some so items have unusual affixes that can't be pulled off (and we have done that where it makes sense), but what if we just made items more interesting in general?
Say hello to equipment abilities. These are powers your ships will trigger on their turn if the requirements are met and the ability isn't on cooldown. This quickly solved our science problem and immediately made combat much more interesting. It also made Speed and Detection more valuable stats. Being able to taunt your opponents for the rest of the round isn't very useful if you go last, and knowing your opponent has a ship that can delete your missiles can help you choose the right target to focus on. There are of course additional tools to discover that may solve these problems.
The Future
These are just the systems that you'll start to encounter in chapter 2 when our Early Access launches next Tuesday, September 15th. We don't plan on stopping here with improving your combat options. Tactical upgrades and faction specific buffs just two examples of what's coming soon later this year. We're also eager to hear your thoughts and ideas either here on Steam, our discord server, or on social media.
We'll be back later this week to talk more about our Early Access timeline.