Hey there AFF Community!
We're back with more content, some important fixes and a big system overhaul.
New map - Anaster
Anaster is the massive corpse of a failed moon, situated in the belt of debris around the planet Anansi c. The tunnels and chambers were partially formed by natural processes, when the more porous rocks were etched away. In times past pirates and smugglers from Glyfhaven had build structures in the vacuum of these tunnels to serve as an outpost.
These have been long since abandoned, but the Antareans see it as an optimal location for establishing a beachhead on the border with the Cinnabar Republic. Now, both the Antarean Empire and the ULP fleets are vying for control over this curious structure and the habitable planet below.
Gameplay-wise, Anaster is a space Territories map, with a handful of twists. This time you'll be facing off inside a structure with your fighters and corvettes. In addition to capturing the objectives you'll also be able to take control of additional warp-in beacons to bring in the reinforcements exactly where they are needed.
Commander AI overhaul
Over the last few weeks we've been carefully observing how players organize their defense and offense on various maps. Based on that data we've rewritten MILNET, the commander-level AI in the game.
This doesn't affect the behaviour of individual bots in combat as much but an AI-driven team as whole should behave more like an organized group of actual people. The new AI has a much better understanding of spreading and focusing forces, picking flanking routes, prioritizing objectives based on teammembers' locations, enemy locations, objective completion percentage and a couple hundred other factors.
Of course this also means the human squadleaders should now be given more sensible orders if MILNET AI is in charge.
Smoke effects
Another thing we've been investing into recently is rendering upgrades that will be introduced over the next few updates. In the meantime we also got a lot of feedback about the smoke grenades being, well, frankly quite useless - the smoke did technically mask the signatures of enemies but the visuals were so glitchy and weak that you could simply spot enemy silhouettes inside the smoke cloud.
So in response we used some of our new tech to make a more seamless, better optimized and more functionally obscuring smoke effect. It will possibly need some further tweaking but it's a good representation of the visual fidelity we want our VFX to achieve in the nearest future.
Changelog:
- New map - Anaster. Fight over control points and warp-in beacons inside a huge space rock
- Improved commander AI based on data gathered from Community playtests
- New effects for the smoke grenades/detpacks - less glitchy and more functionally obscuring
- AI-led squads will now re-deploy whenever dropships become available more responsively, dropship-occupying AI will fall back to boarding a different ship if they can't get inside the one they're ordered onto
- Tweaked the destroyable objectives (dropppods, lockouts, cores) to be a bit weaker versus explosives and AV weapons
- Minimap location name now cycles with driven vehicle name
- Disabled overheat mechanic on space shotguns
- Objective-related messages stick around on the HUD for a bit longer
- Added HUD prompts which tell the player that a dropship is available at a particular station/carrier
- Rebalanced the health of subsystems on capital ships so that they can be disabled easier from the outside, having a more meaningful impact on the gameplay
- Tweaked all the LSP variants (for infantry, vehicles and ships) - more lenient overheat, smaller burst size
- Reduced splash radius of the underslung rocket launcher
- EVR rebalanced to have a more useful (and faster-traveling) primary firemode and less overpowered heavy mode (less accurate, plasma travels slower, overheats faster)
- Rail barrel mod slightly less powerful
- SAR reconfigured to be less good at everything and more of a specialized weapon - burst-fire, with a minor potential for overheating and a recoil pattern that promotes stationary firing
- Reduced heavy vehicle counts in Yin Tao Shan Territories
- Improved how spawnpoints and warp-in beacons are listed in the locator part of the TacMap
- More lenient Sturm tailgun constraint
- Ship interior location subtitles in the TacMap now cycle between displaying the location name, person at the helm and ship health value
- Shortened the core meltdown timers for destroyers and corvettes
- Increased the speed of MLI rockets
- Reduced the spread on RID's dumbfire mode again, should be less ridiculously inaccurate but still not practical compared to the lock-on mode
- Gunship bomblets split into submunitions over the ground and inherit gunships velocity. Generally they now fall where you'd expect them to now.
- Lock-on and reload mods removed from vehicle weapons for now
- Cooling weapon mod increases reload time by 10%
- Increased the effective DPS of MGA across the whole spin-up range
- Flechette cannon mag size increased to 50
- Minimap location name now cycles with driven vehicle name
- Fixed TT18's default ammo display in the loadout
- Fixed an issue where HUD chatbox steals focus from mouse actions, preventing weapon-switching with mousewheel
- Fixed vehicle offer and team balance prompts spamming the HUD during the de-briefing
- Fixed disabled-by-EMP effect not appearing on vehicles
- Hopefully finally fixed bots navigating that ramp in the hangar at Ixion
- Reduced some instances of log getting unnecessarily spammed with messages for players who join an online game during the de-briefing, bloating the logs directory
- Several minor fixes to Meudeverre's collision and navigation
- Fixed the dropships limit not working correctly on some maps
- Fixed incorrect command rank being displayed for the MILNET AI
- Several minor fixes to collision and lighting in Irega and Errah
- Added missing server details in the in-game server browser
- Steam's server browser (the one in the Steam client, not in-game) should now display correct playercounts
- Fixed a rare case of Steam invites failing due to bots filling the server
- Fixed passenger turret variant of the MNL
If you got a feedback on anything in the game, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!