The Beta build for Heathen Engineering’s Terran can be accessed from your Steam library. To learn how, take a look at this entry on the Steam Community Product Betas.
This patch brings a load of fixes and changes around ship handling and mechanics (the stats, category mappings, etc.). In particular, the maths applied to ship stats have received a lot of attention with fixes for thrust and torque over-calculations (flies like a bathtub problem) and category balance issues.
Changes to the stat and category calculations will be most apparent with regards to thrust and torque as well as max weapon mounts. Ship stat ‘capacity’ values have been re-enabled for power, cargo, complexity and drone storage and bandwidth in preparation for additions due later in this build cycle.
Along with the patch the Terran web site is getting a major update. While the site is still under construction, there is a great deal of useful information for players and spectators alike.
Below you will find the current fixes, changes and additions available in the 20160330.X patch on Beta. Be sure to join the community on Steam and let your voice be heard!
Available as of build 20160330.6
You can see the current build in game on the Dashboard in the Notification tab!
Fixes:
- Corrected S, M and L mount point counts that were resolving higher than they should be on ships with large numbers of parts. This change will likely lower the available mount points on your saved ship templates. Weapons above the available mount point count will simply be disabled when in space.
- Corrected torque & throttle calculation on ships with large numbers of parts. This was causing ships to hit the maximum allowable throttle and torque values quite easily and is responsible for the ‘flies like a bathtub’ point noted by the community.
- Corrected LH2 hull component default material; this was incorrectly using the LH3 material
Changes:
- Part category bonus has been changed to a penalty. When applying parts to a ship in a category not supported by the part, the parts contribution will be reduced by 20%. This is effectively the same result as the previous model however it allows parts to ‘support’ categories in a more flexible manner. Previously support was a category ‘range’ as in (from X to Y); now ship parts can ‘support’ any combination of categories.
- All category values have been adjusted, the same distribution pattern is in effect, however the maths have changed resulting in new values. Ship ‘health’ should be generally lower for Tech level 1 and lower ships and the relative difference between the light, mid and heavy classes has been increased. More work is underway in this area along with additional details on the main site and updates to the Ship Editor to better express ship stats and the effect of category selection.
- Several low level systems responsible for spawning, destroying and managing ships in space have been updated to improve performance and reduce processing. Changes should be transparent in game. These changes will be highlighted later in the Early Access as the game approaches a stage involving the TSDK (modding kit).