We've heard your feedback after setting torpedoes live on the default branch, and one of the biggest complaints is that torpedoes can wrecks ships hard, especially the shield-penetrating ones. We're adding a few countermeasures for you in this patch, and we're also trying to create more trade-offs so that combat stays interesting in the end.
There's some explaining to do here. Torpedoes have a high potential to damage your ship's hull. When your blocks start breaking off, your ship's stats go down - crew dies, energy levels sink, etc.
While this can be a great tactical move, it can also be very frustrating, especially early game, when your ship becomes unmaneuverable due to a lucky hit by the AI or your turrets get shot off immediately.
This can lead to an unrecoverable downward spiral during combat, making fights unfun and frustrating as long as you don't have shields.
We've got a few changes in this patch to improve this behavior. First off, we're buffing integrity fields. Second, we're adding a system where blocks won't be immediately blown off, to ensure that you get a fighting chance while taking damage. In order to understand why we're doing what we're doing, here's some explanation on how damage in Avorion actually works.
Each block has its own HP, which is a threshold until it breaks, which is normally its HP that it contributes to the ship (with several exceptions, but we're not going into too much detail here. For example, inner blocks have a higher break threshold to make intricate ship designs combat-viable and to make designing more fun).
Damage to blocks is ALSO directed to the normal HP of a ship (health bar). What integrity fields do, is reduce the damage that a block itself takes, so it takes longer to break, while damage to your durability stays the same.
With this patch, we're doubling damage reduction to block HP through integrity fields, and blocks protected by integrity fields also only send 50% of the damage taken to the ship's HP, instead of 100%.
We're also adding another major change: Blocks on PLAYER owned ships (not NPCs!) that take damage start breaking only after a certain threshold of ship HP is reached, based on difficulty.
For example, on "Normal" difficulty, this threshold is 40%, so your ship's blocks only start breaking after your ship has 40% or less health.
In total, this should make fighting without shields and taking hull damage a lot less punishing and combat more fun.
Gameplay
- Implemented an upgrade that makes shields impenetrable
- This upgrade redirects shield durability to make shields impenetrable, except for collision damage
- This upgrade also increases the time that shields take to recharge after a hit by a lot
Balancing
- Increased break-damage reduction for blocks from integrity fields from 90% to 95%
- Blocks can now take double the damage before they break
- Ship damage from integrity-protected blocks reduced by 50%
- Shot hits to blocks protected by integrity fields will only cause 50% damage to your ship's durability
- Blocks start to break on player & alliance ships only after the ship's durability has been lowered to a certain point
- This threshold scales by difficulty:
- Beginner: Threshold is 0%: Your blocks will never break.
- Easy: Treshold is 20%: Your blocks will start to break once your ship hits 20% or less HP.
- Normal: Treshold is 40%
- Veteran: Treshold is 60%
- Difficult: Treshold is 80%
- Hard & Insane: Treshold is 100%: Blocks will start breaking immediately (pre-patch behavior)
- Increased time that shields have to take to start recharging after the last hit from 10 seconds to 30 seconds
- This was actually an oversight of ours and one of the reasons why shields are so strong. We upped recharge time to what we actually had in mind while designing shields to make it a little harder to continuously fight even with strong shields.
Bugfixes
- [UBR] Fixed shield penetration not working
- [UBR] Fixed several performance issues which might have led to players experiencing weapons not dealing damage
- To all those who had this issue: Please try if this makes it work, if not, report back to us! We're taking this very seriously!