Hey everyone,
we're glad to see so much excitement about the upcoming Combat Update II!
We've been getting a lot of questions and speculation about how exactly it's going to work so here's a little Q & A for you to make things clearer:
Q: Oh boy, all my ships look terrible, I usually use ships from the workshop and I'm really not that excited about building anyway, now I have to build my guns, too?
A: Don't worry, turrets still work the way you're used to. You still have to buy or loot turrets and you can simply install them on your ship just as you always have. The turret building mode will just give you the additional option to build a turret design to match your ship. You'll also be able to download turret designs from the workshop or get workshop ships with matching turrets.
Q: Is it only cosmetic or is damage, range etc. scalable with size/form of the turret?
A: It's mainly cosmetic - the idea is to let you build turrets that match your ships, not to rework the way weapons work completely. You have to equip a turret in your design for it to work. The same design can become a chain gun or lightning turret, depending on what you put inside. However, the size of your design does have an effect on the turret scale. If you build a size 1.5 turret, you can't equip a size 2 turret in it. Though you can use turrets that are smaller than 1.5.
Q: So how is looting going to work?
A: It will work exactly as it used to. Ships will still drop all the different kinds of turrets they do now. You collect them and either build them directly onto your ship or onto a turret base to activate one of your turret designs. You won't be able to loot other people's designs but you can download them from the workshop.
Q: Is there going to be a cap on the block count like there is with fighters?
A: Yes, due to performance reasons, a single turret can only contain a maximum of 250 blocks. The same is true for coaxial weapon designs.
Q: So how exactly is it going to work?
A: When you're in build mode, you'll be able to switch between ship building and weapon building and in the build mode for weapons, you'll have a choice between turrets and coaxial weapons. All weapons will be connected to the ship via a base and to enter the weapon's build mode, you have to select a base you want to modify on your ship. Once you leave the weapons build mode, you have to build a turret onto the base to activate your design. Inactive designs will not be visible when you're not in build mode.
A turret consists of three parts: the base, which is connected to the ship, the body, which is able to turn sideways, and the barrels, which can move up and down. Each part will have a bounding box. You need to stay inside the bounding box or your design becomes invalid.
Since the saved ships menu can get pretty crowded with all your ship and turret designs, autosaves and workshop subscriptions, we're adding a folder structure that lets you impose order and keep track of everything.
Most of the features we want for Combat Update II are ready. We still need to add a few things, do some play- and usability testing, maybe rework a couple of things if we find any problems, fix any major bugs that crop up, and then we'll be ready to start beta testing. So far things are going smoothly. If no major problems come up, you'll get to try it soon!
So long, have fun!
