Hi all - I am happy to release the latest content patch for Stellar Tactics today. There are a lot of changes in this build so please read the patch notes below. I'll be monitoring the bug forums closely over the next few days and patching out any issues you might find. While I've done a lot of testing on this build, as you know, things happen. I hope you enjoy the changes.
I expect I'll be spending a week or two tweaking a few things with the special attacks, addressing issues (if any), and clearing a backlog of small issues that need to be looked into.
What's next? Sometime in the next week, I'll post an update covering what you can expect going forward. There are a lot of changes coming to Stellar Tactics and I'm really excited to be at a point where I'll be implementing new story content, expanding the mission system, polishing various rough edges, adding psionics, and more.
ADDED SPECIAL WEAPON ATTACKS AND SUPPORT SKILLS:
Weapon special attacks and support skills are now in the game. Note that enemies start using special attacks at around level 5. Players get all weapon skills at the start of the game and they improve over time with five total tiers increasing at skill levels 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100. Weapon skills are specific to each weapon type and several are shared (1hand slash and 1hand blunt). Initially these attacks are fairly weak, however, over time they scale nicely and you will be using them regularly in combat.
- Special attacks and support skills use zero AP and can be triggered at any time if they are available as long as it is your turn in combat.
- Special attacks are guaranteed to hit, however, DEFEND can mitigate damage.
- Enemies start using special weapon attacks at level 5
- Weapon special attacks are on global cooldown timers.
- Support skills are reset at the beginning of combat. You can use sprint, taunt, and barrier at the start of each combat session.
- You can use special attacks and support skills from both equipped weapons ( primary and secondary ) in the same round if global timers are reset by swapping weapons.
- Special attacks, taunt, and barrier increase in power as you gain skill in that weapon class at levels 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100.
- Game difficulty affects how NPC's use special attacks by changing how often they are used. The frequency and power of these effects from NPC's vary by enemy difficulty. A regular NPC will use them less often, a single skull enemy more often and bosses will use them most of the time when their cooldowns expire. On easy mode, these attacks are less likely to trigger - on extreme difficulty the attacks will be triggered more often.
- Some enemies have special abilities. For example Phage vomit. Rather than triggering a special attack, they will use their special twice in one attack if they trigger a special. New enemies in future updates may have similar attacks that they use more than once in a combat round.
UPDATED - BOARDING:
- When boarding a ship, there will always be a loot container that contains ship equipment loot similar to what would have been dropped if you had destroyed the ship. NOTE: Ore and ship ammo is not included in the loot table.
- Enemy subsystem regeneration time increased by 30 seconds. It should now be easier to board ships with lower-tier ship equipment. Note that it has always been intended that boarding a ship with starter turrets would be difficult. Upgrading your turrets and systems will make boarding enemy ships much easier. While boarding, a ship may regenerate its shields, however, they go down faster after repaired by the enemy crew.
- General reward for selling ships to Arkus increased by 30%. Selling a ship with multiple decks increased by 70%. Note that repairing ships to full always rewards more and yes, it does take some time to gather the components - though, with higher salvage skill, more components are rewarded. I will be adding side missions for Arkus and he/she/it will have missions that will let you earn better rewards as you develop your relationship.
ADDED - REVIEW AND UPDATE CREW PERKS/STATS FROM THE CREW MANAGER:
You can now edit crew member perks, stats, portrait, voice, and name in the CREW MANAGER for any crew member by selecting the crew member you want to edit from the list on the left and then clicking the "EDIT CREW MEMBER" button. This is very useful when adjusting space crew perks for mining, space combat etc. Previously, you needed to add the crew member to your active crew to make adjustments.
ADDED - DEDICATED CREW MEMBERS FOR HACKING, SALVAGING, CRAFTING, AND REPAIR
When activating any of these skills, you can now select the active crew member as dedicated. This means that no matter which crew member activates the skill, the dedicated crew member will be the crew member who's skills and perks are used. This crew member also receives all experience from actively using these skills.
If you would prefer to not use a dedicated crew member anymore, just select the portrait to remove the "check mark" and the crew member that initiates the skill will be used.
The first time any of these skills is used a popup is displayed explaining how to select this crew member as the dedicated crew.
SELECT DEDICATED CREW MEMBER: When any of the skill UI's are displayed, click the portrait and a checkmark will be displayed indicating this crew member is not the dedicated crew member for that skill.
REMOVE DEDICATED CREW MEMBER: When any of the skill UI's are displayed, click the portrait and the checkmark will be removed indicated a dedicated crew member is not selected for that skill.
--NOTE: Removing or replacing a crew member from your ground team in the crew manager will reset your currently active dedicated crew. You will need to re-assign a new crew member to the various tasks.
UPDATED - VSYNC AND FRAMERATE CAP OPTIONS:
Uncapping the framerate in the video options has been changed to give players more options. You can find a new slider in the video options menu. Default is VSYNC ON. The slider lets you cap your framerate to 30 FPS, 60 FPS, VSYNC ON, VSYNC 1/2, VSYNC 1/4, and NO LIMIT (no cap at all!). VSYNC is highly dependant on your system, monitor, and video card settings. This should give players more options and hopefully address issues of animation slowdown. If you have any issues, you can always either uncap the framerate completely by dragging the slider to the far right or set the framerate cap to 60FPS or even 30FPS.
I'll keep an eye on the bug forums to see if any of the VSYNC and framerate adjustments mentioned above cause any issues. VSYNC ON should always provide the best performance.
GENERAL PATCH NOTES:
UPDATED: Increased base Micro-Warp speed of ships.
UPDATED: Reduced spam-click timer so there is less delay when interacting with objects and NPC's.
UPDATED: Skyboxes for the main menu and FTL space.
UPDATED: Doubled faction token and faction standing rewards for agent missions.
UPDATED: Doubled positive/negative faction reward values for clearing explore locations.
UPDATED: Increase the number of credits rewarded when completing a faction agent mission
UPDATED: Faction display in the log map area now displays your current faction values as positive/negative values ranging from -50,000 (worst) to +50,000 (best). Neutral ranges from -10,000 - +10,000.
UPDATED: Hacking and auto-hacking are now faster. When entering the correct key code, the next combination digit begins immediately instead of waiting for the cooldown timer to expire.
UPDATED: Repair and Salvage experience bars when repairing/salvaging ship components on boarded ships now show experience toward the next level instead of total skill experience.
UPDATED: Adjusted bleed damage down a little.
UPDATED: The FTL guide entry is displayed the first time you enter FTL space. A reminder to accelerate is displayed on the screen when entering FTL space. Additional information added to the FTL guide entry noting that piloting skill and FTL drive quality affect SHIP speed in FTL space. Guide entries/tutorials will eventually get an overhaul.
UPDATED: Added new key binds. Your current key binds have been reset.
Keybind for toggling grenades on/off [O]
Keybind for toggling med-kits on/off
Keybind for scanning the selected target in space [DELETE]
Keybind for attacking the selected ship. When in space combat you can tab-target ships in combat with you, and press the attack key to switch all turrets to the new target. [RETURN]
FIXED: Neutral system stations would occasionally spawn faction agents that would give missions that could never be completed.
FIXED: It was possible to mount heavy turrets on light turret mount slots. I recommend replacing any heavy turrets mounted on light turret mount locations to avoid issues with space combat.
FIXED: Corrected ship info list below turrets on ship screen [K} so it correctly displays the mount point info for heavy/light turrets.
FIXED: If entering the Abandoned Facility and taking missions before completing the Slice Mines mission, it was possible you could not turn the Slice Mine mission in to Scarby Hurzog.
FIXED: Rollover highlights for a number of objects.
FIXED: When removing status effects using first-aid perkS, the status effect displayed under the crew portrait is updated immediately.
FIXED: A few minor visual glitches with projectiles.
FIXED: A few material errors with Kchor NPC's
FIXED: A skill rounding error when recruiting mercs that would round skills down one level occasionally.