Greetings Commanders!
We hope everyone has been enjoying the start of the holiday season. This week we bring you new items with the power to add new abilities to the ships that equip them and changes to AI carriers. With that said, on to the changes:
Item Abilities
With this patch we roll out our test of a new breed of items. These items add abilities to the ships that equip them rather than adding to any of the ship's stats. We are quite pleased with the initial testing of these items.
Furthermore, we have gotten some feedback that once players get access to carriers there is little point to deploy so called "regular" fighter units. So the new items being introduced all add abilities only to fighter craft. This lets us test the new technology and also helps to differentiate named fighter craft from the generic units that come with carriers.
New Gear
Dumbfire Torpedoes
Dumbfire Torpedoes are powerful single use torpedoes that can be equipped on fighter craft. These fire and forget munitions deal good damage in an area, and are effective against all types of ships. This is an especially powerful item and can only be equipped to Slot 1 on fighter craft.
Fighter Sensor Probe
Remotely deployed sensor probes allow a fighter to scan an area of space. This item adds a sensor ability to any fighter that equips it, and can give a fighter even more uses to a ship that already has a sensor probe ability. This is an especially powerful item and can only be equipped to Slot 1 on fighter craft.
Fighter Shield Network
The Fighter Shield Network was already added to the game in a previous patch. Its abilities have been updated to add a new Shield Overload ability that is a single use ability that replenishes shields.
Carriers
We continue to look at the numbers and still think there is work to be done to make the endgame levels more fun. One of the issues with the later levels is that they can play much more slowly.
To address this we have altered all AI controlled carriers. All enemy carriers now only carry 4 fighter squadrons down from 6. While this is a pretty major loss of utility for the carriers, with many enemy carriers in a mission this also speeds up the rounds quite a bit while still giving carriers a unique roll to fill in enemy fleets.
This should make late game missions with carriers both slightly easier and also should make the combats faster.
Balance Tweaks
- Added Dumbfire Torpedoes and Fighter Sensor Probes to the item drop tables.
- Reduced the number of fighters on all AI carriers.
- Reduced the number of fighters on AI Catapults and AI Battleships.
- Increased the health and initiative of the barges on the Nemesis mercenary mission.
That's all for now. We are going to keep reading all of your feedback while we work on the upcoming DLC.
Thank you to everyone for playing our game!