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Main Battle Tanks!

Main Battle Tanks

A new type of ground vehicle will now roll out on the battlefield! The Main Battle Tank (MBT). On the NATO side, we have the M1 Abrams, and on the PACT side there's the legendary T-72.

These tanks have movable turrets with 120/125mm cannons that will kill the smaller IFVs (the ordinary vehicles we've seen before) with one shot. They also carry machine guns that can fire at enemy aircraft. They can even use these weapons to engage different targets simultaneously.

When MBTs start rolling over the battlefield, it might be a good idea to launch some CAS aircraft before they break straight through your lines!

Reinforcements

Everybody likes an even match!

In Sky Knights, matches tend to snowball sometimes, making it very hard to recover from a bad start. A new mechanic called "Reinforcements" tackles this by giving the losing team a chance to rally and get back into the game.

This is triggered whenever a team loses a base and is behind on the total amount of player kills.

At the moment, this happens when a Reinforcement is triggered:

  • Main Battle Tanks spawn on the losing side (normally 3, in Coldsnap it's only 2).
  • AAA are respawned around the remaining FOBs.
  • Morale is zeroed out.
  • Every player on the losing side that is currently waiting for respawn can respawn right away.

I have setup the system so it's easily tweakable, without requiring patching. I can toggle all these four effects on and off, tweak the amount of reinforcements a team can get, and tweak how many kills behind you have to be for the reinforcement to trigger. So keep the feedback coming, and we'll make sure to balance all this to make the experience as good as possible.

Modification balancing

Several modifications have been balanced. Check out the patch notes for details!

Input device ignoring

The game uses a system that always discovers input devices such as gamepads. This is to make everything as hassle-free as possible. You shouldn't have to restart the game when connecting a gamepad, or click some option if you want to transition to mouse/keyboard in the middle of a match. This is generally a good thing! However, it also means that the game will react on input from all connected devices. So for instance, if you have rudder pedals, they might be outputing a slight signal, and the game can pick it up and think you want to use those. Before, you had to disconnect them from stopping this.

After this update, you can use the options menu to select the input devices that you want to use and which ones to ignore. This should hopefully take care of these problems.

Bug fixes

Some smaller bug fixes are in there as well, most ones related to modifications.

Best regards
//Bankler

Patch notes

1.4.0

  • Added "Reinforcements" anti-snowballing mechanic.
  • Added Main Battle Tanks.
  • Ground vehicle AI (specifically MBT's) can now track and engage several targets simultaneously.
  • Ground vehicles that can target aircraft now have better accuracy on shorter ranges and worse on longer ranges.
  • Added slight camera shakes when destroying a AAA or an MBT.
  • Ground vehicles now start and stop in a more smooth fashion.
  • Anti-tank missiles should now more strongly prefer to lock-on to AAA and MBTs over IFVs and FOBs.
  • Added team's total kills in the HUD.
  • Added a skull icon on destroyed FOB health bars.
  • In the options menu, you can now select input devices to ignore input from, to avoid conflicts between gamepads, joysticks and rudder pedals.
  • AI bots now use modifications. Higher skill setting bots use better modifications than bots with lower skill.
  • Modification boxes now show secondary stats icons.
  • Modification boxes aircraft symbols are now yellow if the modification fits multiple aircraft.
  • Unequipped modification slots that only have modifications that are already equipped on other aircraft now shows like "(1)".
  • AI is now more aggressive with the gun, and should miss fewer opportunities when an enemy shows up in front of the nose.
  • Altered team AI so that bots should be less likely to head back to base and change aircraft shortly after takeoff.
  • Replaced Infantry Fighting Vehicle models (BMP-1 and M2 Bradley) and with better-looking, more optimized versions.
  • Added black outline on the "Starting" text when starting a game.
  • Decreased Turning Power Modification max power from 10 to 5.
  • Decreased Gun Range Modification max power from 25 to 15.
  • Increased Gun Ammo Modification max power from 20 to 30.
  • Increased Flare Ammo Modification max power from 4 to 6.
  • Increased Hull Modification max power from 10 to 15.
  • Fixed bug where you lost your stats if you were hosting, lost connection, and re-joined.
  • Fixed bug where customizations and modifications remained on aircraft when switching from online mode to offline mode.
  • Fixed bug where you could get the modification bar to show up in offline mode by cycling past a locked aircraft.
  • Fixed bug where bots didn't get trait bonuses.
  • Fixed bug where you sometimes didn't crash if you missed the runway, but instead started to fly very low.