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Bounties
Update 1.9.5 introduces player bounties with the goal of tying a reward to the PvP side of Expedition. The bounty system is carefully designed to turn those interested in PvP on each other rather than further promoting the slaughter of innocent cargo haulers. Bounties are acquired for assaulting bountyless ships and for destroying ships but only if you destroy it while a bounty is on your head. Additionally, any bounty acquired from a bountyless ship cannot increase your bounty beyond 20 gold. Ships with a bounty placed on them can extract for 50% of their bounty in gold or hunt down other pirates to gain an even larger bounty. Destroying or disarming a ship with a bounty allows you to claim 100% of the bounty as gold upon extraction. This system ensure piracy against other pirates is the most lucrative way to PvP, piracy against non pirates is the least, and players who successfully fend off a pirate attacks have something to gain.
Airships with bounties gain a black dot above their airship and any balloon paint also turns to black. This is visible to all players and the dot will be visible from greater distances when using a spyglass.
The existing bounty system might feel a bit unrewarding in its most bare bones form but I am planning to expand on the system with elements like resource rewards and a "pirate king".
Crew Orders
Crew orders while them may seem nice for high player count ships are truly geared towards users relying on AI turrets. AI gunners will obey all targeting commands and when combined with their accuracy improvement this update will exceed the effectiveness of your average human gunner. While the AI may be better gunners that is their only function and a human player can both man a gun and repair the ship between reloads so I do not expect the AI gunners to be valued over a skilled human. I'll be keeping a close eye on this relationship.
Float Stone
Float Stone is a brand new resource spread across the 5 brand new "small islands" added this update. Float Stone orbits in the sky in clusters of up to three. Float Stone can be used to craft Float Stone Shards and Bricks, heavy components that provide a massive amount of lift per volume. The heaviest ships in the game will have no problem being suspended by two float stone bricks. Float Stone lifted ships are slower for this trade off but should be able to protect themselves unlike any other ship given the free space opened up by lacking regular balloons.
1.9.5
Major Features
- Added bounties for PvP. Players get bounties when they attack bountyless ships or destroy ships. Destroying bountyless ships can only increase a ship's bounty up to 20 gold. Extracting allows you to claim 50% of your bounty.
- Pilots can issue targeting commands to their crew. AI gunners will obey the commands. Autoturrets will ignore targeting commands but will hold fire and reload.
- Added float stone as a resource and two new components: float stone brick and float stone shard.
Minor Features
- Added a tooltip when you mount the steering wheel.
- Collisions are disabled for distant airships.
- AI controlled turrets lead moving targets for improved accuracy.
- AI airships can target engines, propellers, weapons and balloons.
- Added 5 new minor islands: Lookout, Igloo, Tooth, Floes, and Copse.
- Added a /cargo command to add cargo to your ship in sandbox.
- Moderator forced extraction refunds contract cost.
- Parcels can be picked up using the grappling gun.
- Picked up parcels are not automatically equipped.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed cannon smoke firing in weird directions.
- Fixed hunt contracts spawning ships inside each other and crashing the game for clients.
- Reduced frequency of audio cut outs in populated expedition matches.
- Reloadable heavy turrets can start a reload even if one of the guns is already reloading.
- Fixed water noises playing when loading into sandbox or battle.
- Altered the tracers of all projectiles to fix stretching on cell shifts. Might have some lingering stretching, let me know you see any.
- Fixed cannons and gatlings not exploding when destroyed.
- More server stability improvements.