This week overhauls two underutilized weapons. The lighter of the two, Rail Guns, have been overhauled and renamed to Magnetic Beams. Mag Beam ships utilize focusers the same way Rail Guns did but the weapon now fires a continuous 3 second beam dealing damage 10 times to parts caught in the beam.
The new damage profile circumvents the Rail Gun's difficulty of reliably hitting single shots by giving pilots a window to line up the shot and get partial damage. The sustained beam also allows the weapon to deal more damage overall since landing all shots on the same parts will only be possible on a stationary target.
Rams also receive a rework this update. Rams posed many balance issues by being situationally easy to use and inconsistent in their damage application. New rams prevent a single ram from hitting the same part twice in one ram or hitting it again without actually colliding again.
On top of functionality improvements, their limiting systems have also been improved. Instead of setting the ship on a global no-ram-cooldown after one hit, every ship has a ram damage limit that maximizes at 25% ship mass and decays from 100% to 0% in 10 seconds. This means that heavy ships, those hardest to pull off rams with, deal the hardest hits but light ships, those easiest to pull off rams with, will not be destroying functional parts in one touch.
The new system means hitting with more rams deals more damage so a new style of ram, the blade ram, has been added to utilize this feature. Blade rams do the most damage when dragged along colliding parts compared to the original rams that excel at impacting targets. They also make your ship look really cool.
Finally, the parts menu sees some improvements with part groups. Similar parts are now put into expanding groups to prevent clutter in the list. You can see the number of parts in a group in the upper right hand corner of the image and just a single click is sufficient to select the top level part of the group. You can disable this feature in the settings if you've sufficiently acclimated to the previous list.
Join us on Discord for public playtests Friday at 12pm ET, Saturday at 3pm ET, and Monday at 7pm ET.
1.13.3
Major Features
- Reworked and rebalanced rams. Hitting with more rams now deals more damage but ships have a "ram damage cap" equal to 1/4 their mass. The limited value constantly lowers and takes 10 seconds to reset from full. Any one ram cannot ram the same part again until 10 seconds of no ramming have passed.
- Added blade rams. Blade rams deal the most damage when dragged across a surface.
Minor Features
- Spectating while on a pilot seat in sandbox (default key "V") changes to an orbiting camera setup that tracks the ship.
- Reworked and renamed the rail gun to the magnetic beam cannon. It now fires a sustained beam dealing damage to everything inside 10 times during the beam.
- AI part targeting now ranks parts based on percent HP instead of raw HP. This reduces the effectiveness of "bait" components.
- Rail gun audio is now audible down the length of the beam.
- Parts with A and B variants will now only show one option in the parts list and automatically select the option that will connect when mousing over a surface.
- Improved the lance cannon hit particle.
- Reduced audio cutouts in big fights by making AI controlled turrets fire as part of a ship wide audio system. Audio from quick bursts will be grouped into one playback.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed crashes occurring randomly in the server browser.
- Fixed random circular explosions from flaks and siege cannons.
- Fixed part icons disappearing until resorted when the main menu was opened.
- Fixed a bug where setting crew shares to 0 would cause the captain to lose resources from contracts.
- Fixed harvest contract collecting values at higher levels.