Another new map preview, another 2 new regions. The central bay is finished off with a stretch of coastal cliffs and a rivery region fills out the rest of the peninsula. As the final regions appear on the map over the next few weeks, keep in mind that most of regions are being added at a low level of detail so a playable map can be available as soon as possible. Expect additional detail passes in the future.
The design of the new map will undeniably change the effectiveness of all kinds of ships. Heavy ships in particular will gain a large amount of relative mobility due to redeployment and the lack of jet streams increasing the value of mag drives. The current archipelago uses plentiful jet streams to give the faster lighter ships discretion when picking battles. They can always quickly hop into a stream, get out of range and enter a second to escape a heavier attacker. Some stealthy balance changes are arriving this update to prepare for the new environment.
The first change aims to address the most deadly weapon choice available: large adjustable weapon arrays. The power of these weapons climbs quickly with number placed because overlapping fields of fire drastically improve a ship's ability to pulverize important parts. This same relationship leaves low counts very ineffective since their individual inaccuracy means you won't consistently hit an important part with one weapon. The spread of all captain-aimed weapons will now scale with the amount of firepower from captain-aimed weapons on the ship to counteract this relationship. Captain-aimed weapons will now fire perfectly accurate in small firepower amounts and gain double spread in the biggest possible firepower amounts. This change should be a big power increase for both light adjustable weapon ships and mixed weapon platform ships.
While the accuracy scaling change tries to level the playing field, the second stealthy change just lowers the damage of weapons on heavy ships. A ship's raw combat power scales quadratically with firepower thanks to increased weapons offering both extra damage and a bigger HP pool for those weapons. This quadratic scaling is being chipped away with a ship-wide weapon damage reduction scaling from no reduction at 20k firepower to 25% reduction at 30k firepower. The goal of this change is not to unseat heavy ships as the biggest damage dealers but to flatten the curve and make them less in the lead.
Join us on Discord for public playtests Friday at 12pm ET, Saturday at 3pm ET, and Monday at 7pm ET.
1.17.9
Major Features
- Added a coastal cliff-side region to the new map.
- Added a rivery coastal region to the new map.
Minor Features
- Captain aimable weapons are more accurate on lighter ships and less accurate on heavier ships. A spread multiplier scales linearly from 0 to 2.25 from 3k to 30k of captain aimable firepower. Weapons affected by this change are labeled in their part description.
- Player heavy ships deal reduced damage with all weapons. Damage multiplier scales linearly from 100% damage at 20k firepower to 75% damage at 30k firepower.
- Further optimizations to memory usage on the new map at a small performance cost in tree heavy areas.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed the altitude maintainer not applying maximum vertical thrust control for heavy ships.
- Fixed projectile explosions not orienting to match their projectile.