I have now gone through all ship designs that come with the game and updated them for the new damage model and game balance. Practically all ships got some changes. Some were redesigned, some all new designs are introduced and some outdated designs are removed completely.
The battle challenges haven't been updated yet.
Tips for updating your own designs
- Change from heavy to medium armor except in critical places. This reduces weight and ship cost a lot.
- Place hull modules for additional light armor inside ship.
- Use corner and slope armor pieces where possible to benefit from increased effective armor thickness.
- Add more gas tank modules to ships with chemical thrusters.
- Cut number of weapon modules to reduce ship cost. Add power generation and radiators to get better fire rate instead.
- Shields now use even more power when under strain. Reduce number of shield modules and add power generation.
- Check the ship's center of mass since armor is now very heavy.
Fixes and changes in this version
- Fixed projectile impacts sometimes causing ships to jump or shake.
- Fixed exception if user clicks "release ship control" button twice very quickly.
- Fixed a crash related to module targets.
- Core modules now explode (but still don't necessarily get destroyed) when they get disabled.
- Improved mobility stat calculation to take relative actuator strength into account. This affects automatic classification to ships and platforms.
- Improved enemy surrender logic to keep enemies fighting longer.
- Balance: Buffed armor effectiveness against kinetic projectiles.
- Balance: Increased armored thruster thrust slightly.
- Balance: Increased beam weapon range.
- Balance: Module price changes.
- Balance: Tweaked weapon ranges.
- Balance: Reduced medium plasma electricity use and increased that of medium gauss.
Next I will update the battle challenges, hunt down some remaining bugs and then the beta branch will become the official version. If you don't like the new balance now is the time to voice your suggestions.