ELINT Rework
The most substantial change in this patch is the rework of Electronic Intelligence (ELINT), the passive detection of enemy emissions, to be fully integrated with the rest of the sensor infrastructure. Previously, there were two different types of track: Tracks and Bearings. Bearings were a kind of second-class citizen, where they weren't shared across ships and couldn't be interacted with. These changes upgrade passive ELINT tracks to be first-class tracks just like your radars provide. This means that they can now have orders issued against them, and other neat things.
While being able to shoot at ELINT bearings is nice, especially for jamming, this update takes the improvements a step further and introduces automatic calculation of ES Crossfixes. When multiple bearings are being sent to the team's sensor network, they will be automatically combined to estimate a position for the emitter. These crossfixes are calculated using the actual geometry of the sensors relative to each other and the signature, not a gamified random position, so the accuracy of these fixes will improve as the angular separation between the sensors increased. Similarly, having two ships with ES sensors close together will actually degrade your fix as a whole, even if other ships are spread out.
One thing to note about these Bearing and Fix tracks is that, while they can have orders issued against them like a radar track, they do not contain any velocity information so you'll be unlikely to hit moving targets.
Ownership Transfer
I'm aware of the network issues some of our players are experiencing, especially when playing with people on the far side of the world, and understand how frustrating this can be when in a 4v4 and 25% of your team's points just disappear. While there is still plenty of network optimization left to do, I can at least mitigate the impact of these situations in the meantime by transferring the ships to the remaining players on the team. For the time being this hand-off is done automatically based on some criteria to try to give entire formations to the same player, and preference players with the least number of ships in their fleet already. If the player's entire fleet cannot be handed off to anyone due to all the remaining teammates reaching the ship limit, any ships that don't fit will be abandoned as before. Also note that this will only occur once the game has begun, if the player disconnects before or during the deployment phase their fleet will not be transferred.
Electronic Counter-Counter Measures
A new Noise Filtering stat has been added to all of the Search and Fire Control sensors, which improves their ability to sift through noise and get a valid return. Because jamming works by artificially raising the noise floor, increasing the noise filtering capability of a sensor will reduce the effect of jamming. The Adaptive Radar Receiver has had a buff to this stat added to it, and had its point cost increased slightly commensurate with its increased utility.
Automatic Power Management
Probably the most frustrating thing in NEBULOUS is taking a hit to one of your power modules and having half your equipment go offline, even though the functional equipment sucking up all your power isn't actually doing anything. This update introduces fluctuating power draws for various components, so they will only actually consume power when they are doing something. Passive buffing components (e.g. Ammo Elevators) are considered always on, and will always consume power.
As always, full patch notes follow:
Changes/Features:
- Passive sensors (e.g. ELINT) refactored to be unified with the rest of the sensors systems:
- ELINT bearings (LOBs) are now shared across all ships, regardless of which one is selected.
- ELINT hits from two or more ships are now automatically combined into a Crossfix Track (sensors must be on separate ships, two sensors on the same ship will only produce a single bearing).
- Accuracy of crossfixes improves as the angular separation between ships with passive sensors increases.
- LOBs and Fixes are now first-class tracks, and can be fired upon in TRK mode (but don't expect to hit).
- Updated ES22 Pinard module description to describe new mechanics.
- Players (who are not the host) who abruptly disconnect due to a network issue or crash will have their ships transferred to other player(s) on their team. Ships that do not fit in the open ship slots of any teammate will be abandoned as before.
- Ship components will now only draw power when they are active, making low-power conditions much more survivable.
- Added additional 2000 and 2500 point victory conditions to Control.
- Added warning audio cue every 5 seconds when a ship has crossed the withdraw line.
- Sensor tracks will no longer show the highlight circle when hovering over them with no visual.
- Added Noise Filtering stat to search and fire control sensors. This provides a dB reduction in both ambient and jamming noise, making a sensor hard to jam.
- Added a noise filtering buff to Adaptive Radar Receiver, and a positional and velocity error penalty.
- Added additional ambient announcements to ships, which can be heard when the camera is zoomed in close, for damage control and abandoning ship.
- Increased max modifier for hull-identificationwork stat to 1000%.
- Improved rendering performance on Caltrop.
- The number of restores remaining in a DC Locker are now displayed in the tooltip in the DC Board.
Balance:
- Decreased reload time of Mk550 Mass Driver to be 45 seconds (was 60), and improved accuracy by 56%.
- Increased cost of Adaptive Radar Receiver to 30 (was 20) due to increased utility.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed ship elimination conditions so that ships will be eliminated if they have all power/drives and command destroyed and have less than 2 restores, as the ship cannot possibly be brought back into the fight.
- Fixed thruster power values in fleet editor UI being scaled incorrectly.
- Fixed exception causing disconnect when using the POV camera on a ship that has already exploded, or exploded when in POV view.
- Added missing button click sounds to Action Menu buttons.
- Fixed ship template list not loading when a ship template had been created with a mod that is no longer loaded/subscribed.
- Fixed being able to change selected ships with number keys when a widget was open.
- Fixed intelligence identification difficulty modifier being reset on ships during initialization.
- Fixed eliminated ships set to WCON FREE firing on ships in rare situations.
- Fixed some sound effects not fading out completely regardless of distance to camera.
- Fixed widget lines sometimes being rendered in the wrong order, causing strange perspective overlaps.
- Moved Small Energy Regulator to Weapon Support category, to match Energy Regulator.