Upcoming Combat Improvements

With the wrapping up of overworld-centric updates for the time being, the next 3-5 months will be almost entirely combat focused in nature. The plan will be to greatly expand the amount of abilities, perks, hullmods, and weapons currently ingame. This will likely be paired with additional ships and factions that make use of them. Additionally I'm looking into some other cool mechanics, but that's a hush hush for now. As this is going to be a rather significant undertaking both on the creative and technical ends, exact timelines and deliverables are uncertain. The first month will more likely than not be based around new weapons tech and abilities. If that goes quickly, I can pivot into other things.

Overall by the end of this dev cycle I expect combat related content to nearly double.  An optimistic estimate, but one I'm pretty sure I can manage.

Weapons Tech

Damage over distance

Projectiles can have an optional min damage and time until damage dropoff, which can be handled in a damage lerp calculation on impact. Beam weapons may use similar functionality.

As the damage is interpolated, it would technically support inverse dropoff as well.

Integrated Plate Shields

Plate shields will be getting reworked into something placed all over a ship, similar to a built in weapon. It'll essentially function as localized regenerating armor panels that don't generate heat when damaged.

Two stage missiles

Missiles that fire other projectiles after a set time/arming distance. This one is actually done already, just didn't make it in time for May.

Spinup Weapons

Weapons that increase firerate over time. Unsure yet if I'll roll it into its own subclass or make it a base function of all projectile weapons.

Multi Beam Weapons

Beam weapons currently only have support for one laser emitter. Hoping to fix that by next update to allow for multi laser arrays to blind your enemies with.

AoE Weapons

Planning to  make weapons that can fire large scale circular AoE effects. These can be anything from explosions/flak that work once, to more esoteric  behaviors like black holes and electrical storms that linger.

Support Weapons

Support weapons already exist with one or two examples, but with the new perk stuff I can actually introduce more status effects that the weapon class is built around.

New Abilities and Hullmods

Now that the perk tech is available, abilities and hullmods are high priority for a major content overhaul. You'll likely see modifiers to mundane things like speed/turn boosts, fire rate, range, damage, etc. But I also want to include more exotic abilities that do entirely new things.

More crew portraits

As usual, I'll try throwing in some crew portraits this update and the next ones, time permitting.