Welcome back.

This month will be a little bit of everything as I shift away from pure overworld development. There's still a lot of broken and unfinished things in the overworld and it's going to take time to truly fix it all. However I've gotten it to the point where it's at least functional and "playable" in the minimal sense, so it will begin to take less and less priority while I move back to other areas of the game.

Faction Interactions

Player Storage

A player will be able to go to a station and pay an upfront fee to store items and ships. This fee will be relatively sizeable, as I want it to be something an early game player has to work towards and a mid game player will still debate if it's worth setting up elsewhere.

Faction commissions

Basically you can choose to work for another faction, and are essentially in a contract with them and them alone. It'll pay a monthly stipend which grows based on your relation to them and player level, and will automatically be forfeited should your relation with that faction dip below an amount. This should provide early game players with a sense of direction and steady income so they feel more confident taking risks. Additionally the storage fee will be waived with that faction while you're commissioned with them, yet another reason to take one.

To balance out the immense upside, completing quests for factions that are enemies to that one will cause a reputation penalty, which if done too much could remove your commission. Additionally, periodically the faction will automatically assign you what I'm calling "imperative" quests. These quests cannot be dismissed and are assigned automatically. Failing to do them in the allotted time will result in a significant reputation penalty. I intend for them to also have sizeable rewards as well to balance out the annoyance factor, and doing them gives a significant boost to faction reputation. These may also involve sabotaging other factions and provoking conflict.

Crew

Crew will be receiving more attention as I expand their API.

Crew class checking in dialogue

I'll be adding support for checking if you have a certain class of crew in your fleet. Won't be as helpful immediately, but as I add more crew types who knows. I'd really like for crew types to matter to go down that star trek or space opera esque road of "Security officer, give me your opinion on dealing with these stupid pirates" kind of thing where they can chime in and provide solutions to problems you're dealing with, and then you can use your fleet skills to execute them, maybe at a reduced threshold for using the right people.

Crew Service History

A bit of a low priority requirement, but I'd like to get it in especially now that crew type abstraction some other important refactors were done to make it more feasible.

Basically on the crew page it'll list basic stats for each crew depending on each crew type. Battles/kills/deaths in infantry and ship combat, successful deployments for disruptors. For ship combat this will be broken down further into service on each ship. This will also include time served on the ship, which I might use for the below mechanic.

Ship-Officer Bonding

Once an officer has served on a ship for 2-3 cycles (subject to change), an option in the refit menu will appear to bond them to the ship they're assigned to. This costs story points and can only be done once per crew to a given ship. The officer will then be granted the Bonded perk, which will grant a general stat boost when using the ship they bonded to. It won't be game changing or anything, but it'll be like a free perk and serve as a bit of player lore building for their runs. I think the time delay will also add an interesting aspect, as early game ships may not be the most desirable, providing a player decision to whether or not they want to commit to that. It also serves as another story point sink for the player, and the more of those the better.

Combat Improvements

Fighters

Interceptors are being added which will seek out friendly ships and follow them, shooting at enemy fighters orbiting the ship they're protecting.

Fighters and turrets will be getting overhauled. They'll essentially attach themselves to friendly or enemy ships depending on what their function is, and repeatedly orbit it while performing a task. This will work a lot better with the combat model I have set up and require less work on my part with AI as its essentially just picking a random point in a circle over and over. I also think it'll be more "fair" to point defense weapons, since they have more time to shoot small targets which requires less advanced predictive firing. As the fighters will be in a "fixed" rotational vector irrespective of the ship itself, turning the ship will allow your point defense weapons to get an angle on them. In general I want to avoid fighters being annoying mosquitos you can't get rid of, but I also want them to be something with a degree of staying power so they don't get shot down immediately. By making them easier for PD weapons to shoot at I can give them much bigger health pools and spread their damage output. Overall, the idea is that they're almost a status effect inflicted on your ships, with the more PD weapons and interceptors you have the quicker you get rid of them.

More Fighters

I will also be adding more fighter and turret variants, since many factions are lacking them and most of the ones currently ingame were just there for testing purposes when I initially added hangars to the game. I already have quite a few mocked up, and will be aiming for at least 3 (fighter, bomber, interceptor) for each faction with an additional turret or support fighter thrown in here and there.

As a teaser, here's the sprites for the Symbiosis fighters. The Enum (interceptor), Fragment (Fighter), and Heap (Bomber).

Ship Ammo Pools

Ships will have a total ammo pool. Any time a weapon with "regenerating" ammo (not all weapons use ammo and not all weapons regenerate it) resupplies it will take a bit off this pool. The amount consumed is based on the weapon's ammo per shot multiplier and the number of rounds resupplied. This adds another vector for attrition and weapon/ship balance. As a general rule, heat and ammo efficiency will be inversely proportional to each other, with secondary aspects like range, DPS, and loadout cost also serving as counterbalance. Ballistic weapons will be all rounders, energy will trade heat efficiency for taking little to no ammo, and missiles will be great at heat, but have bad ammo efficiency. Hangars will take tons of ammo, mainly penalizing losing them and spamming too many at once. I might make bombers take more ammo when they resupply, we'll see. Of course, exceptions to the rules are just as fun to make as the rules themselves.

Since I find the idea of totally running out of ammo to be unfun, hitting 0 ammo will instead apply the NoAmmo debuff, which simply nerfs weapon resupply times. This will still reduce the effective DPS of those weapons without setting it to 0. By abstracting it into a perk, it also becomes trivial to configure for players who want a more "hardcore" experience of completely running out.

This mechanic will affect different factions in different ways. For instance Marrock ships will have extremely bad ammo capacity to represent their terrible supply lines and over expansion even if their guns are hard hitting and don't use up much, while AFG ships will have outright excessive ammo reserves for their miniguns to endlessly churn through. Energy heavy or diversified factions like Glith and Reef won't really need to care about the mechanic at all, while a missile heavy faction like the the Civil Alliance will need to be careful how many missiles with regenerating ammo they equip.

This will open up another form of support ship that can resupply allies. I already have one such ship for the AFG, though it directly resupplies ammo to weapons with its ability. I'll likely split this ability into two. One that supplies ship ammo for the AFG, and another that resupplies weapons (more specifically missiles) which will likely go to the Alliance.

I will also add a field for abilities to optionally require ammo pool consumption, in the same way some abilities require ability charges or stamina to use.

Finally, I'm thinking maxing out vents will grant a percentage boost to ammo total. Other hullmods may be added that also adjusts this amount.

Active Venting

Ships will now have a flat overload/active vent time (computing the active vent rate as a function of this time), generally getting longer with ship size. This is to decouple these times from vents, hopefully making them less of a god stat and avoids weird situations where passive vent rate approaches zero and active vent times become insanely long. All in all it should make combat more consistent and predictable.

Maxing heat sinks will provide a bonus to active vent time, which should synergize nicely. I'll likely set it to shave off a second from the time, which will make small ships less proportionately vulnerable timewise (going from 6 -> 5 seconds is a bigger amount than say 14 -> 13), while giving capital ships with larger heat capacity a much bigger effective active vent rate. While small, the flat bonus should overall work out in favor of both big and small ships, but for different reasons. In general I'd like to keep active vent/overload times relatively constant, so when you overload a ship it's always roughly the same time as what you'd expect. I'm not completely against hullmods and perks that lengthen the time, but would like to avoid anything that shortens it.

As an intended side effect these changes will also enable high heat capacity, low passive vent rate support ships centered around thermal fighters (thermal carriers). These will suck up heat from allied ships and then active vent it, preferably in the backline where it's safe. Thermal carriers already exist in game, but now they'll actually make sense.

Terrain hazards

Terrain hazards are things that affect your fleet as you fly past them. I had them in the previous overworld and will basically need to re-add them. The plan is to eventually have these affect combat on top of the overworld, but first I need to get them ingame in the overworld layer.

Minefield

Minefields occupy a single location and will detonate when an enemy fleet flies over them, doing damage and unstealthing them. A high bombardment skill is necessary to disarm them. Luckily the fields are easy to detect and avoid.

Firing Array

Firing arrays will be making a return. These are basically a massive array of defensive turrets designed to shoot hostile fleets down, and are extremely good at detecting and unstealthing fleets. Taking them down will require a high level of stealth to get up close without being ripped to shreds, and either hacking or bombardment to reprogram or blow them up.

Other Terrain

I'd like to add in asteroids and gas clouds as well. We'll see. These may affect stealth ratings and ship/fleet speed? Asteroid mining is also a consideration.