Hello!  Here’s this week’s installment of the developer blog.

Enkelin

The team skill Warmongering has had its cost reduced to 1 skill point per level. This should help new teams who are strapped for skill points.  We are also creating missions to allow you to turn in excess Spirit and “Hoberian” augmenter blueprints for another chance at the one you want.

NCCIntrepid

Suggested and completed a change to allow the turn in of 10 Combined Aspect Tablets for 2 Honorary Diplomas and a Zaphragi Research Diploma similar to the Primal Ship Remains. Combined Augmenter tablets have also been split off from the themed Emperor loot. Once this change is patched in, you will be guaranteed to receive an Emperor item on every kill of the boss.

Blue Dwarf

A conversation about fueled energies have lead us to deciding how they operate to change slightly. In the future fueled energies will not consume fuel if your energy bank is at it’s maximum capacity. If your energy is max and your fuel burns out, you’ll drop to 25% of your regen just like when you don’t have fuel. A fuel will be consumed when your bank dips. This change does not affect energy banks that produce waste. In other news, Seer is getting a new weapon in the Underminer series. The new weapon, Seer’s Sideminer, will be available from the Seer’s Conclave soon for those with the Weaponry skill to use it (22). Lastly, Sniper Analysis charge time has been dropped to 2 minutes from 5.  This change will hopefully streamline some of the more tedious boss fights.

Hober Mallow

Mastodon-themed augmenters have been added to appropriate areas of the Serengeti dungeon.  There is a new Aspect augmenter, Combined Aspect augmenter, and Spirit (base-only) augmenter.

Hello!  Here’s this week’s installment of the developer blog.

Enkelin

Players have alerted the dev team that the “Bana King” uber has been difficult to find this universe.  I inquired and learned that he is guaranteed to spawn in DF 480 or higher of Kalthi Depths. This isn’t a whole lot of help since there are very many DGs in that range, but hopefully anyone who is looking for him will now at least know where he may be found.  Going forward, we are considering shrinking the size of Kalthi Depths. There was some initial confusion over how to interpret the XML data, but I can now confirm that he is in DF 450 this universe. Going forward, he will be placed in a custom dungeon so we don’t need to deal with this issue. Going forward, he will continue to be placed in a random Kalthi Depths dungeon but the total number of Kalthi Depths galaxies will be reduced by about half.

NCCIntrepid

I have gone through and increased weapon slots on certain ships so that they are usable by Berserker. This change only applies to ships that had very few weapon slots, and especially those like Reaver that come with a weapon equipped. I also changed the unstable overloaders that are obtainable from AI bases: they now have the “can’t unequip” tag which means they also become size 0 when equipped.  You will be able to carry a good stack of them now, making them a little easier to use.

Urza

I reduced the costs of mission-reward fighter generators.

Blue Dwarf

I noticed some discrepancies in how the Lagrange Control and Resist skills work. I will publish some fixes and clarifications soon!

Hober Mallow

The Gunner proposal I posted on the forum has been accepted, it will be quite some time before we end up doing this though. I’m changing the +33% Electric Tempering aug mod on Multifiring Combat Control Bots to 20%, this should make those bots more useful to Fleet Commanders. I still have not finished with Tractor Beam balance, but I plan on doing some work in creating a Hull Expansion balance sheet so that Hull Expanders are more impactful. This will probably result in pretty radical changes to a lot of hull expanders, but overall it should be a net positive thing. Look for some commentary on both of these things in the future.

In other news, I’m also working on some proposals for Adv. Class Subskills. I want to have them done so they are easier to tackle when we finally address class balancing, so look forward to me sharing some of my rough ideas in a forum topic sometime soon as well.

Hello!  Here’s this week’s installment of the developer blog. Unless otherwise indicated, these changes are all awaiting patch and not yet live.  Also, we will be running a Bindomite-themed monthly event this weekend. The much-discussed revamp to the item modification system has unfortunately been put on hold due to an unanticipated drop in code dev time, so feel free to go wild with the extra Bindomite!

Blue Dwarf

The spawner timer on Speedy Gonzales has been reduced to 5 minutes, but the zone is still not instanced.

NCCIntrepid

I have changed the Carcass Missile on the Vulture to be ship-bound and 0 size while not being neurobound. This will allow you to transfer Vulture bots more easily. The JAC Drop rates have been increased in the Jungle, and Lore skills are no longer required for any of the Ancient Ruin Gear.

SunDog60

Prawn Pieces will now drop as a single uniform commodity, rather than a series of A to H of pieces. Any blueprints that required Prawn Pieces will now require this new Prawn Piece. Old A-H pieces will be renamed into the new commodity as well. This should help ease the difficulty in building the Prawn (which requires 80 pieces).

Urza

Removed most class locked items from the dg drops, and moved them to the respective ai stations in lyceums.  Most of these bps/items have had there build times and max workforces adjusted to be at most 5-6 hours. A few have had there costs changed to remove Dementium costs.  T20 ship dg ubers will drop their ship commods and bps 100% of the time. Also all t20 non Serengeti ships will take a max of 5.5 hours. Reduced size of inertial dampening blueprints (they used to be up to 8000 and can only be obtained in Lunacy). Buffed the drop rate of Love Cylinders from 0.5% to 2.5%. Pax Astronomica+ can now be upgraded to Hybridized Astronomica.

Hober Mallow

There is still work being done on Tractor Beams, we’ve hit some snags along the way but I’m confident we’ll have a balance sheet done within the next few weeks. In light of some conversation with end game and lower level Gunners, I’ll be writing up a forum post in General Discussion regarding Gunner class bonuses and a proposal I have in regards to the Deathblossom. Look out for that in the upcoming week.

Hello everyone! Here’s what we’ve been working on lately.

Enkelin

Since Spirit of the Lion Blueprints are demanded at a much higher rate than any of the other Spirit blueprints, the other three variants end up accumulating in storage. We approved a suggestion to allow players to turn in any four Spirit blueprints for one Spirit blueprint of choice.

We have created new forum and Discord roles for our Press Corps. Track them down with any questions you have about the development process!

NCCIntrepid

Last week I spent some time on my massive list of improved QoL stuff. So far ready for patch is I have improved the drop rates for Jungle zones on JACs; now you will be guaranteed a JAC per boss kill with a special chance for another to drop from Baloo beyond the normal drop rates. I have also updated Kalthi Ships to be swappable. What this means is if you have your augmetners on your Berserker and decide you want a KAW instead of a KWW, you no longer need to aug reset or go buy another ship form from Paxian Stronghold. You can simply build your KAW Upgrade and equip it to you KWW instantly becoming a KAW. This will apply to all Armored and Wrathful Kalthi ship types as soon as patch hits. Lastly, I have updated the Fembot Factory and Blueprint to be T16 to ease the ability to get to Station management to actually possible without purchasing Fembots themselves.

I have a few other projects in progress as well. We finally have a resolution to the Cloning Vats: I will be adding a mission to simply get the fighter generators in the future. I will also be resolving the Hermes one hit issues. I will be working to make a low level travel ship given to you by the Paxian Ships. I will also add some new dailies and weekly missions to the Serengeti and Jungle Zones to acquire some Honorary Mentions and Diplomas.

Hober

I have further tweaked the Phoenix and Glaucopennia. Updated stats are on the test server and ready for players to test some more. I’m currently under the impression that they are a bit underpowered according to their cost, but that may be OK. I’m considering reducing their cost and rarity instead of increasing their power.

The second round of engine adjustments are now available for testing on the test server. Thrust has been increased on all Engines by 100%, while Turning has been increased by 33%. These changes are meant to mitigate the necessity of constantly using Ace in a Pill tweaks to maintain a reasonable level of maneuverability. This may mean that players who were already pretty maneuverable can now use a smaller/weaker engine, or they can instead opt to use heavier gear.

I’m working with enkelin on creating some balance standards and formulas for Tractor Beams. Right now they’re in a very weird place, with a lot of their stats decided on arbitrarily. We hope to create a much more reasonable power differential between tech levels and types of tractor beams.

Welcome to another Pixel blog where I, Pixel, will be going over what has been done over this past week.

Hober Mallow

Tentative Tractor Beam Changes

Additionally their’s been a topic made about suggesting changes to current tractor beam mechanics. Click here to find out more…

Pixel

Battle Sphere – Super Laser

Finally witness the fully operational Battle Sphere! Yes, the Battle Sphere is currently being worked on to add a super laser that will be able to cut through almost everything.
Here’s a mock demostration of the current progress on the superitem visual, this is probably going to change at the final result, as discovered some issues occur with this current animation after multiple uses.

User Interface Improvements

In other news higher resolution background textures for all dialogs in the games user interface, this will reduce artifacting that the previous version used to produce.

Ring Station

As you’ve probably noticed via this blog’s background image, ring stations! This is currently in concept stage but most of the visual work is done. Here’s some image content produced so far:

• Ring Frame (deployed)
• Ring Facilities (building/resource focus)
• Ring Habitat Supports (colo resource focus)
• Bio-ring (colo focus)
• Ring Enhancers (galaxy effects focus)

Bug fixes

* Fixed -weight auras applying twice
* Fixed a case of server crash.

Content fixes

* The mission “Sas Allied Defense Orders” now correctly tells the player they need to kill 10 Outposts in its description.
* Junkyard X25 hydroponics missions and Initiate of Lyceum mission issues fixed.
* Sniper Sharpshooting now mentions that it increases range

Content Changes

* Added Leopard Jump and Monkey Jump to their respective boss loot tables in The Jungle.
* Increased the XP rewards for non repeatable Enigmatic Sector missions.
* Albatross Augmenter – Rate of Fire increased 40%>80%
* Poseidon The Earthshaker Augmenter – Energy Recharge increased 50%>70%
* Mad Scientist Augmenter – Added Capacity +10%, Energy Bank +74%
* Adjusted Recon backpack Superitems to 1 minute charge time.
* Increased m4 hull space by 84% and speed by 50%
* Mythos Stream is now ethereal (This means Mythic Defenders now have an ethereal healing laser once again).
* Removed the Personal Computer and Gravity Controller cost from the basebound extractor blueprints
* New Junkyard Scrapping mission to remove Prefab Fighters from your ship.

Next uni changes

+ Suns if necessary are generated lower down so that the tops of them are no more than 200 above the z=0 plane.
+ Added 7 more tiled galaxy backgrounds.
+ Added new EF layer DG boss piloting a Vulture

Hello everyone. We’d like to share some up and coming changes to the Industrial Commodity (IC) system that we had planned for this universe reset. However due to an error this wasn’t patched in at the actual reset so we will be scheduling a patch to implement the changes next week. This post will be to inform you all about what exactly will be changing. We’re also making a QoL change to BvB that will be going in with the same patch.

Why?

First I’ll give some data on why we’re making the changes in the first place. Last uni I’ve kept an eye on the IC prices across the uni and after reviewing the data we came to the conclusion that the average price for most Tier 0 ICs (such as Steel Girders and Sentient Chatbots) was far below the 100% price mark (ICs vary in sale price from 200% to 50%). This varried per commodity with the highest being Steel Girders at 81% and the lowest being Paxian Figurines at 57%. This meant that a lot of AI stations were buying ICs are minimal prices. To remedy this we (mainly enkelin) did some math and came up with adjustments to the consumption rate of bases as well as the price. This will result in ICs being lower price but you can sell a lot more of them for an on average higher price.

Let me explain with an example: Last uni Paxian Figurines had their price average at 57%. The commodity is worth 37.500 credits at 100%. The average price you could sell it for was  21.375. After the patch the commodity is worth 18.750 at 100% but the consumption rate has been increased by 110% (x2.1), which means the AI bases will likely buy the commodity above the 100% mark which will almost certainly surpass the 21.375 you could sell the commod for last universe and you can sell more of it for that price.

What’s changing?

Below you will find the exact changes that we will be making next week. In addition to these changes you will nolonger be able to sell off-theme commods to AI bases. So a Fusion cell base will only deal in Fusion Cells and its respective T1/2/3 commodity and nolonger deal in Steel Girders, Sentient Chatbots, Paxian Figurines, Fine Space Whisky, Sub-shield Buffers or Cyborg Brigade. We are also reducing the total output of the IC system by 20% as it was yielding more than intended.

+Steel Girders: Price lowered to 8.600 (from 15.000), consumption increased by 39%, Station max increased to 1.250.000
+Fusion Cells: Price lowered to 11.500 (from 22.500), consumption increased by 82%, Station max increased to 1.250.000
+Sentient Chatbots: Price lowered to 6.500 (from 12.500), consumption increased by 54%, Station max increased to 2.500.000
+Cyborg Brigades: Price lowered to 140.000 (from 165.000), consumtion increased by 60%, Station max increased to 750.000
+Paxian Figurines: Price lowered to 18.750 (from 37.500), consumption increased by 110%, Station max increased to 1.250.000
+Fine Space Whisky is now made from 350 Space Oats (up from 250)
+Fine Space Whisky: Price reduced to 8.500 (from 10.000), Station max increased to 1.250.000

 

QoL change to BvB

We’ll be introducing the ability for teams to lay Small Warp Beacons into owned galaxies as long as your team is eligible to BvB that galaxy. There’s two reasons to this. First of all the only reliable way to get 10.000 range (hardcap on permanent assets) away from enemy assets is by using a Singularity Brake (or the likes) on your (usually engineless) ship. However, when you warp into the galaxy you’re (of course) shot by the enemy assets, which will likely kill you instantly. The only way to then get out of range is to ‘beat’ the server’s response time (ping) when you get back in. So your ship goes yellow, you enter and instantly hit your Singularity Brake hotkey, and if you ‘beat’ the server ping, the warp goes off. If you didn’t ‘beat’ the server ping you’ll be shot by enemy assets again and die. Now, for people that live in or near United States (where the servers are located), you can ‘beat’ the server ping fairly reliably. However, for people across the world this is not the case which makes getting out of range to even engage in BvB extremely tedious if not impossible.

Secondly, we’ve had talks about teams being too scared to recruit new members in fear of them being spies and laying Small Warp Beacons to warp enemy ships in with. We’re hoping this change will reduce this fear.

Lastly, some have mentioned that this change cuts off any chance of keeping the assaulting team from even laying stations even if they do find them trying to get out of range. To counteract this we’ll be implementing a warning shout in a defending team’s Team chat when a BvB station gets deployed in one of their galaxies.

Client Fixes

* Fixed one of the most common remaining client crashes.

Bug Fixes

* Fixed -weight auras and tweaks not applying properly.
* Fixed source of 2 server crashes.
* Fixed a bug with Warp Navigation level calculation which gave people W1 for free if they weren’t a Seer
* Fixed constant shield recharge bonuses not working.

Content Changes

* The Delquadrikamdon’s “Red Pill” form now lasts 18 seconds with a 180 second cooldown.
* The Burning and Lacerating line of weapons now impart 3 times as many Medium Fires and Major Surgeries as before, and have all been standardized to 300 range (which results in a significant size reduction as well).
* The Earthshaking line of weapons are no longer high rate of fire physical pulse guns, they now work like multi-projectile Catapults. This means their recoil, firing visibility, number of projectiles and knockback has been increased. Their DPS has also been massively increased.
* The mission “A Fair Trade” should no longer have a very small chance to give the player nothing.
* Changed the Poseidon Wave and Isvas’ayu Submerger to 5 Pulses instead of 4.
* Changed Lion Maul Tweak Generator to a Superitem. This will allow Slaves to use the Superitem.
* Added FC requirement to space blue delta fighters
* Combat Bot Tweaking now gives +1% speed, +2% thrust and turning and +1% shield recharge per level
* Removed the requirement of 20 Honorary Diplomas to unlock the Unstabilized Plasma Fusion Core missions and merged the Copper/Bana/Anaconda/MS kill mission requirements with the initial mission
* Nanite Fabrication Blueprint will now show up as ’1000 Nanites’ in the construction bay of a userbase
* Added rare tag to Twisted station kits.
* The Absentis built-in tweak are now shipbound rather than neurobound
* Base Amplifications now build nearly instantly (from 1 day) and take 3 days to activate (from 7 days)
* Demolishing/Neutralizing Blast Blueprints now drop from Kalthi Depths dungeons. Kalthi Depths previously dropped Surge Blueprints, which was not intentional.
* Minor, Basic, Std., Good, Exc., Sup. and Ult. Augmenter Fabrication Modules have had their Combonite requirements reduced to 1, 10, 20, 50, 100, 250 and 500 respectively.
* Put decay on universe reset tags on all base thrusters.
* Arctia AI name pool increased by about 50% with the addition of French and Finnish names.
* Removed second Torpedo weapon from Flyswatter Flyboys due to Torpedo rebalance.
* Rumble instances have had their lockouts removed.
* Paxian Battle Frigate has had its reflectivity decreased to ~807%.
* Antuayu’s Siege Mode has been buffed. Gives -30% Electric Tempering, +25% Damage, -25% Recoil, +50% Splash Range, -50% Resists for 10 seconds with a 60 second cooldown.
* Corrected Selenite Modulating Shield’s description
* Platform Augmentation Alpha/Beta/Gamma are now Base augmenters
* Reduced weight on Defensive Annihilator Pulse Gun (1600000000 -> 2000000)
* Kalthi weapons have been overhauled completely and have completely different stats in most cases.
* A Kalthi Torpedo, the Kalthi Fist, has been added. Its blueprint should drop from the same place other Kalthi blueprints drop.
* Mythic Defenders laser and transference weapon are no longer ethereal, and the transference weapon does not chain.
* Lyceum Offensive and Defensive Fields are not usable by Trade or Combat Bots.
* Added K.S.Victory skin to Kalthi Stinger series
* Added Angry Grim skin.
* Added Golden Grim skin.
* Added Frosty Grim skin.
* Permanent drones only accept Base augs via Astral Injection.
* Adjusted the Base Radiation Fields to give vulnerability.
* Increased Golden Man Blueprint drop rate.
* Buffed the Kalthi Armored Stinger’s inbuilt tweak from 500>1500 Shield Recharge and 50%>100% Critical Immunity for 10 seconds.
* Buffed the Kalthi Armored Commander’s inbuilt super item, now deploys a mobile Kalthi Minion Protection Drone that can heal and significantly buffs the defensive stats of fighters for 60 seconds.
* Buffed the Kalthi Wrathful Stinger’s inbuilt super item. It now imparts -90% Radar, -34% Range and -34% Tracking to enemies within 1000 range for 15 seconds.
* Death of First Born fighters now have 50% less range.
* Removed the detrimental Electric Tempering effect from the Gunner Ion Missile super item.

Next uni changes

+ Instanced vulcan bosses
+ Adjusted kickout time of vulcan bosses to 5 minutes
+ Altered Anatolia background.
+ Altered Emphatic Mother backgrounds.
+ Altered Enigma backgrounds.
+ Altered Elysion background.
+ Altered Halloween zone backgrounds.
+ Altered IQ Bana backgrounds.
+ Altered some Jungle zone backgrounds.
+ Altered The Junkyard background.
+ Altered Lunacy backgrounds.
+ Altered Mausoleum backgrounds.
+ Altered Ruby Steppes backgrounds.
+ Altered Sol background.
+ Altered Temple Ground background.
+ Altered Citadel resource amounts for next universe.
+ Altered Dorado resource amounts for next universe.
+ Fixed Hallway to Mother double boss wormhole issue.
+ Massively reduced the chance to get galaxies with giant suns
+ Added 25x Junkyard Hydroponic mission options to The Junkyard.
+ Adjusted End of the Universe visuals, added background.
+ Improved the resolution of the galaxy in the background of Temple Grounds.
+ Alien Invasions no longer happen in any arm other than the Sas arm.
+ Sas Arm Invasions happen every 5 tp 7 days, and should no longer happen at the exact same time every day.
+ The Monthly missions and their rewards are still in Subspace, all but the Sas arm missions only require kills of Aveksaka ships. The Sas arm Monthly requires kills of Aveksaka ships and Aveksaka Outposts. Allied Commendations have been removed from every arm’s rewards but the Sas and Pajca arm.
+ AI now roam in every single arm of Subspace, whether there is an invasion or not.
+ Kalthi Depths will have far less mobs swarming the higher danger factors.
+ Kalthi Armored mobs, Cybernetic Battleships/Cruisers are significantly less tanky, but do more damage. Their fighters also have less range now. Kalthi Deployers drones now follow the mobs around and last longer. Cybernetic Support mobs deploy their drones faster and their drones do more damage.

Hello everyone. We’d like to announce some changes to permanent drones that will take effect tomorrow on Universe Reset.  The upshot is that healer permanent drones have had their HPS output nerfed by about 50%, down to around 23,000 for endgame variants.  For exact numbers, please consult the spreadsheet linked below (which also gives some helpful augmentation suggestions).  We have undertaken this nerf as part of a larger repositioning of permanent drones as anti-player emplacements, as opposed to general-purpose defense assets that often rival bases in defense utility.  For this reason, we are trying to balance drone healing power to around the level that a player ship can achieve.  Since endgame drones were healing in the 40-60k range, a nerf of roughly 50% was required.

Spreadsheet of Changes

There’s one other change to permanent drone mechanics that was decided on ages ago but never got coded until now. When we revamped Augmenter Tweaking, we buffed all non-base augmenters by a factor of two to compensate. Accordingly, we decided to stop allowing non-base augmenters to be inserted into permanent drones via Astral Injection, but the code for this has only just been prepared for patch.  We do regret giving you all such late notice on this change. If you were planning to use non-base augmenters on your drones and have been thrown off by this, we would be happy to do an exchange at no cost to you. Just submit a ticket within the first two weeks of the universe and specify which non-base augmenters you would like to have exchanged for base augmenters (tech 10 and lower).

Greetings!  We are excited to announce a new role on the Star Sonata development team.  This role is being introduced to address two separate goals:

1. We would like to make the dev team’s work more transparent to the community.
2. We would like to attract skilled and dedicated community members to the dev team.

As a member of the Star Sonata Press Corps, you will receive read/listen-only access to weekly dev meetings.  At these meetings, you will have the opportunity to ask questions, much like the public comment period at a local governmental meeting.  In exchange for this access, we would like Press Corps members to report to the rest of the community on what the dev team has been discussing and working on.  You’ll receive a forum designation to reflect your status as a Press Corps member, but you are also welcome to use other avenues to report to the community. Joining the Press Corps is also a great way to get acquainted with the team in case you’re interested in becoming a developer in the future.  Everyone is welcome to apply, even if you have previously applied to join the dev team.  Just send an email to jeff@starsonata.com indicating your interest and he’ll take it from there.

Universe Reset July 22nd 2017

In recent events, Hober Mallow has learned how to buff stuff. With this revelation he has buffed the strength of the Aveksaka exponentially to increase the difficulty of Subspace. The Aveksaka are now destroying the Terran universe quicker than ever before – Lyceum scientists predict our universe will end on the 22nd of July, 13:00 EDT (18:00 BST, 03:00 AET). This is only days away now, remember to pack your bases and permanent drones before they are deleted! All characters, ships, bots, and skills will be unaffected by the reset. Fortunately, the newfound power of the Aveksaka will be lost in the collapse of our universe.

SunDog60

I’ve been working on Arctia the past few days, fixing any issues with it mainly. The Arctia AI will now spawn around each room, not on top of every wormhole as they do currently. They will also spawn in a flurry of snowflakes, this should help alleviate the strangeness of seeing a random shard of ice appearing next to you. Lady Aurora will now drop a rare holoprojector similar to Lord Borean (these changes aren’t in yet at the time of posting this blog!).

Next patch, there will be a temporary mission in The Junkyard to delete those pesky Prefab Fighters from your ship until we can get an improved solution to them.

Bobbo

Bobbo has been working on fixing problems and in general improving the Seer Nanite Infusion Devices. If you have had issues with this and would like to help speed up the fixing process, the current fixes are available on test for you to experiment with!

NCCIntrepid

NCC has converted the built-in Lion Maul tweak generator on the Lion and the built-in Sniper Re-Router tweak generator into tweak devices. This will allow bots to use them as well as modernizing the ship inbuilts to be closer to what is now found on ships today, such as the Paxian Grand Reinforcement on the high tech Paxian ships. We are aware of the lack of information on the super item tooltips and we will be looking into fixing that soon.

Pixel

Pixel has been very busy yet again adding wounderful background changes to galaxys and other things.

End of the Universe

Temple Grounds

Shadow

Reaver Skins

Base Radiation Field Generators

Changes to base radiation field items, that will affect enemy ships resistances as they get closer to your bases.