Content Changes

* Lyceum Offensive and Defensive Field’s are no longer useable by bots and no longer affect drones
* Fixed mission description wording in exchanging twisted tech for tokens.
* Energy needed for Earthforce Overload Prototype’s Overloaded Mining Laser Prototype increased to 25k, charge time increased to 54 seconds.
* The Lyceum Research Cruiser’s Offensive and Defensive auras are no longer improperly affected by Neuro Tweaking.
* Over 25 Permanent drone fixes. This will result in heavy nerfs to a lot of drones (but they were unintentionally too strong to begin with).

Bug Fixes

* HAZMAT Collection mission in Tra Subspace fixed, Corrosive Alien Plamsa has been renamed to Corrosive Alien Plasma and will now appear as a parasite in your ship.
* Fixed all Parasitic pulses to properly inject parasites again.

Content Changes

* Due to the excessively strong nature of the Mastodon as a fighter platform, the fighter bay is being nerfed to 6 slots from 10 slots. The launch speed of the Bay has been reduced from 5 seconds to 0.75 seconds. There may be further adjustments to the Mastodon, as neccessary, going forward.
* The Trap is Set mission in Katur Subspace now points you towards the Landmark Drone to begin, which has had its trigger radius increased from 100 to 300.
* On The Offensive mission in Katur Subspace requires 15 Sahvitra kills, the Sahvitra will now spawn from an interval of 45 seconds (2 spawners) down to 20 seconds (2 spawners).
* Dark Kobaldstein’s Offensive and Defensive Lasers replaced with Injectors in the drop tables. Any existing offensive and defensive lasers will still convert into injectors.

Bug Fixes

* Fixed a bug where slaves would not follow seers into a warp if the seer was relying on their seer skills for warp nav.
* Fixed a bug where seers would not get the full map merged from their team if they were relying on their Seer skills for warp nav.
* Fixed 3 of the most common client crashes.
* Fixed a bug where team xp progress towards the next level would have been wiped when the server loads.
* Fied bugs where range tweaks weren’t counted for deathblossoms and the Seer jammers
* Fixed Voulge and Flamberge skin names.
* HAZMAT Collection mission in Tra Subspace fixed, Corrosive Alien Plamsa has been renamed to Corrosive Alien Plasma and will now appear as a parasite in your ship.

Next uni

+ Copper background adjusted.
+ Dragon Boss Lair background adjusted.
+ Easter galaxy backgrounds adjusted.
+ Captain Kidd galaxy background adjusted.

Introduction

Greetings! I’m excited to announce a new project that has recently cleared the earliest stages of development (in other words, the devs have finally stopped arguing over all the little details). The main goal of the project is to make the item modification system more accessible to new players, while also giving endgame players greater ability to fine tune their setups.  While we’re at it, we’re also trying to make modifications more exciting.  As with any revamp of existing content, there is always the danger of throwing off the balance of the game. The purpose of this post is to share our plans with you at the earliest possible occasion; we’ll listen to your feedback and take our time with the next development stage in order to avoid any unintended nerfs. One other note: while this project is a whole dev team effort, enkelin is taking point on it so any feedback should be directed to him.

Discussion of Design Philosophy

Making Modifications More Rewarding

People play video games because they are rewarding.  One of the great UI improvements of the past few years was the Ship Window revamp, in which you can view all your exact stats.  This gave players a concrete way to measure the improvement of each new item they obtained, and has led to an improved sense of reward.  But while you may feel rewarded when your DPS goes up by 1000, this is not the most powerful kind of reward a game can offer.  What we are going for is a game experience where you KNOW you’re better even before checking the Ship Window. That’s a deeper level of satisfaction compared to unemotionally comparing two numbers after the fight.

The problem with the current modification system is that most mods only provide a small increase in stats, and the total effect is only noticeable because you have so many modified items.  We are making mods feel more rewarding by introducing new, powerful modifications on a limited number of gear types.  There’s a weapon mod that splits every shot into two, an energy mod that redirects some damage taken to your energy bank, and a radar mod that boosts your hostility by broadcasting rude messages to all your enemies.  The end result is that your gameplay will be noticeably altered (and improved) when you obtain one of these new modifications.

Stat Stick Discussion

With the addition of these new, extremely powerful modifications, we are going to be toning down another aspect of your setups in compensation.  Part of the reason for this is that we would have to rebalance all existing dungeon content if we allowed everyone to get way stronger than before, but there’s a more fundamental reason too.  The nerf will target so-called “stat sticks,” i.e. any item that is equipped primarily for a stat bonus it grants, and is rarely or never used for its primary purpose.  In Star Sonata, examples of stat sticks include Mzungu Cloak, Point Defense Zeta, and high-tech tractor beams.  In many cases, well-modded items of these types are carried but never activated/used.  In a game like Star Sonata, stat sticks may make up over half of a player’s inventory.  This is sometimes taken to be a sign of customizability of setup, but it is actually the opposite, as I explain below.

One of the principal facets of game design is to give players interesting choices. Should your Shield Monkey sacrifice 500 shield regen for 2000 more HPS?  Should your Speed Demon sacrifice 100 speed for extra range?  These are examples of choices where there’s no clear answer, and that’s the kind of decision that makes for an interesting game.  But when an item’s value is exclusively based on its modifications, there’s no choice left for the player.  As a Berserker, you want to fill your hull with Evil-modified gear, and if you get the chance you won’t mind a few Radioactive or Super Intelligent mods on top of that.  The actual nature of the gear has no bearing on the decision, so long as it’s reasonably small.  In pushing back against the proliferation of stat sticks, the dev team is shifting the game in a direction that will give players much more interesting choices, which is what customizability is really about.  For specifics, see the Grand Table O’ Nerfs below.

Rundown of Changes

What is staying the same?

• Any existing modified items will retain their modifications.

• The stats of most current modifications will remain unchanged (see Grand Table O’ Nerfs for details)

• Bindomite acts the way it always did on non-core types of gear (core types are Weapon, Shield, Energy, Engine, Radar, and Cloak).

What is changing?

• Bindomite can now also be used to add modifications to neurobound, unmodified gear.

• When using Bindomite on a core gear type (Weapon, Shield, Energy, Engine, Radar, Cloak), you will receive one new Primary modification in addition to a random number of Secondary modifications.

• You may use Bindomite to add a Primary modification to a core item that gained modifications before this change. However, certain legacy modifications are being deprecated and will be removed in the process.  The client will warn you if any modifications would be removed in this way.  See Grand Table O’ Nerfs for a list of the deprecated modifications.

• Primary modifications have a range of possible stats. For example, your weapon could gain x-y% AoE damage.

• You can spend credits to repeatedly reroll your gear’s Primary modifications. Each time, you’ll be given three choices: pick one of two new Primaries or keep the one you already have.

• Modifications that are randomly spawned on loot will only be drawn from the Secondary pool, but they won’t be overwritten when you apply Bindomite.

Grand Table O’ Nerfs

We are aware that this project will cause a lot of concern in the community. This blog post will serve as the first step of many in ensuring that the revamp proceeds in a way that works for the players.  We are intentionally leaving all numerical values up for debate for now, which will allow us great flexibility in achieving the desired game balance.  Here are some considerations we will be looking at as the project proceeds:

Jey

Recent client patch reduced the crashes by a lot but there is still more than can be considered acceptable. I am still working on tracking and fixing as many of the crashes as possible but the remaining ones are pretty complicated. We are up to date on patches so expect new ones every week or so.

Pixel

Has been busy with another developer make the faction selection dialog!

Dark Steel

We’re introducing a new tag that allows items to drop on death. It’s first implementation will be on every kind of Industrial Commod. If a bot or player gets killed all their/its Industrial Commods will be dropped.

We’re also going to be making bots drop 20% of their credits upon death which will be modifiable by Piracy and Surgical damage. This should put a lot more risk on off-team trading routes.

Bobbo

Fixed a bug with Deathblossom where it wouldn’t take the range tweak bonus into account when choosing targets.

Ryan

Ryan has been working on our ingame store. Here is a preview of it while it is still in progress. Keep in mind that there are still a couple images missing and that the fonts in several spots are going to be upgraded.

– Server Patch 06.14.2017 (minor patch) –

Misc Changes

* Fixes Flamberge and Voulge skin name.

Content Changes

* Kalthi Armored Commander: Speed from 127 to 100
* Kalthi Wrathful Commander: Speed from 127 to 100, +10% Splash Damage, +25% Splash Range
* Bule Hyperdrive Device turned into an inbuilt Superitem for the Bule Eradicator. New stats: 200 warp distance with 700 speed afterwards with 60 seconds cooldown.
* Altered Christmas Present drone size from 12 to 1.

Bug Fixes

* Fixed Lelih’ayu and Zarkar’ayu fighter factories, they should now generate a fighter generator.
* Fized Bule Blackness requirement in Bule Eradicator Upgrade Blueprint mission.

– Server Patch 06.10.2017 –

Misc Changes

* Added option to “Use Some..” for stacks of items such as Crystals and Industrial Commodities
* Multiple client crashes fix
* Slight improvement to the client dump generation to help track and fix the remaining crashes.

Visual changes

* Added muzzle flashes
* Updated the visual of the Unt Faranji Wingship.
* New lightning laser effect
* The following plus ships now have different textures: Wingship 1-4+, Saudara+ and Bule Saudaron, Ghostship+, Thatch+ and Battle Thatch, Anachron+, Bulk Trader 1-2+, Banshee+, Wyrm+.
* Added Twisted Wattage skin.
* Added Adamantiumized Behemoth Skin.
* Added Emberge Skin to the Voulge, Flamberge, and Flamlite.
* Added Heaven’s Eagle skin to Heaven’s Decent.
* Added Heaven’s Antu skin.
* Added Eridium Isavas’ayu Skin.

Content Changes

* Kalthi Wrathful and Armored Blueprint requirements lowered: Kalthi Ship Plating 10 > 2, Reinforced Kalthi Essence 10 > 4.
* Changed Zeus Research Module to require 200 Platinum (was 2000)
* Sub-Shield Reactors Factory now consumes 50 Enriched Nuclear Waste every 1 minute (from 25)
* Base AI base price of Sub-Shield Reactors increased to 700.000 from 375.000
* Tamed Wasp fighters no longer do twice the damage they’re intended to do.
* Fixed “Rewired” giving +elec temp rather than -elec temp and corrected the description to show the actual bonus
* Removed the splash damage from the Demolishing and Neutralizing line of pulse guns. These weapons are still the highest DPS Mining and Radiation weapons you can acquire, but they were doing a very large amount of damage against multiple targets while still maintaining high DPS numbers.
* Ruby Carrier kill mission for Strontium (Silver base) fixed.
* Rumble Instance Rooms now have a 5 minute lockout.
* Nexus Map arrangement fixed, Arctia and Building Academy Entrance are now in the top right area of the Nexus layer.
* Particle, Singularity and Quantum Brakes nerfed to not be usefull in combat.
* Added missing newline to description of Translocators
* Twisted ship blueprints have gotten their relatively unnoticeable Microchip requirements changed to Sentient Chatbots
* Olympus ship blueprints now require 5 T21 modules of various kinds (down from 10-11) and 1 Adamantium Module (down from 2)
* Battle Sphere changes
** Battle Sphere and Battle Thatch weights have been increased from 3,000,000 and 2,000,000 to 30,000,000 and 20,000,000 respectively.
** Maneuvering Thrusters weight has been dramatically increased, and its Turning has been dramatically increased.
** Battle Sphere and Battle Thatch now have twice the diameter.
** Battle Sphere and Battle Thatch now have 50% Hostility augmod.
* Design pass on Plating X to bring it into line with power curve for other X gear. Tech 14-20 affected, up to 22% nerf to T20.
* Increased Twisted Extensive drone energy charge by 20% more.
* Increased Twisted Compact drone energy charge by 20% more.
* Increased max workforce amount from 10,000 to 100,000 on the Demented Titan Shield plus blueprint.
* Phoenix AI will now transform much sooner and has additional resistance when transforming and increased shield bank by 50,000.
* Converted Lunarium Dust to Lunarium Shard.
* Converted Lunarium Shard Blueprint to Lunarium Blueprint. Blueprints already installed wont be effected.
* Seprated the inbuilt items between the Voulge and Flamberge. The Voulge has recieved bonuses to its versions of the built in items. The old built in items will be deleted on the Voulge and Flamberge and will require the /outfithull command to install the new ones.
* Added Flamberge Charge Drone Device Superitem to Flamberge.
* Added Voulge Charge Drone Device Superitem to Voulge.
* Fixed -electric tempering aura mods and tweaks making weapons cost more energy, and vice versa.
* Fixed Blue Photon mission name typo and clarified the objective of Sweep the Asteroid Field Subspace daily.
* Fleet Commander Transwarps can no longer be sold to AI bases.

Bug Fixes

* Ships can no longer thrust and turn without an engine. Stats from auras, tweaks, zen skills, and engine skill will now no longer add into the turning or thrust of the ship if there isn’t already turning and thrust values from an engine.
* Attempting to thrust in a ship without thrust will no longer play the engine sound or create particles.
* Fixed the bug where class skills were giving skill point debt
* Fixed a bug where your possessions could charge your Gunner Analysis

Changes that will be applied upon Universe Reset

+ Paxian Figurines consumption rate and base max increased by 20%
+ Sentient Chatbots consumption rate and base max increased by 20%
+ Price of all Tier 0 Industrial Commods decreased by 20%
+ Improved Absolution background.
+ Improved Judgement background.
+ Improved Penance background.
+ Improved Arena Lobby visuals.
+ Improved The Colosseum visuals.
+ Improved The Planetarium visuals.
+ Improved Beta Antares AI base and ships docking visuals.
+ Improved Jux background.
+ Adjusted Beta Antares visuals and added shipyards.
+ Adjusted Blue Photon visuals and rock belt.

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

Background Improvements

Yes! That wonderful default background of nebulae that has been around Star Sonata for quite a while now has been expanded upon! With eight more variants of backgrounds, expect next universe and possibly some current instances of this universe to have a more dyamic background than before!

Here’s one of many changes the new background visuals have produced.

Shipyards

Shipyards are now visually constructing dreadnaughts and battleships in Beta Antares once again, this will come next universe.

Here’s the shipyard animation in action.

Added a new ship to the game called the “The Commissioner”. This has been co-opted with Hober Mallow to add the final touches to the ship for in-game release.

Special thanks to James5 for producing the ship. The topic related can be found here.

Been expanding Kalthi Depths loot table, making additions to the following areas (in-progress):

• Corrupted Conversion Ray
• Fuel Compressors
• Transwarps
• Envelopes
• Prospecting
• Engines
• Tractors

• Drone Controllers
• Electron Clouds
• Scanners
• Sludges
• Torpedos
• Shields

In the shadows of the development, something is making a scratching noise.

Industrial Commodities

DarkSteel and enkelin have been keeping an eye on the Industrial Commodities market and have some proposed tweaks for next universe.

SunDog

Some players have been experiencing issues with the Psychic Mastery mission for seers. Specifically, the repeatable version of the mission after you first complete it. Last night’s hotfix was to address this mission, the Psionic Flares will now appear in Bipolar. If this is the case, send in a support ticket (or contact me on the Star Sonata Discord) to have it removed from your character so you can repeat it.

Kraken, Poseidon’s miniboss, takes a while to spawn in. I’m looking into reducing the time it requires as dragging out the spawn time for so long doesn’t accomplish anything besides increasing the time to complete a Poseidon run.

For anyone interested in lore, I’ve written up the lore of the Blue Pirates. You can read it all on the wiki, on this page: http://wiki2.starsonata.com/index.php/Blue_Pirates

Pixel

There has been some adjustments to the Voulge, Flamberge, and Flamlite where they were too similar so now they’ve received different arm amounts.

• Flamlite has 3 arms.
• Flamberge has 5 arms.
• Voulge has 6 arms.

Pixel’s been adding even more skins, enjoy!

Additionally, changes to Lunarium Dusts and Selenite Dusts will become Shards, this will skip the process into just one step from shard to final commod. The existing dust commodities and blueprints related to dusts will automatically convert over to the shard versions. Existing dust blueprints installed on stations won’t be converted.

This patch is to address an unforeseen issue with base thrusters in bvb. It seems that they can currently be used by the defenders to indefinitely “outrun” a bvb attack and prevent loss of ownership and cause a loss of all attacking kits. This patch will be making the following changes:

*Base thrusters cannot be equipped (and will turn off if already on) on a kit that has been attacked in the last 5 minutes (sharing a timer with the base transfer rule).

*Bases outside of the userbase placement limits (over 30k from the nearest solarbody e.g. suns, planets, wormholes, etc) will not count for galaxy ownership. If the only kits in the galaxy are outside of this limit, the galaxy will go un-owned. If a galaxy is owned with kits outside of their team beyond the limits, they will be converted to bvb kits.

s_m_w

Has been hard at work adding new visual effects with the following new lightning bolt effect as shown below, enjoy!

Each shot is dyamically generated giving that shocking experience each time. Additionally while still in the works lasers has received a slight adjustment with a rounded tip. To be warned this is all subject to change due to future developments.

Jeff

Jeff has fixed the bug with class skills giving skill debt. Additionally he’s made a new tutorial event that triggers if you try to warp through a blocked wormhole.

Pixel

Pixel added a new skin for the Behemoth, Divine Behemoth, and Leviathan.