Hello Sonatians! There have been whispers amongst the player base that Fighters and Deathblossoms would see some sort of adjustment sooner or later. I am here to confirm that we are definitely making some targeted changes to both of them, and we plan to patch them in soon. We’re doing this because, in our conversations with you during the Healing Revamp, we committed to taking decisive action to fix pain points and problems sooner rather than later. We’ve also found that the way that Fighters and the Deathblossom works causes the game to become almost unplayable in crowded situations.

With that being said, let’s dive into some of the problems we’re going to address.

Note: Things may be subject to change before release.

Problems

Deathblossom

When enough SOBs (Space Objects) are present on the field, the user’s game experience deteriorates rapidly. Not only do excessive SOBs cause significant graphical lag, they also lead to severe network latency between players and the server. The more Deathblossoms looking for targets to fire at, the bigger the lag and latency for all players involved.

We decided to target two separate things in order to fix this problem:

• Bots firing Deathblossoms.
  • Bots will no longer use a Deathblossom.
• Deathblossoms firing at fighters.
  • Deathblossoms will no longer fire at fighters.

When a Deathblossom is fired, it creates lots of space objects that need to be tracked. When those projectiles fly towards fighters, and the fighters evade them, those projectiles still exist and will keep trying to track towards the fighters. This causes a significant amount of latency and graphical lag.

Also, when a critical mass of fighters are on the battlefield it becomes almost impossible to actually use a Deathblossom or splash weapons to kill them fast enough due to the cap on the number of targets splash is allowed to hit (20 at present).

This creates a weird situation where Deathblossoms almost completely counter fighters, until you bring enough fighters to a battlefield and suddenly the Deathblossom is nearly useless against them. UPDATE: Several players pointed out that splash, on live, does not have a limit. This limit was considered in the past, but was not implemented in favor of another change. Unfortunately, I had bad information. However, this does not change the point of the project.

We’ve decided to remove this from the equation. These changes will result in Fighters being much more durable against players and AI that use Deathblossoms. They will also result in Gunner bots doing less total damage than they used to. We’re aware that this will result in lower damage output from high-end bots, but we believe that Gunner is overtuned in DPS in the first place. Any niche situations where the drop in Gunner bot DPS unreasonably affects squad play will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Fighters

When enough fighters are present on the field, the user’s game experience deteriorates rapidly. There are too many objects with their own particle effects from weapons and engines in play, and when a critical mass of fighters are on the battlefield it becomes almost impossible to actually figure out which ones you should prioritize shooting down. This means that area-of-effect weaponry are the best way to deal with them, but even this is unreliable because of Evasion and the random nature of target selection.

However, the biggest reason to adjust fighters is the sheer number of fighters players have fielded at once. The presence of this many fighters in play at once creates an enormous amount of client and network lag, and has made it clear that Star Sonata is not able to handle massive swarms of player assets. All of these factors combine to create a situation that warrants a change to fighters.

We decided to target a few things in order to address these issues:

• All fighters will require 1 slot to launch.
• Bots will be disallowed from launching fighters.
• Fighter bays will have a maximum of 2 slots (+2 on Fleet Commanders).
  • The total damage that Fighters do is increased to compensate for the reduction in the total number of fighters launched.
  • Fighter shield bank will be increased, and they’ll be made a little bit bigger visually.
  • Stat bonuses on Capital class Fighter Bays are doubled.
• Evasion will be removed from fighters.
  • Fighters will have a 90% chance of avoiding non-targeted damage. This includes area-of-effect, splash, non-targeted collisions, and so on.
• Fighters with aura generators will no longer have them, and fighters that take very high amounts of energy for extra damage will no longer do so.
  • Death of First Born, Jovian, and Panther Kitten fighters are examples of fighters that have been changed.
• Radiation Expert will no longer apply to Fighters.
  • Flight Controller will give 20% damage per level to Fighters (from 15%, on live).
  • Advanced Flight Controller will give Fighters +15% Damage.
• Pulse Guns on fighters now act like Magcannons, and do not inherit the velocity of the fighter.

The most controversial change is the removal of fighters from combat bots. It’s important that we do this because Bots represent an automatic way of engaging targets, and they can be used to immediately launch dozens or even hundreds of fighters in seconds. As long as Bots are allowed to launch fighters, we will continue to see players trying to figure out how to reach critical mass with regards to the number of fighters on the field at once.

To address this, we are going to make fighters more powerful on the main ship.

In addition, there have been long standing requests from the players themselves for changes to be made to fighters.

• Players have routinely asked for fighters with projectiles to be changed so that they continue to fire at targets when in range, so we’re doing that.
• Players have also asked for AoE and Collision code mitigation, and although we’re not giving them resistances or immunity to it they will be highly resilient against it.
  • They also will no longer be targeted by Deathblossoms!
• Players have also asked for fighters other than Radiation to be useful, and we’ve done this as well by removing the Radiation Expert Bonus from fighters but buffing all fighters Damage values through Flight Controller and Advanced Flight Controller.
  • This will result in a reduction to Radiation damage bonuses on Fighters, but an increase to non Radiation damage bonuses.
  • UPDATE 2: We have also changed Radiation Expert so that Radiation Damage is increased by 15% per level, while Damage is is increased by 25% per level. (NOTE: This means Radiation weapons will have ~154% bonus damage.) This will allow Fleet Commanders to consider a wider array of damage types when outfitting their combat bots.
• Players have also routinely asked for something to be done about holiday fighters, specifically Death of First Borns, being powerful and impactful relative to other fighters. By normalizing them, we’re making them no longer feel mandatory.

“What does this mean for me?”

Summary

• Fighters will no longer be launched from bots, at all.
• Fighters launched from your main ship will be stronger and tougher to kill, won’t be shot at by Deathblossoms, they will no longer have Evasion when targeted but will evade the vast majority of non-targeted damage.
• Higher tech fighters will be visually bigger.
• Fighters with projectiles will shoot them more consistently.
• There will be much fewer fighters launched at once.
• Gunner bots will no longer use Deathblossoms.
• Gunners will not quickly kill groups of fighters.
• The DPS you do with fighters should be equivalent to what you are able to do on live. This will be higher in some cases, and lower in other cases.
  • If you are a low level player just starting out as an FC and only have a few fighters, you will probably do more damage.
  • If you are a mid level player who has a bunch of bots that launch fighters only, you will probably do less damage.
  • If you are a high level player who has good fighters on yourself and your bots, you will probably do more damage.
  • If you are an end game player with powerful bots, and powerful fighters, you will do more damage in most situations.
    • The one area you will certainly be less powerful is with Radiation fighters.
• UPDATE 2: Radiation Expert now grants 15% Radiation Damage per level, while Damage is increased by 25% per level.

UPDATE: To further clarify, if a player used Death of First Born, Cerberus, or any fighter that used a very large amount of energy to do more damage (High Energy), your personally launched fighters under this change will not do the same amount of damage as your bots and your own fighters combined. This is because High Energy fighters do not exist in the new system, and the damage bonus they received for using large amounts of energy will not be carried over.

While we are doing our best to vet this project from many angles and solicit feedback from the players, it’s always possible that we may overlook something important. If this happens, we will quickly move to address the issue.

What do the items look like now?

Will you be adding more fighters?

Yes, we will be adding more fighters in future updates. We have about ~40 fighters that have been created and will eventually be added to the game.

Can I test these changes to see how they affect me?

These changes are now available on Test.

(You can select “Test Server” from the drop down menu within your client’s login screen.)

~

All of these changes should be coming in with an upcoming patch, keep your eyes peeled!

[Repair Costs]

• The following item types have had their repair costs reduced:
  • Cloaks are being reduced by 50%.
  • Radars are being reduced by 50%.
  • Microwarpers are being reduced by 75%.
  • Tractors are being reduced by 75%.
  • Translocators are being reduced by 75%.
  • Transwarps are being reduced by 75%.
  • Scoops are being reduced by 75%.

[Item Changes]

• Made the following changes to the Mega Dangerous Dung super item:
  • Removed the parasite.
  • Moved the effects to non-tweakable weapon effect.
  • Removed the physical knockback effect.
  • Note: the AI version used by Mega Moe is unchanged.
• Warheads (missile-like explosions) being activated by a superitem now grants 300 firing vis for 2s to the user, similar to how it works with weapons.

[System]

• Changed the team base player attack warning interval from 30 seconds to 10 minutes per entity.
• The following changes have been made to base names:
  • Bases no longer can have leading spaces or spaces following their names.
  • Bases can no longer have multiple spaces between characters.
  • Bases can no longer use names that already exist within that galaxy regardless of capitalization.

[Bug Fixes]

• Fixed a bug where Seer Radar Jammer items would work on bases.
•  An exploit with killing Spirits revolving fixed.

[Item Changes]

• Warp Beacon, Attached Warp Beacon, Native Warp Beacon have had their base Resistance to Damage increased to 87% and added 80 soak excluding Transference, which remains 30% vulnerability. They were also each given Annihilator Shield Z and Annihilator EnergyBank Z instead of their Andaman counterparts.

[Bugs]

• Fixed a credit exploit with items that decay on jump or decay on leaving an instance. They no longer have scrap value.

[AI Changes]

• Fixed issue with Shielding 22 (Vihara Vaidya) having way too much regen and will now give a consistent shout when its changing damage types.
• For Weaponry 22 (Devalaya Deva), platforms do not spawn until the boss is aggroed.
• For Tractoring 22 (Kandara Janayitri), bombs spawn more frequently, have a higher maximum speed, and do more damage. Infected Bombs should now properly heal the boss when they come into contact with it.
• For Cloaking 22 and Radar 22 (Akhara Vizvadrz and Akhara Gupta), during the damage absorption phase, the bosses will heal for 20% of incoming damage instead of 100%.

[Bugs]

• Fixed a bug where constant dps did not interact correctly with parasite damage.
• Fixed a bug where constant dps didn’t interact correctly with rate of fire tweaks.
• Marked targets (in weapon range) will now be shot by bots from beyond 2k range without needing to mark as team enemy.
• Fixed issue with “A Fair Trade” having a chance of giving no items.

[New Servers]

• To address some of the lag that players have been experiencing, Star Sonata is upgrading the servers that the website, game, and support system is ran on. We understand some players will be inconvenienced during the downtime, but we are expecting the servers to operate at least twice their current speed.

[UI/Client Changes]

• Fixed issue causing target menu buttons to get oversized if name was longer than 16 characters.
• Base items no longer appear in equipped and in flight use ship inventory search methods.

[Item Changes]

• Added new holoprojectors to the Free Market station Friendman for SP.
• Imperiled Polarized Catapult no longer has giant particle effects.
• Earthshaking weapons have one third the particles for one third the duration.
• Added Zeus’s Call to Zeus Throne and Zeus Throne+, which fabricates Jovian Guard fighters for a Zeus Fragments and credits.
• All Engines from Olympus now have updated visuals with unique aesthetic qualities derived from the engine’s prefixes.
• Empyreal Zenith Coalition Regenerative Field Emitter, Rapid Repositioner and Commanding Spirit given a visual effect to indicate when the super item is used.
• Commanding Spirit no longer gives shield regeneration to allies.
• Coalition Regenerative Field Emitter now drains shields and gives increased electric tempering for 5 seconds, instead of 15 seconds. It also gives 26,666 shield recovery for 5 seconds instead of 13,333 shield recovery for 15 seconds. The energy cost is now 36,000 over 30 seconds.
• Empyreal Zenith: Replaced Shield Overcharging Beam with Coalition Preventative Field Emitter. The Coalition Preventative Field Emitter is a short ranged advanced blocker style super item that only affects your own drones.

[AI Changes]

• Greatly increased the respawn interval within the Infernal Tempest main room to allow for out of combat regenning.
• NB items for Fallen Delquad bosses are now in their own drop list and don’t mess with chances of other items.
• Ancalagon the Black and Timotheus the Red have had their vacuum attack adjusted. The first pulse of the vacuum, which warns players of what is about to happen, now does 98% less damage than before.
• Emperor Sharahn Rhak’kai IV now orbits The Emperor’s Peak instead of drifting out.
• Twisted Artillery in the Twisted Fate of Death instance no longer have very high amounts of turning normally, or during their telegraphed attack. They also no longer microwarp sporadically.
• In Twisted Nikola and Twisted Dragon Ai, when the minions explode, they explode for several seconds and deal damage over that time period instead of dealing their damage all at once. This should give players more time to react to what’s happening.
• Reduced Shield Bank of Super Omega Platform and ARoused Slumberchrome by 2/3.
• Reduced the damage, range and tracking of Super Omega Platform’s ethereal laser.
• Removed the tracking on the ARoused Slumberchrome’s pulse guns fired from the super item, while reducing the projectile speed by 150
• Reduced the damage and rate of fire of the KiloWatt Chain Laser, changed the damage type from Radiation to Energy, and reduced the negative Energy Bank aura from -67% to -33%. Reduced the tracking of the KiloWatt Blaster (from the super item) by 80%, and reduced the duration of the negative Speed tweak on the Kilo Wattage super item from 2 seconds to 1 second.
• Big Green Dreadnought, Ragnarocker, ARoused, Kilo Wattage, Super Omega Platform should now drop loot appropriate for their danger factor and difficulty (Already live edited).
• Increased size and number of asteroids in Fallen Flames (Fallen Kuhani’s arena).
• Increased the time until the player is kicked out of Fallen Flames.

[Subspace Changes]

• Adjusted the damage of all instanced Subspace bosses and mini bosses.
• Being outside of the bubble in some bosses (Piloting 22, for example) wasn’t disincentivized hard enough. Instead of making that effect do more damage, it gives immunity to transference, a large -% damage tweak, and a large -% shield regeneration effect.
• It is no longer possible to ignore the damage immunity phases of Subspace bosses.
• Praheti Sahvitra mobs in various Subspace boss rooms have had their damage buffed significantly.
• Removed the old gremlin style simulated desynchronization effects from Subspace alien weapons.
• For Rader 22 (Rajanicaragupta) and Cloaking 22 (Rajanicaravizvadrz), they have new and more meaningful effects to watch out for, clearly display when they are entering their damage immunity phase now, and fixed wormhole issues.
• For Cloaking 22, Akhara Vizvadrz, the boss will no longer target a non player during its visibility checking phase.
• For Engines 22, (Adhara Akara), has had its turning rate reduced.
• For Shielding 22, (Vaidya)  will cycle through phases in a truly random way and will not repeat any phases and made it easier to see where you’re going to take damage by making the damage indicators red and orange.
• For Electrical Engineering 22, Vihara Sahvika, the boss now has 70% base resistance to incoming Energy damage instead of 0%.
• For Piloting 22, Devalaya Sahisth, all debuffs that a player would incur for leaving the protective bubble now apply to their bots, except for the constant damage. Guardian eggs will no longer spawn simultaneously if the boss is damaged too quickly, preventing the player from killing anything.
• For Weaponry 22, Devalaya Deva, The boss will no longer bug out and either become permanently invulnerable, or permanently vulnerable. It now spawns each station individually before becoming aggressive, and clearly states that the stations must be killed in order to weaken it. The damage the boss does directly has been reduced, but its minions are now stronger, and get stronger as the fight goes on. (You’ll probably want to keep them culled.) It’s mining pulses have little to no tracking, and can be dodged. You might not want to dodge them, they can break the asteroids and spawn additional new minions.
• For Equipment 22, Bila Zarkara,  Zarkara, Raurava, and Hantr should now trigger their attack phase every single time without failing. Reduced the damage of the energy beam by one third, and made the chains do more damage to spread the incoming damage out.

[Universe Changes]

• Moved the suns within Rhino instance away from the edge of the GSA spawning.

[Next Universe Changes]

• Greatly reduced Solar Prisms prospecting node in Arctia.

[Mission Changes]

• Adjusted “A Fair Trade” mission exchange rates to match their quality tier now.

[System]

• Super items now require the ship tech to be greater or equal to the super item’s tech minus 2 tech levels (For example, a tech 16 ship can equip up to a tech 18 super item).
• Characters that log out no longer will get kill credit several minutes after the ship vanishes.
• Added a check to only allow the current character logged in on an account to get kill credits.
• Items that require tech of ship or greater will now display on their descriptions such as Augmenters or Aura Generators.
• Auras that don’t work on bots now state: Does not work on Bots instead of just nothing.
• Added a new chat command /autotarget. Which toggles the functionality of auto-targeting AI in certain situations on or off.
• Added a new chat feature that will auto forward private messages to an accounts alts (will not tell sender who it was forwarded to and allows the receiver to choose to respond).
• Mission rewards now grant Cargo tag to eligible types. (Known issue that missions don’t factor in the cargo tag, when asking for items.)
• The visual effect when bases are scanned has been removed.
• Changed the galaxies web api so that userbase totals in galaxies are no longer updated immediately and instead are updated up to 24 hours later. This change is intended to reduce the usefulness of polling the web api to receive information in an unfair manner.
• /enemies and /mc command are disabled for characters logged into the web chat.

[Bug Fixes]

• Fixed a minor issue when attempting to transfer a wild bot to a character with Radiation Expert would report that the recipient didn’t have a Radiation Expert level equal to the hull’s tech instead of the actual value needed.
• Fixed a bug with “Also makes:” on blueprints missing the first two “[[“.
• Fixed a bug where constant dps did not interact correctly with parasite damage

Star Sonata servers will be unavailable at midnight on December 12th, at 00:00 server time for server maintenance and a patch. Patch notes will be available as the server is taken offline.

Timezones for shutdown

EST: 12 Midnight
CST:  11 PM
MST: 10 PM
PST: 9 PM
GMT: 5 AM

Christmas is here and Astro-Santa is out to deliver presents to all the good peasants and workers in the universe again! However, Earthforce and the other Terran factions report that Astro-Grinch has been sighted roaming Perilous Space again! Many speculate he is looking to stop Astro-Santa from delivering his presents!

Lyceum Scientists report that the wormhole to Lapland will stabilize in Sol on December 10th, 2021 for the beginning of the Christmas event! The event will continue until January 3rd, 2022.
For the duration of the universe, Lapland will remain in Sol for any turn-in’s you may have forgotten to do.

[Emperor System]

• Galactic Palace can no longer be moved via tractors (some slight client desync), thrustered or otherwise moved.

[Items]

• Reduced Spirit of the Elephant’s Transference Power and Transference Efficiency to 40% (matching Spirit of the Rhino). Will be further reduced to pre-healing revamp values at reset.

[Bugs]

• Removed Empyreal Protection fleet instance loot drops that were not properly removed from the mobs during design. This ensures instance recreating does not allow for farming without killing the boss.  This does not affect any unique loot from the boss drops.

On November 18th, 2021 we announced that galaxy assault (BvB Slots) were temporarily disabled.

After examining the problems and discussing temporary fixes for large scale galaxy assaults, we have decided that the two week timeframe is insufficient for a good solution to be implemented. Therefore, for the duration of this universe galaxy assault is going to remain disabled, with changes being implemented on next universe reset.

This is to prevent more server-wide lag, unenjoyable gameplay, and provide a cleaner timeframe for the issues to be addressed. Over the duration of this existing universe, the development team is heavily focusing on improving the Wild Space experience, as well as addressing long-standing issues that have revolved around the galaxy assault scene.

The aspects of wild space that will be focused on are:

• Galaxy Assault
  Greatly reducing the complexity of the rules and limitations around galaxy assault while retaining deep theorycrafting potential. Also substantially reducing the engagement duration and minimum resource expenditure necessary to engage in galaxy assault.

• Player-Versus-Base Assault
  Envisioning new roles for players in galaxy assault including essential roles in backline/logistics and sabotage.

• Galaxy Control
  Lower the emphasis demanding that players are immediately present during resets, and how quickly the layer is claimed. As well as adjusting resource distribution to remove the Feast or Famine effect that is currently prevalent in Wild Space

We understand that keeping BvB disabled for the rest of the current universe will interfere with some players’ plans. If you deployed bases with the intention to support or defend against an impending galaxy assault, you may be entitled to a refund of base kits and augmenters. Message enk#3571 on Discord for a review of your case.