Hello everyone! It's been a few weeks since the release of 1.0, so now that we've had a reasonable amount of time for the dust to settle I want to take a few minutes to discuss the state of the mod, common feedback, and our own perceptions after having played more of the mod ourselves, read all the feedback, and watched as many of other people's playthroughs as we could get our hands on. We're happy with the direction in which we are headed, but as always there's plenty which is yet to be done, and also some unforeseen consequences of some of what has been done.
One of the first and most important aspects upon which we are still working is game pacing; the early game can sometimes be painfully slow, but the resulting buildup ends with Sins typical problem of having trillions of unusable resources accumulated, and travel speeds are also fairly slow. Part of the slow pace in the early game is he result of an attempt to scale back that late-game overflow, but the end result didn't actually do what we wanted it to. It hurt the early game too much, without fixing the late-game problem. As a result, we're playing with resource scaling in a few different ways. Firstly, planet upgrades are being made cheaper, so that it's less punishing to expand early in order to gain the credit income you need to start supporting a fleet capable of dealing with militia. This may have some balancing implications for the factions we need to look at, but it should make things a bit easier. We're also adjusting income rates to be relatively higher in the early game, and to scale less with research. In order to address the initial overflow problem we were trying to fix, we've got a few other ideas, chief among them being the reworked
Upkeep System (and yes, before anyone asks again, mole miners will more than likely be a part of this if we can swing it properly).
The other point of feedback as far as pacing is the travel speed at which ships go between planets. The slow pace of this is actually a result of the greater scale of the map compared to the base game, considering each map is built off of a consistent-yet-huge repository map I've put together of every planet in the Star Wars galaxy I could stand to plot without losing my mind from the tedium. We've recently increased the base speed of all factions (Empire of the Hand more than the others) and will play with that until we're happy with it. Because strategic movement and positioning
is supposed to be important, but we don't want to punish people who want a bit faster paced of a game, the differences between all of the game pace options in the pre-game menu will also be significant and able to tailor the game to different desires.
Another prominent issue is the role fleet tenders have come to play in battles. Fleet tenders were meant to be a way to encourage diversity and attention to fleet logistics, able to keep your ships in prime condition between battles and differentiate between players who choose to opt for full firepower for one engagement vs those who choose to bring less absolute power to the table, but more long-term deployment capabilities. The problem here ended up being that one of the best strategies for certain factions is to build several of the most powerful capital ships you can get and spam fleet tenders with them (which also leads to some fights being more drawn out than they should be, as well). As a result, we will be nerfing this strategy in a way which should theoretically not remove some of their utility in battle or between battles. Instead of just having a cooldown on the ships performing the repairs, the ships being repaired will also have their own internal cooldown; the number we're currently using is a 60 second cooldown between repairs, with a helpful little particle indicating when this is in effect. Numbers will, of course, be adjusted as necessary.
This brings us to another thing we're going to be working on for 1.1- documentation, both ingame and out. This is partially a result of the systems still being in development, but some players end up being confused by certain systems when they're new to the mod, especially fighter supply. We'll be working on particles, menu, and tooltips as avenues to make this information as obvious and natural for players as possible (for example, a similar particle to the repair cooldown one will exist for a ship which lacks the Supply to spawn another squadron). We're also thinking of a manual similar to what we've done for ICW. More of this will come as we discuss some of the
UI rework OzWolf has been working on. If you're a forum member, you can click on that link to see some early WIPs of it. Essentially, we want to make it more possible for
Bane to beat Gul next time.
This model is being improved still, too.Lastly, I want to contradict what I said earlier and address a specific bug (and also one of the major features of the 1.83 patch as far as modders are concerned). This is the issue where Starbases can sometimes prevent the Galaxy Gun from destroying
actually a planet- we're working on a fix for this. One possible solution is to use the newly-implemented ability to ruin other peoples' worlds via buffs that now exist in the game, however we intend to use that specific feature for something else involving a faction that is not yet present. I wonder what will Hapan then, if Yuu Sii what I did there. Hugs and Chisses!
This is all, of course, to say nothing of our usual little improvements between versions or the other areas of the mod being specifically focused on in 1.1- namely, random events, unique encounters, defensive structure changes, and other things meant to enhance the "Star Wars feel" of the game, like pushing out more VOs, debris, and the like. As far as the VOs go, if you want to help with that, Davis is currently running
a thread on the forum for it.
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Topic: 1.0 Post-Release Roudup (Read 3757 times)