Thank you all for the kind words!
So much new content! Kudos on the art, simple, visible/obvious, fits with the feel of the game.
I'd say less "content" and more "mechanics", though there's certainly some content to exercise the new mechanics, too
I can totally see the Active sensor burst used in an "Angler fish" tactic. Go in a pirate system and let everyone know you're here, feast on the overly curious pirate fleets and collect the juicy bounties.
Yep, that could work, provided the pirates thought they were stronger than you.
By the way, what is the ship represented on the Emergency burn ability? It looks a bit like a Wolf but i'm not sure.
You'd have to ask David to be sure, but I'd imagine it's intentionally vague. Would feel a bit odd to call out a specific ship there, since it's a general ability.
Really exciting to make travelling fun!
Hopefully
Also I totally want a stealth armor hull mod to decrease my sensor profile.
(Per the previous post, phase ships actually have this built-in. Of course, that's not the same as being able to put it on any ship you want.)
I'm glad that the burn speeds are going to be more normalized - no more glacial capitals! Interesting that the emergency burn takes fuel and CR - hence supplies, cutting into a trader's profit margin.
Yeah. Part of the idea there is to make sure it matters for AI fleets, which generally don't keep track of fuel. Plus it makes sense in-fiction-wise, so that's a nice bonus.
The AI behavior is going to be the biggest factor in how much fun this is - I'm imagining things like a patrol fleet, seeing a friendly trader in emergency burn, going over to investigate and make sure they are ok. (Or just responding to a "distress beacon"?)
Yeah, the AI is going to be super important here. Probably going to take a while to polish it - it's not quite combat levels of complexity, but still.
Interesting point specifically re: going to investigate based on the actions of visible fleets. A distress beacon might be good for that, too. Hmm.
The only thing I do not like is if you use Active Sensor Burst to explore for derelict fleets, secret bases, artifacts, etc. over a very large area (eg. an asteroid belt) it would get annoying to have to start and stop over and over again. I don't know how to fix it.
Easy way to fix that: a mix of pirate fleets and Domain-era automated defenses that make exploration dangerous - Sure, you'll find stuff with a sensor burst... but there's always the danger that stuff will find you, too. As long as that's a serious risk, I don't think the skill will get annoying to use.
It's not really meant as an "exploration" ability at the moment; would have to look at it again when that's a thing.
As far as UI flow, you wouldn't have to stop and start over and over. When you use the ability, your fleet automatically slows down, but keeps the destination you'd clicked on, and will automatically speed up once the ability runs its course.
I just thought about the "visceral" WASD vs the "strategic" click to move.
I think click to move already does both extremes of visceral and strategic. Click your destination and forget for strategic things. And click and hold down the mouse and move the mouse around to act like WASD visceral dodging enemy fleets, etc.
I think you're right in that once the mouse button is held down it gets closer to WASD-style. I'm just not sure that "mouse held down movement in an inertial environment" would work out well if it's meant to be visceral. Plus, moving the mouse in that mode of control just feels less like you're "in" the game than when you've got direct keyboard control... but that's probably subjective.
(I'm not even sure "visceral" is a good word to use here. Maybe just "responsive"? But that's a good thing always.)
Anyway, I'm loving how this update is turning out. It's awesome that the general mechanics have pretty much fallen into place and that we are now in the "fleshing out" more or less, stage of development. Its exciting!
Yeah, it feels great to be able to knock features out fairly quickly because much of the supporting infrastructure is already in place.
I do kind of feel like the next release might be a bit of a mess balance-wise, though, since we've got a lot of moving parts here. Well, we'll see, and in any event, that's not a
huge problem.
Can't wait until the full game is finally released.
You and me both
