Update: Hotfix for crashes from picking up a ship in your fleet under some circumstances and from showing the tooltip for an over-capacity crew bar is up. Please re-download the game using the links below – make sure the file you get ends with RC4.

Starsector version 0.6a is now out! You can get it here:

(Alternate download links: Windows Mac Linux)

While that’s downloading, let’s take a look at what’s new in this release:

• Hyperspace, a new star system, and a new faction
• Complete combat sound overhaul
• New campaign battle mechanics – use of travel drive to enter the battle space, a new battle type for chasing down escaping ships
• Reworked logistics system
  • “Combat readiness” used to deploy ships into combat
  • “Logistics rating” combines fleet points and other supply-consuming expenses
• New logistical support ships – Construction Rig, Ox-class Tug
• Campaign UI overhaul – takes advantage of higher screen resolutions, displays more pertinent information while traveling
• Improved fighter mechanics
• Adjustable battle size
• A ton of modability improvements

The above is a rough outline; if you’re interested, the full list of changes is here, and it’s… sizable.

I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about why 0.6a took until now to get out the door. It’s been a little over 8 months, certainly much longer than I’d like a release cycle to take. The reason for this is that almost all of the features in this release are interrelated, and so 1) are difficult to separate and 2) are dependent on each other to work well.

Except for the addition of hyperspace and a new star system, this release is dedicated to reworking how the combat and the campaign layers interact. Combat readiness is central to that, as discussed in a prior post.  The new battle mechanics are inseparable from it. The logistics rating and the new fighter mechanics are, if you will, its tendrils, reaching both into the combat and the campaign.

Would it have been possible to separate out some of these? Sure. But, I don’t think introducing a feature without related mechanics that actually make it work is a good idea. Given that, the best approach was to wait until enough features were ready to make a coherent whole, which is where we are now. On the bright side, this makes the development process more efficient – the amount of placeholders, temporary UI elements, and the like is reduced significantly.  So, yes, it did take a while to get here – but would have actually taken a good bit longer if I tried to force out a couple of releases along the way.

With that said, thank you for your continued support, and I hope you enjoy this release!

Comment thread here.

In a previous post, I’d talked about combat readiness. One of the benefits of that system is that it makes it easy for other mechanics to tie into it, whether they’re in the combat or the campaign layer. I’d like to talk about what’s more or less an overhaul of the various fleet management mechanics, both fixing some long-standing issues and streamlining the approach without oversimplifying it. First, though, a brief recap of how things currently work.

The player character has a “fleet points” stat that determines the maximum size of their fleet.  (So do the AI fleet commanders, but never mind that for the moment.) The fleet has a cargo, fuel, and personnel capacity, based on the stats of the ships in it.

These are all soft caps – you can go over them, but doing so costs extra supplies every day, and there’s a risk of accidents when any of these is exceeded by too much.

Overall, this works well; there’s no reason to throw out the system and start from scratch. I’d actually started writing out the issues with the current system, but since it does work fairly well, it’s hard to build a compelling case against it. So instead, let me outline the new approach, and point out how it’s better.

Logistics
The general idea is to replace fleet points with something based on supply consumption, and since supply consumption already plays a role in other places, it can all be rolled together to clean things up. Enter the new stat, “logistics”. It’s a measure of how many units of supplies per day your character can manage to distribute efficiently. So, supply consumption up that limit is fine, but going above it introduces penalties.

The things that consume supplies are:

• Ship maintenance – ships have a new stats that indicates how many supplies per day they require for maintenance. More on that later.
• Crew and marines; marines consume more to reflect the cost of keeping those armored suits in good repair
• Ship repairs
• Combat readiness (“CR”) recovery
• Being over-capacity in fuel, cargo, or personnel – a fixed supply cost per unit

The daily supply expenditure on all of that is added up, and together with the logistics stat, is used to produce a logistics rating (“LR”), which is a percentage value. Use up to the logistics value results in an LR of 100%, and it goes to 0% when supply use double the logistics value. For example, if your logistics stat is 50, and you’re using 75 supplies per day, the LR is 50%.

LR has the following effects:

• When below 100%, reduces the maximum combat readiness of all the ships in the fleet by up to 50% (at 0% LR)
• When at 0% for more than a day, there’s a chance of an accident happening (note that simply being way over capacity in something is not enough to cause one now)

Read the rest of this entry »