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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
6/25/2017
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We added "Escort" orders to the game this week. It is an option of the Guard Order. There is another option on the Guard order for "Escort a Group". this allows you to search for a the Name of the Group you want to escort, as opposed to a corporation you wanted to guard. Only actual Groups or Fleets can be escorted, not individual units unless they put that unit by itself in its own group. When escorting another group, your unit will shadow that units movements, moving with them when they move and to the location they move to. If you are at a distance, your unit will move full speed to try to get onto their escorts location or to the spot they are moving to that turn. In addition to shadowing their movement the escorts will "guard" that unit when attacked and will also join the attack in whatever combats that escorted units attack in.
You can not automatically escort any group in the game. The only Groups that will show up in that search are ones that have been flagged as "Allow other units to escort this group" from their own Group manage page. You have to essentially grant permission to allow anyone to escort your group. It is a new checkbox under your groups manage tab. All you have to to do is check it and it will allow others to escort that group. When unchecked again, any units escorting you previously will have their orders "competed" on the turn flip. This feature was tricky so please report any bugs you find when employing it.
Contracts had some problems for a long time when it came to allowing single corporations or guilds only accept your contract, guild only contracts was never actually implemented.. I think I straightened this all out now. i also fixed a few other bugs with contracts I found such as seeing the entire group in the contract. There were some strange comms messages firing off when the wrong people tried to accept a contract that wasn't for them. Please let me know if you see problems like this again.
Military Tweaks.
I've been making small changes on military units combat stats the last couple of weeks. I don't like making drastic changes so I'm keeping them small and gradual. We've made commandos a little less effective at attacking other things besides structures, just to put them underneath Infantry in just about everything. Commandos are the anti structures unit, but they also pretty effective at attacking large capital ships en masse (not much different than structures). Their attacks vs aircraft and small ships have gone down but they are still a third higher than infantry when it comes to the capital ships. Since other ground units are all very low against capital ships it makes commandos the cheap effective unit to attack them with ... HOWEVER the damage they do towards things like Infantry and aircraft has been reduced so while commandos can effectively mass attack an empty capital ship, you can counter it very effectively just by having some infantry on board. In a fight, Infantry hit commandos 5x harder then commandos hit infantry now. I don't plan to mess with commandos anymore, we'll see how well it plays out.
Artillery was reduced against ships last week but as people pointed out, it makes them useless compared to something like battle suits unless you're going up against straight infantry. Also artillery is supposed to be the anti capital ship ground unit. SO, artillery attack was upped vs capital ships while its attack vs fighters was actually reduced some (hits bombers for 3x of any other ground unit though). Artillery is now effective vs soft ground units, bombers (relatively) and moderate against capital ships. They are just below fighters for the money when attacking capital ships. You might say that commandos hits big ships for 30% what artillery hits for but cost nearly 1/10nth the price which makes them much more effective, while this is true, artillery actually COUNTERS the infantry that would counter the commandos. For ships to counter the ground artillery they needs to send in bigger units like fighters or armored, to counter commandos you only need cheap infantry. That seems fair.
Fighters hit ships and some ground units harder then before now (including commandos). And bombers do also by a slight amount. Variteks were not changed. This makes Variteks now pretty weak against capital ships compared to fighters, nearly half. Variteks don't have a direct counter because they are essentially using the combat value of a fighter or Battlesuit (slightly reduced) depending on which one is better. Thier only weakness is that they are more expensive than fighters but take the same damage from anti fighter defenses like Destroyers and missiles. They now also seem to be pretty weak against large ships. We'll see how it plays out.
Assuming no problems with Escorting, I want to move on to The two big pirate factions or Strategic orbits next.
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Hutton Posts: 276
6/25/2017
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Sounds good. I like that commandos are effective against capital ships because I think of capital ships as space fortresses. If you were going to tweak it further I would suggest that commandos should be dialed up more against larger capital ships compared to smaller capital ships.
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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
6/25/2017
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Hutton wrote:
Sounds good. I like that commandos are effective against capital ships because I think of capital ships as space fortresses. If you were going to tweak it further I would suggest that commandos should be dialed up more against larger capital ships compared to smaller capital ships.
They already are, Well, scout and corvette are smaller and everything else is large . I can't play with their stats because we're down to 1,2, and 3 attack values already =)
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Hutton Posts: 276
6/25/2017
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Fair enough. My own definition of Captial Ship is Cruiser and above. Everything else is a picket ship.
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-The Obsidian Church- Posts: 10
6/26/2017
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While I still think variteks need an actual counter, the buff to fighters (Previously the most worthless aircraft.) versus ships make it at least closer to where it should be balance wise. Overall this seems to be a good balance pass.
Looking forward to both the major pve content addition (Us combat focused players really need this. As combat events are really rare right now. And quite easy.) and the mega-structures addition will be great for everyone, give us all something to band together to create. (Or destroy, whatever.) Plus I get my "Doom Cannons" you promised in beta. :P
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Doctor Dread Administrator Posts: 1478
6/26/2017
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-The Obsidian Church- wrote:
While I still think variteks need an actual counter, the buff to fighters (Previously the most worthless aircraft.) versus ships make it at least closer to where it should be balance wise. Overall this seems to be a good balance pass.
Looking forward to both the major pve content addition (Us combat focused players really need this. As combat events are really rare right now. And quite easy.) and the mega-structures addition will be great for everyone, give us all something to band together to create. (Or destroy, whatever.) Plus I get my "Doom Cannons" you promised in beta. :P
I promise that "Doom Cannon" will t least be the title of an event involving one in honor of the the #1 military player in the game =)
I'm imagining an event where we have to build a doom cannon to fire at some MAK Planetoid or something BUT you can choose to fire it at anything and its determined by vote with the weight being the military force you have at the doom cannons location. So.... if you really want to decide to fire it on Houston you just need to wipe out the military fleets there and take control of the vote. Sounds politically delicious! =)
edited by DrDread on 6/26/2017
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