Cosmoteer Release Candidate 0.15.11 RC1 - Major Balance Changes

Walt

Cosmoteer "unstable" release candidate 0.15.11 RC1 is now available for testing! This update contains major balance changes, bug fixes, and quality-of-life enhancements. If you are a competitive PvP player, then I would greatly appreciate it if you could test out this update and let me know what you think of the balance changes. Thanks much!

Download Cosmoteer 0.15.11_rc1

Changelog:

Balance:
- Flight:
  - The drag that is exerted on ships now increases exponentially once ships exceed 110 meters/sec. Very fast ships will have significantly reduced top speeds as a result.
- Missiles:
  - Missiles no longer experience any drag ("air resistance") and will instead keep accelerating for their entire lifetime. Their actual per-second acceleration has been significantly reduced as a result, but at long range they tend to be signficantly faster than before.
  - Missile guidance logic has been improved so that they are aware of their own velocity and will attempt to counteract it and head straight toward the target instead of "orbiting" it.
  - Reduced HE Missile initial speed from 30 to 15 and increased their guidance rotation speed from 180 to 240.
  - Reduced EMP Missile initial speed from 30 to 20.
  - Doubled the distance at which missiles will avoid friendly targets.
  - Increased H.E. and E.M.P. missile lifetime from 10 to 12 seconds.
  - Reduced Nuke targeting arc from 200 to 90 degrees.
  - Increased Nuke range from 180 to 250.
- Tractor Beam:
  - Tractor Beam's "Auto" mode has been replaced with a "Tether" mode. It is similar to the previous "Auto" mode but behaves more intelligently and transfers between pull and push more gradually and seamlessly. It will attempt to keep the targeted object at the same distance as when the beam first hit the object. If the beam breaks contact with the object and then re-touches it, the distance will reset to the new distance. In effect this means that in order to actively push or pull on a ship or object, you must first attach to it with a tractor beam and then move toward or away from it.
  - The strength of the Tractor Beam's "Pull" and "Push" modes has been reduced to 10%.
  - Reduced Tractor Beam range and stretch range from 300/600 to 200/400.
  - Tractor Beams are now blocked by shields.
  - Tractor Beam Emitter turret rotation speed has been increased from 40 to 120 deg/sec to improve their ability to stay attached to their target.
  - Tractor Beams will now automatically cancel their target when in Tether mode and they lose contact with the target.
- Railgun:
  - Railguns now have greatly increased recoil that is applied continuously as the projectile travels down the railgun instead of all at once upon exiting the railgun.
- Ion Beam:
  - Decreased Ion Beam damage falloff at maximum range from 50% to 30%.
- Point Defense:
  - Increased Point Defense health from 2000 to 3000 and penetration resistance from 2 to 3.
Crew A.I.:
- Crew will no longer leave their posts to go get ammo or power if someone else has already been assigned the task of getting more ammo or power.
- Crew are now aware of "production chains" and will no longer abandon a job supplying ammo/power to a part earlier in the chain in order to supply a part later in the chain, even if the later part has higher crew priority settings. (For example, crew will no longer stop supplying power to an Ammo Factory in order to supply power or bullets to a Mine Factory, even if the Mine Factory has higher priority settings.) This does not apply to storages.
- If a weapon or other part is out of the required power or ammo and no one is scheduled to deliver more, any crew that are operating its controls will now wait for 1.5 seconds before leaving their posts to get more power or ammo.
Bounty Hunter:
- If an A.I. ship spots a player ship within its sight range and decides to attack it, any other ships that can "see" the A.I. ship will now also attack that player ship, even if it's outside their own sight range.
User Interface:
- Added Finnish and Ukrainian translations from the Cosmoteer Translation Project.
- Miscellaneous other translation updates.
- Changed the default hotkey for using target-relative attack angles and grid-relative follow angles from Ctrl to Alt. (This fixes the issue of not being able to swap modes when adjusting a command using the command handles.)
- When opening build, paint, crew, or repair modes, the camera will no longer zoom or move focus if the ship is already sufficiently zoomed-in and mostly on-screen.
- Removed the "Auto Focus" settings for build, paint, crew, and repair modes.
- Pressing F to focus on the center of a ship while editing its blueprints will now focus on the center of the blueprints instead of the center of its actually-existing parts.
- The ships and parts that are selected by the player will now be stored in saved games and restored when loading the save file.
- Ship descriptions are now limited to a maximum length of 1000 characters.
- Players can now save a "Default Paint Scheme" that will be used for any newly-created ships.
- Updated button icons for the part/decal select and delete tools.
- Changed the default hotkey for restarting the app to Shift+Tilde+Esc.
- The "D.P.I Scaling" setting is now called "U.I. Scaling". Its functionality is unchanged.
- The crew and power tutorials no longer erroneously mentions the existence of "minimum" amounts on the crew and power meters.
- It is now possible to save the designs of your own ships in PVP multiplayer.
- Added a "Game Guides" link to the Community menu on the title screen.
- You can now ban players from your games even if you are not the host of the current game. This will not kick that player from the game (only the host can do that), but it will ban them from any games that you host in the future.
- The game will now automatically mute itself when the game window is out of focus. This behavior can be disabled in the audio settings.
- Added a message to the Auto-Saves tab of the settings that warns players against disabling the auto-save features.
Graphics:
- The Heavy Laser now uses the same hexagonal floor pattern as the Small Laser.
- H.E., E.M.P., and Nuclear Missile particle trails have been updated to behave more realistically.
- The glows around lasers and electro-bolts will no longer fly past the bolt's point of impact.
Bug Fixes:
- Crash when viewing hotkey conflicts if the names of any of the conflicts contain certain characters such as '&'.
- Rare audio crashes when the money tick sound stops looping.
- Very rare crashes during gameplay.
- Multiplayer desyncs caused in some circumstances by reverting blueprint changes while a ship had missing doors.
- If a ship needs repairs and has destroyed parts that left behind structure tiles, going into blueprint mode and adding those structure tiles to the blueprints would then prevent the ship from being repaired.
- Copying a group of Ion Beam Prisms and then flipping them would often cause them to lose their targets or target the incorrect part or location.
- In Domination multiplayer games, it was possible to exceed the maximum fleet value by editing a ship after purchasing it.
- If the lead ship of an A.I. formation is disabled before it can attack you, the follow ships wouldn't attack you until the lead ship was completely destroyed.
- Reassigning crew to different quarters would always teleport them even if they are able to walk there.
- Crew assignments to deliver ammo or power weren't being saved when saving the game.
- Dragging a ship file into creative mode while editing a ship that has only blueprints would display the "close confirmation" dialog as expected, but the "cancel" option would simply show the dialog again in an infinite loop. The only way to get out of the loop was to lose the ship design.
- When starting or loading a game, the "show interiors" button would appear "off" until toggled, even if ship interiors were being shown.
- Pressing "MAKE IT SO" while a ship had destroyed parts would only repair those parts and would not make any other changes until the button was pressed again.
- Firing arcs would remain on-screen after using the handles to rotate or change the location of a move command and the shift key was released before the mouse button.
- Focusing the camera view on multiple ships and then dragging a selection box would anchor the corner of the selection box to the background grid instead of the center of the focused ships.
- It was possible to press F on the galaxy map during an FTL jump, which would cause the view to focus on the sector that you jumped from the next time you open the map.
- In build mode, selecting an FTL drive with no other blueprints present would display "NaN" as the FTL efficiency.
- While saving a ship design and typing in its name, if there were any existing ships with the same entered text but different capitalization, the capitalization of the entered text would be changed to match that of the existing ship.
- In the multiplayer pre-match screen, setting a player to the same team that they already belong to would move them to be the last player on that team.
- When hosting or joining a game, the lobby chat wasn't properly scrolling to the most-recent message.
- H.E. missile fire particles weren't being shown when the Fancy Particles setting was disabled.
- The visual size of E.M.P. and Nuke Factory explosions was being incorrectly scaled by the amount of missile parts they stored.
Modding:
- Fixed crash (without an error message) in build mode when there are multiple different kinds of parts that each both consume and supply the same type of ammo. (Such as a storage.)
- Fixed issue where using 'Bounce = true' in a bullet that also has an 'AntiBullet' would break collision detection.
- Setting ChainsFromBuffType to a buff that is not in the part's ReceivableBuffs list will now display an error. (Previously this wouldn't crash on load but was very likely to crash later during gameplay.)
- Ships now have different linear and angular damping parameters that allow damping to be applied non-linearly relative to the ship's velocity.
- Criteria blocks for buff providers and proxies can now use 'Categories' or 'IDs' lists to specify multiply possible part categories or IDs. A part needs to only have one of the listed categories or IDs to satisfy the criteria.
- Bullet TargetHoming components now support an optional 'VelocityCompensation' parameter which control how aggressively the bullet will try to cancel out its own velocity if its velocity is taking it away from the target.
- Added 'StaticToggle', 'StaticValue', and 'StaticMode' components that store a single unchanging toggle, value, or mode and can be used by other components.
- MultiValue components now support an optional 'Abs' parameter that, if set to true, will cause the component to return the absolute value of the value that it calculates from the referred components. (If 'Negate' is also set to true, it will return the negative of the absolute value.)
- Audio and beam media effects will now interpret negative intensity values as their positive (absolute value) equivalent. The exception is the speed of the beam effect, which will now actually run in reverse for negative values.
- Added a 'BeamRegulator' component which computes and outputs a value depending on the length of a BeamEmitter's beam.
- Timer components now have an optional 'TriggerWhenStarted' parameter that, if true, will cause the timer to immediately fire its trigger when the timer is started.
- Added a 'Barrier' particle updater and 'SetBulletBarrierID' particle initializer which work in conjunction with bullets to delete the particle once it passes the location at which the bullet died.

Ultranova

Walt The Heavy Laser now uses the same hexagonal floor pattern as the Small Laser.

game is finally playable again.

Walt Fixed issue where using 'Bounce = true' in a bullet that also has an 'AntiBullet' would break collision detection.

I did not know Bounce = true was a thing, but I must check it out now...

clojelo

Walt Tractor Beam's "Auto" mode has been replaced with a "Tether" mode.

Game would crash if tractor beam Range were buffed by mod. The new parameter BeamLengthRange only accept [a, b]. where a, b are floating point values. Error:

---> Halfling.Serialization.DeserializeException: Reference '_{/Part/Components/Emitter/Range'} in expression at path '<C:\Program Files\Cosmoteer\Data\ships\terran\tractor_beam_emitter\tractor_beam_emitter.txt>/Part/Components/TractorModeTetherComponents/Components/BeamRegulator/BeamLengthRange/0' does not refer to a field node..

Any chance BeamLengthRange would accept expressions? For example,
{ BaseValue=200; BuffType=ImprovedRangeShot; BuffMode=Multiply; }

Nordwolf

Walt The strength of the Tractor Beam's "Pull" and "Push" modes has been reduced to 10%.

To 10%? Maybe by 10%? Ten time reduction seems a little drastic ^^

janiTNT

Oh Yeah Steam Release Is Coming Right Up!
Intresting Changes

Walt

clojelo Any chance BeamLengthRange would accept expressions?

Done. I also made OutputValueRange buffable because it was easy and why not?

Nordwolf o 10%? Maybe by 10%? Ten time reduction seems a little drastic

Drastic is deliberate. 😉 The intent is to make push/pull modes essentially useless in combat so that you have to rely on tether mode.

Wolfric But why reducing the nuke targeting arc?

Mainly to differentiate nukes from other missiles and make them more of a high-risk/high-reward weapon. If nukes aren't good enough even after the range and speed buffs, then I think I'd rather increase their "reward" rather than decrease their "risk".

Lafiel alone is not enough for use as sensors without a means to compare or check the values

I don't understand your point.

Wolfric

Changes look good. As Nordwolf stated TB to 10% looks like a typing mistake.
But why reducing the nuke targeting arc? I greatly dislike that. Nukes are already poor. Nuke bombers will be uneffected but other uses hindered. I had been very happy with nukes creating hazzards to watch out. If nukes can´t be fired sidewards only the bombes will remain. I actually hoped to increase their targeting to match all other missiles. I expect it is done fearing nukes will get too strong when top speeds are reduced ? If yes then this is the bad way to do it. I would prefer a reduced nuke acceleration (not launch speed!), not fire arc destruction.

Lafiel

BeamLengthRange alone is not enough for use as sensors without a means to compare or check the values.

Roasted

250 nuke range, oh god. My nuke wall will be unstoppable.

YAreyaREdAzE

Roasted working on a nukebomber, that can prob stop it

Roasted

YAreyaREdAzE
Ha
No

CaptainRedstone

• Ship descriptions are now limited to a maximum length of 1000 characters
I have succeeded

YAreyaREdAzE

CaptainRedstone so no more bee movie script?

Atarlost

Walt Mainly to differentiate nukes from other missiles and make them more of a high-risk/high-reward weapon. If nukes aren't good enough even after the range and speed buffs, then I think I'd rather increase their "reward" rather than decrease their "risk".

Having an arc less than about 100 or 110 will make them flaky on diagonal ships. It's the same problem missiles had when there was only one kind and they had an arc of 270, except worse because you can't even place them on the forward sides and have them fire reliably.

Danwood

Can't give actual feedback, but the game feels better now, for some reason.

Walt

Atarlost That's fair. I think I'll increase their arc to 120.

Atarlost

Walt Thank you.