Sneak Peek

Here is a sneak preview screenshot of what I have been working on lately for the game:



It is a "formation manager". Currently, when you start a game, your ships are all positioned in a "line abreast" formation and you can control the direction they all face, but that is about it.

With this tool, you will be able to create as many formations as you like and save them to your user profile. You create the formation by placing ship classes into specific locations and facings. Then when you start a battle, you can choose the formation you want your ships to start in. The game will automatically pick ships from your fleet to fill in the "slots" you have designated in the formation.

I think this will add a small layer of tactical planning to battles as well as add some individuality and coolness to the game :)

Might as well Jump

I have just deployed a few small changes to the game logic.

The main change is to the FTL jump drives. Players have been using them a little too much making battles hard to resolve. One player jumps so the other player immediately jumps to keep from getting caught in a vulnerable position. This goes on forever and no one gains an advantage.

So, the following changes have been made to FTL drives:
1) You cannot jump in too close to another vessel. Since there are no collisions in the game (yet), you could jump in directly on top of another ship taking advantage of the extra damage done by beam weapons at short range. Now, you will get a message that the jump was thrown off course because the destination space was occupied. The jumping ship will be placed some random distance away.

2) All jump drives now have a "cool down" period of 6 turns after a jump where you cannot begin spooling the drive again. I may make this depend on the type of ship or drive in the future, but for now it is always 6 turns. This will make it more likely that your opponent can hit you before you can jump away again.

Secondly, the fighter-to-fighter combat has been updated a little bit. Up to now all fighters had an equal chance against eachother. Now their type is used to determine who has the advantage. I won't post all the specific numbers, but the relative advangates should be intuitive. Interceptors are good against bombers and recon, but bad against "fleet defense" fighters, etc.

There were some other small bug fixes that aren't really worth mentioning too. Happy hunting...