📋 New Feature – Ship Bonuses
There are only so many dials to turn, speed, hull, shields, slot counts, and once you have turned them all you are left with a roster where the differences are a matter of degree rather than character. A bigger hull, a slightly quicker engine, one more slot. Nothing that makes a captain say I want that one, because it does this.
So hulls now carry bonuses of their own, The bonuses come as Shield Boost, Shield Regen Boost. Weapon Damage. Two new ones Crit Damage and Crit Chance.
All of these apply to items FITTED to the ship. So don’t fit a shield, and you won’t get the bonuses, don’t fit a gun and same, no bonus. One more time, it applies to the items Fitted NOT the raw ship stats. Yes it counts multiple shield and multiple Cargo Expanders, so stackem up and gain the bonuses!
I won’t list what was added to each ship, you’ll only run off to the Item Database anyway 🙂 The afore mentioned database has a new element added for the Bonuses, so you can see at a glance what that ship has as bonuses. You will also find the Ship Loadout left hand panel has been given a steroids injection listing bonuses and giving you a lot more info.
📋 New Ship – Rapier
A fourth hull joins the yards, and it is the strangest thing we have built. The Rapier is a Corvette, and on paper it looks like a mistake. One gun. Three hundred shields, which is less than the Cutlass sitting next to it on the forecourt for a million more. Armour and hull that will not win any arguments. If you walked past it on the way to something heavier you would be forgiven.
Then you look at the hard points. The Rapier carries four, and up to three of them can be missile launchers. That is the most any hull in the galaxy will take, and it is the entire point of the ship. Where other corvettes bring a rack along as a supplement to their guns, the Rapier brings guns along as a supplement to its racks.
Flying one is a different job to flying a Cutlass. A brawler wants to close, sit in it, and out last the other ship. The Rapier does not have the armour for that conversation and should not try to have it. It wants to put three tubes of ordnance into something, break contact while they reload, and come back.
Its shields recover faster than anything else flying, which is not decoration, it is the whole design. That recovery is what buys you the time between passes. It carries the sharpest shield regeneration bonus in the game to go with it, so a good shield fitted to a Rapier does substantially more work than the same shield bolted to anything else.
There is also a damage bonus for its guns and racks, and a critical strike chance to go with it. Two things worth saying honestly before you commit. It is not a beginner’s corvette, and a captain who flies it like a Cutlass will lose it like a Cutlass. And it eats missiles, so a Rapier without a supply line behind it is an expensive way to carry one gun into a fight. Blueprints are available now from Argus Starships.
🔧 Bug Fix
Two smaller ones, both spotted by Orge Snorrsen. Defence turrets were advertising three times the hit points they actually had. A Sentry Turret Mk1 showed four and a half thousand in the launch menu and then deployed with fifteen hundred, and the same was true right up the ladder to the Lodestones.
Snorrsen caught the discrepancy by comparing the menu against a turret he had just put down. The reassuring part is that fifteen hundred was always the correct number. Your turrets have never been weaker than they should have been, they were simply being described wrongly before you launched them.
The readout dated from an earlier version of turrets that carried three layers of protection rather than two, and it was still doing the old arithmetic long after the turrets themselves had changed. Every turret in the launch menu now shows exactly what it will deploy with. Second, the combat view was using different icons for your holds than the navigation view does. On an Extractor your ore hold now carries the same gem it wears in space, and your cargo hold the same crate, so the two views finally agree with one another. A small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that makes you look twice mid-fight.
Galactic Emporium
Our thanks to Orge Snorrsen, who noticed that modules could be listed on the Galactic Emporium but never actually bought, because there was no category to browse them under. He was right, and when we pulled the thread it turned out to be a good deal larger than modules.
Twenty four listings were sitting in the Emporium that no captain could reach. Eight modules, six salvage lasers belonging to five different captains, four R&D Complexes, six outpost reactors, and one rather lonely Rail Slugger. Between them, they came to nearly forty-four million credits of stock. Every one of those had been handed over by a seller in good faith, and every one of them was invisible to every buyer in the galaxy.
The cause was that selling and browsing each had their own idea of how items were filed, and the two lists had quietly drifted apart. If your item happened to fall outside the handful of categories the browse screen knew about, it went in, and it never came out. That is now fixed properly. Browsing works off what an item actually is rather than a label written when it was listed, so the two can no longer disagree.
All twenty four listings are back on the shelves and can be bought right now. While we were in there the Emporium gained some tabs it had been missing. Modules, Auxiliary, Outposts and Corporation are all browsable now, salvage lasers have joined the Weapons tab where they always belonged, and R&D Complexes sit under Systems.
Corporation gear is kept deliberately separate from Outpost gear, because a Syndicate Reactor and an Outpost Reactor look almost identical on a listing and fit entirely different things, and we would rather you did not find that out after spending twenty million credits. There is also now an Other tab. Nothing should ever appear in it. If something does, it means an item type has been added to the game without a home of its own, and we would very much like to know about it before somebody’s gear goes missing again. The tabs themselves have been split across two rows and given a little more room to breathe, since there are rather a lot of them now.