Dear Commanders,

   Thanks to  all  the feedback we gathered during the previous Testing Session, we are exited to present you the brand new game system, along with several mechanics updates.

Wave / Phase System

   The victory condition of the game is now to have 3 victory points more than your opponent, which means that some games can be close and go up to Level 10 easily.

In order to gain a victory point, you need to win a Phase, constitued of 4 waves. This mechanic allow a much more strategic choice and placement of your units to counter the ennemy fleet.

   Each ship destroyed during a wave gives Honor points (corresponding to their base cost) to the killer.  At the end of the 4 waves, the higher Honor points wins. This choice finds its logic to allow each player to do mistakes, but still being able to win if corrected soon enough.

Deck Tree

   A feedback that came back several times was the confusion in front of so many ships (and we are actually only 5 % of the total ships we want to bring in the game) and their respective datasets.

To comply to the new system we discussed above, we decided to organize the deck as an evolutive one. After Each Phase, each player wins a number of Deck points that he can spend in the Deck tree, to unlock a new ship branch or to improve one he has already.

Weapon Class / Armor Class / Ship Class

Another major improvement is the arrival of Weapon and Armor classes. This system took us quite some time to figure out right (and we are exited to hear your feedback on this one).

It is designed to reimplace the old Specialist system, which was not fine enough to our taste (and to lots of players as feedback suggested).

Weapons and Armor classes are divided into 3 categories : Light, Medium and Heavy. For the weapons, this represents the "Caliber" of the rounds fired. The bigger, the more damage, but also the more reload time and, as you can read further, a lower chance to hit smaller ships.

Armor Class represents the sturdiness of the ship, its capacity to absorb damage, but has also an impact on its handlig capacities. The heavier, the more clumsy, hence the easier to hit.

As a general rule, one can say that the bigger the ship, the Heavier the armor and the bigger the guns, but as mentioned, it's just a general rule. This systems offers the capacity to propose you very different builds and roles.

Reworked Damage System

As you can imagine, we reworked the way the damage is calculated. Each weapon Class now is more efficient against its corresponding Armor Class. Moreover, the Energy and Kinetic weapons got a new mecanic for calculating damage : Energy is decreased by armor, to a minimum of 20% of its raw damage, Kinetic Inflicts maximum damage if passes the target armor, otherwise inflicts only 10%. 

This rework globally means that where energy is a good all-rounder, Kinetic becomes more specific to certain Armor values.

Target Selection by armor Class

The targeting system is now favorizing the optimal armor class and will select the most apropriate target within its range. The Cloaking device Perk allows a slightly different mecanic : the stealth ship will select the farther target with the optimal Armor class and will engage until getting the kill. Then it will switch to the normal target finding mode.

Accuracy & Dodge

Another important change is the Accuracy system. Each weapon now has an internal accuracy value (generally decreasing with the size of the round). To which adds another modifier : the ShipClass dodge malus. The smaller the target, the more difficult to hit.

In other words, a heavy  gun will have a lot of trouble to destroy a nimble destroyer.

Failures

We found interesting to add this feature, thus adding a bit more randomness  to the fight. 4 Failures are actually up, and can reduce certain capacities or can block certain mecanics.

Global rebalancing

The entire ship library has been rebalanced to be in phase with the DeckTree system.

UI/UX Improvements

We are awaiting your feedback on this one, because we spent quite some time making this new display ! We also added a rough tutorial to have a better first game immersion.

Thank you all for your incredible support and time, this project is going well thanks to you, and we intend to keep it that way, so if you have any feedback, suggestion, we are very exited to hear it !

Remember to join our Discord  and our Early Alpha community :  https://discord.gg/hcPgUDYr

Great game to all !