Patch 0.16.6 Patchnotes

[koonschi]

Patch 0.16.6

 

Date: March 28th, 2018

 

We've heard your feedback after setting torpedoes live on the default branch, and one of the biggest complaints is that torpedoes can wrecks ships hard, especially the shield-penetrating ones. We're adding a few countermeasures for you in this patch, and we're also trying to create more trade-offs so that combat stays interesting in the end.

 

There's some explaining to do here. Torpedoes have a high potential to damage your ship's hull. When your blocks start breaking off, your ship's stats go down - crew dies, energy levels sink, etc.

While this can be a great tactical move, it can also be very frustrating, especially early game, when your ship becomes unmaneuverable due to a lucky hit by the AI or your turrets get shot off immediately.

This can lead to an unrecoverable downward spiral during combat, making fights unfun and frustrating as long as you don't have shields.

 

We've got a few changes in this patch to improve this behavior. First off, we're buffing integrity fields. Second, we're adding a system where blocks won't be immediately blown off, to ensure that you get a fighting chance while taking damage. In order to understand why we're doing what we're doing, here's some explanation on how damage in Avorion actually works.

 

Each block has its own HP, which is a threshold until it breaks, which is normally its HP that it contributes to the ship (with several exceptions, but we're not going into too much detail here. For example, inner blocks have a higher break threshold to make intricate ship designs combat-viable and to make designing more fun).

Damage to blocks is ALSO directed to the normal HP of a ship (health bar). What integrity fields do, is reduce the damage that a block itself takes, so it takes longer to break, while damage to your durability stays the same.

With this patch, we're doubling damage reduction to block HP through integrity fields, and blocks protected by integrity fields also only send 50% of the damage taken to the ship's HP, instead of 100%.

 

We're also adding another major change: Blocks on PLAYER owned ships (not NPCs!) that take damage start breaking only after a certain threshold of ship HP is reached, based on difficulty.

For example, on "Normal" difficulty, this threshold is 40%, so your ship's blocks only start breaking after your ship has 40% or less health.

 

In total, this should make fighting without shields and taking hull damage a lot less punishing and combat more fun.

 

Gameplay

• Implemented an upgrade that makes shields impenetrable
  
  • This upgrade redirects shield durability to make shields impenetrable, except for collision damage
    
  • This upgrade also increases the time that shields take to recharge after a hit by a lot
    

Balancing

• Increased break-damage reduction for blocks from integrity fields from 90% to 95%
  
  • Blocks can now take double the damage before they break
    

  [*]Ship damage from integrity-protected blocks reduced by 50%

  • Shot hits to blocks protected by integrity fields will only cause 50% damage to your ship's durability
    

  [*]Blocks start to break on ships only after the ship's durability has been lowered to a certain point

  • This threshold scales by difficulty:
    
  • Beginner: Threshold is 0%: Your blocks will never break.
    
  • Easy: Treshold is 20%: Your blocks will start to break once your ship hits 20% or less HP.
    
  • Normal: Treshold is 40%
    
  • Veteran: Treshold is 60%
    
  • Difficult: Treshold is 80%
    
  • Hard & Insane: Treshold is 100%: Blocks will start breaking immediately (pre-patch behavior)
    

  [*]Increased time that shields have to take to start recharging after the last hit from 10 seconds to 30 seconds

  • This was actually an oversight of ours and one of the reasons why shields are so strong. We upped recharge time to what we actually had in mind while designing shields to make it a little harder to continuously fight even with strong shields.
    

Bugfixes

• [uBR] Fixed shield penetration not working
  
• [uBR] Fixed several performance issues which might have led to players experiencing weapons not dealing damage
  
  • To all those who had this issue: Please try if this makes it work, if not, report back to us! We're taking this very seriously!
    

[Alanthier]

That break off threshold should not be at 100% for vet/insane. That literally still leaves you with a 0% fighting chance when the AI get their 100% "lucky shot" on every shot.  Dropping it to at least 95, or even 90% for break, would have been an actual "balance" patch for those 2 difficulties.

[Hammelpilaw]

This looks really great, thanks.

 

That break off threshold should not be at 100% for vet/insane. That literally still leaves you with a 0% fighting chance when the AI get their 100% "lucky shot" on every shot.  Dropping it to at least 95, or even 90% for break, would have been an actual "balance" patch for those 2 difficulties.

No it is called insane, and so it should be. I love to play on this difficulty, to me. If you want it reduced you should reduce difficulty. I would never want such a threshold in my game, but I think it is a really great feature wich makes more difference between difficulties.

The only thing is that ship defence got buffed a lot, torpedoes can deal very high damage, but the normal weapons from npc ships have not been buffed. They are got a very low dd. Maybe there should be a damage multiplier on all npc ships, depending on the difficulty setting and the distance to core.

Ps.: does damage multiplier also affect torpedoes? If so, I think it should be possible to change the damage of both seperately via scripting API.

 

[Kamo]

The no-damage bug is still active on 0.16.6, just tested it now.

 

The new "blocks not breaking" patch is kind of easy, almost rewarding vulnerable designs at lower difficulties and seriouly cutting down repair costs, but since torpedoes inflict high AoE damage, they may wreck the systems on the inside so I guess it protects small designs from ubiquitous capital-ship-destroying ordnance !

Though, I got a Misao cruiser hit numerous times by torpedoes and the delicate "energy millefeuille" (ultra-fine-grained solar array made of less-than-1 hp solar panels) inside stayed fine...

 

Oh ! Is NPC torpedo damage not affected by difficulty ? That would be where the balance problem is, as it would increase the already-huge disparity between NPC torpedo damage and NPC turret damage.

 

Each block has its own HP, which is a threshold until it breaks, which is normally its HP that it contributes to the ship (with several exceptions, but we're not going into too much detail here. For example, inner blocks have a higher break threshold to make intricate ship designs combat-viable and to make designing more fun).

Damage to blocks is ALSO directed to the normal HP of a ship (health bar). What integrity fields do, is reduce the damage that a block itself takes, so it takes longer to break, while damage to your durability stays the same.

With this patch, we're doubling damage reduction to block HP through integrity fields, and blocks protected by integrity fields also only send 50% of the damage taken to the ship's HP, instead of 100%.

So, when a block is damaged, the block and the ship are damaged, but when a block is destroyed, the max HP stat goes down, resulting in corresponding HP going down and therefore additional damage ?

Interesting, and I wonder how it does with AoE damage: is the hit inflicting damage on the ship per block (basically multiplying damage by the amount of damaged blocks then doubling it as it breaks them, probably causing the "shield penetrating one-hit-kill" effect) or just once per ship then the block damage ?

That and the inner block threshold multiplier explains how wreckage is even possible.

[koonschi]

Oh ! Is NPC torpedo damage not affected by difficulty ?

Torpedo damage is very much affected by difficulty.

 

but when a block is destroyed, the max HP stat goes down, resulting in corresponding HP going down and therefore additional damage ?

No, max HP stays the same. This is one of the reasons behind why you can't edit a damaged ship, amongst other things. You'd also see ship HP bars going up again if that was the case (had an experimental build in very early times that did that, it didn't feel very good).

[Kamo]

Okay ! And I just did some additional tests, AoE hits do not inflict damage on the ship per block hit, so no damage multiplication either. They do the same damage when hitting a one-block generator (had to put a big one to hit it with torpedoes... and bigger hull blocks besides to not hit the ship's behind ::)) or a giant 200-block millefeuille.

[Wanderer]

I really like the update and think its gonna help a lot.

 

But, if you cover your entire ship with integrityfields, isn't it going to "double" your ship hp? Since all damage gets halved?

 

Also, could you take a closer look to the targetting of pdc? I feel like its very off. The pirate torps usually arent that bad to shoot, but headhuntertorps are just unhittable.

 

Also, love the longer recharge rate of shields!

[Ravien]

But, if you cover your entire ship with integrityfields, isn't it going to "double" your ship hp? Since all damage gets halved?

 

From the way I read it, it looks like it. I think this is a good change myself, as hull tanking always felt very weak compared with shield tanking.

 

The only thing I would suggest is leaving the block destruction threshhold for insane difficulty at 90%, so that players have *some* protection from getting bits blown off their ship from minor damage, but are still at risk of losing blocks in any serious engagement where their shields drop.

[Hammelpilaw]

The only thing I would suggest is leaving the block destruction threshhold for insane difficulty at 90%, so that players have *some* protection from getting bits blown off their ship from minor damage, but are still at risk of losing blocks in any serious engagement where their shields drop.

 

 

Then please only do it for hard difficulty. There should be at least the insane that turns threashold completely off.

[koonschi]

To those that have the issue of their PDCs not being able to take down torpedoes, what exactly happened? I've never run into the issue, so I need more information as this is clearly not intended, especially when you have lots of PDCs.

 

What do your PDCs look like, where in the galaxy did this happen (for torpedo tech level)? Did the torpedo come straight at you or flying a curve? Did you fly around and if yes, how fast?

[Hammelpilaw]

To those that have the issue of their PDCs not being able to take down torpedoes, what exactly happened? I've never run into the issue, so I need more information as this is clearly not intended, especially when you have lots of PDCs.

 

What do your PDCs look like, where in the galaxy did this happen (for torpedo tech level)? Did the torpedo come straight at you or flying a curve? Did you fly around and if yes, how fast?

Maybe this is related to the issue that makes entities invincible agains railguns? I do not know, but I can confirm the railgun bug still exists. Some targets are invincible agains railguns, some are not. Did not test all weapons, but at least cannons worked fine on targets where railguns did not.

 

A server restart can change the invincible vs. railguns state, so a target that was invincible against railguns get unbugged and can be damaged by railguns then, or entities get bugged.

 

[Wanderer]

To those that have the issue of their PDCs not being able to take down torpedoes, what exactly happened? I've never run into the issue, so I need more information as this is clearly not intended, especially when you have lots of PDCs.

 

What do your PDCs look like, where in the galaxy did this happen (for torpedo tech level)? Did the torpedo come straight at you or flying a curve? Did you fly around and if yes, how fast?

 

Well this was my situation: i was sitting still, with 2 midcore headhunters shooting torps at me. 1 pdc ( iron 66 dps) in the middle and 16 pdc (xanion 17,6 dps) in 2 groups of eight on the left and right. Against pirate torps it works fine, so there's something special with the headhunter torps that makes them hard to hit. In the end, 7 out of 8 torps got through. Sometimes it just feels like you're lobbing fish at an incoming car or so.

[Alanthier]

Then please only do it for hard difficulty. There should be at least the insane that turns threashold completely off.

 

95% for insane would be tolerable.  There is no reason you should instantly have blocks destroyed by an overpowered weapon type as it is.  It's unbalanced.  Torpedo's should be a 1 time use thing to either finish off the target, or get the advantage over them.  NOT be purely used for killing by firing as many as possible.

 

But that would make too much sense right?

[Valshala]

Not played the game since torpedoes were introduced due to my pc dying and my laptop struggles..  I'm not really looking forward to coming back to it to be honest..  The update seems like a big FU to players like myself who create small ships 3-4 upgrade slot maximum.. 

 

I beat X2 In a pirate Bayamon, I completed Reunion In an Argon Nova.  I ain't one of the people complaining about game balance being too easy while at the same time flying around In an op battleship with millions of shields..  The game was fine and if there is no option to disable torpedoes then there is no incentive to travel anywhere near the center..  All that is left for me is trading and building factories.

[Ravien]

Not played the game since torpedoes were introduced due to my pc dying and my laptop struggles..  I'm not really looking forward to coming back to it to be honest..  The update seems like a big FU to players like myself who create small ships 3-4 upgrade slot maximum.. 

 

I beat X2 In a pirate Bayamon, I completed Reunion In an Argon Nova.  I ain't one of the people complaining about game balance being too easy while at the same time flying around In an op battleship with millions of shields..  The game was fine and if there is no option to disable torpedoes then there is no incentive to travel anywhere near the center..  All that is left for me is trading and building factories.

 

If you play on beginner difficulty, you can probably tank most torpedoes and persecutors won't spawn on you.

[Charless]

Cant wait for combat update 2, however I'm also curious how the weapon designer will work, will you be able to generate custom turrets from every random drop, or will you only make them at factories, will you be able to download blueprints like with fighters, how will barrels work... I'm really interested to see

[Therolfgar]

To those that have the issue of their PDCs not being able to take down torpedoes, what exactly happened? I've never run into the issue, so I need more information as this is clearly not intended, especially when you have lots of PDCs.

 

What do your PDCs look like, where in the galaxy did this happen (for torpedo tech level)? Did the torpedo come straight at you or flying a curve? Did you fly around and if yes, how fast?

 

I have 4 point defense turrets on my ship, 3 chain gun and one antifighter cannon. The PDC are spread out, but can still all fire on my frontal arc. If I am standing still I can reliably take out a single torpedo just fine, however it is seems like the antifighter cannon takes them out. If I try to just strafe around they never get shot down and I usually get hit.

 

The problem I currently have is right outside the core ring I will enter a zone surrounded by a dozen pirates and will have 3 torpedoes shot at me, I can fly away from them to avoid them at first, but when I turn around to head back to destroy them I don't stand a chance at taking out half of them that come my way. Half is a generous amount, I would say most get through, even if I stand still.

 

I'm only playing on normal difficulty, and my ship is strong enough to survive so this isn't the end of the world but I do feel like the chain gun point defense turrets are not worth their slot. I have tried the laser ones but with their short range and slow tracking they fail to function while you are moving or if the torpedo is curving as well.

 

Are we supposed to have a dozen of these on our ships to protect them or should they be taking them down more efficiently than this?

 

On a possibly related note I am also getting the bug where my railguns don't do damage to random ships. It does't feel consistent and usually it will be a single ship out of a fleet that is immune. I am only playing on single player, new world since the update. 

 

I am enjoying the update, the change to blocks being destroyed based on total ship HP is a welcome one so I'm not forced to slap a giant ugly block of armor on the front of every ship.

[Ravien]

If you are right outside the core ring, you really, really, really need more than 3 PDCs. I'd recommend 8 or 12 by that stage of the game to provide you full coverage from all firing angles.

 

Buy up all the armed turret upgrades you find at turret factories and research them to upgrade them.

[Therolfgar]

If you are right outside the core ring, you really, really, really need more than 3 PDCs. I'd recommend 8 or 12 by that stage of the game to provide you full coverage from all firing angles.

 

Buy up all the armed turret upgrades you find at turret factories and research them to upgrade them.

 

I have a pile of great ones, they are super cheap to make at turret factories so getting many of them isn't an issue. I have 20ish offense slots on my ship, using half of them to counter torpedoes feels wrong.

 

I'm also not complaining about being shot from all directions. What I will do is fly 50k+ away from the ships and let them group up and start heading towards me so I'm not surrounded, then when they are being fired from max range, more or less straight in front of me the PDC still have trouble taking out a single torpedo, let alone several. The turrets have plenty of time to shoot them down, they just miss completely.

 

I'll try this evening using more and see how it goes.

[Ravien]

Being far away from the enemy can actually make it harder to shoot them down because it gives torpedoes a chance to accelerate to full speed which can be 9,000 m/s in some cases.

[Therolfgar]

I've slapped 12 on my ship and they do shoot down more, however they still seem to have terrible tracking. It would be nice if they didn't take up an entire turret slot, or alternatively there was a way to increase their tracking and accuracy. If I start moving around much they don't hit anything.

 

It does however look cool with them all firing at different angles when you enter a sector and are surrounded.

[koonschi]

It's not the tracking (although turrets will have a hard time tracking torpedoes if you turn your ship a lot or if torpedoes just swoosh by), it's tunneling. Torpedoes skip over shots and avoid 90% of the shots that should have hit them. This behavior is fixed on the beta branch, we'll set it live soon.

[Ravien]

It's not the tracking (although turrets will have a hard time tracking torpedoes if you turn your ship a lot or if torpedoes just swoosh by), it's tunneling. Torpedoes skip over shots and avoid 90% of the shots that should have hit them. This behavior is fixed on the beta branch, we'll set it live soon.

 

That is good to hear!

[koonschi]

The patch for the bugfixes has now been on the beta branch long enough, I've set it live. The tunneling issue should now be resolved and PDCs should work a lot better.

[ThunderDodge]

Whats about the Performance problems? Cant put my Server online & loosing a lot of Players...