STA3 A Call To Arms 1.3 done and onto 1.4 news - Star Trek: Armada 3 mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

... went into 1.3 and numerous bugs and areas were tweaked including fixing the long overdue diplomacy errors.

While mostly our release has been positive its time to talk about some of the areas we hope to correct, some of these may be released early as this has been promised in the past and now that Xmas and New Year has settled down we can regroup and focus.

The STA3 coding team is currently on a hiatus until February after burning the midnight oils to produce 1.3 on time for Xmas release however we've taken on-board your feedback and sat down and discussed some of the issues raised.

Random Events - Random events were discussed between myself, Draconis and Zurme recently, Pre 1.3 we had a lot of concern over the impact of Random Event spawns in the games and the fact that the stock nebula and particle events were not really something we enjoyed. Post 1.3 I myself had tweaked the file to remove the stock random events and also tweaked the weightings of each individual event to ensure some spawned more often negatively though while testing was carried out it has meant we did not get it quite right for the very small maps.

We have reset the timers to stock timers similar to the original sins, however as a lot of our events could be considered game enders in some way shape or form we've reconsidered how these are dealt with and weighted. In testing on medium to large maps we found that most of the "Super Six" events could be dealt with if they spawned early by a player however on small maps it became very challenging to deal with said events efficiently unless you focused on the building of defensive outposts very early in your planning, it is possible to beat all events however it does stall the game out for you as player should you have to.

Our current events system now that the stock ones are weighted so heavily, would be like winning the lottery for them to occur but has the added effect that has the super 6 then a further 6 events now the only likely to appear scenarios. This currently means if all were weighted the same you would have a 50/50 chance of seeing a super 6 somewhere between 5 and 8 minutes into the game spawn, however they are not all weighted the same. Our non super 6 events are weighted higher than our super 6, in testing we found that you currently have a 4/10 chance of seeing a super 6 every 8 minutes. While this is high we found in an average game you may see only 4-5 super 6 events over an entire game in 1.3 compared to barely 1 if you were lucky in a 1.2 game. The odds obviously decrease depending on where the AI sends the event and the odds of it affecting you lower even further should they patrol a central system only. Most if not all the super events are coded to spawn at the star only.

So taking on many viewpoints, feedback and criticism over this I've taken the decision as the balancing lead with the coding team to stick to our current plans which means we may release a sub patch for the Random Events sooner than a 1.4 release, Our plans to this regard involve increasing the overall amount of events because essentially more events (weighting dependant) means less chance of a super 6 occurring, however we will not be removing the possibility entirely of a super 6 occurring at all within the 5-8 minute spawn timer as even pre 1.3 there was still a chance within the first 8-10 minutes one could spawn... that's something we would like all players to bear in mind and in honesty in real life its a dangerous world (space) out there.

So what events do we plan to add in?

First of all separate from the overall pirate faction that you can bribe, we plan to introduce pirate war-bands event's, there should be one for each race, So Fed, Klink, Card, Rom Pirates will exist in some shape or form, these may even take the guise of say Rogue Tal Shiar or Obsidian Order, The Marquis etc, in difference to the star spawn these will also spawn randomly across the galaxy, there are more event ideas past these but just by adding these we increase the odds of getting a super 6 event.

i hope this adequately explains the issues around Random Events and i thank you for your patience with their frequency at this time rest assured while we think the frequency is higher than we would like at the moment we don't consider them broken, just challenging as it stands, remember you can turn these off should you wish to via the the game creation options.

Other issues that are outstanding?

Galaxy forge is something that we have promised and not delivered, its something that id like to apologise about as i know there are many would be map makers out there who want our galaxy forge set-up , i'm still hoping to deliver this soon for 1.3 at least but due to both the lost years sub mod and the upcoming sins i must make players aware that both Ambarenya and Max are looking at diversifying even more of the planetary systems used currently.

Other 1.4 Developments?

I Believe Max hopes to continue his ongoing work on re-skinning Romulan vessels amongst the federation ones as they are not quite up to our new standards. Max himself is truly an inspirational leader of the mod and brilliant designer but it takes a lot of time and effort to craft vessels to the level in the mod so expect to see a slow burn on these as he continues his search for perfection.

Team Changes.

Expect other news on team changes in the mod team for some the journey has been long and there are a few names of dev members who have retired but require acknowledgement of thanks etc still.

Multiplayer.

Theres still an active community at MTG looking for new players for all kinds of strategy games if your looking for players to play STA3 with amongst other things you can check them out at www.morethangamez.com and by joining their Teamspeak asking for Zurme or ImperialCore.

As always thanks for your support of the mod and wishing you a happy new year

Bane (The old and tired one)