STA3 CTA Dev Diary 3 news - Star Trek: Armada 3 mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Range and Defence:

When changing something as dynamic as Range values in the game one has to go back to the drawing board so the devs gathered around a "virtual" table over Skype and came up with ideas, its safe to say we felt the range triangle had been broken and when we say triangle we mean the following conclusions that Fast Corvettes and Escorts > Artillery , Star bases > Corvettes/Escorts/Cruisers and finally Artillery > Star bases.

Its also true that while some people did build steam runners and other racial variants we felt that more effort was needed in regards to making these ships that exist within the game usable, to do this we had to make artillery viable and that meant looking at defences, what i can tell you now is that every turret for every race will have at least 2 abilities but to find out more about those you will have to wait for a future dev diary, oh and if you think star bases are tough now, wait till you see what's coming up for these as well!... SuperWeapons HO!

But of course if were going to change defences there has to be a counter, sure you can go hard or go home taking out a star base and defensive line with your big supplied out fleet but your going to take crippling losses i.e. Deep Space Nine level chintoka raids! (See below)

to achieve this goal, only for a cunning opponent to counter you but you'll be happy to know that defensive station costs have risen as well as how many can fit around certain planets so you can still sneak attack through a poorly defended system, but if you do have a choke-point needing clearing, then roll out the big guns, the enemy will be forced to bring in carriers or its own fleet to remove the bombarding artillery pieces, this opens up distraction tactics more so than before.

Now you may be thinking well I'm not to worried if i lose one system...well that's where you may be wrong, we've gone and re-enabled a stock sin feature where if you lose a lab environment you will lose unlocked research until you can get the labs back up and running and if artillery can shoot out of your defensive range well your going to need attack ships to deal with that threat so defending those key systems becomes even more vital than before....and of course the harder the planet to colonise... well suddenly remember that class K planet with those infrastructure set up's that took you sometime to get built up, well that's a vital system requiring defence and those pirate raids mean trouble can be around every corner if you lose those labs!

A small video showing ranges is linked below (plus some dominion sneaky pics!

Artillery:

Someone wrote: Artillerymen believe the world consist of two types of people; other Artillerymen and targets.

So we've mentioned artillery being vital for digging out stationary targets, but to further diversify artillery we've split the artillery into two types:

Light~Heavy
Steamrunner~New Orleans
Raptor~T'liss
Chuq'beh~Stalker
Wedge~Harbinger

Light Artillery can out range all other ship types except for heavy artillery and do reasonable damage against all targets for the most part they will out range all static defence turrets with the exception of the longer range star bases and outposts.

Heavy Artillery is the ultimate in long range fire-power however due to the high cost and power requirements the weapons are often fitted to smaller models of cruisers, due to the aforementioned power requirements this often means that shield arrays are not sufficiently powered to sustain long durations of direct combat. These new vessels are capable of targeting most long range targets while keeping at a safe distance from return fire and depriving star bases of the ability to fire back without them you may struggle to clear enemy systems out.

Capital Levelling

We felt capital ship levelling was just plain wrong in 1.0, in reality how does a ship magically gain armour and shields through the crew gaining experience? So that's now been scrapped and switched so they will now gain a higher rate of fire etc as the crew gains experience because they of course become better at their roles as a team allowing a veteran crew to outshine a novice crew out of basic in combat terms.

these new areas of change are of course a major departure from the base 1.0 but i hope you'll welcome them with open arms as we have and be excited by some of the wrongs we have righted in the expansion as well as generally making the game as strategic while still fun as it should be...

and finally ill leave you with this food for thought.....why wouldn't you want a Borg assimilation turret! until next time... this is Bane....Out!

Peace has cost you your strength! Victory has defeated you!