In the previous updates, we've talked about some general playstyles for the three factions (Imperial Remnant, New Republic and the Empire of the Hand) and shown a lot of their ingame assets.
This update covers one of the more important gameplay changes we've made so far.
...Progress Report...
With the release of Imperial Civil War, I've been able to shift my focus to Ascendancy, so real life aside progress should pick up a bit more. Currently I'm working on implementing the tech tree of the Imperial Remnant (22 of their research options are in as of now), as well as some of their abilities and remaining units. During that process we'll work on preliminary balancing, after which the mod will be in an at least semi-playable state. Once we go further down that road, we'll have some more updates about the specific units, abilities and research options. We've also started an official wiki for the mod, accessible by clicking that link as well as from the forums which will most likely take the place of a manual for the mod. It's entirely empty right now, so feel free to add information to it.
...System Failure...
One of the problems with Sins is that until a ship dies, it has the same capabilities at 1% health as it does at 100%. We aim to address this. The numbers are still very much up in the air and will certainly shift around as we go along, but under our current system, there are certain points at which ships will lose some of their functionality. The first area is in damage; as it is in the mod right now, if a ship drops below 50% of its health, it will begin to do only 50% of its damage. Depending on how, if at all, this impacts performance, I'd also like to put similar downgrades at 75% and 25%. We will also ideally have impacts on ship speed and other aspects of its performance, but this will again depend on how system stress tests with it go, and how it feels to play with after more testing. Having the game run properly and be fun ultimately takes precedence over any other considerations.
...A Million Voices...
Another thing which will have degrading performance as they get damaged in the mod are planets. More specifically, planets which have been attacked by the Galaxy Gun will have their ability to continue existing severely limited. I wanted to show a video of it, but we'll probably wait until more of the GFX are done for it
When playing base Sins, one of the most annoying things to us was that the late game just descends into a series of random, essentially meaningless superweapon shots, we are mitigating that. First off, the Imperial Remnant will be the only to have this kind of interplanetary cannon. We're also making the effect much larger, and the frequency much lower to reflect that. The Galaxy Gun is capable of destroying a planet entirely, however the cooldown on that is going to be extremely high, as well as the cannons themselves being far more rare.
That's all for now, thanks for reading. As always, feel free to join the discussion on our forums if you have any suggestions or just want to talk about the mod. We've started a daily screenshot thread there, in which we (ideally) post a screenshot every day. I've lapsed for several days now, but intend to post several to make up for it.
...Follow the mod...
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amazing news and work guys i look forward to hearing more
all sounds good, hope the AI wont try to spam those IR superweapons. though you said you would fix it to prevent that hopefully.
I remember back in diplomacy before they added the limit to superweapons and late game almost every planet the AI controlled had a superweapon on it
In the base game you were allowed one superweapon per every 4 planets and the cooldown meant you could shoot about once every 3 minutes or something. Maybe 5. Our requirements are going to be substantially higher.
hmm maybe it just seemed like they had one on every planet :p
all you would hear late game is the announcer saying a weapon was fired
sounds good, that would be extremely OP otherwise. will the AI actually build and use them?
I don't see why they wouldn't.
the sovereign pics are like WOW
Wasn't this uploaded already?
Or do I see the future?
I think you maybe read it on their forums before they took it here or something. <shrugs> I have a sense of deju wu aswell, and I think that's the reason. :D
Yeah, it's been on the forums for about a week and we posted a picture linking to it, so you probably saw it through that.