Developers explain the 3.14 combat overhaul: new weapon range categories, shorter ballistic magazines, and the capacitor system for energy weapons. They also cover ship balancing and the Sabre, radar pings, removal of shield hardening, and G-force tolerances.
TL;DR3.14 splits weapons into categories, shortens ranges for fast-firing anti-fighter guns and makes cannons heavy hitters, as a framework giving each weapon a purpose, with differences between weapons planned to return later.
OK, I'll take this one. 3.14 does a massive change in the overall combat system. And the thing which we always wanted to do and which we're now starting to do is to give every item, every ship, and every weapon a dedicated purpose. We do not want these items to be just interchangeable. There need to be proper pros and cons. But this is a very complex balancing process. So to start with that balance process, we created different weapon categorizations. The first thing we split up was the size one to four weapons from the size five plus weapons, mainly because those weapons are typically employed by fighters, whereas size five plus, except for some cases like the Vanguard, are typically carried by heavier ships. But the focus in 3.14 was on the small fighters. And within those weapons, we also then separated the fast-firing weapons, which we consider anti-fighter weapons, versus the slow-firing weapons, which are mainly cannons. And the difference we did there was to check: what are the ranges in which we want these weapons to be actually employed? Most of the combat between two ships happens within roughly 1200 meters when you talk about fast-firing weapons. So extending these ranges a lot didn't really bring us any more benefits. Then we also tweaked the cannons to be the heavy hitters, not necessarily just by damage, but also by their efficiency. Together with a new capacitor system, you can use cannons to dish out a longer continuous high-DPS stream as opposed to the weapons which are meant for fighters. Because in fighter gameplay, we do not really want to see the situation where you just tape down the fire button and then just fire and fire and fire without any consequences. So those anti-fighter weapons will empty their ammo load a lot faster to force the player to pick carefully when they actually want to employ them. So this is the story why we actually placed them out that much. That doesn't mean, though, that they're going to stay as they are. At the moment all the weapons in these categories are pretty similar to each other. They will be different again in the future. But we can't do all at once. So for us, it was important to first set up the framework and then do the differences again. And this is what we're doing with the weapon ranges in 3.14.
TL;DRShip balancing can't be done in one quarter; 3.14 intentionally reset things to a simpler framework, and a dedicated team will refine the details over several releases using player data.
I'm going to say no. Because it's quite a lot of work. Especially with 3.14, we've changed a lot. So we've had to reset some things to bring not only the weapons and everything, but the ships together in a certain way that resets things for us. So the ships are a lot closer in performance. But as you said, our plan isn't just to keep it like this. Our plan is to discover what our new features mean for the game, because we can test things as much as we want, but it's got to get in the players' hands and then we can see what happens as the players make choices, and then basically it's how their choices influence the results of that. So if they pick certain weapon loadouts or pick certain ships at certain times, we can see patterns in this and that will shape the balance of the weapons and the ships going forward, but it's really difficult to balance all this in one quarter. So we've done it in stages where we're happy with the framework we have now, but I wouldn't say we're happy with the finer details within the balance because we're still figuring it out. So that's going to come over several releases, but it isn't something we're just going to stop now and go, that's it. We've got a dedicated team now to do this over every single release going forward.
The cool thing, too, is as Rich and them are balancing stuff, they have a lot of analytical events that they research and look at to see what's happening throughout the entire PU and AC. So the one thing we always see a lot, too, is a particular thread or something like that, where they say that they're seeing a certain experience, which might be true in that certain circumstance, but we also have a lot of analytical events that happen throughout, so Rich could see the bigger picture of what's going on, that maybe that little small thing is something much bigger that's happening, and they do a lot of looking at and data analysis to see how the balance should go and where it's going right now. And there's always those fun players that are exploiting certain things. And it's like, how in the world did they do that?
TL;DRReleasing in stages helps the team see what the new combat system, with balanceable shields, weapons and thrusters, adds overall before tuning individual ships, which can only be judged in real combat.
It makes our life a little bit easier in terms of basically understanding the changes we've made to the game in terms of the feature set. So the big change for 3.14 is we've got a brand new combat system where you can balance your shields, weapons, and thrusters. And that's a new system. So basically going backwards a little bit helps us understand how that system is influencing the game. Rather than being bothered about how it works on the individual ships as much and being caught out by tuning it to a set ship or not, we get to see an overall experience of what this has added to the game. And then we can look at it from an experience point of view and go, right, what does this feature allow us to do on this ship, on that ship? And where does that ship need to fit? Because we've done a rough guide of where the ships fit, but until we see it in the combat situation, so we see all the ships fighting each other and the different weapons and different missiles and torpedoes all come together in terms of the combat, we don't really know, because there's so much to test. There are so many ships.
It's worth pointing out as well that we don't, we also don't want to... And it just so happens, I think, especially in the case of 3.14, making the game fun for this particular feature set that we have now also helps us understand the features that we have changed for this release, which is what Rich and Yogi are after.
TL;DRCannon ranges were reduced so fighters can get at large ships, but projectile speed matters more and can't yet be changed, with physicalized damage expected to change large-ship dynamics later.
Well, that problem existed before already, because a large ship like a Hammerhead cannot just evade the bullets. It has to tank the damage one way or another. But that specific use case actually came out of the playtest. We didn't see that in our internal tests. The behavior of kiting the ships at a large range and just trying to avoid the shots that way while still keeping the firing forward is something that we honestly didn't see before. It might sound odd, but it was like that. So we tried to counter that by reducing the range of the heavy hitters, like the cannons, the ones which have a shorter range now, to allow the fighters to get into range and take down the Hammerhead faster. Though I would still argue that it's not the range that is effectively defining how well a Hammerhead can defend itself. It's always the projectile velocity. And it came up in the feedback that the Hammerhead was supposed to get weapons with projectiles that just fly fast and thus give the ship a better chance to hit attacking fighters. We actually wanted to try that out, but the weapon system cannot do this at the moment. We can change the properties of a weapon contextually, but we cannot change the properties of a projectile. So once that kind of tech has been built in, we can reevaluate that thing. But for 3.14, it was not possible to address. That being said, we would still see any kind of gun gameplay as short-range gameplay. And we do have missiles for medium- and long-range gameplay. But it can be argued that looking forward, we can also implement other kinds of weapons which are more effective well beyond the close-range area.
There's also, once we get physicalized damage, things are going to change a bit where the Hammerhead is going to be, as you're saying, more of a tank beast, where it could take more of an impact. It has much thicker armor that the physicalized damage is just not going to be able to penetrate as well as the guns that it's shooting onto fighters. So right now it's probably going to be mostly just a health pool, while in the future when physicalized damage comes along, it's going to be a different type of game. It's where velocity and the projectile masses will be taken more into account. And you're going to see a different dynamic with that. But that's also going with what Dave was saying earlier. We're adding these incremental changes to get to where we want to go, and we don't want to just throw everything in all at once and unbalance the game. We're adding little bits of changes to see how well it affects the gameplay and getting player feedback to change some things with the analytical data.
TL;DRYes, balance will have to change once physicalized damage and armor arrive; the team balances for current tech, discusses the future internally, and plans to roll out and adjust afterward.
I mean, that's the beauty of Star Citizen. You balance for the tech that we have now, and you anticipate the tech we'll have in the future. It's the same issue that we have with a bunch of other systems. We can't build the damage and the balance for tech that's not ready for the live game. So while internally we're preparing for all that stuff and having a lot of discussions and testing a lot of philosophies, it will have to get changed once we get to that point. But we're already having discussions internally about what that means. So it's like when we had a more recent one, the shield tech, where it was using SDFs. We rolled that out for a few different ships, and the community actually found some loopholes and bugs with it. We kind of want to do that with physicalized damage, too, once we get to that point: we roll it out, see what impact that has, and then make balance changes when it gets there. But yes, it will definitely change the game. And I know Rich is looking forward to it.
It is definitely a big challenge to keep on top of a live product, but also think of what's coming in the future and how we get to where we're going to be in the future. But the two do kind of align because we're always thinking about it. Which does make it difficult sometimes explaining to players that we've done this for a reason and we've done this in anticipation, or we've done this because this is what we have in the game currently, but it will change. And it is difficult to keep on top of that, but it keeps me on my toes and it keeps the team on our toes. It's part of the enjoyment, really, because we're always moving the tech forward. So it's always going to change. And for me, that's a really great part of Star Citizen: the tech's always getting better.
TL;DRThe roles of ballistics and energy weapons haven't changed: ballistics still damage the hull through shields, but now have limited ammo with no regeneration, unlike energy weapons.
They pretty much haven't changed. I mean, the balance has changed, but the function and the way that we intend for them to work hasn't really changed. The idea pretty much has been all along that ballistics are not, like, 'oh, they only work against the hull of the ship' or something; that isn't quite true. The shield is taking away some of the stopping power of ballistic ammo through absorption, but they still will then go through and attack the actual hull, even if you have a shield up, which is how it's always been. We've changed some of this a little bit, which maybe Yogi knows a little bit more of the detail of what's happening there. But that's largely the idea. The ballistics then become obviously very desirable because they can damage the hull even though you have a shield up. But obviously a lot of work has happened in this patch to make ballistics this significantly more valuable thing, where the ammo is much lower and they run out really quickly and they don't regen in the same way that energy weapons do. But that's kind of the trade-off. You can do loads of effective damage to a ship with ballistic guns, but you don't have this cool feature with energy weapons that you can regen the ammo, which is how we're trying to balance this.
TL;DRBallistic magazines were cut and damage raised because continuous fire streams were too powerful with no other way to force pauses, making players choose when to use them.
That is mostly down to the role we want to see in ballistics. I mean, the purpose of ballistics was always to feel limited but powerful. And in 3.13, we didn't really have that. Ballistics were practically just cannons which looked and sounded a bit different compared to laser weapons or energy weapons. I mean, they had fire times of several minutes. And it comes back to the thing that David said before: we want to give these things purpose. And the specific issue that we had in 3.14 was the length of a continuous fire stream which you could put out, which was always much more powerful than the energy cannons, which had natural fire pauses because they needed to regenerate. But that offset was very, very large still. And even when we equalized the DPS outputs of energy repeaters versus ballistic weapons just to see how they would perform, the ballistics were still a lot, lot more powerful because they could keep up this weapon stream. And at the moment we do not have any other ways to force a break in that fire pattern. So for that reason we harshly limited the ammo and also upped the damage quite a lot to force players to make very conscious choices about when to employ those weapons.
Sorry, there's one extra point I forgot to mention about ballistics, which maybe we shouldn't go into too much detail on, but Mark mentioned the physicalized damage. When that comes along, ballistics' roles will change. And obviously certain ships that have very high armor will then be much more resilient to ballistics than they are now, right?
So there's more work we want to do on them to make them feel different in the future. But everything will make more sense once the physicalized armor system is in. But for now, we're happy in terms of where it brings us in terms of weapon versus ship balance.
TL;DRShifting damage from shields to hull isn't possible right now because weapons carry a damage type and shields hold the resistances, and it isn't something they can do for 3.14.
Firstly, that kind of approach is contradicting what we want and the general idea of energy weapons versus ballistics. But the other part of that is that our weapons do not have a shield damage property. It's the other way around. Our shields have a damage type property and every weapon dishes out damage of a certain type. Can be distortion, can be physical, energy, and there's a couple of others. And the shield has absorption and resistance values that counter that. So even if we wanted to do that, we couldn't do it right away. So this is nothing we can do for 3.14.
There's also coming along, which we want to do and talk about more, probably another point with the physicalized damage, our ship destruction. It's kind of arcadey still. Everyone knows it. I mean, we had it since the first AC. You hit the health pool of a critical part and the ship's dead. We, and I'm sure CR has also mentioned many times in the past, don't want that. We want it where you could damage certain sections and the ship could still be functional, but it doesn't just die. So we've also been talking for other systems like insurance, what does it mean that we indicate that a ship is in a bad state? Maybe all the power plants are gone or certain parts of the wing just make it inoperable, so the ship is basically dead but not dead. So once we get more aligned on what those critical areas are, we could reduce the arcadey death explosion. And that will get rid of those instant builds where you just ram a bunch of health and then it dies. So the problems that we're seeing now are going to be different problems in the future. It's just those things that we keep repeating, too. It's those incremental steps to get us there.
This is just because we can't do it any other way at the moment. But this comes back to the question we had before. We'll talk about these things in 3.14. But specifically for that reason, we swapped out most of the loadouts of the ships to have at least 50% energy weapons. And only a fraction of them actually have ballistic weaponry on board. But yeah, obviously that is the case. If I'm flying in a huge capital ship, then of course it makes more sense if we can dish out a lot more ballistic rounds.
To be clear, when we say we can't do it, it just means that the system right now needs reworking to do that. And for this release, we lacked the time to actually do that.
TL;DRBallistic ammo has a limited range because unlimited range would let players kill big ships from far away, and tracking every bullet on client and server would be too expensive.
So there's multiple things there. First of all, I would draw the game card. If we had unlimited ballistic ammo ranges, you could sit 20 kilometers away from a Hammerhead and just kill it right there, given enough time. That's not fun. And there's not a lot you can do to counter that. The second thing is, if it just keeps traveling forever, you get into a situation where you need to track all these bullets on the client and the server. And given how high our fire rates are sometimes, it just wouldn't be maintainable. It would be very expensive. I mean, this is again the real-world question. Also in the real world, there's a lot of ammunition that has an integrated timer. So it blows up after having flown for three or four seconds just to not have some bullets hitting a poor guy on the street somewhere else. So I think it is okay just to go for the gamey part here.
I imagine the physics system, if it had to track every bullet that was ever fired infinitely across the entire system, that would cause some unnecessary...
TL;DRPinging with no downside is not intended; a planned feature would make pings expose the pinger through emissions, and power costs may follow, but these weren't ready or balanced in time.
This is not intended. Going back to what David was saying earlier, we are doing incremental changes to not completely break the game. The primary big change that we've done with radar scanning for 3.14 is to move it off of being vehicle-centric and make the system work with any generic entity that design wants. So the shift between 3.13 and 3.14 was to move the system over to that new system while trying to keep it very intact to what players originally had. Fundamentally, the system has had a huge overhaul that exposes a lot of things for design to change and fluctuate and add things. It's just we didn't add extra things in there because of time and because of balancing. So eventually, yes, we'll be able to add and incorporate other aspects into it.
There was something we were trying to get in for 3.14, but it wasn't going to make it last minute. I think we called it Signature Deltas, where when certain emissions come on the ship, we categorize them to help the player understand what's happening. One of those is ping, then quantum, and then even EMP. If enough EM and IR is getting emitted out of this object, we classify it somehow. And we didn't get the system in in time for 3.14, but when you emit a ping, the concept is it generates a lot of EM and IR so that not only do you get to see things when you ping out, but other people get to see that maybe you're pinging out or there's a contact pinging in that area. So you kind of expose yourself a bit when you ping out. Another thing that we didn't get to is power requests. Certain ships might require more power when they do a ping, and just balance, we haven't gotten there. Poor Rich actually has, I think, a change list to balance all the EM and IR signatures, but it's just one of those things where we don't want to shove too much into a patch and completely change too many things. And so we've tried it out and rolled the little bits and pieces of it out.
TL;DRPings were designed as manual, but because players would script repeats anyway, the team just approved adding repeating pings to the backlog, with no timing given.
The intended design was always, of course, you hit a button and then the action happens. However, like some other systems that we've had, when we changed ping to always happen rather than only in scan mode, the community comes back with feedback that they would like to improve the game. So I actually just had this conversation with the radar team before this meeting. And even Yogi brought it up with me, I think, a day or two earlier. Even if we don't add the button to repeat the action, players will just make scripts to automatically do that. So we might as well incorporate that. So we literally just got the approval to add that to our backlog, to add that to the feature. So yes, we're going to do that at some point. I mean, players will just do it anyway, so might as well add the support.
But I mean, you could do it. Just be cautious that once we get the signature deltas in, you're going to be exposing yourself more frequently now that other people could see your ping.
In 3.14, we didn't get a chance to add ambient... We're hoping to do that in the next patch or two, or at least roll out different areas. We have the room system, and the room system could do things like pressure, air, and heat. It also could add ambient values into the scene. So design could set up a space station like Port Olisar to have ambient on the outside and a different ambient on the inside. So we have that system fully fleshed out. We just haven't put it into the verse for players just yet. It didn't make 3.14, but we're hoping to roll out ambient in other areas, yes.
TL;DRThe team says ship balance is not perfect and individual ships, components and weapons still don't fit properly, though they're happy the release didn't break balance and gives a foundation.
I think we always want to make it perfect. That's the problem: we'd love it to go out in a place where we go, right, we nailed it. But I don't think we have. But that's part of it being a very complex game to balance. This isn't just moving a few things and the numbers work out and then the balance works. There's so many different systems and so many different things. Even having a different amount of thrusters on the ship, or them being in a different location, or a different power plant setup or a different cooler setup can really affect where that ship fits. So even though the numbers look right, until it goes in the game and it fits with everything else, it's really hard to know where that ship fits. So I'd say we're pretty happy that we don't think we've particularly broken the balance of the game, which is basically what we said before, but we wanted this release to go out where we really haven't done anything majorly wrong and broken everything, and it creates a foundation. I wouldn't say we're really happy with how each individual ship fits or how each individual component or kind of weapon fits yet. We've still got a lot of work to do on that. But as far as the foundation goes, I think we're pretty happy. But as I said, we'd love it to be perfect, but it takes a lot of time to do this and a lot of testing as well. A really big part of what we do is there's a lot of testing, and then we can look at the data to back up some of the feedback we get and everything. So it takes a long time to get together and just figure everything out, because there's so many systems that come together to create what that ship is in the game as well. And it goes for the radar scanning system as well. We've got a lot of intended balance for that, and that requires every single component on every single ship to be set up how it's intended to be. And that's just not the case right now. But we've been building a team to do this. So there's lots of stuff to do and we're cracking on with it.
TL;DRThey have no exact time-to-kill target, since it varies with pilot and sub-targeting and a fixed number would encourage meta builds, though perceived time to kill was too long.
Okay, so in general, from the feedback in our combat tests that we had before 3.14, the perceived time to kill was always too long for us. Because you could tape your fire button down and fire forever and eventually ships would explode, but it was not really meaningful. I think giving an exact time to kill is not really working because you cannot really measure it properly. Combat is very dynamic, and depending on how a pilot flies his ship, if he makes a left barrel roll or takes other maneuvers into use, the overall time to kill changes so much based on the individual pilot that it's not really useful for us. And also, the other thing with exact time to kills is that it kind of tells you, hey, you have an exact number you're aiming for. And I would say no. Because if you just look at numbers and then you have tools that data-mine the game data and try to draw strategies out of that, this is something we would like to avoid. We want to avoid the gameplay of building a meta build that will always be better than all other builds combined. So as such, for us it's not important to get an exact number, but rather to experience how these ships and fighters and shields feel, and if you as a player think they give you the advantage that you need. Because ultimately, we want to play a game and not read out an Excel sheet. So that's why we do not have a specific time to kill. We roughly know where we would want it to be, but this is some data we really don't want to give out, because we want people to enjoy it and tell us, hey, this is too long, this is too short, and then we adapt it accordingly.
I would add that as we improve the actual flight experience, as in moving your ship around in combat, we want to head toward a situation, which I think we've done a pretty good job of in this patch, where it's not a DPS race of just hold your gun down and then eventually the ship explodes. And so the result is that, particularly in this patch and going forward, combat is not about waiting for the health to go to zero or something. A simple naive way of doing it is, oh, you hold down your button, and then the ship blows up. And in the older patches, that was like two seconds. But the actual experience, like what Yogi is saying, when you actually have a fight with a real person, it doesn't feel like two seconds. And that issue is much more magnified in this patch, which is why this is the way we plan to do it.
And of course, we're using the phrase time to kill, but with physicalized damage and armor and stuff, at some point it's going to morph into a time to disable, I suppose, would be a more appropriate term.
It also depends what you're targeting, too, because now you have sub-targeting and more items are getting physicalized. If you want to kill the ship, maybe you aim at the power plant and it blows up. If you want to disable it, you shoot out the thrusters. If you want to just disable the guns, maybe shoot up the guns. The definition of a win is different.
TL;DRThey don't want a tool giving an overall ship health number because it would encourage number-adding meta thinking and misrepresent a ship's real durability, and they currently lack such a tool internally.
Well, a tool like that would actually emphasize the thing we want to avoid, which is building a meta gameplay. We do not want players to say, OK, if I add this part and this part and this part and this part, I have 20,000 HP together. But those 20,000 HP give you no idea what the actual effective HP of a ship is. So even if we had this tool, we wouldn't want it to be an effective thing in your decision making. I mean, if you buy a car, maybe you look at how fast it can go, but you're not really interested in the exact number. You're interested in how it handles, if it's safe, how many airbags it has. But you do not care about, hey, it has a top speed of 260.5 kilometers per hour. You do not care about, hey, the frame will dissolve itself when you crash it with that much velocity into a wall or something. It's always about the experience. And I would like to avoid that kind of thinking that you just add up numbers. Star Citizen is not an RPG where you do that. It's supposed to be a believable gameplay simulation slash experience. And as such, I would like to de-emphasize the pure number thinking and go more to the experiential view of things. That said, we actually do not have a tool ourselves to display all the data. Sometimes it would actually be useful, but at the moment, sometimes we actually have to draw the data out of XML tools.
There's also, on top of us wanting it to be experiential, a lot of subtlety to the combat system that makes giving numbers actually quite hard. A really good example that we have had is that a certain fighter could have, I don't know, let's say 50,000 hull HP points. But it has, say, a wing or some other part that's extending out and it has thrusters on the end of it. You could, for example, break that part off without dealing all of the HP damage and have effectively nullified the effectiveness of that ship. Which makes the actual HP, for example, not actually that representative of what fighting that ship is truly like. And that subtlety is not captured in straight numbers.
TL;DRThey aren't against a meta emerging and want players to discover and debate setups themselves rather than being handed hard numbers, with different scanners giving role-specific information to support varied gameplay.
I think, what a desirable experience... Yes, there is meta. And I think we're not necessarily working against that, because the players can still play the game and figure out the meta and make their own notes about it and try and learn about the game by playing it to then decide on what the meta is. And an ideal situation is a group of players play and they find that a certain configuration of components works really well. And then a different group of players start from a different starting point and discover that actually a different set of components is better. And that kind of variety in the community, that's desirable. And you're not going to get that by the game giving you just hard numbers. You're going to get that from people trying to learn about the game and quantify it and then having disagreements and discussion about it. That's what we really want.
One other aspect of this, too, is going to be scanning. Depending upon what you want to do, we're going to have different scanners give you different information. If you're a mining prospector or something like that, the scan that you're going to get on another ship is maybe not what its guns are. Maybe it's not any good information about combat. Whereas a fighter ship, when you scan something, it's going to tell you how combat-ready that is against you. Whereas a more security ship is going to want to scan and give you maybe how much bad cargo you have in there. So it also depends on what we want to give the players when you scan and what information to get based on the role of that particular ship or what they're trying to get at. A medical scanner is going to give you something different than someone who just wants to blow stuff up. If you go in the game and you just want to blow a bunch of things up, eventually the idea is you're going to run out of money. If you blow up a cargo ship or a Prospector that has a bunch of valuable cargo, you just lost it all. You want to disable that ship and maybe capture it, but that's going to make that Prospector maybe call in his friends. So a lot of it right now is how can you get away from just making the gameplay blowing people up? How do you incorporate different information so that different gameplay aspects can come out of it?
I mean, you're going to get the people that want to blow stuff up. But if you repeatedly do that, how are you going to get money to continue to blow people up?
Yes, absolutely. We also have a change list that brings the tolerances back, because especially eyes-out g-forces, like going backwards and going downwards, are something that humans cannot endure for long. So most of the ships have already been balanced to allow less downward and backward acceleration than on the other axes. But we did not have enough time to actually tweak the g-force tolerances yet. So we're planning to do this in the future, which again will then change the combat geometry between fighters a little bit.
TL;DRRather than one capacitor item, weapons, shields and thrusters each have their own stamina-like system tied to the power triangle, and the team expects to iterate on it further.
Okay, so the role of the capacitors has slightly changed since we had this first ISC, and there was a lot of feedback from the community. There was a lot of feedback from Chris actually on how to make them better. And we tried to incorporate this all. So we do not have a separate capacitor item or something like that; every subsystem for weapons, shields and thrusters has its own idea and implementation of how capacitor gameplay, which roughly translates to stamina gameplay, is implemented. The most well-developed part is, I think, the weapon system. So when you have energy weapons on board, on their own they cannot even fire, even when they're powered, because now they need some kind of energy ammo. That kind of ammo is being supplied by a weapon capacitor item that is on the ship itself. So it's an item that's on the ship and it has X amount of a thing we call ammo load, which is practically the amount of damage weapons can do. And it has an X amount of regen. So once this item goes online, and at the moment you cannot power it on or off, but it goes online, it will start supplying the weapons with the juice. And then the weapons, based on the requests that they're making to the system, will get a slice of the ammo load and the regen cake. And this also means if you, for example, have two laser repeaters and one laser cannon, what you can do in order to increase the output of your laser cannon is turn off the repeaters, and then all the juice from the repeaters will go into the cannon. And this will then allow you to keep a longer fire stream. And you will also see that you have more shots in the cannon. Now this is all coupled with the power triangle. So if you put full juice with the power triangle towards the weapons, you will see that the weapon capacitor, or the item on the ship, will now be able to output a little bit more. So you will see the ammo count in your energy weapons actually going up. And also the regeneration will be faster. So that's the weapon part. Then we have this on the shields. On the shields, when you assign more energy in your power triangle, they will regenerate faster, but you will also get a little bit more resistance in them. Not a lot, but just enough to give you a little bit of an edge when you need to fly defensive and need to recover in some other ways. And for the thrusters, we have a similar system there. So on the thrusters, we now have a limited capacitor pool which we're going to use with boost, which was afterburner before. Now we call it boost. And the more assignment you put on your thrusters, the faster this boost will regenerate. And the more assignment you have will also make it a little bit more efficient. So you use less the longer you use it. That said, I don't think this is the last iteration of the capacitor gameplay. I think we will iterate on this, because especially for the shields, for example, there's more stuff we'd like to do with that in the future. But this is where we are right now.
TL;DRThe weapon capacitor isn't a physicalized item on ships yet, though it is a swappable item in the system, and whether it becomes physicalized is a question for the future.
OK, so physicalized. At the moment, not, because the items which we would build into the ships haven't been set up to be measured and fit into the ship. So at the moment, not. But specifically the weapon part, because it's an extra separate item that powers all the weapons, is a thing we would like to swap out and turn on and off separately in the future. So practically the idea is if this thing goes offline or if you turn it off, all your energy weapons will stop working. So as in physicalized, I don't know yet. This is more a question for the future.
Just for the benefit of someone who might not understand, by physicalized, Jared, you mean that the capacitor has an actual interactable object that you can see in the ship, right?
So the thing to keep in mind is that even though right now it is not a physicalized object, because we need to work very heavily with the content teams to actually modify ships and so on to do that, it is still an item, even though it may not have a representation. So we still do have the ability to swap it out and upgrade it and so on, which we haven't done for this patch, but we do have the ability to do that.
Okay, so specifically on the shield hardening, when we had our combat summits, and we had a couple of them now, it was always the thing that we don't really think shield hardening as it was implemented in the past is really interesting, because it's just an on-off button and it doesn't give you really meaningful differences. So in 3.14 shield hardening is disabled and removed. What we would like to do in the future is supply a more interesting implementation of that, but that's also for the future.
TL;DRTowler admits the Sabre's placement may be pushed too far and its yaw is weak, says it can be improved, and asks players to explain why it feels bad.
Yeah, that's all my fault. So that's one of those ones where we've taken the Sabre and we've gone, right, we think the Sabre fits here. But again, that's not final balance. I could have pushed it too far into that bad zone where it doesn't fit quite right. But that's where we can react to this and we can work on that in the future. But it would just move back to a baseline that we thought would work for the ship. But it's been one of the ships that hasn't quite fitted where we thought it would fit. So we can definitely look at some changes, because I think it's got quite a weak yaw compared to where it should be. But that's also a consequence of the way the ship is as well. But we can work with that, and we can definitely improve it.
One thing also to indicate, too, is if the Sabre is bad, it would also be really, really nice to know why it's bad. We see this a lot on the forums. Someone says, this is broken, this is bad. If you can provide an extra bit of detail, that would actually really help us understand why you think it's bad. Any bit of context other than the words 'it's bad'. Now, granted, there might be a chance that there's a bug and it's bad in the case that it doesn't fly; that I get. But any extra input on why you think it's bad, please put it in there. Because when we scroll through the forums, any extra bit of information helps us gather and build why a certain thing is the way it is.
And also, it's not just a question of it being bad in flight, because as a comparison, it could maybe have worse flight than a similar ship, but the Sabre could excel in a different area. So that's definitely something we've looked at, where we've tried to give ships different reasons for being what those ships are. And there's some ships where that's not possible right now, that they fulfill their complete role, I would say. But it's coming.
I mean, the ships are not being tuned without some context. So specifically for 3.14, we added a couple of measures that tell us, hey, what is the rough dogfight performance we can expect from that ship? And the Sabre is actually not that bad if we look at the raw numbers, but I get why players don't like it that much. But this is also because the role that the Sabre is supposed to excel at is not very well developed yet. So don't melt them down. They will play their role and they will have their proper space in the combat environment going forward.