Yogi Klatt · Senior Gameplay Programmer, Vehicle Experience

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.