How do you decide what the time to kill of a ship is? Do you do all of the weapon calculations and then get to a time to kill, or do you start with a time to kill and then start adjusting things to match that?

Where do we start? Start small. The time to kill, I know obviously we said this, prefaced it a lot, that things aren't finished and it's still ongoing balance. So we tend to try and get things right on the small level, the small scale with damage, rate of fire and all those things. And then with the shield items, the armor items and the ship health. I wouldn't say that we have an exact time to kill in mind.

So you start at the small level and you do one ship against another ship. You get that rough ballpark time that we're interested in. And then we go, oh, what's the next level up? Does it sort of scale with that? And then they all sort of build onto each other. Then the wildcard is obviously people can change their loadouts. So when we do our time to kill goals or estimates, we do it off the base loadout. Because you can't really factor in every single combination of weapon and missile and shield and armor combinations that they can do. So we go on the defaults, and the default loadouts for every ship sort of contain most of our weapons. So when you're balancing one ship against another, you're already factoring in those weapons. So hopefully it doesn't get skewed massively if someone changes all the weapons from one to another, because it's factored in somewhere. But as we build up the ships, it does get longer.

We tend to play test these things a lot with smaller ships actually to get the feel right for those. I think I'd be honest to say that we haven't spent as much time with the larger ships and that is still work in progress. There's a lot more to do there.

There's a lot of systems still to come that will make those ships more enjoyable to behave.