How will thruster damage affect your ship, and how have things changed since we first showed this off at CitizenCon?
TL;DRThruster damage mostly works as first shown: shot thrusters reduce thrust and acceleration, even asymmetrically, while the new flight model gives a free pass on ship imbalance so ships stay fairly stable.
So in terms of that, aside from the tuning and balance, it actually hasn't changed that much, because we found that it plays really, really well. Some of the ships are a little bit hard to shoot the thrusters on, and we're working with the ship artists to try and have thrusters that are exposed as the weak elements. And so when you shoot a thruster, you start losing thrust and you get a reduced acceleration. The new flight model is a little bit more lenient toward ship balance. So previously, if you were to shoot a thruster on one side of the ship, then every time you tried to move it would spin, because it was just out of balance. We don't do that as much anymore. We give you a free pass in that respect, just to make the game a little bit easier to manage. So what you will feel is reduced thrust in a certain direction. The ship will still be quite stable up to a point, obviously, when you just completely lose everything. The ship will be quite stable and you'll just lose thrusters or you'll lose acceleration. And so the result is that it feels sluggish, and you might find that it's asymmetrical. So it's sluggish strafing in one direction and not the other, which feels really cool. It forces you to change how you're flying in the middle of combat, which is fun.