Greetings!

Today I'll be talking about a wide variety of topics ranging from the impact of the new gravity mechanic on ship building, a big weapon rebalance in the tech web, and a number of new features both coming soon and over the horizon. I've been busy at work playtesting and tweaking numbers to improve the feel of the spaceflight combat portion of the game.

The addition of gravity to the game adds more realism to the flight mechanics but also changes how players will want to build their ships. A planet's gravity well requires effective thrusters to counter its pull, which puts a higher premium on better thruster technology as well as incentivizing the use of the engine/thruster slider to give your ship a bit more maneuvering power over raw speed to help maintain its agility during sub-orbital flight. In future playtesting sessions, we'll be looking at possibly boosting the output of all thrusters to help compensate for the increased draw on their power.

Weapons have gone through a large rebalance to help make each of the three basics classes feel more distinct and effective:

• Lasers and other energy weapons received a large damage boost to make them a better short-range but precision high-damage option.
• Kinetics and autocannons are still the balanced, middle of the road choice but have had the speed of their projectiles increased to make it easier to land hits towards the end of their range, whereas before the high speed of most ships meant you had to press in too close to ensure accuracy. They also had their ammo reserves doubled by popular demand for longer sorties and to make them more effective at demolishing buildings.
• Missiles received a boost to both the lifespan and velocity of their projectiles to make them effective long rage killers, but also a significant reduction in damage so one missile isn't a death sentence if it hits. Missiles are now harder to avoid and better fill their role as a long range threat.

Disclaimer: The following features are still in production and may drastically change before making their way into the game.

Coming to Rank: Warmaster in the near future will be a repair/rearm mechanic for fixing combat damage and refilling your ammunition reserves. The mechanic will allow ships to park themselves near a friendly factory which will automatically connect to them with a repair beam and slowly replenish their armor and restore any damaged internal components as well as refilling their ammo. The team is discussing other ways of achieving the same end results, such as arming builder bots with the same functionality or dedicated repair pad buildings, but this first iteration will give players the much needed ability to restore their battle-damaged vessels to full strength.

Also being added is a sensor strenth attribute to the cockpit, which will significantly change the information game. Players will no longer be able to see every building and ship in the game and must fly close enough to be within sensor range of a friendly ship before it displays on your HUD. This will make hiding outposts and conducting lightning raids possible and declutter the HUD when large numbers of distant buildings and ships are present.

One of the big features on the drawing board is the addition of space limitations to ships. Every ship will be limited by the space value of its components that are installed, restricting the size and effectiveness of the vessels they can construct at the beginning of the game to relatively small fighters and freighters. Players will have to research technologies that allow them to increase the space limit, effectively allowing them to install more and bigger components in a larger, stronger hull. This is a huge change to game balance as currently only the cost in refined materials and the time needed to produce a ship matter. With a limit on how much can fit in one ship tradeoffs between offense, defense, agility, and other utilities will be a major consideration in design.