2019-11-26
Update!
Hi everyone.
I have applied a few updates over the last couple of weeks, these include:
New chat spam protection.
New chat dice spam protection.
Outpost defense fleets no longer contribute to war score.
I have another update inbound, this focuses on preventing some griefing as well as testing an improved "tick rate" on the server.
All ship movement has been updated and improved, ships will no longer wiggle along when flying towards their target.
Ships will now fly with a course to intercept their target at a range that suits their weapons.
Larger ships will no longer change course to avoid smaller ships, smaller ships will get out of the way, so no more titans turning to avoid a corvette.
This new movement has improved the overall look and feel of battles.
The reporting system has been updated to reduce spam reporting.
Warp protection will be enabled for ALL sectors and warp speed will be increased. ( This is a temporary override but will stay if it works )
The Tick rate is the speed that the server sends updates to the game, this is currently set at 1 per second.
The next patch will be running a test of 2 updates per second, this means the game will look smoother and be more responsive to your input, however it also increases bandwidth.
Bandwidth for a normal fight is currently tiny at about 1kb/s going up to 6kb/s for a massive fight, so the increase should be fine as even a bad 3G connection is faster than this. However I will be monitoring it and getting feedback in case there are any issues with very slow/poor mobile connections. Worst case I just revert it back, so not a huge deal.
With a double tick rate the game speed can also be improved, I would like battles to be a bit faster and with more action.
As a temporary test I will be increasing some of the battle speed. Ship speed will be increased, projectile speed will increase and weapon fire rates will increase. I am still testing the increase amount but it could be up to 50% faster ships/weapon fire. Abilities, Subsystems etc will be adjusted to make up for the increased fire rate without them activating too fast, this would be mostly done through the amount of damage they do.
The overall impact of the tick rate and game speed increase along with the new ship movement makes for a much nicer battle. Battles mostly being quicker means farming is also faster and the overall feel of the whole game improves.
The game speed increase will be run for at least a couple of days and will stay if it works well.
Once everyone has the next update on the store ( should be released on all platforms by the end of the week ) there will be a minor update to attacking larger fleets and outposts with smaller ones. This will work the same way as it does now with larger attacking smaller fleets.
Thanks!