[img=http://d3tagfjj1pibwj.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/Power_to_CPU_Changes_INC_BAL_CPU_CHANGES.jpg] Hi all, An important change that is launching with this Thursday’s Aeroflak Sentinel update is the new link between ‘Power’ and ‘CPU’. Power is the blue bar that appears around the crosshair in battle and is the resource that Weapons and Modules need to fire. This bar depletes when you fire your weapon and recharges at a constant rate. The Power Bar currently recharges from empty to full in 10 seconds. This new feature links Power to CPU. Robots with high CPU will have more Power and a faster regen rate and Robots with low CPU will have less Power and a slower regen rate. Some examples: > At 500 CPU Robots will have 25% less maximum Power than before the update > At 1125 CPU Robots will have the same maximum Power as they did before this update > At 1750 CPU Robots will have 25% more maximum Power than before the update The Power bar will always take 10 seconds to recharge from empty to maximum, but since the maximum Power depends on CPU, this effectively means Power regenerates 25% faster at 1750 CPU and 25% slower at 500 CPU. The aim of this change is to help us balance weapon across the whole range of CPU from smallest to largest, and to help us prevent high Power consuming weapons from being overpowered in low CPU matches. We believe this is a big change and we will be monitoring how it affects Robocraft carefully once it launches. Please give us your feedback on this change once it’s live on Thursday, via this thread. Be sure to make clear what CPU you’re playing at when you give feedback. Other Balance Changes: We are making a number of smaller, but significant balance changes along with this update. > We have doubled the projectile velocity of Lasers (they were 4x slower than Rail, they are now 2x slower than Rail). > We have decreased the spread on Laser Wasps (making them more accurate) by around 2x, and decreased the spread on Laser Leviathan by 20% with a linear interpolation of the spread on Lasers in between. > We have reduced the Flak explosion radius against air by 15%, this radius is used for both the new ‘Sentinel’ and the Aeroflak Guardian (which is the new name for the Aeroflak Cannon). > We have renamed ‘nominal’ to ‘maximum’ for all weapons to simplify the understanding of how many weapons you need to place to get the maximum fire-rate. We have also removed the ‘tail’ after the maximum, so adding more beyond this number will not give you anything extra aside from redundancy. We have also reduced the maximum number of weapons required to reach max fire-rate on a number of weapons to the kinds of numbers you might expect, for example 4 for Laser Disintegrator with any more than 4 giving you redundancy only. NB: the ‘tail’ only gave an additional 10% if you added an insane number of extra weapons (like 20 Disintegrators) so we felt it unnecessary to keep it in favour of providing more clarity on this for Crafters who want to get maximum efficiency out of their builds. > We’re also exaggerating the difference between small and large Lasers. The larger Lasers are getting a significant damage boost but with a significant increase in their Power consumption, for example the Leviathan is getting a 100% damage boost (i.e. double) with a Power per shot increase taking time to run out of Power when trigger is held down from 20 seconds to 4 seconds (of course, if you’re using your Laser properly you’re probably not holding down the trigger 100% of the time, depending on range). There are also other smaller changes coming in this Thursday’s update, which we’ll detail in our patch notes tomorrow. Thanks for reading, and for all your support as always. Mark (Game Director and CEO, Freejam) (Thanks to MarcusMustang who’s robot features in the blog image at the top of this post!)