Damage absorption shields

A new kind of combat ability is now in the game:
Damage shields are an alternative way of providing healing to your officers. They spawn an hemispherical shield over its area of protection, usually centered in the casting officer:
After it's spawned it will absorb every damage hit sustained by friendly units under its surface. It will be destroyed once its own HP reaches 0, or when a timer runs out. Any officer will be able to wield this ability, but it will be much more potent in the hands of a Scientist.

Civ ships visiting your station

Other civ ships are now able to visit your home asteroid, and they will be displayed in the galaxy map:
This is the backbone of making more sense of some station systems and events, so other civs NPC wanting to visit your station first have to get there, instead of magically spawning. No more than one ship will be spawned per system, to keep their numbers under control. A galaxy filter will be implemented later on to hide these ships, if the user desires so.

Civ-specific shuttles, visitors and ships

As a continuation of the on-galaxy civ ships, visitors now arrive in one of those ships, and dock in your station using a civ specific shuttle:
Visitors will respect its visiting ship schedule, coming and going using their respective ships.

Invasions based on ships, hostile event gating

The next system to migrate to galaxy ships will be group invasions. Before any group invasion happens a ship will have to be spawned from an hostile system, so the advance notice for the invasion will make more sense (and the area warning will also be kept). This means the user first has to unlock a system with a hostile civ before invasions start. Other smaller invasion events, like sneakers and impostors, will also be locked this way, making the early game free of invaders.

[ 2016-12-08 22:12:13 CET ] [ Original post ]