Hello everyone! The holidays are fast approaching and the end of 2022 is not far beyond. Stuffie and I are hard at work on BETA 12, and we wanted to share a bit about what that will include. For a long while now we have been talking about updating missions in Space Impossible as we go through our iterative passes on developing the game. One of the issues with missions was they were pretty generic and not always obvious what was going on. We wanted them to be more important when in a star system, and equally valuable whether playing alone or with others, all the while having maintaining the influence from scifi tv shows and movies we've been inspired by. There were also some technical costs which made things tedious and bloated when creating factioned versions of a mission.
That desire lead to the creation of "Star System Problems". These problems will affect the whole star system, and will be multi stepped issues that can be addressed by one or more players and it will be quite apparent what the current issue is. Each step's issue will have a clearly define goal, ranging from simple "blow up targets" to "disabling ships" to "deploy object to a location". Each step will have a reward upon completion, and when the entire problem is resolved, the system will receive some boons similar to the end of a conflict. Speaking of goals, we have added more capabilities for the AI and game to recognize. Things like "disable a ships engines (blow them up) and the ship will surrender" is now possible. Or the "deploy object" capability, where, for example, a station will be able to spawn a specific platform, where the player then has to maneuver, to a specific location out in space.
Not all systems will have a problem all the time. It will be influenced by a variety of factors, some of which we're still working on. There will be faction specific ones, so they only appear when a system has a specific owner. We'll probably be releasing a limited set of problems to test from start to finish as an experimental build in the first or second week of January. A full release sometime after that as we add the rest of the initial problems. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays