Boarding parties

Boarding parties now add a huge new high risk/high reward dimension to the game. When you launch a boarding party, a boarding shuttle streaks across space towards its target. Shuttles can be attacked, protected, disabled and rescued just like any other ship.
If the boarding shuttle reaches its target, a special mission begins. You must then decide what actions to take based on the situation. Both the boarding party and the target ship are at risk of loss. Each faction has its own type of boarding party with their own strengths and weaknesses:

Pact Marines

Pact Marines are loyal and will never mutiny. They are good for putting ships under your control, and very good at disabling enemy ships, both actions that generally make for poor relations. They provide excellent defense against enemy boarding parties. Unlike all other factions, they respect the rule of law and will only board enemy ships.

Empire Shocktroopers

Fiercely loyal, Empire shocktroopers are bloodthirsty. They excel at eliminating enemy crew, disabling and even destroying ships. They can also be used to take over ships and put them under your command. Shocktroopers are the most effective of all boarders, but success always leads to a worsening of relations. Like Marines, they are excellent at defense.

Corp Mercenaries

Although they are not particularly loyal, mercenaries value ships too highly to intentionally destroy a target ship, and would prefer not to disable them. They dont share that same value of crew and have a habit of accidentally killing them off. In the next version we will be giving mercenaries the option to bribe captains with ore to join your fleet, but for now they are still reasonably effective at putting ships under your control -- that is, unless they mutiny and jump away with the ship. Lastly, mercenaries are very good at defense.

Rover Pirates

Pirates give you the legendary jury rigging abilities of the Rover on disabled ships, although this is a much riskier option than using a Fixer or the Rover Leader. Pirates do have a nasty habit of stealing the ship they were asked to board, but theyre pretty good at capturing and disabling ships to balance it. Pirates too are quite good at defense.

Irenic Diplomats

Wait, but the Irenic are pacifists! you say. True! For this reason diplomats will not defend a ship they are aboard, nor will they kill a crew or destroy a ship. However, diplomats can be asked to destroy one or more weapons aboard a ship for the good of all. They may even do so without being asked! And perhaps due to the quality of their cookies, they are quite good at peacefully persuading ships to join your fleet -- as long as the diplomats are not killed in the process. The greatest strength of diplomats is that their actions never cause relations to turn negative.

Boarding Details

Any passengers aboard a warship can be trained as a boarding party, as long as relations are friendly with that faction. Training cost is 1 unit of ore. Training is immediate and cannot be reversed. Once trained, a boarding party can no longer operate a ship. Boarding parties, as long as they are alive, can be reused. Multiple boarding attempts can be made against a target. Captains be advised: disabled ships can launch boarding parties, including those of your enemy. Do not let your guard down once a ship is disabled! Boarding shuttles can be re-tasked in flight, including after a successful boarding action. The crew aboard shuttles continue to consume fleet water until destroyed or they mutiny and jump away with a ship. Launching a boarding party against a ship in your own fleet transfers the boarding party to that ship (unless there is unrest aboard that ship, and in that case an event will occur). Your tactical computer has been upgraded. Non-player ships now generally display helpful status messages when you hover them, including which ship in your fleet they have targeted! There's plenty more to discover, but let's discuss our other major improvements:

New features

New hotkeys! You can now set Rules of Engagement (ROE) instantly on all selected ships with these hotkeys: R: hold fiRe V: weapons free (Vree?) B: Berzerk N: defeNd And just a reminder that you can change all hotkeys in the Options menu. The Pact Frigate and Pact Destroyer had their second cargo slot replaced with a hardpoint, giving you the option to add firepower (at the expense of no longer being able to ferry crew/cargo or do ship upgrades). All mining ships also have had their cargo slot converted to a hardpoint, so you can double up on mining lasers.
Destroying one of your own ships now drops ore (same as with non-player ships). You can now lay minefields directly on a target. Plans and ships are now much more frequently available for purchase in trade events. You can now filter your fleet for ships with boarding parties and upgrade items aboard. Non-player ships will now use nukes defensively, while player ships always require an explicit action to launch nukes (because they have devastating area of effect damage). Ships that come into your fleet now clear their attack orders, and ships in your fleet also clear their attack orders against that ship. This should help prevent any friendly fire incidents. Giving a Destroy command switches the attacking ship to the defend ROE if the hold fire ROE was previously set. Issuing a Nuke order switches the attacking ship to weapons free ROE if hold fire was previously set.

Events

Its now possible to play in a much more aggressive style -- what I like to call Razor mode (in honor of a certain Pegasus Admiral). These Razor events give you morally flexible ways to add ships like farmships to your fleet. This is not an easy way to play. Every single event was adjusted to allow for boarding. This alone took over a month and several passes, since at that time there were over 125,000 lines in our events file. (It's up past 180,000 now with boarding parties!) One hundred and seventy eight new boarding-related events were created. We hope to expand this out over time. Right now a different event occurs based on the combination of faction boarding party, target ship class and target faction. Ships (particularly warships) respond differently if they have defenders aboard. Most of these 178 new events are player boarding events. A few of them are enemy boarding actions and results. We hope to expand this out over time. Lots of work was done outside of boarding, too! All trade and repair events can be restarted as long as you remain at the current location. Caches still self-destruct after they have been accessed. Trade events were made much more frequent. The number of items for sale were also increased.
Disabled and Abandoned ships now have events that are spawned each time a ship becomes disabled, abandoned (or both). Now when you crew/recrew/maroon/repair these ships interesting and unexpected things can happen! Lifeboats also have their own special events. All cargo ships now have a chance to carry minor ship upgrades like nanorepairbots. Enemy AI was improved for all factions. More work will likely be done there. Many new events were created including: The Laser, ROE Your Boat, Razor: The Tanker, Razor: The Farmyard, Razor: The Share Deal, Razor: The Payfarm, The Pirate Party, The Covenant, The Comrade, The Sibling, The Dronet Plea, The Oremore, The Party, The Rescue Promise, and The Handoff. The tutorial was massively expanded, cleaned up, improved and hopefully made clearer and more engaging. For example, the fuel resource is not displayed until jump is ready, where it is then explained. As another minor example, the battleship starts following the station so it wont drift out of view. The explanation for water now always appears at the right time. Well almost certainly do even more work on this as well. Related to the tutorial, we now track if the player jumps without hailing or engaging with an event and throw (hopefully) helpful reminders. This will likely be tightened up in the next minor update. Many events such as The Fair Swap were made to use the new centralized crew/recrew logic. Dozens of events were tweaked, fixed, adjusted and expanded. Lore was added for crew, passengers all boarding parties and items.

Modeling

Models for the different boarding parties were added: Pact Marines, Empire Shocktroopers, Irenic Diplomats, Corp Mercenaries, and Rover Pirates. Boarding shuttles were created for some of the factions. More to come! The boarding action animation was created, but due to a horrific oversight, is not present through at least 1.39f. Penance shall be served, and we should have that added soon. All stations were made much larger. Its purely visual, but they look much better. Thanks to intern Moe for the idea!

User Interface

The water display was completely revamped. The water icon now animates when you are gaining or losing water, and the center of the drop now clearly indicates how many more crew you can take on before triggering a water riot. Lastly, when water is at zero or less, the icon goes grey.
We also colorized the other resources and increased their size for better readability. Resource graphs showing you the speed of resource gathering at a given location were made larger, more colorful and more consistent. Look for these when hovering the center of the minimap, hovering locations in the starmap, and viewing a locations details in the starmap.


The ship info window was added to choice trees to help anchor which ship youre talking to/making a decision about.
When a player has zero ore, we now grey out the Fix action and display an insufficient ore tag. The attack order is now greyed out if the target is disabled and a tooltip was added, this should help to clarify that an explicit destroy action is required. Contextual actions were reordered to make more sense. When there isnt enough ore to nuke/fire missiles/lay a minefield, we now grey out the command(s) and display a helpful message. The protect and attack actions are now centered on their target ships, making those actions a little more clear. The attack action doesnt always center, thats a known issue for now. Feedback now sends in the background. Event results now display on the starmap in case you are there when an event ends. The ring of doom is now more visible. Many small but annoying UI bits were cleaned up, spacing was adjusted and things were made more consistent.

Behind the Scenes

It has been and exciting, exhausting and totally worthwhile three and a half months. It's the longest we've gone since we entered alpha without a release, but the scope of the change required this much time. Its difficult to understate what an epic amount of work this update represents. 178 new boarding events alone! The file that contains all of our events grew by 50%! Overhauling existing events was an epic task. In addition to expanding many of our existing conditions, every single event had to be evaluated and adjusted to accommodate boarding.
I restructured the event file, organizing events by types. This was also a lot of work but it makes maintaining the events much easier. We also expanded our robust event scripting with quite a few new features: The moveCrew action was added, which allows us to move crews between ships in an event. The randomVariable action was added, so now event results can be randomized. This was vital for boarding party actions. The wasBoarded condition gives us the power to know if a ship has been boarded or not. Different variables and parameters can be used to resolve the boarding action in the local event or in the spawned boarding event. Several more actions and conditions were added such as destroyWeapon, isSelected, fakejump on jumpFollow, pulseTooltip, states in getShip, board and launch boarding party actions in shipActions, disableTrigger, and isJumping conditions.

Next up...

We already began work on the new jump animation, and have done a lot of work on improving formations so that they curve along the playfield and also respond better to commands. Upcoming version 1.40 will have both of those new features and more events!

Bugs

We fixed about 200 bugs in this release, but most of them were never seen as they were related to boarding parties. A HUGE thank you to our Discord community and all the players who contributed bug reports. Here are some highlights: Event logging was massively improved. syntax highlighting was added in VIM and boy does that make a difference!
Ships no longer default to the long way around when using T or Z hotkeys. Losing a faction leader at the rendezvous no longer triggers negative events. Haggling no longer results in zero cost or sub-1 cost items. The battleship no longer has maroon actions available unless it has passengers aboard. The Diplomacy action is no longer shown against fleet ships. Transfer/evacuate/rescue/maroon/crew/cargo transfer/etc actions were cleaned up and given better logic. The battleship is now released from seize before the seizing ship jumps away (due to boarding or an event result). Quests should now always spawn where they can be reached before the Harvesters expand into their space (assuming the player does not dally). It is no longer possible to evade the relationship hit for confiscation by jumping quickly. Upgrades are no longer duplicated in trade actions. Lifeboats no longer jump away due to faction leader lost events. Feedback works under Linux again. Choice trees expand down (instead of up) An epic number of broken tooltips were fixed A variety of issues with the shipExists, crewCount, crew and evac actions were fixed, most of them in event logic. A bug related to scouting and events was fixed that would result in zero events at your destination. Trade events no longer spawn twice. An issue with returning boarding parties from a spawned event was fixed. Delays caused by sending ships scouting were undelayed. A few bugs that would cause zero events to spawn at a given location were squinched. Counterattack was removed as an accidental contextual action. The spawnHarvesters action was added to the save game state. The hidden rendezvous beacon no longer flashes briefly when entering/exiting the starmap. The resetTrigger action now properly resets locationChanged and time conditions. An issue related to the weaponCharged trigger was issued termination orders. An error caused by transferring the molecular sieve item was corrected. Waypoints now work properly when restoring a game. Operating crews are now displaying properly when hovered in fleet info and scan. The Fixabot now displays a proper model. Harvesters now properly respawn after the tutorial. Rendezvous beacon now restores properly from saved games. Several projectile-based edge case issues were fixed, some of which could stick the game. A fix was made to an Irenic-related crew mission. getShip was made to work with boarding shuttles. Trade and repair events are no longer possible to spawn at the rendezvous. A lockup related to reaching the rendezvous was fixed. The mystery of mysterious Pact passengers was solved. Ships given the board action in an event no longer stop before reaching their target. An issue with crew not being killed when they were meant to be was fixed. When crew is transferred they no longer show their crew info dialog. The nofuel tag was given text. A bug with no events cropping up on day 5 was fixed. Farmships no longer have counterattack actions. Whoops. An issue that could cause zero scouted events was resolved. Hovering Investigator details now no longer crashes the game. An issue with boarding-related speech was talked out. Factionleader gain/lost events now end properly. The boarding shuttle no longer aborts boarding if the target is disabled. Warships only have the confiscate action now. Unfriendly factions no longer can train marines, show tooltip instead. Boarding shuttles no longer overshoot their target regardless of closing speed. Range rings were fixed in the formation editor. Some issues with the relationship change animation were fixed up. Some speed optimizations were done. Thanks for making it this far and we have much more in store!

[ 2020-11-18 18:59:30 CET ] [ Original post ]