Ship Behavior

Targeting behavior has been completely reworked, and ships now prioritize targets much more intelligently than before. Stationary ships will be more appealing targets, and ships that dramatically affect the battle (such as gravwell generators) will become high priority targets when activated, causing ships in the vicinity to break off of previous targets to face the new threat. This also means a ship won’t break off from a hostile target that’s returning fire to instead fire upon a resource collector that’s wandered into the fray. Also, thanks partly to improved targeting behavior and partly to the new true ballistic weaponry, if a ship (such as strike craft) approaches a ship that would normally have difficulty targeting it (such as a destroyer) in a head-on approach, the strike craft will be ripped apart as they are very easy targets due to their approach vectors.

It’s not only targeting behavior that’s changed: flight speed and maneuvers have received a complete rework. For example, the more ships are present in a formation, the slower the formation will move. It won’t be dramatically different, but it is noticeable in comparison: Dave showed me a claw formation of five lance fighters flying side-by-side with a claw formation containing ten of the same unit, and after moving approximately 50km there were several ship lengths separating the two groups. Formation size also affects the turn rate of the formation. As more ships are added the further the ships on the trailing edge must travel when a formation rotates; thus reducing the mobility.

Because ships no longer move at a static speed, their behavior in combat is also altered. “These new flight maneuver abilities allow for more intuitive behavior” Stephen Cole (one of the core team members who’s working mostly on balance) said to me in a later email, “for instance it is now possible for fighters to slow down during their attack run to maximize time on target and speed up when coming back around”. While having strike craft fly slower to maximize damage sounds appealing, with the implementation of the new ballistics system that means they’re also more susceptible to enemy fire: “ships caught going slower during a strafing run are easier to hit”, said Cole. Waypoint behavior has also been modified as Cole informed me: “waypoints can now be closed, creating a patrol loop, and ships can leave their patrol to attack enemy units encountered while on patrol and return to the patrol, or ignore enemies altogether”. I think this will be really useful for setting up offset patrols of single scouts as an early warning system, or to find enemy resource ops without having to micro as much. There are a lot of synergies between the various changes which, when seen in action, are a dramatic improvement over the current version.

Another change which I like very much is exploding ships now deal much more damage than they did previously – from what I saw in the patch, a capital ship exploding will easily destroy any frigate class ship or below in the vicinity. However, since ships are much ‘smarter’ now, whenever a ship starts to go down you’ll see all nearby vessels work frantically to clear the blast radius. Dave illustrated this by scuttling a Battlecruiser, and watching all of the frigates desperately alter course was like watching WWII naval footage – eerily accurate. This was a change I’ve always wished for, and it was too cool seeing it realized. This update also impacts…