It was brought to my attention that when I said “bigger update” in my last note, some understood that to mean a game update instead of a verbal update on the work I was doing on the ship systems. Apologies for that.

Today was not the day I wanted it to be. I didn’t truly get committed to doing the codework that needed doing until this afternoon, which meant that I was burning hard on that until this late hour (approximately 2am). Needless to say, I don’t find myself with the time I intended to have to discuss ship systems with you all. I’ll still try to cover the big bullet points for you guys. Here:

• This ship system is not the system we were talking about months back. That was more ambitious and, frankly, probably a dev-time sinkhole.
• Ships come with some “fixed” attachments and some free slots that can be left open for more crew space or filled by more guns and upgrades.
• Escape is accomplished by charging up your light drive – this takes one round to charge. Should you take any electrical damage to your armor/hull before escaping, the charge is lost.
• Weapons can be toggled on and off individually. This may be an important part of combat if you rely on high energy weapons or have a ship with weaker energy generation capabilities.
• Ship weapons can fire single shots or bursts of up to four shots.
• I just updated storage capacity to pull storage size from your ship’s stats. It’s still 10s across the board for the Casstech.
• You can choose not to fire any weapons to double your ship’s energy generation for that turn.
• You can choose to evade (and not fire) to gain a 50% evasion boost.
• Dodging/Evasion for ships works differently than for land combat. Evasion still functions as a % miss chance, but the attacking ship’s accuracy is effectively subtracted from it. For example, you could have a ship with 120% evasion, but a craft with +60% accuracy would still hit you 40% of the time.
• Upgrade modules that provide large boosts to one ship attribute are planned, but not yet put together.
• Special modules are planned but not yet put together – modules that allow a once per fight shield restoration or full charge of energy, for example.
• I intend to add ship weapons with “Turret” flags that deal slightly more than double the damage of the normal version – to compensate for the fact that you must have a free crew member to staff them (making it effectively take 2 slots).

Of course, while doing this, a number of other things have gotten cleaned up. For example, shopkeeper busts should still display while you’re viewing their inventory. Penny, Amber, and a few other NPCs have been updated to allow them to be removed from your crew and re-hired. We can’t have you getting stuck on a backwater planet because you have too much crew to fly!

Again, sorry for any confusion (and dashed hopes)! I promise, this stuff is falling into place pretty quickly. Wsan is doing a hard burn to write the smutty parts of the first ship battle, and look forward to getting it in your hands to play with.

<3 Fen