Star Citizen News – SO MANY THINGS!
Star Citizen News for the week ending the 14th of February.
It was a surprisingly busy week and there is a load going on and coming up… but Ill start with The Sneak Peek… looks to me to be the interior of the Constellation Taurus that is currently pegged for release with Alpha 3.14 around the end of June. Some people are expecting a bit more of a overhaul to the constellation series as a whole as well BUT I am not… tho CI did suggest they might do some tweaks to struts… ahhh if it gets even a little bit of the Mantis love I’ll be happy!
So what else is on… XenoThreat Phase 3… Fleet Battle!
This has you taking on multiple Idris and the XenoThreat Fleet.
Tho it’s sometimes hard to get on a server that has the mission active as it’s quite quick to complete compared to the Phase 2 Cargo one…
You can also Get Your CDF Service Spectrum Badge… just by participating in the XenoThreat Missions. It was implied specifically for Phase 3 but also vaguely any of the XenoThreat Saga….
“So we just talked with Rowena Dulli, the Special Agent in Charge and CDF Coordinator for the Stanton System, and agreed on rewarding everyone who took part in the mission with the CDF Service Spectrum Badge.
Any backer who participates in the XenoThreat event will be awarded an exclusive CDF logo badge on Spectrum. These will be distributed in the week following the conclusion of the event. More details soon!”
There are 3 sets Sales going on for Different Reasons too…
XenoThreat Gear Up Combat Ship Sale
Coramor Valentines Sale
Red Festival Sale
The Red Festival also adds red envelopes that are effectively full of money so go find them around Landing Zones.
There was a hint at maybe CI trying for a CitizenCon on 7th August as they appear to have booked the LA Convention Centre… we might hear more on that soon.
There is some RSI Service Maintenance incoming on Monday at 4pm UTC for around an hour…
One of the Reasons for this is because a FreeFly Event is about to start and they want the servers in GOOD ORDER! The Free Fly runs from the 15th Feb for 2 weeks… so if you or you have friends that want to try out the game… then is a good chance… expect some additional ships on sale with start packages most likely… it’s not confirmed BUT there was a picture of the DragonFly, Prospector, Arrow, Mustang Alpha, Aurora MR and Freelancer shown when they talked about the event…. So I would expect those to be ships that everyone has access to during that time for free MOST LIKELY.
I’d expect that event to start around 5-6pm UTC just going by the server maintenance.
SCLive Capital Ship Combat Summary
The AI Idries are not as deadly as they had originally wanted, this is partly due to server performance BUT also they have purposely made the weaponry on the Idris target different ships and change targeting to make battles look and feel cooler BUT they will be improving their Targeting and threat recognition further to target certain things quicker… like torps or bomber threats…
The Idris do have limited ammo and countermeasures… so you can exhaust their supplies during combat even now.
They want the Capital Ships to make a big entry and exit… them just appearing / disappearing from QT is not intended. We’ll see them Spool up and prepare to jump.
One day we will see battles and missions spill over between atmosphere and space BUT AI need more work to appropriately fly and transition to atmospheric flight.
The Fleets do work together and have some form of basic tactics and behavior BUT it’s early implementation wise.
They are working on having the ships respond to a Fleet Commanders Orders.
In the future they foresee Capital Ships trying to escape and that being the norm when doing missions like this, rather than blowing them up.
They will be building better station defenses to combat Capital Ships too.
They will be building a more robust law system that deals well with accidental friendly fire.
Capital Ships will be expensive to run and operate… you’ll want a reason to bring them out.
Roadmap Summary – The Roadmap saw various features added:
Alpha 3.14 got Healing Tools, 3.15 has Salvage Tools as well as the big old S7 Weapons for the Ares AND 3.16 has fire extinguishers. The Progress Tracker has a load of FPS Tools and gear added to it as well along with a flurry of other features.
ISC Summary – Looked at Capital Ship AI and Shields of these big boys! They are looking Sweet!
There was an AMA with the Vehicle Experience Team quickly highlighting some bits:
Future Dogfighting should encourage ships to fight at slower speeds.
There will be targeting and UI Filters. And they plan to have a landing camera a bit later. Multicrew is getting more work and will be an effective use of manpower BUT probably not always the best use. Capacitor Gameplay will have a huge affect on the game and they are going to be tuning ships a load more for role in the future.
There is an overhaul for ground vehicle physics planned. The Nova will have realistic tank movement with it’s tracks.
BoredGamer is organizing an Event for XenoThreat Phase 3, that will probably be Tuesday at around 3pm UTC most likely, checkout the Discord.gg/BoredGamer for info on that when we have some!
And that’s it for this week’s Star Citizen News!