Star Citizen – The Future Of Space Combat
There is a lot going on with Star Citizen… we have the IAE potentially the biggest event of the year, 3.15 came out, 3.15.1 is on the PTU with loads of new stuff, CI have talked about the future of space combat AND short – mid term plans for Server Meshing in detail… this video is a summary of the weeks highlights that you probably don’t want to miss.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.15 is finally out to live… but there is no time…
The IAE 2951 starts on Friday the 19th November and runs until the 1st December… with a FreeFly, an Expo at New Babbage, New Ships, Ship Sales and more. We also have Alpha 3.15.1 coming out with that AND I am currently playing that on the PTU… you can see our tours of the Ares Starfighters and Redeemer as videos.
Along with those ships and the IAE the patch also adds a few other things that are being tested on the PTU now:
Volumetric clouds around microTech.
Improvements relating to Inventory
UI Improvements for the Medical Tool
The Guards at Loreville have that amazing Quirinus Armor
AND a huge host of bug fixes and performance improvements
There has actually been another PTU patch that also has CI
Tweaking the Ares Ion weapon, making it faster firing but lowering it’s damage.
Polishing the Redeemer as well… literally making it shinier.
Also Modifying shield values to have them less drastic in performance difference for all ships.
Inside Star Citizen: Future of Space Combat
The Vehicle Experience team have been planning the future of Space Combat, looking at all the features that have worked and what has been popular. They also talked to various real life dogfighting experts and specialists.
The goals for combat are meaningful decision making based on information and feedback the player will have to make important choices.
Every ship, item, weapon component and vehicle should have a proper purpose in the game.
The customization of your ship and how you use it in the situation that you are in is important. There are limitations and weak points to choosing certain gear.
They also want this all to be believable while also avoiding heavy meta gameplay.
In Star Citizen 3.14 and more refined in 3.15 they have tried to establish a new combat foundation. Stripping everything down to focus on base combat before adding more to it again.
This has all ships assigned to a specific archetype, ships have strengths and weaknesses, they are making sure multi-crew is a core purposeful feature.
They are also defining weapon archetypes, currently there are only 2… anti-fighter and anti large-ship, tho this will be expanded upon in the future.
Shields were made more readable at a glance and have been made simpler in the short term.
Capacitor Gameplay was added, which is similar to stamina… and using it effectively gives you boosts to your systems when you need them.
Short Term Plans
G-force Exhaustion – Certain maneuvers and turns will start to tire your pilot and you will have to manage this especially through prolonged fights.
Expanded Weapon Archetypes – Adding Anti-Infantry, Anti-Missile, Suppression Weapons, Hybrid or General Use Weapons.
They also want to have weapons rebalanced for ship loadouts, so you’ll see some ships becoming more specialized by default again.
Shield Variance – 3.14 saw all shield sizes unify, in 3.15 we start to have variances again between different shields. They want to make the shields more diverse again BUT they don’t want too much of a HUGE difference between shields types within the same size.
Power Triangle – This helps players focus energy and capacitors but they want it to be a nonlinear system, adding power to weapons in the future may affect turrets, 3.15 added minimum regen even without power triangle assignment, so the systems will still work even if you have 100% in something else.
Flight Tuning – They are not happy with the current flight tuning. Alpha 3.14 and .15 pushed the ships towards their archetypes. They want more variance between the ships within these spaces and to retune them realistically while also giving them character, this will be part of a longer ongoing process. They are aiming for fun and enjoyment and the main goal.
IFCS Trimming – Is currently being prototyped and is mainly for Dual Stick users, allowing one stick to be set as a “sticky” throttle.
However this will also allow Mouse & Keyboard users to use a relative throttle.
Gunnery – 3.15 saw auto-gimbals reworked… they don’t want it to be a skill bridge and are investigating it’s use and balance.
Also they want the options to turn off all assists if you want to.
Staggered Fire Groups are being added for 3.16, this staggered between types of weapon.
Turrets are being looked at, they want them to be powerful, so they might add buffs when weapons are on them but they are also exploring shared capacitors with the pilot and rest of the ship…
Longer Term Plans
They love low speed combat at short ranges and want to avoid super high speed long range combat. They are looking into solutions.
Ballistic Ammo Management will see changes in the future especially with physical armor.
They want an EMP Operator Mode, it also sounds a bit like e-war as well.
They talked about Flak as a weapon type that would be useful for defense, take out missiles and repel fighters.
They are working on Flight Maneuvers for AI.
They also want to have deeper capacitor gameplay too but this will be reliant on other tasks being completed first.
There was a Q&A on Server Meshing, I’ve done a video breakdown of that which will be going live at somepoint on the weekend, Static Server Meshing is planned for as early as Q3 next year AND there are lots of details about how player caps will rise and sharding will work.
There was a Star Citizen Live talking about and to Concept Artist Gavin Rothery.
He has concepted over 20 vehicles for Star Citizen. He has worked on many other IPs in the industry. It was a mostly fluff and random chat episode tho.
This Week’s Sneak Peek is what I assume is some ambient space in the Pyro System?
Boom, that’s it for this weeks Summary…