What specifically has been changed?
- Complete rebalance of SCM speeds and ship handling
- Complete rebalance of all shields for all ships o These simulate the item2.0 shield item values that will come with a future patch. As such they are approximations of the intended default loadouts.
- Complete rebalance of fuel consumption and fuel tanks for all ships.
- Afterburner and boost consumption rates have been adjusted.
- Once fuel is depleted you are kicked out of afterburner until enough has regenerated.
- Complete rebalance of all missile loadouts for all ships.
- All new missile racks have been made.
- Every ship has had its missile rack hardpoints adjusted.
- All missile rack hardpoints are now editable and missile rack items can be exchanged again.
As you can see, every ship in the game has been given a new SCM max speed which is approximately half of what they were before in order to condense the scale of speeds to
roughly between 100 and 200m/s. This crunched range has allowed us to keep combat much closer and tweak every ships acceleration (lateral and rotational) to give them all a better feeling that you would associate with a ship of that type and role. Up to now, certain ships were held as a gold standard, meaning that we had to force values for new ships far beyond where they should naturally sit. Our goal is to nominalize speed and reset the balance across the board. Reducing the SCM speeds has allowed us to keep/tweak the afterburner/cruise speeds close to what they currently are and to put a resource on boost fuel and its management to hop between engagements. Alongside the flight speed changes, we’re also putting in an early approximation of the shield items that will come online in a future patch for early feedback and a revised default missile loadout for most ships. With the revised loadouts, we’ve created all new missile racks and reenabled the ability to swap them out.(edited)
Why have we made these sweeping changes? As more and more ships have gone into the game, the speeds have slowly crept up to make room for them. The end result is that combat in SCM mode has progressively got worse and further apart. With these increased speeds, undesirable sliding when turning comes in, and with that, more unintended collisions and a general requirement to not fly near any of our cool setups in the world. The changes mean that the management of this boost and afterburner going forward is once again become a viable combat tactic.
