Control: To help give players more control over when their turrets are firing, they now interact with fire groups. Turrets not in the currently active fire group will not track targets or attack (it doesn’t matter if they’re set to primary or secondary bindings). In addition, the Target Only mode is changing:
- When set to Target Only, turrets in the active fire group will track the target as before, but will not fire.
- Target Only weapons can be manually fired. When the player attempts to fire the weapon while it is tracking, the gun will start firing and will ‘latch’ on until you lose sensor contact with that target, switch fire groups or otherwise disable the weapon. Moving out of range or fire arc does not break the latch.
This means Target Only mode can now be used to initiate fights and attack illegal targets, but the pilot bears all responsibility for any crimes!
Turrets set to Fire At Will are no longer able to accidentally commit assault crimes. They will check if their target is legal before firing (or that it’s someone you’ve already assaulted) and do not fire at a target that would be a new crime, any ships hit accidentally by stray shots will not punish you for the hit.
There are some other improvements to how turrets react to targets moving and what causes them to wobble or lag behind. We think the changes will give a more interesting experience and allow turrets to be more accurate at range but possible to outmanoeuvre in a close fight. It should also add more variation between turrets, where smaller turrets are better able to track and hit fast moving ships.
