Hello everyone and welcome back to our Developer Diary!
With the new ‘Alpha 3’ galaxy knocking at the door and the current ‘Alpha 2’ galaxy entering an exciting phase this week – it’s been a long week for the team and it’s likely to continue on into the weekend… But it’s cold outside and dark early right now so – meh. We’ve got a game to make 🙂
The new leaderboards
First of all, apologies for not posting the link to the new leaderboards yet. We will get them up and the link out to everyone as soon as possible.
But they have been tracking scores since they were launched (Wed Nov 21 16:00 UTC). So all of your actions in the game are counting and many of you have not wasted any time.
Stealing of resources
Hate mining or just despise all forms of manual labour? Are you a marauding soul that yearns to express themself? Do you feel the romantic allure of the pirate’s life? Well, now you have a perfect opportunity to bring these dreams of yours to life 🙂
We’ve added new gameplay mechanics that enable you to steal resources from another player (without having to blow them up):
- You need a frigate with an assault troop carrier installed and filled with troops
- This frigate either needs its own cargo space or to be part of a fleet with free cargo space
- Move this fleet on the orbit of an enemy planet
- Click on the planet and choose ‘Steal resources’ from the menu.
- After that you’ll have to wait some time before your assault troops will drop down to this planet and return with any resources they were able to find (it takes an hour for now, but this number may be changed)
- Check for the results of your heist. Your guys will steal all accessible resources on the planet up to the limit of the cargo modules and fuel tanks of the fleet. If the planet has tons of different resources they will be stolen proportionally (a little bit of everything).
If the idea of having your hard earned resources plundered doesn’t appeal, stealing can be countered:
- Prevent thieves from having a free run at your colony by placing guard fleets in orbit
- Orbital defence systems can also be constructed to blast a potential thieve out of the sky
- The chance of a success of a thieving mission also depends on the ratio of assault troops against the army size on the planet. If a planet’s army size is 20 times bigger than the assaulting group, the stealing attempt will always fail.
Every failed attempt will result in casualties among the marauders. This number is random, because no one really can predict all of the consequences. You could lose every last trooper or just one unlucky guy 🙂
Implementation of this mechanic may entirely change the way you play the game. You no longer need to build dozens of mines and send your population underground, if you have some very careless and extremely wealthy neighbours…
New models to implement
Before we get our noses back to the grindstone – here are some screenshots of new models our artists have been working on:
Shipyard
After the recent patch with shipyard’s in orbit, our designers thought there was room for a ‘coolness’ improvement. There was also talk of making the shipyards even more realistic and adding visible ship activity e.g. flying around, construction progress etc.
People’s Realm cruiser
We can have another look at the new addition to Realm’s happy family. Just a brief glance at this model is enough to tell us that these guys don’t mess around and will rip your fleets apart at the first opportunity.
Well, that’s it for now. Thank you all and till next time! 🙂
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