Hi everyone,

Alpha patch 0.9 has been released today via Steam to all Alpha players. This patch includes a reworking of fleet management and a couple of small bug fixes. The first version of the planet management assistant that was discussed in last Friday’s dev diary is pretty much done, but needs a little more testing still so didn’t make it in to this patch.

Updating the game client: the game should be automatically updated via Steam. Please check here if the download doesn’t automatically start when you launch Steam.

Improvements to fleet management

A couple of weeks ago we previewed some changes that were on the way related to fleet management. There were some common issues players were having and we wanted to make some improvements e.g. flagship levels were confusing, manually forming fleets was clunky. You can find the full details here but we’ll summarize the key changes here:

• Simplified flagship levels
• The flagship level now always represents the maximum number of ships that can be formed into a fleet around it e.g. a flagship level of 10 means 9 other ships could be merged around this ship to form a fleet of 10.
• We did consider making an exception only for Dreadnoughts, but decided not to in the end (the question was whether it should be possible to have more than one dreadnought in a fleet, but as it will be challenging to construct multiple dreadnoughts, it should be up to the player if they place more than one in the same fleet).
• Increased the fleet radius size but limited the max distance between ships
• Increasing the space a fleet can occupy means there won’t be any more trouble filling a fleet with ships up to the flagship level (if the flagship level is 4, you will be able to fit 4 ships in that fleet, no matter how big those ships are).
• However, this also meant we had to limit the max distance permitted between ships in a fleet to 300m (if there was no limit, it would be possible to position ships in a fleet so far apart from each other that the splash damage property of missiles and torpedoes could be far too easily countered).
• A new fleet grid
• The new fleet grid makes it easier to see the distance between ships in a fleet e.g. if a torpedo launcher has a splash range of 300m you can see the effect it would have on different ships in the fleet depending which ship it struck (we want to be able to illustrate this more clearly in the future).
• Fleets can only be formed using the ‘Merge fleet’ menu command
• Manually forming fleets by zooming in and dragging one ship from outside the fleet in to the fleet was clunky, confusing, time consuming and not compatible with the other improvements e.g. increasing the space a fleet can occupy – so it’s been removed (we will likely implement something similar to the ‘split’ feature in future which will provide another option for forming fleets).
• For now, fleets are formed only via the context menu, by selecting one fleet, clicking another, and choosing the ‘Merge fleet’ option
• Originally, we said ships would be added to the fleet horizontally to the left and right of the flagship, but for now they will be added in a circular pattern around the flagship
• The camera locks over the fleet you are managing
• To prevent losing it or accidentally zooming away

If you’d like to discuss any of these changes related to fleet management or have any other suggestions, let us know on the forum. The wiki page for commanding fleets has been updated but it we’ve missed anything it would be great if you could help us get it fixed up.

We’ll be back again soon 🙂

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Full patch notes

Features and changes

• Improvements to fleet management:
• Simplified flagship level to always represent the maximum number of ships that can be formed into a fleet around it (no exceptions)
• Increased the fleet radius size but limited the max distance between ships to 300m
• A new fleet grid graphic which shows the distances between ships in a fleet
• Fleets can only be formed using the ‘Merge fleet’ command (removed the manual way)
• The camera locks over the fleet you are managing to prevent losing it or accidentally zooming away

Bugs fixed

• Sometimes it wasn’t possible to merge fleets (even when at the same position) or to split ships to form new fleets
• Fleet transfer screen: quantity input fields were limited to 5 digits instead of 6

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