V2.9

V2.9 Update Artillery & Base Defense Rework Base Defenses and artillery Cruisers are getting a rework to make the game flow better and be more intuitive to new players. (Rather than 10 Cruisers getting destroyed by a single Sentinel.) Previously certain units were unable to attack structures or units with their main weapon which was contrived and inflexible, making units fit into overly rigid roles. The following cruisers can now attack buildings with their main weapons: Athena, Mauler, Zeus, Nemesis, Avenger Artemis and Destructor Artillery cruisers can attack units (but have difficulty attacking targets moving dynamically) Base defenses build time reduced by approximately 25% Artemis Reworked to have a single unified weapon against all targets. Missile DPS increased to match lost Harpoon. Harpoon attack removed Missile attack now uses harpoon visual effect Missile attack can now target buildings Damage increased from 32 to 85 Attacks per volley increased from 2 to 6 Projectile speed reduced from 200 to 150 Health reduced from 820 to 520 Movement speed reduced from 150 to 100 Metal cost increased from 325 to 380 Minimum range increased from 100 to 300 Radioactives cost increased from 57 to 90 Destructor Can now target units AOE increased from 0 to 10 (This means that the specific locations of each rain drop applies damage, rather than the damage “tracking” the target) Health/Shields reduced from 200/720 to 100/400 Movement speed reduced from 150 to 100 Secondary weapon damage reduced from 10 to 2 Minimum range increased from 50 to 300 Metal cost increased from 305 to 380 Radioactives cost increased from 56 to 92 Base Defenses Build Times Base Defenses are getting build time reduction to compensate for Cruisers being able to attack them with main weapons. Smarties from 35 to 25 Barrager from 50 to 45 Sentinel from 65 to 44 Oblivion from 80 to 60 Drone Bay from 65 to 40 Repair Bay from 70 to 50 Constable from 30 to 25 Falcon from 60 to 45 Air Eliminator from 80 to 60 Annihilator from 38 to 28 Heavy Annihilator from 45 to 40 Disruptor Cannon from 90 to 70 Pulverizer from 70 to 48 Exterminator from 90 to 60 Drone MRV from 60 to 40 Regenerator from 60 to 40 Blossom from 35 to 30 Starburst from 65 to 45 Skyender from 80 to 60 Frigate Rebalance Frigates were too weak after the early game because their build speed was disproportionately long and their damage too low to justify their vulnerabilities. Frigates will now be much more spammable and control the flow of the early game, while remaining an option for overwhelming units and defenses that lack splash or rapid-firing weapons. Furthermore, the huge frigate buffs allow the Athenas and Maulers to gain frigate targeting with main weapons but still remain weak against them. Reduced build speed of all frigates by approximately half Reduced cost or increased power of all frigates Athenas and Maulers can target frigates with primary weapons. Martyr Martyrs and Reapers are getting their squad sizes flipped to make Martyrs better against weapons with long reloads, such as Archers and Sentinels. Movement speed increased from 150 to 160 Projectile speed increased from 200 to 250 Accuracy increased from 33 to 50 Damage increased from 5.5 to 6 Squad size increased from 3 to 4. (Health reduced to maintain same durability) Reaper Damage increased from 12 to 19 Squad size reduced from 4 to 3 (Health increased to maintain same durability Range reduced from 600 to 550 Steering module range increased (will not charge in as closely) Brute Damage increased from 2.5 to 3.5 Cooldown reduced from 1.9 to 1.5 Metal cost reduced from 30 to 25 Movement speed increased from 150 to 154 to float slightly ahead of Archers. Archer Damage reduced from 40 to 30 Cooldown reduced from 3.8 to 3 Shots by volley increased from 2 to 3 Steering module range increased (will not charge in as closely) Hermes To make the Hermes a more viable harassment unit against undefended areas. Cooldown reduced from 3.9 to 2.9 Health reduced from 100 to 75 Metal cost reduced from 72 to 52 Medic The big frigate buffs made the Medic less valuable. Reduced metal cost of from 108 to 95 Reduced radioactives cost from 54 to 35 Reduced build time from 20 to 16 Reduced health from 250 to 200 Heal rate increased from 60 to 75 Sky Cleanser Sky Cleansers don't need to be so strong anymore with Drone Hives as a Tier 2 anti-air. Damage reduced from 10 to 7 Removed armor-piercing Tormentor Lowered tormentor cost from 196 to 180 Increased steering module range Athena To remove contrived and unintuitive balancing, the Athena and Mauler can target frigates, though it will still be weak against them due to a long reload. To compensate for Frigate and building targeting, they are losing health, gaining cost, and frigate damage is being increased. Can target frigates with all weapons Health reduced from 1000 to 920 Metal cost increased from 350 to 410 Reduced range of Athena outer (One of its secondary weapons) from 600 to 400 to be consistent with other weapons Reduced damage of Athena outer from 30 to 25 Mauler Can target frigates with all weapons Health/Shields reduced from 980 to 910 Metal cost increased from 380 to 400 Balance Reduced how far units will spread out in army formations Engineers & Constructor Stacking a big blob of build to make things unkillable was cheesy and will be weakened. Halved repair rate Zeus Lightning Whip range increased from 250 to 300 Drone Hive The Drone Hive is being reworked into an anti-air unit to give Substrate more flexibility and to distinguish it from the Avenger and Masochists' that both had anti-frigate roles. Drone Hive’s drones now have an anti-air beam weapon and are incapable of targeting ground units. Drone Hive now has a weak turret weapon to engage ground targets Reduced metal cost from 350 to 320 Reduced radioactives cost from 80 to 50 Increased hover height of Anti-air drones Caregiver Caregiver and Regenerator are both getting a buff to assist in replenishing shields from the Nova Cannon Shield restore increased from 40 to 50 Masochist The Masochist was made obsolete by the Avenger. Now it will be a deadly counter to mass frigates. Damage increased from 24 to 50 Range increased from 300 to 400 Substrate Mobile Nullifier Can now also be build from the Auxiliary Assembly if players have the Hunter / Prey expansion. Avatar The slow projectile speed looked weird. Increased projectile speed from 230 to 400 Substrate Nexus Another cosmetic change because before the slow-traveling weapon looked odd. Increased projectile speed of slow-moving weapon. Reduced damage and clip size to compensate. Air Harbinger Damage increased from 300 to 350 Accuracy increased from 90 to 100 Dreadnoughts The faster build time on base defenses meant countering an incoming dreadnought was too easy. It was also unfair for Dreadnoughts to be the same speed as the much faster Juggernauts. Movement speed increased from 72 to 92 Overmind Weaker Athenas/Mauler made the Overmind even stronger. Gets more power to forward guns but less to Drones to weaken its ability to kite away while engaging. Metal cost increased from 3600 to 4400 Reduced regular Drone Swarm count from 4 to 3. Increased Plasma bolts damage from 10 to 20 Prometheus & Savager Multiple Dreadnoughts taking down a Juggernaut should be more viable. Metal cost reduced from 6000 to 5500 Cronus The Cronus will be much stronger due to some fixes of its special abilities and more powerful s tatic defense in Hunter/Prey Projectile speed increased from 180 to 220 Cronus Rail guns can no longer attack air units. Cronus Devastate can now target units Fixed an issue where the Subsonic Demolisher upgrade was not firing. Metal cost increased from 3200 to 4000 Leonidas All Juggernauts are getting a slight power reduction to make more room for multiple dreadnoughts being viable. Reduced range from 1400 to 1200 Lowered beam damage from 250 to 240 Agamemnon Missile AOE reduced from 200 to 125 Eye of Darkness Damage reduced from 6500 to 6250 Nest of the Queen Removed anti-air drones Fury Bombers and gunships were too difficult to counter with base defenses, while air fighters would shoot them out of the sky too easily. Anti-air defenses will be better now with lower build times, and Air fighters are losing some damage. Lowered Cannon damage from 10 to 6 Dominator Lowered damage from 3 to 2 Increased accuracy from 75 to 80 Hades Increased projectile speed from 60 to 90 AOE increased from 90 to 120 Harvester Too easy to kill with Orbitals or Air runs. Health/Shields increased from 100/500 to 500/500 Strategic Bomber To compensate for improvements to weapon targeting Increased cooldown from 3 to 6 Annihilator To prevent Nemesis from outranging Annihilators, they are getting more range but less health. All basic defenses are getting armor-piercing to be stronger against Cruisers. Range increased from 600 to 800 Health/Shields reduced from 1000/1000 to 800/800 Now has 20% armor-piercing Heavy Annihilator Range increased from 600 to 800 Health/Shields reduced from 1500/1000 to 1200/1000 Now has 20% armor-piercing Smarty & Barrager Now has 20% armor-piercing Artillery Post Strong nerfs to compensate for the health reduction on Artillery Cruisers making the Artillery Post even stronger than before. Metal cost increased from 320 to 600 Health reduced from 1500 to 1200 Unlike other defenses, build time remains long at 70 seconds Oblivion Will no longer be able to snipe artillery cruisers automatically /Attack range reduced from 1200 to 1000 Drone Bay The Drone Bay shut down frigates too easily, we want frigate spam to be more viable. Cost increased from 340/80 to 380/140 Drone MRV Like the Artillery Post, the health reduction on Artillery Cruisers made the Drone MRV and Shredder even more powerful. Health/Shields from 1200/600 to 600/600 Shredder Turret Shredder Turret is being reworked to perform more like an artillery base defense. Although It won’t rival the PHC Artillery Post directly to compensate for its secondary Drone Pod attack. Plasma Ball attack can now be fired at Frigates Plasma Ball attack attack range increased from 1200 to 2000 Plasma Ball attack cooldown increased from 2 to 8 Health/Shields reduced from 1200/1000 to 600/600 Drone Pod attack cooldown increased from 6 to 15 seconds Drone Pod attack range increased from 1200 to 2000 Metal cost from 400 to 600 Build time increased from 50 to 60 seconds Assembly Health/Shields increased from 1600 to 2000 Sky Factory With Frigates becoming so much more potent, Hades rushing to nuke frigates was overpowered. Metal cost increased from 175 to 250 Build time increased from 35 to 40 Aviary Build time reduced from 45 to 40 Regenerator Shield restore increased from 35 to 55 Emergency & Serpentine Turret These Turrets especially suffered from the Cruiser changes. Now have 20% armor-piercing Range increased from 600 to 800 Now block capture Quanta cost ramp up per cast reduced from +15% to +10% Can now target aircraft Emergency Turret damage increased from 10 to 15 Lowered Ability cast cooldown from 5 to 0.15 seconds Model sizes increased. Boost Orbital Lowered cast cooldown from 1 to 0.10 seconds, allowing for much faster triple casting. Orbital Command & Subspace Streamer To help Substrate field Harbingers and Eradicators faster as a reaction to counter an incoming enemy dreadnought. Build time reduced from 160 to 120 Incursion To compensate for being allowed to target buildings with cruiser weapons Quanta cost increased from 200 to 250 Turinium Generators To de-emphasize pure aggression and rushing, the resource bonus from holding Turinium Generators is being reduced. Reduced global income bonus from 5% to 2% Maps Replaced some small mountains with basins or plains on Merga, Italia and water for better unit pathing Increased Turinium Requirements of many maps Atwater Added additional connection from the Nexus to make base cutoffs less brutal Europa Moved Metal & Radioactives deposits at the starting location closer to the Generators to make it possible to capture region while building Extractors, as per other maps. Ulrich Ulrich games too often were entirely decided around shoving the middle. This will give more variance to the strategies on the map. Moved some resources from the center to the sides Added additional Generator near the Nexus to make the cutoffs less brutal Brighid Increased thickness of Mountains near the starting locations to prevent Artillery Posts from sieging the Nexus. Campaign Reduced difficulty of some defense style missions and scenarios to compensate for Cruiser targeting changes. Swapped order of Calthaeon and Yorkshire to a more gradual introduction to new content and complexity Adjusted unlocks of some Imminent Crisis missions for smoother and more gradual introduction of new content. Reduced AI difficulty of Athena from Challenging to Normal when playing Imminent Crisis - Falnass on Normal Increased available resources on Falnass. Audio Updated many weapons with new and improved sound effects. Normalized all audio files and rebalanced loudness for consistency. Increased max radius on audio from 3,000m to 4,000m. Increased maximum audio falloff distance from 2048 to 4098. This makes it so that you can hear sfx you can still visually see. Updated all audio files to higher quality. Rebalanced all sound effects, priorities, volumes and radius against one another. Updated all environmental audio with cleaner sounding versions. Removed extraneous explosion sfx from various unit/building timelines and muzzle vfx. Updated impact and weapon vfx to call updated sfx where needed instead of explosions. Added new kinetic/energy impact sfx to weapons – these play sparsely so as not to be annoying. Added new explosion sfx. Removed lots of overlapping sfx throughout the game where they shouldn’t have been. The game's audio will overall feel cleaner and more noticable. Added new missile/artillery impact sfx. Updated structure destruction sfx to better match up with visuals. Adjusted default volumes: Reduced music from 50% to 25%, increased effects volume from 50% to 75%. You’ll only see this if you wipe your game settings. Converted campaign VO from .wav to .ogg format. This should help speed up load times and reduced space on disk from 1.01GBdown to 273MB.Updated buttonclick sfx to be consistent between main menu and in-game. Replaced PHC, Substrate and drone movement sfx with new, better loops. Also made quieter unless you zoom way in. Added engine audio to damaged state on units. Assigned Juggernaut units their own destruction sfx. Visuals Improved ground texture quality on all terrain types. EMP and Regenerate orbital Abilities now have a new unique visual effect. Increased view distance of SkyCleanser and Dominator shots, many Orbital Abilities, dreadnought and artillery projectiles. Carving Turret now has a new unique model instead of using a duplicate of the Sentinel Turret Added fire and heavy fire effects to the Nexus when low on health. Resized many unit zoom icons to be more consistent. Added additional detail to Athena and Strategic Bomber zoom icons as they were heavily scaled up. Added missing unit zoom icon to Sentry. Improved quality of some smoke trails. Added a bigger Muzzleflash effect on the Oblivion and Exterminator turrets Quality of Life Ordering a unit to Stop now sets its leash range to 0. this means it will never move to engage an enemy. Stop command renamed to "Hold Ground" Camera Increased camera angle (Is more top-down) Increased starting camera distance (Game will start more zoomed out when you load in) AI Battlegroups The skirmish AI builds battlegroups and sends them to take regions and attack the enemy. Many of these battlegroups were inefficient and have been adjusted to make the AI more challenging and use unit compositions more like a real player. AI will build less Capacitors AI will no longer build SkyCleansers and will build much less Drone Hives when playing on air units disabled. To avoid excessive anti-air, AI builds Reapers instead of SkyCleansers in an army lead by an Overmind or Queen AI builds Maulers instead of Drone Hives in an army lead by an Overmind or Queen AI builds Reapers instead of SkyCleansers in an army with Drone Hives AI will build more Maulers instead of some Avengers AI will build more Maulers instead of some Caregivers AI will build more Hades in their bomber battlegroups AI will build more Athenas and Nemesis instead of Zeus cruisers AI will build more Archers instead of Brutes Miscellaneous Approximately doubled the hover height of all air units Many units have had their targeting priorities equalized. This prevents unwanted behavior where units dive after enemies instead of targeting based on proximity. (Many weapons where it's important still retain priorities) Removed unused assets to improve startup load time. (Though this will be offset by new Hunter/Prey content) Moved Juggernauts into a new build panel on the Dreadlaunch and Advanced Assembly to distinguish them from dreadnoughts Removed the ability to build air units as reinforcements on ground unit armies. This was largely pointless and causing clutter. Renamed "Frigates" and "Cruisers" to "Frigate Reinforcements" and "Cruiser Reinforcements" on ground armies to be more intuitive to new players. Updated loading tips to provide more useful information to players. Reduced collision avoidance force of frigates, allowing them to clump up more. Added info about what base defenses upgrade into on their tooltip. Fixes Improved Strategic Bomber targeting Fixed an issue where Substrate voice over alerts were only playing based on percentages of health and not also shields. Fixed an issue where Scan mode would get stuck on if minimizing with ALT + Tab. Fixed an issue where Shredder, Exterminator and Drone MRV weren't displaying properly through fog of war. Fixed a bug where the Overmind Static charge, Retributor Havok and Cronus Death Blossom would only fire when there were massive amounts of nearby enemies. Fixed an issue where some anti-air towers were incapable of targeting aircraft floating directly above them. Fixed display ranges not matching attack range of towers Fixed a typo when the host changes in a multiplayer game Fixed an issue where Cronus Subsonic Demolisher was not firing. Disabling Air Units in lobby options no longer removes Aviary and Harvesters, as they're an economy unit. Fixed an issue where the Hera’s weapon was able to avoid collision and shoot through terrain. Improved weapon alignments of some dreadnoughts and juggernaut weapons. Fixed a noticable ground seem on the Desert and Terran map textures. Fixed an issue where Atlas Frigates weren't being spawned on Entropy Scenario. Fixed an issue that was causing audio crackling Fixed an issue in Griffinclaw where the bonus objective wasn't being completed. Fixed a crash that occurred when unplugging an audio device Other Resources V2.9 Forum Post