Hello from the STNH team!
As promised we’re trekking on with more Dev Logs in the run up to our next major release, which promises to be our most unique and exciting one for a long time! The team are planning an exciting build up to the release, so I am determined not to spoil the hard work that’s being planned for that and under strict instructions not to spoil any more than I should!
So where to start…
Maximum Warp!
Ever since warp was removed from the base game, the team have been looking at ways of giving FTL travel in STNH an authentic Trek feel within the limits of what the base engine allows us to do. The introduction of the Warp Jump mechanic was seen as an exciting replacement, but early feedback suggested that the AI just didn’t like to use it, whilst the most recent implementation of hyperlane relays offered a lot of potential.. Until we discovered the massive performance hit it had as fleets attempted to path between systems.
Not wanting to be stopped and excited by the updates to the jump drive as part of the vanilla update to primitives we started looking at how we could evolve our current system, incorporate more lore from Trek and give players a new tactical means of playing. So we’ve introduced maximum warp, which uses the jump mechanic to propel the fleet to their destination as quickly as possible. In order to make this feel more authentic to Trek we have replaced the negative buffs on arrival with a debuff on warp travel speed, evasion and emergency FTL. Meaning that sending a fleet to a location at maximum warp can be a huge tactical advantage, but if you miss-judge that move it can be costly to that fleet.
We also wanted to look at balance and avoid ruining early game exploration, so this feature unlocks from T5 engines, with range, cooldown and windup speeds adjusted as engines advance. Also traveling at maximum warp to an unsurvey’d system can be very dangerous. Further to this we’ve extended the range and tweaked the debuffs on Spore Drive/Transwarp/Slipstream drives to keep them unique, but dangerous.
Leader Portraits!
It’s been suggested in certain circles that our hero portraits needed a bit of love and despite being proud of some of the attempts to bring some likeness to our heroes, they did need some attention and it was fair to say some attempts were better than others (looking at you Will Riker!) Now using some of the newer technologies available to the team we have revamped all our existing portraits and added portraits for nearly all of our human/near-human hero leaders, and they look really cool! We’ve seen the details that PDX have released for 3.10 and the changes to leaders and are already planning how this will fit alongside our hero revamp.
A quick thank you to everyone who has helped prepare this release, its been a real team effort from the Dev Team, our Collective and Beta Testers. That’s about all I can say right now, but the reveal of our next update and a small teaser is coming very soon, so until then Live Long and Prosper!