Update 20.05.2020: announce has been changed to reflect updates to this upcoming mechanic.
Update 25.06.2020: fleet's “strength” was reduced (it's now total basic armor, not actual armor).

TL,DR:

All fleets in local coordinates (LC) will become orbital objects and would be able to collide with satellites or planets.

“Orbital” fleets will include:
- fleets staying in LC,
- “escorting” fleets: those that are located on satellite or defend/occupy one,
- fleets arrived to LC/satellite with any mission that forced them to enter the battle (during the battle).

This feature is in testing phase and will become active after that phase concludes.
Estimated deployment date is 29.06.2020.

After a preliminary discussion, I want to address some frequently asked questions:

Will a fleet sent to defend a satellite collide with that satellite?
No. Escorting fleets will appear on a safe distance from their carrier satellite and move to stay on the same distance if the carrier satellite moves.

Will fleets collide with other fleets?
No.

Will fleets that arrive in LC collide with existing satellites?
No. Fleets appearing in LC will select positions to avoid collisions.

Will teleporting satellites collide with existing fleets?
No, in case of free-staying fleets.
Maybe, in case of escorting fleet of another satellite (just like with the satellite itself).

Will satellites collide with fleets on planet?
No. Fleets located on planet (or defending/occupying it) won't show in LC, so they wouldn't participate in collisions.

How will fleets collide with satellites then?
By sending a satellite to ram into a fleet, or using satellite's escorting fleet as a ram.

Collision details:

The collision must be between a celestial body (CB) and other object. Fleets won't collide with each other even if they intersect in LC.

Escorting fleets would be able to collide with other CB, if their carrier satellite has allowed collisions.

Other conditions (vacation mode, newbie protection, etc) that apply to CB-CB collisions will apply for fleets as well.

Fleet's “strength”:

The damage a fleet will deal in case of collision will be determined as total basic armor of all its units. When receiving collision damage, a fleet will lose ships of random types, until lost armor covers the damage. In case where remaining damage is less than one unit's armor, a unit will be lost with probability [damage]/[armor] (damage must be at least 1% of armor).



If the fleet is in battle at the time of the collision, the destruction of ships will happen inside of the battle, with a message in the battle log.

Units, destroyed in collision, will drop debris according to rules of combat. They won't be restored.

It is estimated that using the fleet as a ram will give no more than 0.3 damage per unit of Vespene, which is worse than using the moon itself (estimated as ~4 damage per unit of Vespene), but more predictable: the same satellite can be used indefinitely.

Fleets' behavior:

Free-standing fleets won't be able to move yet. To collide with such fleet, one would need to ram a satellite into it.

Escorting fleets will move in the same direction and with the same speed as their carrier satellite. If the satellite has turned collisions off, it will stop to avoid collision not only for itself, but for all of its escorting fleets.

Fleets which are sent from an orbital object will leave LC as soon as the warmup time elapses.

Adding yet more 'realism' to the game I see? From a logical point... How would a satelite (like an unsteered moon) be able to 'crash' into a fleet, destroying it (or itself for that matter)?
Does this assume that the fleets pilots (especially during a battle) are all Blind and/or asleep?
That no proximity alert goes off and none of the ships autopilot functions that might exist alert the crew of the incoming moon and prompt it to evade it with their maneuvering thrusters.

*chuckles at the great minds behind the recent gamechanges*

Just my two cents (that is LITERALLY 2 Eurocent for this message)

I can only agree. it is absolute nonsense.
rather change the game again so that it is playable and does not constantly bring out brain-torn changes.
your change to the mines is still absolutely ridiculous.
and i'm not sure. but did people notice your secret change to the trampolines? jumping now costs 50% of the fuel again.

That's a bit off-topic, but this change wasn't secret, it can be found in Balance Forum log on April 20th


As for the main topic, this change is a step toward next generation of combat system, which will have fleets as physical objects fighting on local coordinates. There's a lot of animosity from players directed at that goal, but it's not stopping the administration from pursuing it by any means. Even the recent Production butchering was partly motivated by that (the stated goal there was reducing unit counts, which at the current rate can easily overwhelm the 3D-engine).

(I understand that players are still bitter about all the nerfs coming seemingly at random, but I suggest having a constructive dialog about the developed feature. We got quite a lot of good questions from ru-forum already, so we'll post an update with more info after we process that feedback.)

You guys can always top stupidity and definitely the front runners of dumb. So this makes the xerj moons worthless for one thing, I mean why spend real money or millions of resources building Dunks, when you can spam spy sats now to destroy moons. Also how you going to stop people from creating new accounts and ramming their free ships into moons? I mean you guys don’t think of anything before shooting out bad ideas

Enough “spy sats” to destroy a moon will cost millions of resources as well. And it may be many more millions, than Dunkleosteus costs.


First, you can't just order your fleet to ram into something. You need a moving satellite, which new accounts don't have.
Second, even if you take a moving satellite on a main account and place those free ships from account farm on it, you'll still need thousands of them even for a small moon.
Third, an account farm doing this have a very slim chance to go unnoticed. ~200 damage per day from one account using freebie ships will require either many days or many accounts. The former isn't practical, and the latter will have tremendous interaction footprint. Which is also would be visible outside of the farm, by a moon's owner at least.


If you have other questions you can ask them tomorrow, preferably without insults.

Your right I am so sorry, your highness, I won’t say any more mean words towards our great developers. I mean what generous rulers would make Dunks cost some much and then make them obsolete.
You are right though, there is no way for new accounts to get active satellites, no way at all. Without going to premium page or getting them from an active member already (but other than those no way). Also yes making satellites would cost resources ( which we don’t have since production and farming killed) so basically as rough as making dunk. I forgot our devs are perfect and never let anyone exploit the game, I mean they even ban people with no evidence so my mistake.

when most of the players are against this shooter change and at the same time your customers are too. why do you want to enforce the change so imperatively?
I understand that the 3D is overloaded with the current fleet sizes etc. of the servers. but why does that have to be?
it is difficult to give feedback when you come online every day and get the next low blow. Currently something is changed every day that the game is only more expensive and unplayable. e.g. the current change that the resource exchange now costs 15% fee and thus became 50% more expensive.
I know you can talk to you. and I am glad that you are reporting here in the forum. but the changes piss on everyone. it is no wonder that the mood here is very tense

for feedback: forget about the change to the shooter and allow your customers to play or they will run away. I know enough people who have already stopped because of that

UncleanOne... Mate, since we're talking about engines, I will lay it out for you easy using a quaint little Engine analogy:

---If my car won't go at 200 MPH then it won't do me any good to cut the doors off and toss the seats out trying to make it go faster, ok.. that just makes it a crappy car ---
.
if your '3d engines' are incapable of coping with the system you are trying to put in place, which you admit they would suffer under the new system, then why try to implement it anyway regardless of the nerfs to the game in its current state and the impacts to your customers, paying and otherwise? Is that a good question?
Would it not make more sense to utilise the system you had, make it more attractive for those involved to support it by donation and reward and then, at sometime in future when you have the funds for the necessary upgrades or replacement to your 'Engine' (thanks to all those happy paying customers handing you money for a job well done) then upgrade it... as in, make it actually do what you want it to?
How about that question? Can we process those and post an update later as to why that's a bad idea?
.You devs seems to think its great, and maybe you all chat together about how great it is. good on you, its good to support your friends.
But to us, all we see is your crappy car trying to speed down the road. But hey, we're still here for the show.

You can do that in Complaints section, no one would care unless it's really violent. But here, in game mechanics discussion, I'm going to enforce the rules.


If someone wants to drown the game in money and buys a moon, resources for station/dunk and a lot of ships to break someone's satellite — that's not an exploit. Colonizing a Pirate station may be cheaper, but if someone wanted to use it to attack someone's satellite, why would they devise such a convoluted scheme that includes passing the station to a new account?

I'm not saying that costs of new methods are perfectly calculated and all your points are non-issue. We'll most likely revise fleet's 'collision strength' and/or satellite structure bonuses during testing. I just don't see «using freebie ships to break moons» as a realistic exploit scenario.


Not an arcade, fleets are going to be mostly autonomous as they are now. More like blending the “combat space” with “galaxy space” (local coords).


If I were to make a decision, I would limit the amount of effective fleets a player could send off on missions, and make all PvP-like zones (asteroids, stations etc.) controllable only with flying fleets. So anyone could have as many ships as they like, but any meaningful interaction would be limited, to promote better competition and skill in choosing right fleet for each task (instead of top players' dominating with unkillable “steamrollers”).
Administration doesn't like that idea though. They are going for a “Russian way”.



Can't answer this question, because I don't want to enforce this. I don't care about combat being a wall of text (as CS3 was), 2D pew-pew with optional wall of text (as CS4 is now), or a 3D pew-pew (as CS5 is going to be).
I'm also not a player myself, so I don't have any investment in the current state of the game. I'll do my best to make sure the gameplay is “coherent”, but I have no incentive to keep it from being different. And pretty limited decision powers anyway.


A crusade of administration against top players is in full swing, and your account is developed enough to feel that. I'm sorry for all the suffering, but can't help much.


If we wanted a shooter, we could make one from CS4 (current combat system) already. But the manual control is pretty limited now, and it will stay limited. Administration doesn't want players “to win battles by spamming mouseclicks”.
As I see it, this is more about epic pictures, than a radically different gameplay.


I do. We have no obligation to keep any posts, especially those that violate the rules.


It is a nice question.
We are using Babylon.js library, which seems like a better 3D-engine for browsers than any homebrew we could pull off. So if that one is too stressed by our unit amounts, there's no way we could upgrade it to allow smooth operation.
I agree, there could be more humane ways to get out of this situation than forcing players to get rid of their own ships. When earlier combat systems struggled with the same problem, I employed some methods to reduce the load in place (reservation in CS3, clusterization in CS4) without messing with general gameplay. But for the CS5 I'm not going to be a sole/main developer, and I'm mostly picking up what happened during my three year absence for now, so I have little power to decide how to fit the game and new demands together.
As for accumulating funds and announcing Xcraft2 in a single big update instead of butchering a live game — I don't know the financial side of the project to comment on that.

Hi UncleanOne,
What will happen to the normal battle mechanics, like attacking the planet and satellite with normal attack mission?
Also, Since coordinates will be medium and high orbit, that means you can't attack satellite from same coordinates?
Also, how will fleet fight each other when there is fleet on satellite and you arrive on the same coordinates?

Fleets in those missions aren't becoming orbital objects yet, so nothing changes for them for now.

The thing is, “medium” and “high” orbits don't really exist. As I see it, they were only needed to “explain” why fleets in local coordinates (LC) don't collide with satellites, even though they are visible in the same 3D space around the planet.
Fleets on “high orbit” were already a part of LC space, the missing part was interaction between them and satellites. Since this part will be added with the upcoming patch, there would be no need for “orbits” — all objects on given galaxy coordinates would exist and interact in the same LC space.


Right now, free-standing fleets (placed to defend “high orbit”/LC), wouldn't attack fleets on satellites automatically. To attack them, you would still need to send an 'Attack' mission from LC directly to satellite. Ships on such a mission will drop out of LC-space until they return from attack. That's not a very consistent behavior, we'll fix that by making attacking fleets present in LC in a future update (or, maybe, even during the testing of this one).

UncleanOne,
Which Satellite will be able to move and do collision?
Will it be the same as it is now (station with gravity gun and dunkleosteus)?
Why is shield of the fleet not taken into account during collision?

Alright, so to come back to my initial post. WHY would fleets be colliding with any celestial objects? Wouldn't it be a far more entertaining (and actually logical thing) to have them not bluntly collide but instead enter a fight instance? I did wonder why the pirate space station in the orbit of my former capital was just sitting there waiting while my recyclers would fly out and take debris from the planets orbit... And why ppl could 'guard' or even 'occupy' said planet without the pirate station there giving a single flying f**k.
I, not as a veteran but as a new player, did find those things somewhere between confusing and "ohh, it's just a game"-logical. But mostly just confusing.

Generally One would think that ships (that travel interstellar) should be agile enough to avoid collision unless going kamikaze... Also: shouldn't shields.. nvm the guy before me adressed that while I was typing.

Another 2cent down the drain I guess?

Yes, same as now.


I think it was decided not to include shields so it will be more in line with generic (non-Dome type) defenses, which give bonus to satellite's structure proportional to their structure/armor, but not their shields.
We may revise the collision damage formula for fleets, since it has other problems.


That's the plan for the bright distant future. (Maybe not so distant, but not now either.)


If giant insectoids that teleport between planets doesn't sound “unrealistic” enough for you, why having them move around a planet fast enough to ram into a fleet does?
Many gameplay elements are just gameplay elements. They don't need to be “physically possible” or “explained by lore” — those things may be nice to have but aren't a primary goal.

I assume the DS that killed the station lives from this situation and heals pretty much after the event, also if its fleets running into structures and dealing damage to a structure by dying mayne defense should play a role in this maybe a formula of ho many ships shot down before they collisions?

@UncleanOne:

I see that you guys want to sacrifice the game for some new 3D-features, which noone wants.
For me this game is dead.

How about paying back the money to the players who bought HC and don't like the changes ?
And then the Admins can play their game alone in 3D against each other - without wasting our money ?

Tauriel, I couldnt agree more.
The almighty developers and admins have their head so far up their own ass with their pride at these broken ideas they do not care what we the player base - those that pay their salaries actually want. We do not want these changes! If anything they make the game more unplayable and broken, lagging already broken code. How about fixing the excessive memory leak and streamlining the code instead of making it heavier and able to have less players / fleet? You think by driving players out of game that donators will remain and only non donators leave? Think again. It is the donators you are pissing off that are leaving.

https://xcraft.net/forum/topic_47838#post-871292
Quote: Nessaja
Currently something is changed every day that the game is only more expensive and unplayable.
A crusade of administration against top players is in full swing, and your account is developed enough to feel that. I'm sorry for all the suffering, but can't help much.
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This crusade is not to be won .... The reason is very simple - the development status of an account ....
By development status I understand not only the points and the technology or fleet size - but also that you are prepared for many things .... The further one is developed - the more he will be able to respond to changes or at least be able to survive ....
Of course, the big ones feel the changes painfully ... But the small ones, who are not yet prepared for everything in development and therefore have no chance of survival, are the first to die away ...... The cycle of resources always starts entirely below - from the first planets to be created ....
if the little ones die away - and the aggression of the pirates continues for the medium-sized - then the middle class dies next - players from 1 KK to 10 KK then die next - especially those who have no reserves at hand because they have it in construction and research .....
Only then does the alliance alliance collapse - the top players are still undefeated there ... Their crusade has failed .... They will be damaged and weakened - and their food source will be massively reduced - but there is no longer a threat from strategically clever players who are only medium-sized ..... So they are not challenged and will also spend less money in Hydarian crystals .... Only those from the top 100 will die from their crusade who are not prepared for changes are and have no reserves .... the first 10 definitely survive ... and then? ... I know - it will be difficult to understand ... maybe the translation from Russian into English wasn't perfect either ... I understood it as a "crusade against the top players" .....

why I know this so well with the development of an account - is the reason, because I had always developed further and already noticed last year in the changes that a real game strategy is no longer possible .. Hardly anyone tried in the next strategy to develop, because the last one was not valid due to a change, the strategy was blocked ... the only thought that remained is "how will you survive" ... last year a friend spoke with me and asked me: "what do we do if the pirates unexpectedly get stronger, if the production on the planet will no longer exist, if ???" .. many questions, to which only one answer I had after a long period of careful consideration - the answer was then simply "I do not play the dog that runs after a stick - I am preparing to survive in a war" ....
and how to survive a war is very simple - with reserves and a good hiding place ... and I've already done exactly what many other top players did ... you designed your account so that you can change something what you want - the others die - and your boss loses the money! Your boss can't win the war - either your project dies with everyone - or your Boss give in so that the smaller ones have a chance to play ..... Too many updates kill the game and never the top players ... I did understand right or wrong about the crusade?

that's not a threat, because I can't do anything myself ... I'm insignificant ..... This is only the result of calculations from the development status of a possible account ....

maybe the translation was not correct or I misunderstood - But if you want to get rid of the top players, it doesn't work that way ... It only works if the small and medium players have a chance to play through their strategies .....

I noticed something else - regarding your crusade .....

You have improved the imperators - you can find this information under Balance .... Brand new improvement ....
the little ones and 99% of the medium-sized players are of no use .... Newcomers do not have that much money to buy emperors right away, so that they do not have fleet debts .....
As a rule, only top players have the officer emperor at level ... These players have these officers with years of game performance with or with occasional money stakes ... There is no other way to get to officers with such expensive prerequisites .... Almost no one will be able to buy the 100 K Hydarian immediately (or at least in a month) just to meet the requirements of an emperor ...

This is a new advantage for the top players, while everyone else has a harder time getting at these officers ...

I'm just wondering: why is it that every planet I have each now only produce 10, yes 10, mineral per hour, when they all used to be different, and much higher? Metal production isn't much more. It makes me feel as though Geologist is irrelevant. And why did the price of the Telepathist go up so much? I don't recall it being 80 HC a few days ago. Pricing for officers is really getting out of hand. I don't believe I'll EVER be able to afford high-end officers, like Pirate and those I haven't unlocked yet. Sorry for the rant.