Balance Patch #8 - Equipment Merging, Card Highlighting, Balance Changes

Hey everyone, time for the.... second weekly update this week.
We will be away most of next week, so we have a double-feature this week.

The headline this week is really exciting, a brand-new hangar feature: equipment combining (shoutout to our Discord member Unisus for the initial suggestion). On the balance side we've tweaked some enemy values to smoothen the difficulty curve, and there's a batch of quality-of-life work for both mouse and controller players.
Let's get into it.

Equipment Combining

You can now combine two pieces of equipment of the same subtype in hangars. Feed a donor piece into your equipped one to upgrade it. Adding card slots, subsystem slots, or expanding the drafting library (if the donor is Mk.II) or transfer a single card from the donor to the receiving equipment.

And if the two pieces are from the same family but different subtypes, something more interesting happens: you can transform the receiver into the donor's subtype. It takes on the donor's drafting library and model, while keeping the cards you've already drafted. This means you can now build equipment carrying cards from multiple subtypes. Shredder cards on your Bruiser, or a Light Laser with Pulse Laser cards: the duplicate drops that used to be dead weight in your cargo bay are now build material.

Card Power-Up Highlighting

Cards whose power-up conditions are currently met now light up in your hand, so you can see at a glance that your Charged Shot is getting its bonus right now instead of re-reading the card text mid-turn. This is implemented for the Laser, Flak, Shield, and Resource Bay families so far, with the rest to follow.

Completing Your Loadout

Two changes aimed at the same problem: too many runs end with hardpoints still empty, PDC and Radiators are only found rarely.

To increase he odds of filling out your ship, store equipment slot now has a 50% chance to be stocked with equipment that fits one of your unoccupied hardpoints, so visiting stores should reliably work toward a full ship over a run.

Combat equipment drops also now have a chance to be rolled from equipment that fits an empty hardpoint. The drop rate hasn't changed, but you should be seeing more usable equipment.

Controller: Better Hangar Navigation

On a controller, LB and RB used to hop between every stop on the fitting screen: reactor, perks, hardpoints, cargo, and the store lists. Getting from your ship to the store meant multiple bumper presses, and the order in which UI elements got selected wasn't intuitive. The shoulder buttons now switch between whole panels (Ship Status, cargo, station services, store), and the D-pad moves you around inside a panel.
Each panel also remembers where you left the cursor, so bouncing to the store and back puts you on the same hardpoint you were fitting.

Targeting Fix

If you destroyed every piece of enemy equipment, your railgun, laser, and hack cards were suddenly unable to target any valid targets. Precision attacks could only fall back on the ship body with a mouse, and hacks couldn't be played at all, which especially affected controller players.
Once nothing on the enemy ship is a valid target, precision and hacking cards can be dropped/targeted on any destroyed equipment, and the attack still lands its hull damage.

Change log:
Balance changes

• Solarii S02 Elite: Target Analysis now takes 3 turns to play, up from 2.
• Solarii S02B: Shredder Flak durability decreased from 22 to 20, Shield durability from 16 to 15.
• Starkin S02B: Now fires one regular Pulse card (4 damage) after Blinding Pulse, instead of firing 2 Blinding Pulses in a reload cycle.
• Starkin S03 Elite: Radiate now takes 1 turn to play, down from 2.
• Freeroamer S03 Elite: Rampart now takes 3 turns to play, up from 2.
• Freeroamer S03A: Shield durability decreased from 18 to 16.
• Freeroamer S03B: Now plays Heat Ray+ (3 damage, 3 Ignite) instead of the regular Heat Ray (2 damage, 2 Ignite).
• Deadweight S03C: Thermal Tick now takes 3 turns to play, up from 2.
• Beam Sweep+: base damage decreased from 4 to 3.

New features & quality of life

• Equipment of the same subtype can now be combined in hangars: upgrade, or transfer a card (see above).
• Same-family equipment of a different subtype can transform the receiver into the donor's subtype (see above).
• Cards now highlight in hand when their power-up conditions are met (Laser, Flak, Shield, and Resource Bay families so far).
• One store equipment slot now has a 50% chance to offer equipment fitting an unoccupied hardpoint.
• Combat equipment drops are now biased toward equipment that fits your empty hardpoints.
• Controller: shoulder buttons now switch panels in hangars and the Ship Status screen; the D-pad moves within a panel, and each panel remembers your cursor position.
• Precision attacks and hack cards can now target destroyed enemy equipment once nothing else is targetable, instead of becoming unplayable.

We're excited to get some feedback on how the new equipment combining mechanic works out, especially the cross-subtype transformations, let us know which hybrids you come up with. We're also still keep to hear any feedback on how to improve controller support,

That's it for this week (for real this time).
See you in the next one! o7

The Breachway Team