5.729 Phantasmal Strength

Full release notes here.

Another suite of improvements thanks as always to Badger!

Also, as a side note, Heart of the Machine 1.0 is coming up on March 6th!

Strength Calculation

• Change the strength calculation code to allow weapons that fire only on death to contribute much less to strength estimates. These weapons fire very infrequently and are often very powerful by comparison to "regular" weapons.
• This was causing corrosive ships in particular to have significantly inflated Strength values.

Manual strength rating adjustments

• These changes are mainly hidden within the XML and serve to better represent actual versus perceived value to the AI. The following had their hidden adjustments changed:
• Beam Cannon 2 -> 1.7
• Holocene Missile Turret 3 -> 2.3. With how slow the projectiles are they often arrive late. Thereby wasting some damage potential.
• Fuseball Turret 3.2 -> 2.5. Still an incredibly strong turret, but often has its damage forcibly spread out into nearby strikecraft.
• Solar Flare Turret 3 -> 2.4. This particular turret also has received additional changes, but lost significant maximum target allotment.
• Minefield 0.1 -> 0.05. Outside of a select few AI types that only utilize guardians or very large ships these mines often waste a lot of their potential damage output.
• Ambush Carrier Frigate 1.0 -> 1.4. Very long ranged engine stun and creates sub-units dealing most of its damage.
• Phantasmal Host Frigate 2.0 -> 2.3. The decoys with shot attraction really do need more accounting for within the base unit.
• Darker Mirror Frigate 1.0 -> 1.2. A light tap to strength rating to better let the AI account for the inevitable reflected damage.

Balance Changes

• Corrosive Frigate on-death Finale weapon damage lowered from 9,000 to 5,850 at mark one.
  • The effect on Mk7 damage is 50,400 -> 32,760 for this weapon.
  • Keep in mind this can hit up to 15 targets so the potential damage is still quite high.
  • Still quite strong but is less efficient when it comes to just throwing these ships through a wormhole to die and remove defenders via on-death guaranteed damage.

• Solar Flare Turret weapon revised for reliability.
  • Changed from standard beam to point-beam attack logic.
  • Target count per salvo standardized at 10 max. Previous range was potentially 3 to 27 depending on stacks and some luck.
  • Paralysis duration for each target hit increased from 2 to 5 seconds.
  • Damage per hit doubled from 11,400 to 22,800.
  • Maximum DPS attainable without buffs reduced from 37,800 to 28,000.
  • End result is a turret that can far more reliably control a portion of swarm. Far more consistently applies an expected degree of crowd control. The previous version varied between 6 to 54 effective seconds of CC per salvo depending on if it could fill its target allotments for each of the three beams. And often it would fail to do so.

Bugfixes

• Phantasmal Host Decoys will no longer get immediately de-spawned by the game as invalid. But will again contribute towards AI counter attack progression when killed.

Heart of the Machine

https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/742666698308452998 https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/2001070/announcements/detail/742666698308452854

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/