Category: gratuitous space battles

I’ve turned attention away from long term expansion pack (campaign) stuff today to get patch 1.29 released for the core game. If you have entered an on-line code the game will autopatch sometime over the next 24 hours. If not, you will have to wait until I push the patch out to steam, gamersgate etc. People who kindly bought direct (the really cool people) can redownload the whole game if they really want to, or wait for the auto-patch.

The changes are thus:

1) Fixed a number of typos (thanks david!)
2) Game now automatically creates a new almost-empty default design if you delete every ship design, to prevent empty design list crash.
3) The range circles are now also shown on the currently dragged ship on the deployment screen
4) Fixed display bug where the tooltips over the deployment screens ship blueprints didn’t take race and ship bonuses into account.
5) Fixed crash bug when changing races before you have ever viewed the choose mission screen.
6) Fixed bug relating to messages corrupting or not being deletable.
7) Tweaked the expert fleet for the multari mission to make them harder.
8) Added a new rebel ship hull -> The Midgard frigate.
9) Made the startup online message check multi-threaded, to speed up startup times.

Also, I changed a server setting so that up to 2,000 challenges get downloaded when you hit refresh, so that means less ‘where the hell is my challenge’ mysteries. A longer term fix will happen one day.

In other news, I just put this in (for patch 1.30). It’s a new bit of UI that shows you the shield strength of individual shield modules.

Sometimes lucky enemy shots can skew the damage to one module more than another, meaning you can have one shield taken out, and the others intact, even though physically the modules aren’t destroyed. That effectively permanently reduces your max shield strength, as each module effectively acts like a concentric mini-shield in it’s own right. This was not clear, so hopefully this UI can at least let you spot it happening such as in this situation where the leftmost shield is on low strength, but the rightmost one is taken out.

Aren’t TV and movie space battles a bit tame?

Take the battle of Waterloo. It contained approx 140,000 soldiers. The battle of Kursk was 900,000 Germans vs 1,300,000 Russians, complete with 3,600 tanks and 20,000 guns. This was a big battle between two countries in a world war, fought over 50 years ago, when the world population was smaller.

Imagine a modern day non-nuclear war between China and Russia on one side, and everyone else on the other side. Now picture it as a purely naval battle. How many people would be involved? Lets say conservatively that each side only fielded 2 million troops (a trivial subset of fit, able potential combatants). Lets look at a big US battleship : The USS Massachusetts has approx 2,000 crew involved. Lets assume only 10% of our navy serve on these big ships (200,000 men) so thats 1,000 battleships, in an all out naval war. (remember we are talking a war for survival, not the relative peacetime deployments of today).

That’s a large fight between two earth-bound nations.

But lets assume a planet with less water-coverage than earth, and slightly larger, so it has double our population. Thats a factor of two. Now fast forward another two generations time wise and assume a doubling of that population again. Thats x4. Now assume that they are all on the same side (x6) and that they form part of a federation of 20 such worlds (still an incredibly small speck in an average size galaxy). Thats 120 x 1,000 battleships.

What I’m getting at, is when the Rebel Alliance attacked the death star, they seemed to do it with the sort of navy you would use to maybe lay siege to Malta, or at best, to attack Dieppe. Hardly a clash of galactic powers.  Assume 20% of your 240,000,000 are in fighters and thats suddenly 12,000,000 fighters, or a million twelve man squadrons. Imagine how long “all wings report in” would take… Imagine how quickly you run out of colors?

“Peach-tinted fuschia leader standing by”, “Oaky pastel rose leader standing by…”

So I guess that issue, and the whole problem of ILM filming a million plastic model flybys in 1983 doesn’t help.

I know what you are thinking, Even Gratuitous Space Battles isn’t really gratuitous enough is it? Maybe for the sequel…

Ok, so patch 28 for gratuitous space battles is out, bringing the game to version 1.28. Hurrah. Lets take a looky at the two big new things (in addition to the major crash bug that was somehow still in the game, and is hopefully now hunted down and killed).

CUSTOM CHALLENGES

This is a big deal. If you go to the challenges screen, there is a new ‘custom challenge’ map, which opens up a whole new screen showing stuff to fiddle with to basically create your own map, from existing backdrops, plus settings for pilot limits, budget, and the supply limits or spatial anomalies present. You want a battle with a 10,00CR budget, 4 pilots, no shields and no missile modules? You got it kiddo!

You can save out these custom scenarios or load them in, (if you save them out, that lets you name them, otherwise they default to ‘custom map’. Clicking the deploy button takes you to the normal setup screen for arranging your own fleet, and from there you issue a challenge as before. I hope people really investigate this as an option for the game, because it gives a lot more creative control to the player. If you thing fighter rockets are overpowered, you can issue a challenge where there aren’t any, and see what other methods people use to beat you. if you like a certain map but wished it had a ‘must have engines’ requirement, you can do that too. And if I add in extra anomalies or scenario options, they will all end up in this editor too.

MESSAGING

The game now maintains an on-line ‘inbox’ for everyone, and auto-sends you a message when your challenges are beaten or played, or when someone sends you a challenge. It also gives you the option of sending post-challenge feedback to the issuer. This means less wondering how the hell they beat you invincible fleet, and more reading the gloating from your nemesis, which is of course, all in the spirit of GSB.

1.28 took a lot of under-the-hood fiddling, but I think these two things were missing from the game, and needed putting in. I wasn’t sure the challenge stuff would be as popular as I wanted it to be, but it has proved to be very popular, so it’s been l33t to go back and add this stuff to an existing game. The game will auto-update if you have registered it on-line, but I’ll be getting updated patches to the distributors like steam and impulse and the others right away.