Undo, Damage Types, Armour Variants, and more. Experimental Patch [370] Released

As always you can play the experimental beta via

Right click VA > Properties > Versions & Betas > Experimental

Brain Tier

Ships now require a Brain of the same Tier in order to function.

Technically, all blocks now require their ship to have at least the same Tier of Brain as itself. Otherwise, it will deactivate. So, a T2 Cannon (Legionary) requires a T2 or T3 Brain (Thinker, Strategist, etc)

This let's bigger commands serve a purpose and makes the Tier of a ship more visually apparent. Aswell as making backup lower-tier brains a less viable option on higher tier ships.

Brains still maintain their 5x Health for volume advantage. (They are costed like armour taking extra Tek)

Damage Types

Part of VA's fun is trying to get the player to mess around and make ships with different weapons and hull setups. Damage types let me split different weapons up into different engagement areas. Cannons and Armour are the offence/defense options of the close-range theater of war. While railguns and shields interact at the long-range. Missiles suffer against both making their absurd arena-range less useful if the target still has dedicated physical defenses and Point Defence.

Also much like having TEK allows me to price certain things more aggressively (shields and reactors) without bankrupting your weapon or hull budget, damage types allows me to make armour and shielding better and worse in different matchups without complicating things in other areas.

There are three Damage Types and three Health Types.

Weapon families and their damage types:

Block Armour Variants

Blocks can now be swapped out for their Armoured variant via the hotkey H. Armoured blocks cost TEK, are Health Type ARMOUR, and have 3x the normal HP for volume with no extra weight. They are perfect for protecting against Cannons (the highest and cheapest Damage Per Second in the game) while remaining normal against Piercing weapons like Railguns. Their TEK cost makes them more economical if you are tight on AWE, but also makes negating cannons a price weighed against other TEK systems like shields.

I still have to make Armour variants manually, so not all blocks have an armoured variant at the moment.

Omni-Ports

Hardpoints (weapons) require a mounting socket on a block. Previously they would snap their rotation to use the same direction as the mounting port. This meant you couldn't have guns at odd angles on different blocks. But now I've made it so that mounting ports are omnidirectional. The direction that you attach a gun, is the direction is stays. (This applies to bridges too)

Undo/Redo

The Constructor now supported undo/redo of all operations (hopefully, let me know if things are acting strange). So attaching a bunch of blocks, deleting something, flipping, armouring, etc etc. Everything can be undone and redone.

New starter fleet.

New players will get a brand new starter fleet when playing Wake and when entering Freebuild (bench) for the first time. The ships are semi-functional and partly deconstructed to help a new player learn how to make a working ship.

Campaign (War) Work

Now that I've sorted out a bunch of things I wanted, I've gotten back on working on the campaign. Previously I setup a system that lets me control exactly how battlefields are setup, so I'm feeling out their size and new budgets.

The Masterclass has been cleaned up, so too Hail Detachment, among other things.

Remodeled Weapons

The Cannon, Railguns, and Missiles have all been remodeled with a sleeker more abstract style that I think better suits the game (and is just what I am better at making look good haha)

OK back to work for me. Cheers.

Luke AP