Also, can i in 2.8 disable “Updated Hostile Ship contact”? I hate miscalculate covered distance per increment because increment was much shorter because enemy enable/disable AS or change it’s speed or just get in my AS range.
SJW: You can toggle interrupts for each event in v2.8
Does the “Stellar Anomaly” case for ancient ruins indicate that there is something special going on with the star or is it just flavor?
Just flavour. I have thinking about some star-related events for a while, such as flare stars, coronal mass ejections or a chance of one of the disaster scenarios, but I haven’t got around to it yet.
For purposes of the ancient constructs, about 1 in 50 stars that have a terrestrial or dwarf planet as planet #1, will have a construct on that planet that was intended for study of the star. The potential fields are restricted to power, sensors, energy weapons and defensive systems.
With the new icons, perhaps I’ll finally stop mixing up the ‘class design’ and ‘component design’ windows.
I like the possibility to change icons and colours. But, would the current icons be still available, maybe with two or three other sets to choose?
Love the color change. One less mod to load lol. Current vanilla one burns my eyes out after an hour or two of play.
A tiny thing, but concerning the new context menu update: for the colony creation option, I’d make it a bit more explicit.
Instead of “(flag icon) Planet X”, something like “(flag icon) Create Colony: Planet X”.
SJW: Yes, good idea. I will change it.
I assume that the new context menu changes will also apply to right-clicking on systems on the 2D Galaxy view?
I don’t remember how much functionality the 3D one has but I guess that one is also worth considering.
SJW: I’ve only done the Tactical map so far, but I will get around to the galactic map as well.
This is really looking great! I’m so excited for the release. I’m already starting to figure out my color scheme and icons.
Are the icons in the context menu hard coded, or will they be configured in the config.xml file with the button icons?
They are the same icons as the toolbar. So if you change the Intelligence icon, it will change on the title bar and in the context menu.
Thank you, Steve, for the probe markers in the galactic map. 
1000 km of distance are a bit little, at least for me, 'cause I use sensors ranges of some million km and the probes are placed several thousands km from the JP, but OK.
Mine are placed right on top, while being an active sensor. I guess that’s why mine get blown up from time to time, huh?
I always roleplay my buoys as communications platforms and not only sensors, so they have to go right on the JP to be useful, anyways.
I don’t really understand why there needs to be a separate icon specifically for Jump Point Buoys. Shouldn’t there just be an icon indicating that a jump point is within sensor range of anything - whether that’s a scout buoy, a ship, or a station? I think that would make much more sense. That way, the icon would simply mean that a given jump point is actively being monitored.
There are two reasons:
How do you define “sensor range”?
If a buoy (or anything else) has passive sensors, then in theory any jump point in the same star system is “in range” for signatures of a particular value or larger, since the range at which a thermal or EM signature can be detected scales as the square root of the signature strength.
If a buoy has active sensors, then you could use the nominal range of that sensor, but it could be misleading since signatures smaller than that sensor range may not be detected at that range. A player might be annoyed if the galactic map implies that a jump point is “covered” and then a bunch of enemy ships appear in that system without warning because they were smaller than the buoy, placed a million km away from the JP, was designed to detect at maximum range.
Because of these complications, I think it’s best to simply have the criteria be as stated in the change log (within 1,000 km). As it happens, with the current in-game techs even the weakest passive sensors can detect a minimum EM or thermal signature at 1,000 km and the weakest RES-100 active sensor can detect a RES-1 signature at 1,000 km, so the distance while probably chosen arbitrarily works fine for this purpose.
The purpose of this change is not to show which JPs have sensor coverage, but which JPs have buoys on them. Many players, myself included, like to put buoys at each jump point to monitor traffic from other races, and the feature as described would show which JPs don’t have these buoys so that an attentive player could assign a ship to go place a buoy there. If the feature instead showed that a JP was in sensor range of something, it would be misleading for this purpose as it might show that a JP looks covered because there are ships there, even if there is no buoy.
An open question is whether this is the “right” intent for this feature, since it’s possible that some players might prefer to build small stations or even mobile ships for JP traffic monitoring (I do this in Duranium Legion campaigns, for instance, for historical reasons). In that case, a player might want to know whether there is a ship at that JP. Perhaps a second color of dot would be useful here?
(I think we can ignore sensors on planetary bodies since those move and can’t be relied on permanently.)
The “no shields” option is definitely… intriguing. From a doctrinal standpoint it definitely changes a lot of how more advanced fleets would want to be designed.
One, with how missiles now work you’re now unable to simply absorb the damage from leakers with shields. Now that amounts to “chip damage” that’ll accumulate and ultimately overwhelm your ships if their armor lacks sufficient layers to keep up for the whole span of combat. Two, particle lances become exceptionally more terrifying because armor is now your only real line of defense and particle lances care not for your armor.
The main outcome I see that this leads to is that any ship combat that falls within the range of particle lances becomes a “high risk, high reward” scenario where either fleet would mutually obliterate each other until one or the other comes out on top. Which is to say, particle lance versus particle lance would lead to high-casualty combat for both sides.
The only deterrence to that is range, which effectively constrains combat to having capital ships at long distance to each other. Long-distance lasers would push this distance out even further. The actual combat would happen either by way of missiles or fighters. I can even see the actual combat happening somewhere between both capital ships, as fleets of fighters are sent off to act as a stand-off point defense against incoming missile salvoes, leading to anti-fighter-fighters being deployed to destroy the enemy point defense screen.
I suspect that plasma carronades would fall off heavily in utility, since getting a ship equipped with such a weapon in-range to use them would be quite a challenge and the resulting output rendered fairly ineffective by way of the sheer number of layers of armor that opposing ships would normalize having.
High-powered microwaves would also have high utility, at least early on. The issue becomes that you’d eventually just invest more in hardening, which doesn’t up the cost of the component in 3.0. The only countermeasure aside from “more microwaves” is “larger microwaves”, and the problem there is that to mount a larger high-powered microwave you would need a larger ship. That larger ship itself becomes a larger target, and given all the other factors in play forcing a heavy emphasis on combat-at-a-distance, such a ship by the time it actually gets into range to attack the enemy would be vulnerable to significant counter-fire from long-range lasers and opposing high-powered microwaves. Plus an enemy fleet could just use their own long-range ships of these sorts at standoff distance to continue to defend their capital ships from direct attacks.
In short, I would expect without shields that combat would become a very long-distance affair, with multiple concentric layers of ranged offense acting also as stand-off defense. The outer-most layer would be missiles, followed by fighters acting as long-range point defense and as anti-fighter efforts to break through the enemy’s long-range point defense, followed by long-range lasers and high-powered microwaves to keep enemy long-range lasers and high-powered microwaves from moving into range of the capital ship, followed by some assortment of particle lance ships to effectively annihilate any ship that comes too close, followed by the capital ships themselves (carriers, missile ships, and sensor ships).
I believe all aliens will have to make good progress in Electronic Hardening, as it will be the only thing that can stop HPMs. 40+ layers of armor can guarantee protection against some Lances. But HPMs of any power ignore armor regardless of its thickness. Shields were the only thing that could be guaranteed to stop HPMs. Since any electronics has 1 HTK or 0 HTK, hitting a module without EH (especially Jammers) is guaranteed to destroy it.
Besides, NPRs doesn’t know about the concept of “meta” (and that’s not a bad thing), so I guess they’ll just stop using shields in their designs. No more than that. So if Lances and HPMs are your main weapons, you will greatly simplify your life in beam battle between ships.
It really has a huge impact on the Balance. But if we can change it one way, then why not change it the other way? What about the “mandatory shields” option to make every alien (except for two Spoilers (maybe)) guaranteed to use shields in designs of their ships?
I’m not sure I like this variation.
If I use higher or improved techs for a component, I expect it should cost more than one using simpler techs.
To be honest the only balance I can think of is to have either 1 of the following 2 when no shields game is active:
1 - reasearch cost for armour tech to be either 1/2 or 1/3 of the standard costs
2 - Armour tonnage impact to be either 1/2 or 1/3 of the standard impact.
Honestly though, without having played 1 or even 2 campaigns in no shields mode I cannot say.
If you are creating improved tech FC Cost 1200, you are not using EH. Your component will be too expensive to increase its cost against a single weapon that uses only player and one Spoiler (as I remember).