Surprise! New phase! Only a couple of very minor things to change, but it's also about time to share some statistics from the last phase.
Reading the graphs: Each cross is one game, the distance from 0 on the vertical axis indicates how close a game was to the mean duration for all games on the graph (the weighting for how much this affects the lines is half as much as we used in phase 1). The numbers in the bottom right are the min/median/max/standard deviation for stage up times and game duration.
Both servers combined
Euro server
US server
A
lot more data here than in previous stages. The combined overall ratio remains at a comfortable 55:45, and I'm quite pleased that we can scale up to 25+ without degrading the balance. And the US server had our most balanced round ever so far: out of 4119 games counted, aliens only had 179 more wins than humans. So I'd say the changes from last round are pretty solid. What's left to change?
Changes- Players no longer earn funds from damage dealt by structures. Previously, all damage from structures was ignored when determining the value of a killed player -- if you bit a human's ankle for 10 damage and acid tubes delt the other 90 you would get full credit. Now you'll only get 10%.
- Granger spit slow time increased from 1 second to 2 seconds
- Light armour fixed to protect slightly less from the back instead of slightly less from the front. I'm not going to believe anyone that says they can tell the difference, but light armour was supposed to have a .40 damage modifier from the back and .35 from the front and the calculation for this had been reversed and now is fixed. This only affects attacks that deal locational damage, and only to the middle region of humans, and light armour is the only piece of armour that has different modifiers for the back/sides.
- Defense computer regen rate increased from 3 to 4. I know this isn't going to be enough to appease those who wanted major changes for the defense computer, but I'm still not convinced that it really needs changing. Its current regen rate, however, was always basically arbitrary so I'm open to increasing it a little. If this change doesn't make any difference at all we can consider doing something more unorthodox.
Aside from those things, there've been a handful of fixes to bugs that sometimes affect gameplay (teleporters should now properly telefrag, you should never lose credits as a human when selling equipment puts you over the credit limit, repeaters should be less buggy in general), and the Overmind now broadcasts a message to all alien players when it finishes building.
As should already be obvious, the gameplay at this point is pretty much stable for 1.2. I really can't make any promises as to when a proper release will happen, but development is still going on -- just not very quickly (the
sound licenses are probably our biggest roadblock right now). Thanks for sticking with us.
