Greetings, Commanders.

Ship combat got a lot of attention this month. Before getting into the changes, I want to explain what I'm aiming for.

What Combat Should Feel Like

In Fragile Allegiance, most of the fighting happens over colonies. Ships and missiles attack, turrets and point defense answer. In the remake I want you to have more control over those fights. You should be able to step in during a fight and decide what your ships shoot at, and those decisions should matter.

I also want equipping a ship to be a real choice. If one loadout is always the best, ship design stops being interesting and every fleet looks the same. So every weapon should have its own job and its own weakness. A railgun hits hard and can't be shot down, but it's slow to fire. A torpedo can destroy a ship in one hit, but you only get three. Point defense barely scratches a ship but saves you from missiles, and an EMP does no damage at all but can silence the enemy's best ship for a few seconds. The right loadout should depend on who you're fighting and what they're bringing.

For that to work, the rules need to be clear, so that when you lose a fight you can tell what to change. You also need to be able to see what's happening. If you can't tell which ship carries which guns, or why your missiles didn't get through, the choices don't mean much.

I also wanted ships to be more than a set of numbers. That's where captains come in, near the end of this post.

Guns on the Hulls

Ships now carry visible weapon models on their hardpoints. Every tracer, missile and railgun shot comes out of the muzzle of the gun that fired it. This sounds like a small thing, but once you can see which ship has which guns, a fight becomes much easier to read.

I also desynchronized the weapons. Before, a group of ships would fire at the same moment, which looked mechanical. Now each weapon's first shot is delayed by a random amount, and reload times vary a little between shots. A fleet in combat looks more like a fleet now, and less like one ship copied six times.

The Weapons

Here is what's in the game at the moment:

  • PDC. A short-range point-defense cannon that fires bursts of 6 tracers. Low damage, mostly there to swat down missiles.
  • Twin PDC. Twice the tracers per burst, faster rounds and more damage. Expensive compared to the PDC.
  • Railgun. Hits very hard, never runs out of ammo, and its rounds can't be intercepted. It needs a bigger hull and charges for 3 seconds before firing, with a glow you can see building up. If the target dies while it's charging, it keeps the charge and picks a new target instead of wasting it.
  • EMP. No damage at all. A hit jams the target's weapons for 5 seconds. After the stun wears off, the ship is immune to EMP for the same amount of time, so two EMP ships can't lock an enemy down forever.
  • Missiles and torpedoes. Missiles are homing and come in a 12-round magazine. Each hit is light, but you fire a lot of them. Torpedoes have the longest reach of any ship weapon and can destroy most ships in one hit, but only carry 3 shots. Point defense can shoot down both. They also look different now, so you can tell what's coming at you.
  • Bombs. The ship flies over a colony building and drops them straight down onto it, damaging everything in the blast.

The EMP stun was 100 seconds at first, which was far too long. I cut it to 10 and then to 5. It's one of the numbers I'll keep watching.

Armor as a Percentage

Armor used to subtract a flat amount from every hit. That meant weapons with small hits, like PDCs, did almost nothing against an armored ship, and armor penetration decided which weapons were worth taking. Railguns had by far the most penetration, so against armor they were the obvious answer.

Now armor reduces incoming damage by a percentage, up to a maximum of 60%. It works the same way against every weapon, so armor penetration is gone. A heavily armored ship takes less damage from everything, but nothing bounces off it. So every weapon stays useful against armored targets, and you pick based on range, ammo, rate of fire and what the enemy can shoot down.

Point Defense That Works

This was the biggest fix. Point defense used to only fire during a ship's attack window, which was open roughly a third of the time. The rest of the time, incoming missiles were simply ignored.

Now PDCs track incoming missiles and torpedoes all the time, and they go after the one closest to impact first. A hit destroys the warhead early. They only care about projectiles heading for their own ships or colony, so they don't waste fire on missiles flying somewhere else.

Missed tracers also behave better. About half of them graze the hull and glance off, and the rest fly past and keep going.

Focus Fire

By default, ships shoot the closest enemy ship. That's usually fine, but sometimes you want everything on one target. So now you can left-click an enemy ship to mark it, and every one of your ships at that asteroid will shoot it first. Right-click clears the mark. Bombers keep bombing buildings either way.

This replaced the old ATTACK button in the colony view. The marked ship gets a red targeting reticle, and any ship that has taken damage shows a health bar that goes from green to amber to red.

If you hover over one of your own ships, a tooltip shows what it's doing ("Engaging" or "Under fire") and a row for each weapon: ready, firing, reloading, charging, out of ammo, or offline because of an EMP.

Evasion

Every ship now has an evasion value. It comes from the hull, the modules and the captain, and it's always between 5% and 85%. Every attack's chance to hit is reduced by the target's evasion. EMP shots also have to hit now, so a fast, evasive ship has a real chance of dodging a stun. You can see a ship's evasion in its detail panel.

Captains

This is the part I'm most curious to see in play. Every ship now has a captain, and captains gain experience from combat. Hits, EMP jams and missile interceptions give a little experience, and kills give a lot.

Captains are promoted through naval ranks, starting at Lieutenant Commander and going up through Commander, Captain, Commodore and the Admiral ranks, all the way to Fleet Admiral. That's 10 levels in total.

Each promotion improves the captain's accuracy and evasion by 1%, and raises their reaction speed. Reaction speed affects how fast weapons reload and how fast a railgun charges. A fresh captain is actually a bit slower than the base numbers, and a fully promoted one is about 30% faster.

To keep veterans special, there are limits on how many captains you can have at each senior rank. There are 16 Commander slots but only one Admiral and one Fleet Admiral. If the next rank is full, the captain waits with "NO OPENING" until a slot frees up, for example when a senior captain's ship is destroyed. So losing your Fleet Admiral's ship actually hurts.

Captains don't exist in the original Fragile Allegiance. Most of the remake tries to stay close to the 1996 game, but this is one of the places where I wanted to add something. Ships in the original are interchangeable, and I wanted a reason to care about the ones that survive.

What's Next

The AI fights with the same ships and weapons, and it now designs its ships around what your fleet looks like. That deserves its own post, so the next devlog will be a deeper look at how the rival corporations think. You can follow the rest of the progress on the roadmap.

Signing out,

  • Jari