Release Candidate for next live build - now on PTE

Most likely you have a mod that alters the defense_satellite.json, either on the client or the server. Either can cause a problem if they're out of sync.

I'll give it a guess and say that it's PA-FX. @Fr33Lancer @Alpha2546

Ultra mega super finicky ridiculously nitpicky, but if it has no torpedoes, surely it's no longer a destroyer? Not like IRL naval terminology is particularly consistent, but still...

But it should make the narwals interesting in a naval battle again, which is more important than the terminology.

Overall this looks like a very interesting patch for balance. Especially the anti orbital stuff with tac missiles. Unit cannon drops should feel a little more balanced if you can defend against both the drop itself and the units that land with catapults and mobile forces.

Really looking forward to this going live, I've played it a fair bit over the last week and it's a big improvement on current balance imo.

More ways to be sneaky and surprising, and harder to utterly fail with your eco. What's not to like?

Just to let you know, I recently moved from a GTX 560 to an R9 280, and I do get the brightness bug (even with HDR off). I've tried the PAMM patch however for some reason it drops performance so I prefer to play with it turned off.

The other thing I've noticed is the performance of PA on my new card isn't really much better than on the 560 (despite the 280 spanking it in pretty much anything else), though I could be hitting a CPU limit I guess. I'm certainly not getting the kinda performance boost I expected moving from a Phenom II X3 @ 2.6ghz + 1gb GTX 560 to an FX 8320 @ 4ghz + R9 280 3gb card. I've ruled out any obvious software conflicts, though I think it would be nice if you or @varrak could maybe take another look at PA running on AMD kit. If there is anything I can do to help let me know.

One thing I did notice, the other day I messed around with locking the thread affinity of 'pa.exe' to the last 4 cores of my machine, and set it's priority to 'high' which appeared to result in quite a big jump in performance, although it's difficult to get a repeatable scenario to be sure.

Edit: Just to clarify I'm not meaning this as a complaint, just that based on my experience with playing PA on a few systems (including my ancient first gen i5 laptop) it doesn't appear to be scaling up as well as it should. I know FX CPU's aren't stellar in modern terms, but it is much faster than my 2.4ghz dual core i5 laptop at any test you care to mention, yet the game handles about the same on both machines.

Does the SXX also get new attack visuals? From that Anchor picture it looks more like a classic killer satellite than the dedicated unit... Might be cool if the SXX also had a continuous beam, only green and more powerful looking.

Personally I rather liked the many weak-looking projectiles of the previous Anchor, since it telegraphed clearly that it's not primarily an anti-ground weapon, and the rapid fire made it great for killing Dox swarms. But the new visuals are indubitably awesome looking.

Haha, yes absolutely - I think I was just hinting at maybe changing the description to read as something else, but as you say, in the grand scheme of things, a unit description is hugely unimportant

Something like this:

from: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/screenshot-wars.61975/page-6#post-973594
Where a commander explodes underneath it

Or this:

from https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pretty-screenshots-page-12-10-12-2014.59464/page-10#post-1031324
From orbital warfare mod I think

But maybe these big explosions don't really fit anymore with the current nerf

í´d say the blue beam with an aoe fitting boombot explosion would do ..

one thing i wish for the grenadier to have some tiny explosion effects when their mortars hit same with the bolo and leveler shells ...
laserhit impacts should have sparks and gunroundhits like doxguns few sparks with some extra ruble/dust them ..

This looks promising. You listing the specs of the new space unit gave me flashbacks of playing the text based online multiplayer Planetarion back in 2000. I remember back then we we happy to build units and just see the stats on screen and battle results stating how many units lost.

If you keep developing this game as you are doing then we'll actually be playing Planetarion in a real 3d environment which would be awesome!

Did anyone else play that game?

This all looks fantastic. One thought on Unit Cannon balance. Might it make sense to have the target location show up to the enemy player as a translucent 'gravity well' spherical column? You could add about 60 units of 'fluff' to the diameter of the circle so there is still some uncertainty about precisely where they will arrive. And you could only get this information if you have an orbital radar or advanced radar sat built. This would help a bit to make the inter-orbital UI more fun (and may even be considered to apply to other inter-orbital units) and give you some exciting anticipation of where they are coming from. Just a thought.

The difference is that homeworld had sub-par gameplay.

It looks shared to me. I use around 15 unit cannons at a time and it's a nice spread, not too big and not too small.

i guess a areaattack similar to nukeareaattack would help to spread them more if you realy want them to be more spread out ...

That is strange that the mod lowers perf... All it does is lower the HDR and ldr intensity of sunlight in the terrain jsons.

I'm running a phenom II x6 1055t and 2gb 7850, and I've never noticed a perf problem, ill take look this afternoon to see what's up, maybe it's something I'll be able to fix

Well it appears to, though as I've mentioned I'm not getting great performance really. Out of interest, what sort of performance are you getting and what settings do you run on? Last night I was playing a 3 v 3 on @reptarking's map 'kingdoms collide' which is a large (ish) single planet, and 20 mins in I was down to 10 - 15fps range. That's at 1080p native, everything minimum with the exception of textures (and that is without the brightness fix)...

Nooo! Why?
Wait ... how to build a teleporter on trees without reclaiming them?

That's definitely a concern. There's also the question of why this will even be necessary. The change is a response to the tactic of using orbital fabbers to reclaim enemy bases, but I'm not so sure that's a real problem in the new balance. We used reclaim because it was faster and much more effective than building anchors and because orbital was so rarely used that people were unlikely to have any avengers. With these new balance changes, orbital is a more integral part of the game and people should be less likely to be caught by surprise this way.

I think before long we will see this return to normal once it becomes apparent to everyone that fabbers need to be able to clear trees and defending against orbital gets easier.