» Upon community request: Rhino, Liberty Freighter, now has Mk 2 stats.
3 Class 8 guns, 5 Class 2 turrets, 1 CD slot. Comparable to Humpback in terms of hull and handling.
Eagle, Civilian Very Heavy Fighter, now has a higher hitpoint.
It's agility is also slightly reduced, but it remains on top of the agility list for VHFs. Right below Wraith, actually.
Every faction now has its own restart template which provides a moderately equipped civilian shuttle, 25000 credits, +1.0 rep to the regular faction with faction ID mounted, -0.4 rep to its respective guard, parked on the guard base selling snubcrafts of the owning faction.
These restarts are limited to factions with guard/home systems. Corporations can use the house restart which provides a Freelancer ID parked at the capital planet of the region, with +0.3 rep to every faction in the house. Additionally, there are now two Freelancer restarts, one starting in Barrier Gate and one starting in Heisenberg.
Capital ship missile turrets are now ammo based.
20 for battleships, 30 for cruisers and 40 for gunboats. Additionally, gunboat missile turrets regained their hull damage.
Since there were far too many minor adjustments here and there during the beta phase, updating this thread with specifics of each change would've been insanely time consuming, but since the community has recently started asking for a more detailed change log when it comes to balance, I'll start updating this thread again, with the changes intended for the final release of Discovery 4.87.
Additionally, to quote from the original post of this thread:
(05-15-2013, 09:36 AM)aerelm Wrote:
Two points to note:
» Any balance changes mentioned anywhere outside this thread should be disregarded as rumors or concepts, as no changes are included into 4.87 until mentioned in this thread. » Updates listed in this thread are subject to change, and this thread is for the purpose of providing an outline for 4.87 balance, not the specific results.
To voice your concerns and discuss the announced changes, visit this thread.
To avoid any confusions, Scan Range indicates the range at which ships appear on radar, and Cargo Range indicates the range at which cargo scan becomes available:
Deep Scanner: 12.5k Scan Range, 3k Cargo Range
Adv. Deep Scanner: 15k Scan Range, 2k Cargo Range
Cargo Scanner: 10k Scan Range, 4k Cargo Range
Adv. Cargo Scanner: 7.5k Scan Range, 7.5k Cargo Range
Battleship/Spyglass Scanner: 15k Scan Range, 6k Cargo Range
The reason for the above changes (reducing the maximum scan range from 20k to 15k across the board) is the issue brought up by the community regarding average length of trade lanes and the problems the +1/2 range was causing with lane piracy. Additionally, Battleship and Spyglass scanners are now reworked to offer best of both ranges, rather than offering a higher scan range while having a lower cargo scan.
Nomad Assassin: Hull increased to 14,000, regens increased to 77, and class 9 gun mounts increased to 5 (previously 3).
Rapier: Turn rate reduced to a level comparable to Lhotse (1.1707 rad/s, previously 1.2000 rad/s).
Centurion: Powercore reduced to 10k (previously 11k). It was given a larger core to support the energy consuming Corsair guns for those of Corsair playerbase who insist on using native guns, but shouldn't be a problem anymore with the adjusted Salamanca stats and new class 7 guns.
Making cloaks ammo-based rather than cargo-based was considered (and even tried) early in the 4.87 development, but since a few technical issues were preventing it at the time, it was decided to postpone the change to a later stage of the beta. Since there were more pressing issues present during the development of each update since, this was marked as a low priority task, but now that the team has started working on the final release and all of the major bugs are already fixed, the concept of ammo-based cloaks was revisited and finally implemented.
Please note the following numbers are the initial draft, and are subject to multiple adjustments:
Cloaking Device Batteries (the new "ammo" for cloaks) will be limited to 1,000 per ship.
Light cloaks will take up 10 cargo space, available to ships with up to 250 cargo. Having a charge time of 20 seconds, and a consumption rate of 3 batteries per second will give any ship with light cloaks ~5 minutes of effective cloak.
Medium cloaks will take up 200 cargo space, available to ships with up to 1100 cargo. Having a charge time of 40 seconds, and a consumption rate of 2 batteries per second will give any ship with medium cloaks ~8 minutes of effective cloak.
Heavy cloaks will take up 450 cargo space, available to ships with 1100 cargo or higher. Having a charge time of 60 seconds, and a consumption rate of 1 battery per second will give any ship with large cloaks ~15 minutes of active cloak.
As these numbers are still concepts, and are planned to be adjusted based on results of the future test runs, feel free to discuss this change and share your opinions, suggestions or concerns regarding it in this thread.
