Update news for 2011-05-04 - Terra Incognita

Doubling the game world

The Syndicate Army's heroic offensive resulted in the conquest of 6 new islands. This is a major success, since the area where Perpetuum Agents may operate is practically doubled. As our forces push towards the Nian Empires' hearts, the islands have significantly more infrastructure and the Nians have done some drastic terraforming on them. Three of the new islands will be under tight Syndicate supervision (Alpha zones), but the other three fall beyond its ability to provide policing (Beta zones).

The new islands of course include all the features like the current ones, like harvestable plants, mineral fields, artifacts, intrusions and so on. NPCs are higher in ranks, you will be able to fight heavy mechs on the new Alpha islands, and the weakest NPCs you'll find on Beta ones are rank 4.

18 new level 3 assignments are also available at the 3 new main alpha terminals. More, extensive assignments will come soon.

The new islands:

Hershfield (Alpha, TM/Pelistal)
Alsbale (Beta, TM/Pelistal)
Tellesis (Alpha, ICS/Nuimqol)
Novastrov (Beta, ICS/Nuimqol)
Shinjalar (Alpha, ASI/Thelodica)
Kentagura (Beta, ASI/Thelodica)

EVENT: Taking the new islands

As soon as the teleports are operational, Agents will be allowed to enter the new zones. Beware though, they might be crawling with special enemy guards, especially around the main terminals and outposts. Take extreme caution and move in large forces to be ready to take out these hostile groups. Once they are destroyed, our jammers will go online and you will be able to safely reside around those terminals from then on.

Highways

One of the greatest scientific discoveries of the new territories is a kind of energized highway network, called ElectroMagnetic ACcelerator Strips (EMACS). These help robots traverse at faster speeds - an additional 36 km/h to be precise - while using these paths. These highways link some of the most visited structures, and the Syndicate used this newly found technology to build some strips on the old islands as well.

Thelodica Electromagnetic Accelerator Strip

Event notification system

A new event notification system will show you small non-intrusive popups for many types of in-game events. From friends coming online through money and production notifications, you can individually set which event you'd like to get notified of. The system brings some new features along with it, for example you will now know immediately when another corporation changes their relation towards your corporation.

Explosion damage

Destroyed robots will now deal area-of-effect damage to their environment within a certain radius. This includes other players, NPCs, and even plantlife. The explosion has a relatively small "full effect" radius (20m), and a falloff radius as well (the robot's surface hit size *10 meters). Base damage is half of the exploding robot's maximum armor HP, and this is also modified by its accumulator status: the peak recharge rate is at 50%, thus the higher the reactor’s performance, the higher the damage will be. Similarly to missiles, robot explosions have an explosion radius parameter which ties into hit surface size, so smaller robots can practically "dodge" the explosions of larger robots (or at least reduce the received damage). To avoid griefing, this feature only works on beta (PvP) islands.

New modules

We are intruducing two completely new modules in this patch. The first one is the Energy Recovery Plating (ERP), and as the name suggests, this is a unique armor plating module which will convert a portion of the received damage into energy, directly injecting it into the robot's accumulator. There are 3 types of ERP: kinetic, seismic and thermal. All of them can convert all 4 types of damage, but they are all specialized for their own types. It's important to note that they can only convert damage received to armor, meaning damage after resistance calculations, and they do not work with active shields.

The second one is the Weapon stabilizer, which will reduce the hit dispersion and explosion size of your equipped weapons, raising their effective firepower. They slightly reduce your robot's demobilizer resistance though.

Both modules go into leg slots, and as all new technology, are available via kernel research.

Internal corporation markets

A player requested feature, this allows you to put up items and adverts on the market that only the members of your corporation are able to see and use (this does not work in NPC corporations of course). Corporations that didn't take the communist way of life can use it to supply cheap ammo for their soldiers, put up buy orders for raw materials to automatically pay their miners, or any other purposes we can't think of but surely you can. Internal corporation orders are shown in a yellow color.

Corporation recruitment

Joining a player-run corporation takes gameplay to a whole new level. With Corporation recruitment panels we’d like to make it much easier for you to find a suitable corporation they can join. Corporation leaders are now able to set the traits and parameters of their corporation in Corporation management/Members/Recruitment: primary activity, location, time zone, what kind of players they are looking for, are they combat or industry oriented, and so on. These settings will be the base for the extended corporation search queries that we have now put into a new tab in the search window. With the help of this new extended search feature, other players can find the perfect corporation for their playstyle.

Account reset revamp

Resetting accounts has been a bit complicated so far, since if you wanted to do a reset but didn't have enough EP to delete your characters, you had to wait up to 6 days for practically nothing. Players suggested that we should allow negative EP, so we did just that. This way you don't have to wait for EP to accumulate and can immediately do a reset if you wish.

Furthermore we are dropping the 45-day limit for the reset, and you can do a reset as many times as you want. This alone would of course pretty much destroy the persistence of the game, so it comes with a price: the first reset on every account is for free, without a time limit, but every consequent reset will put 20% of your actual total accumulated EP into a cumulative penalty pool. This effectively means that the older your account, the higher the actual penalty will be. Since this is a new system with different rules, we decided to give everyone one last chance to fully utilize it, so those who already had a reset will start with no penalties as well.

We have added an account reset information button on the character selection screen where you can check how many resets you have done so far, and how much EP you'll get back if you decide to do one.

Gameplay

New: Mobile teleport beacons have now a 3 minute initial deployment timer.
Fix: Weapons set to manual mode did not stop when shots missed or got blocked.
Fix: Newly spawned NPCs did not notice stationary players. They've been sent to a spatial perception crash course.
Fix: Observer despawn timers will be now reset when they get locked.
Fix: NPCs will now try to find a way out of locked places, rather than getting overly depressed and committing suicide.
Fix: Double-click movement sometimes sent your robot in random directions.
Fix: Fixed a certain exploit.

Robots and modules

Fix: Corrected the CPU usage of T2 and T3 medium EM-guns.
Change: Lowered the price of mobile teleport beacons, and increased the armor HP of armored and emergency teleport beacons.
Change: Halved the weight of Demobilizers, ECMs, Sensor suppressors, Signal detectors and Signal maskers.
Change: Coprocessors and Coreactors have now bigger differences across their tiers (+10%/10%/15%/20% CPU and reactor performance bonuses).
Change: Reduced the accumulator usage of miners and harvesters.
Change: Increased the locking range of Tyrannos.
Change: Increased the locking range of assault bots (Waspish, Arbalest, Baphomet and their Mk2 variants).
Change: Increased the base accumulator of assault robots (Waspish, Arbalest, Baphomet and their Mk2 variants).
Change: Increased the speed of non-EW light robots (Castel, Yagel, Prometheus and their Mk2 variants).
Change: Decreased the base mass of Intakt and Cameleon (of their Mk2 variants as well).
Change: Increased the number of maximum locked targets of all Mk2 robots by 2.
Change: Increased signal masking and armor HP of Interference emitters.
Change: Mobile teleport beacon volumes reduced to 2U.

Graphic engine

New: Added a draw distance slider into options which controls the visibility of objects on the terrain. Middle setting is recommended, use higher only if you do not have any performance problems.

Industry

Change: Increased mining yield of 1 cycle for every raw material by 50% (plants are also affected).
Change: Lowered raw material regeneration rates (plants are not affected).
Change: Removed titan ore from all beta islands and increased titan field values on alpha islands to compensate. Note: only the regeneration of titan ore was stopped, current minerals will stay in the ground until they are all fully mined out.
Change: Considerably reduced mineral components of fragments.
Change: Changed the raw material requirements of Hydrobenol.
Fix: The factory accepted unpacked robots as components for manufacturing, which could create various issues.
Fix: Kernel research increase values are now more precise.

Assignments

Change: Reduced the distance to be traveled in the first stage of tutorial assignments.
Change: Assignments are now sorted by level and name by default.
Fix: Private storage is now updated automatically after an assignment has been completed.

Intrusion

Change: Only corporations older than 2 weeks can now register for intrusion events.
Change: Base intrusion registration fee has been increased to 10 million NIC.
New: Introduced intrusion fail points: if you register for an intrusion event and fail to take over at least one SAP, you will get an intrusion fail point. These points function as a multiplier for intrusion registration fees (2x 4x 8x multiplier, and is capped at 8x). Fail points can be revoked by intrusion protection points. (Note: if you already own a SAP and register for the intrusion, you have to defend it (complete it again) or take any other of the SAPs - not doing anything will give you a fail point, regardless of the fact that the SAP will still remain yours.)

Market

Fix: The market rates graph sometimes did not include some orders.
Change: The market rates graph now also includes completed NPC orders, to help marketeers see real demand amounts.
New: Added right-click "sell to this advert" option for individual buy orders on the market, so you can bypass the highest priced buy order if you want to sell to an internal corporation order.

GUI

New: Added missing icon for despawn timer and mobile teleporter recharge timer.
New: The world map now shows what faction an island belongs to, and whether it's a PvP island (indicated by yellow lines around its name).
New: Added marking for secondary column sorting.
New: The landmark information window will now show effect timers too, so you don't have to lock a field container for example to see its despawn timer.
New: Added a new checkbox to Options/Gameplay for automatically centering the map on yourself when opening it.
New: Added an extra note to the "Yourself" checkbox on the world map to show the double-click centering feature.
Fix: Modified all history and log paginations to prevent excessive lag when opening them.

General

New: Added new description boxes into the character creator.
Change: Changing a channel's password will not display the password itself anymore.
Fix: Chat block works now as intended.
New: Trophies and losses have now unique IDs.

Back to update archive