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Blog #19: Shadow Wars[]

May 20th

Hello Pilots,

While Tobias_BP prepares the carrier blog, I thought I’d give you an overview of the stealth fighter and its capabilities. For this blog post I’ll go over the following things:

Design Philosophy and Story
Stealth Ship Stats and Slot Layout
Weapons and Equipment
New Items and Changes to Existing Items

Design Philosophy

Always keep in mind that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.

-Murphy’s Law of Combat

So one of the first things we I wanted to talk about was the design philosophy. We looked at building the stealth ship primarily as a speed based fighter. It’s not intended to get into turning fights and its strafe and turn speeds don’t really favor that kind of fighting. While you can modify the ship to turn and strafe well, it’s not optimized for it.

The quote above kind of reflects some of the design philosophy. The ship has quirks that make it feel like it’s something that engineers had to make design compromises on. We also wanted to have some behaviors that enemy pilots could exploit. We wanted to give it some quirks that make it feel like something that isn’t always optimal. So one of the first things you’ll discover is the ship’s pitch and yaw isn’t equal. It actually has a better pitch speed than it does yaw.

We also wanted to make a glass cannon that was very fast and could deliver a lot of damage, but couldn’t really hold up to a fight. With the stealth ship, you can get it up to as fast as 200 meters per second. So yes, this thing is really fast. It’s very fun to fly and can engage in hit and run tactics very well.

We’ve also created and exclusive item set for this ship. The idea is that these new items are designed to fit on the stealth ship and represent unique field modifications that engineers make to the ship as the need arises. The items set is based on a “costed choice” philosophy. So if you really want to get some power out of something, then you’ll have to give something up.

Finally, we wanted to make stealth less about “turning invisible” and more about the concepts of how actually stealth technology actually works. So, the stealth ship is never really invisible. If you can see it and select it, then you can target it. The hard part is finding it. To compensate for that, we’ve made some ships better at finding the stealth ship than others and we’ll go into that below.

Stealth Ship Stat and Slot Layout

I thought I’d give you a bit of data on the actual stats of the stealth ship. The stealth ship itself has a basic and advanced version. We’ve changed up the naming conventions a bit, so they’re no longer called the “advanced” version. That’s mainly because “advanced” takes up a lot of space above the bracket, so we’re trying to make that smaller.

Ship	Raven Mk IV-R Malefactor Type-1	Raven Mk IV-R/A Malefactor Type-2
Role	Force Recon	Force Recon

Slot Layout
Cannon	2	2
Launcher	0	1
Hull	2	2
Engines	2	3
Computers	1	2

Hull Attributes
Hull Points	350	420
Hull Recovery	3 / second	3.6 / second
Armor	0	0
Critical Defense	60	60
Avoidance	520	520

Maneuverability
Flank Speed	70	85
Boost Speed	90	110
Boost Cost	0.5/second	0.5/second
Max Strafe Speed	30 meters/second	30 meters/second

FTL Attributes
FTL Range	5.25 LY	5.75 LY
FTL Charge Time	15	15
FTL Cost/LY	20	20

Power Systems
Power	120	150
PP Recovery	3 /second	3.6 / second

Electronics Profile
Firewall Rating	125	150
Emitter Rating	100	100
DRADIS Range	2250	2750
Visual Range	225	275

Now, you’ll probably notice it doesn’t have a ton of slots. The goal for this ship design was to actually reduce the number of slots on a strike. With that in mind, we had to increase the power of individual items. So where you’d normally need five items to achieve the same stats, you get that in two to three. We simply wanted to make the ship really easy to equip.

Weapon and Equipment Overview

Since we were designing a new ship, we decided we really wanted it to feel unique. With that in mind we designed a whole collection of new items and equipment. Some of them effect familiar attributes like speed, and they’ll feel pretty familiar. With the familiar things like speed buffs, we tried to give them universal names so players from both factions could discuss them easier. As an example, the speed buff for the stealth ship is called an “Arcjet Propulsion Controller” regardless of faction.

We also created some new items for the stealth ship that effected attributes that had never been manipulated before. An example is the LIDAR Range Finder, which increases maximum and optimal range of cannons by 50% for a few seconds.

With this, we also restricted it so the stealth ship can’t equip existing items.

We’re introducing a collection of new weapons and we’ve changed how weapons will be designed in the future. First, I’ll go over the weapons for the stealth ship. The stealth ship has the following cannons available to it:

KEW-2B Stiletto / Type 2 Insurgent – 11.7mm Machine Gun: This low power weapon is able to fire every 0.2 seconds. It’s a rapid fire weapon designed for harassment.
KEW-9A Dagger / Type 3 Insurrectionist – 20mm Autocannon: This is a standard weapon for any strike fighter. It has good hitting power, but it’s nothing flashy.
FC-39B Blackjack / Type-9FC Partisan – 8mm Flechette Cannon: This cannon fires a shell that explodes not long after leaving the barrel. It showers the target in hyper accelerated micro-projectiles. It is very accurate but has poor armor piercing abilities. It also has an optimal range of 150 meters.
Bonus Weapon – KKC-H1 Javelin / KKC Type 15 Instigator – 2 MJ Kinetic Kill Cannon (KKC): This is a new weapon class. It fires a hyper accelerated tungsten slug at targets. It’s designed for hitting lines and escorts. Its accuracy is terrible, but its armor piercing is excellent and it can hit a target at over 1000 meters. This weapon is exclusive to the Rhino and Marauder.

The really great thing about all of these cannons is that each of them has a unique visual effect and sound effect. So you really get to have a different experience depending on what weapon you have equipped.

The stealth fighter also has a collection of launcher weapons too. We’ve changed the design of launchers a bit for this ship. First, the launchers won’t have random damage. They will be a fixed damage. Rather than a weapon doing 125-200 damage, the weapon will just do a flat 200 points of damage. Additionally, the damage on missiles has been increased to create slower firing weapons, but weapons that do more damage. Finally, the power cost of firing a missile has been dramatically reduced to reflect the fact that a launched weapon doesn’t really require that much energy. It has its own power systems and doesn’t need power from the ship. There is an exception to the rule, but I’ll go into that below. Also, we’ve moved mines into launcher slots for the stealth ship.

The new launcher weapons are:

SIW-9M Wasp / Type-12B Wyvern – Interceptor Missile: This is an exceptionally agile missile intended to for use against strikes. It has a top speed of 200 meters per second and the ability to turn up to 170 degrees at a time. It does 375 damage when it hits with a power cost of 5. The cooldown on the missile ranges for 30 – 23.5 seconds.
ASM-A9 Zephyr / Type-2B Azazel – Heavy Missile: The heavy missile is intended for anti-line ship work. It does 750 damage per hit and has a range of 1200 meters. This is basically an escort missile attached to the underside of the hull. It has a top speed of 130, but very poor turning rates. It has a cooldown time that ranges from 75 seconds to 59 seconds.
DFSR-18 Hornet / Type 9RP-C Hydra – 88mm Rocket Pack: These have some cool new mechanics with them, and are the exception to the rule I mentioned above. These are simply dumbfire rockets the fire straight out from the launcher. They have good speed and hitting power. They also don’t require a target to be launched. With these weapons you have to really learn how to lead the target. These weapons have a high power cost because they can fire as quickly as every 0.9 seconds. They do 200 points of damage per hit.
Mk 90 Blackout / Type-H Incubus – Electromagnetic Mine Launcher: This harassment weapon is mainly designed to hinder pursuers. It drains energy from the target.

Other Equipment & Changes

The stealth ship has a whole series of unique equipment. For the stealth ship, we’ve broken up the buffs a bit, and changed them. First, buffs on the stealth ship only effect the stealth ship. They don’t have an area of effect. We’ve also tried to make it so they aren’t all encompassing.

For example, the damage buff for the stealth ship only effects missile damage and not cannon damage. Additionally, there are some new kinds of items. We’ve introduced a range debuff for the stealth ship. It’s really effective for when you’re trying to run away after making an attack run. We’ve also introduced some new equipment that makes the ship resistant to drain effects.

We’ve also moved all power generation to the hull slots for the stealth ship. The power generation items do a wide variety of stuff including simply boosting your power recovery or increasing your base power, but you can also sacrifice one of those two attributes to get a bigger bonus to the other. So for example, the Ancillary Power Capacitor gives a +30% to power, but incurs a -10% to power recovery.

We’ve also taken some items that were previously kind of useless and tried to make them much more powerful. So as an example, the engine item that boosts your FTL range can dramatically increase your FTL Range, but you’re only able to mount one of them. There’s also a really cool item that can cut your jump time by 50%, and it’s designed to allow you to jump from combat as quickly as possible.

Stealth Mechanics

Now I’ve been babbling about a lot of stuff, but I’m sure you’d like to know how the stealth mechanics work. The stealth mechanics are pretty simple. The stealth ship has a role ability called “stealth mode”. When you engage stealth mode, your ship plays this cool animation where your wings and weapons retract. When stealth mode is active, the following happens:

Player’s brackets do not appear
Any player targeting the stealth ship loses its target.
Player does not show up on DRADIS
Missiles Lose Lock

Now the thing to keep in mind is the stealth ship doesn’t actually disappear. If you can find it and select it in space, then you can reacquire it. Additionally, there are some conditions that can disable stealth mode:

Damage disables stealth mode
Turning on or firing weapons disables stealth mode
Activating Boost Disables Stealth Mode
Entering Threat via missiles fired, damage received, or being effected by a debuff.

Finally, there’s a new stat on every ship called “Visual Radius”. This represents your pilot looking for targets and trying to identify them. If a stealth ship enters the visual detection radius of a ship, then that ship can see the brackets for the stealth ship.

Existing Item Changes

As we were play testing the stealth ship, some things become clear really quickly. It was obvious that we needed a ship that could chase down the stealth ship. We decided to give that honor to the Viper Mk II and Raider. Those two ships had always been intended as interceptors, but they never really had the speed to perform that task. So, the Viper Mk II /Raider have gotten the following changes:

Flank Speed Increased

Level 1: 70
Level 2: 85

Boost Speed Increase:

Level 1: 90
Level 2: 110

Along with those changes, we really wanted to command ships to have a role in finding and detecting the stealth ship. We achieved this through two things. First, we created a new item called a “Synthetic Aperture DRADIS (SAD)”. The SAD increase the DRADIS ranges and visual ranges of the ship it’s equipped on. These items are toggle abilities, so you can just turn them on whenever you want. That means a command ship can boost its DRADIS range continually as long as it has the power. Also, we’ve improved the upgrade curve for the DRADIS enhancer items so they are more effective at lower levels.

Finally, the Ares/Hydra modules have had the DRADIS component removed. This makes command ships really great at locating and revealing stealth ships to allied players. Anyone who has an Ares/Hydra module will get a free SAD module of the same class at an equal level.

New Skills

With the stealth ship, we’re also introducing 15 new skills for you to level up. All of these are skills related to new weapons. Each weapon type has three skills that allow you to improve things ranging from power costs to cooldowns. It basically allows you to specialize in a weapon type you enjoy and gives experienced players something to spend their excess experience points on.

In Conclusion

So there’s a lot here and you’re going to have a lot of questions, but this blog really only scratches the surface of the stealth ship. We had a blast playing with it, and it really requires some solid skills to use properly. It’s fast and agile, but gets torn to pieces under any amount of sustained fire. It also provides a new style of game play that hasn’t been seen in the game before.

Best regards,

The Battlestar Galactica Online Team

Blog #18: Upcoming Features[]

May 14th

Hey Pilots,

Javery_BP here again. We’ve been hard at work on some new features, and we wanted to talk with you about some of the changes that will be coming to the game. The main feature we’ve been working on is the update to the carrier, but we’ve got some other features we’ve been working on also, and I’ll give a brief overview of those features. In this blog we’re going to give you an overview of a few of the new features that:

Carrier Update
Future Blog Posts

Carrier Update

The carrier has been long since been neglected and really needed some attention to become a practical ship to fly. As we were trying to redevelop the carrier we decided that we wanted to make it a really powerful support ship, rather than a combat focused ship. The goal was to make a ship that acted as the center of a fleet, but provided powerful support abilities to your faction in the action.

To achieve this we need to make some fundamental changes. First, we needed give the carrier unique abilities that were exclusive to the carrier. In order to really make these changes, we decided to create a collection of new equipment slots to reflect what the carrier should do and start moving the game towards the ship role system that you’ve been asking for.

With those goals in mind, we have created a collection of new equipment slots that you’re first going to see on the carrier, and we will introduce new ships with these slots. As we move along, each ship will get updated to reflect this new design philosophy. The new slots and abilities that you’ll see with the carrier are:

Gun Slots: These are slots that can only hold cannons. Our plan is to create a variety of cannons. Each cannon will have a unique damage profile as well as a fire arc to reflect its power and range.
Launcher Slots: Launcher slots hold only launched weapons. This includes missiles, unguided rockets, and mines.
Defensive Slots: Defensive slots will hold weapons designed to protect capital, line, and escort ships. These slots will only permit flak weapons and point defense weapons at this time, but as we move forward we will develop new defensive weapons too.
Role Slots: This is the final new slot and probably the most important. The role slot allows us to create a unique ability that only that ship has. It’s the ability that defines what the ship is really about.
Toggle Abilities: With the role slot, we’ve made a new ability called the “toggle” ability. Toggle abilities are designed to be turned on and off as you need them. When they are on, they draw power from your ship, but provide a persistent benefit. A Toggle ability has a cost to active, a cost per second, and a cooldown. Obviously, the activate cost is paid any time you decide to activate the item, while the cost per second is the amount of energy drained from your ship while it is active. Finally, the cooldown comes into effect when you activate and deactivate the ability. So, if a Toggle ability has a cooldown of 30 seconds, that means once you activate it, you must wait 30 seconds before you can deactivate it.

With these new slots we’ll be able to create a wide variety of ship variants that will have unique capabilities that you can master, and also master how to destroy them. Our goal is to create ships with unique strengths and weaknesses that you will learn to use and exploit.

What’s to Come?

Now that we’ve given you this brief overview of what we’re doing with the carrier, and some pretty big gameplay changes, I’d like to give you an idea of what you’ll see from the game in the future. The next few blog posts will cover:

Carrier Ability Overview: In the next blog post, Tobias_BP will give you and overview of the new abilities and weapons for the carrier. We’ll go into detail about its updated abilities that make it a full support ship for the fleet. We’ll also show off some the new visual effects and some awesome new skins for the carrier. No fleet will want to go without one.
Stealth Ship Overview: You read that right. We’ve been hard at work making the stealth ship. The stealth ship is a deadly fighter that can disappear from your DRADIS. With the stealth blog, I’ll go over the new abilities and weapons for this deadly new ship.

Best regards,

The Battlestar Galactica Online Team

Blog #17: Akhlys's Fury: Part 1[]

May 5th

Hello fellow pilots,

This is Claatu_BP, and I’m excited to tell you about the new story missions we’re making.

The previous Story Missions are primarily a means to present systems to the player, and the story was secondary.

We are shifting the focus to the story as our starting point instead of focusing on game mechanics, with an interesting storyline. This means also that we tried a new approach of how we tell the story. This mission presents the beginning of an episodic approach of storytelling similar to episodes of the series. We have created a sector that is different to the commonly known sectors. The mission happens in a sector with a dense nebula that reduces visual range which disrupts your DRADIS It’s a thick cosmic soup that’s easy to hide in. As it is a Single player experience we´re also able to do some fancy stuff that we wouldn´t be able to do in regular space. For this we improved our existing tool to create them faster than before and allow us to really do such fancy things that we have in mind.

We´ve also created a set of NPC´s , each with their own background that allows us to generate a more immersive experience and use them to tell an interesting storyline. And we still have some surprises in our sleeves to present in the upcoming missions.

Episode 1: Akhlys's Fury

Resources are low, and the fleets must disperse into the dense nebulas of the Veil. Mining operations are getting ambushed and you’ve already lost two mining ships. It’s up to you to protect them and you are sent into the sector as the leader of a patrol.

I hope this helps you get some insights of what we want to achieve and we hope you have as much fun with the mission as we had with creating this new content for you. Together we’ll uncover the secrets of the Veil.

Best regards,

The Battlestar Galactica Online Team

Blog #16: New HUBs[]

March 28th

Hello fellow commanders!

We‘ve all walked through our faction’s flagships and felt a little bit lost. It’s sometimes frustrating to have to move to a different room to access something, or accidentally click on a UI element and find yourself whisked away to another room. Finally, there wasn’t anything to really do when docked to and generally it just felt a little clumsy.

All of these things made us realize the docked environment really needed a revamp. When we began designing the revamp of the hubs we have the following goals:

Immersion: You should feel like you’re on the Galactica or the Basestar. The environment should help tell the story of BSGO.
Easy to Use: You should be able to easily access everything that’s important while docked. Characters should be easy to find, the text should be easy to read, and it should be clear what you can do in each room.

Immersion

One of our main objectives was to improve the immersion and the experience while being docked. We thought about multiple ways to handle the immersion, and we asked ourselves what BSGO is really about. We realized that it wasn’t about walking around a ship, but instead it was about piloting ships and experiencing stories. We decided to create a stage.

We wanted to use these environments to tell the story of BSGO, and we felt the fixed, first-person perspective worked well. Taking inspiration from classic games like Wing Commander and Starcraft II, we decided to switch from a traditional, MMO third-person perspective to a fixed, first-person perspective

We also want the player to feel as close as possible to the characters while talking with them, and this required us to set a new camera angle that brings your dialogue partner into focus. The next step was a full recreation of the environment itself to fit the demands of a proper stage.

Easy to Use

In order to make the docked hub a bit easier to use, we decided to do a few things outside of the perspective change.

There wasn’t really any good reason to spread characters out between multiple rooms. All it really did was confuse people and increase the amount of time you spent trying to access important features. First, we reduced the number of rooms to the flagships’ command centers and moved all the iconic characters to into those rooms. We also created a redesigned the outpost scene to fit with this new style. So, we combined all the characters into a single room to make the hubs easy to navigate and present the environment better.

Last but not least we got rid of the walking around, which while being cool when doing it for the first time, didn’t really add much to the game. It also significantly increased the time you need to access certain menus and features. All the hub functions are now accessible through multiple methods. If you want to speak to characters, you can access all the functions through dialogues, but if you need something quick, you can click on side menus on the left hand side of the screen. Basically, we wanted to create a UI that could work for the different preferences of each person using it.

Tradeoffs

This new style does have some tradeoffs from the previous style. Within the decision to limit the field of view to a single shot, and making the characters into interactive objects we faced one fundamental problem. While the Colonial CIC allows you to be close the characters, the architecture of the Cylon CIC is so open that you need to be quite far away to grasp the environment. This leads to a smaller appearance of the characters on screen in the Cylon CIC and a more restricted area to click on. In the end we didn`t wanted to cut the appearance of the Cylon scene and decided for a compromise between immersion and usability.

Blog #15: Fortification[]

February 28th

Greetings Pilots,

It’s Javery_BP again, and I want to tell you about a great new feature we have coming with the next update. Over the past couple of weeks, the developers have hard at work updating the sector control mechanics. With these new mechanics, you’ll see a much different battlefield than you’re used to fighting on. These new mechanics are sector fortification mechanics. The sector fortification mechanics build on the existing sector control mechanics providing more sector upgrades than before. You’re all used to the jump beacon as a factor in the sector control process, but we’ve expanded what happens to a sector.

With the Fortification update, you’ll see deadly weapon platforms spawn to protect the outpost, and you’ll also see the outpost improve as you gain control of the sector. I’ll give an overview of the changes to the sector control mechanics and what upgrades you get.

Sector Control Progress

You’ve all been playing for a while, so you know that as you fight and mine in a sector you gain Sector Control Points (SCP) and the control of the sector improves. If you get enough SCP, an outpost can spawns. With the new sector fortification mechanics each sector now has eight upgrade levels:

Sector Control Points	Sector Level	Upgrade
0 - 900	1	Sector Captured
901 - 1250	2	Standard Outpost Ship
1251 - 1750	3	Jump Beacon, Light Sentry Platform x 2
1751 - 1999	4	Light Sentry Platform x 4
2000 - 2250	5	Light Sentry Platform x 4, Medium Sentry Platform x 4, Upgraded Outpost
2251 - 2500	6	Medium Sentry Platform x 4
2501 - 2750	7	Medium Sentry Platform x 4, Heavy Sentry Platform x 4
2751 - 3000	8	Heavy Sentry Platform x 4, Fortified Outpost

When sector reaches upgrade level 2, the outpost ship spawns just like you’re used to, and at upgrade level three you’ll see the jump beacon. Where things change is as you move beyond those upgrade levels. At level three, you’ll see a pair of light sentry platforms spawn that will assist in defending the outpost from attacks. As you proceed to control the sector the quality of the fortifications improve making attacking the outpost more dangerous.

Now I’d like to give you a bit of information about the new enemies you’ll be facing. First there are the new sentry platforms. These come in three classes: Light, Medium, and Heavy.
Light Sentry Platforms These platforms were mainly developed to defend against strike ships, but their weapon complement and armor makes them a threat to most vessels. Its interceptor missiles are agile and faster than most missiles, moving at a speed of 140 meters per second and turn 25% faster than most missiles.

Structure

Hull 7500
Armor: 35

Armament

20 mm Autocannon Turrets x 8
Interceptor Missile Launcher x 2

Medium Sentry Platforms

These platforms were mainly developed to defend against escorts, but are effective at engaging a wide variety of ships. While the 127 mm cannon turrets fire a bit slower than typical weapons of the class, they pack a much larger punch.

Structure

Hull 10,000
Armor: 60

Armament

127 mm Cannon Turrets x 8
Medium Missile Launcher x 5

Heavy Sentry Platforms

These platforms were mainly developed to defend against line ships with their 40 cm cannons, but their weapon complement if a pair of 67 mm flak cannons and a two, 15 mm point defense turrets allow them to easily engage incoming missiles and strike ships.

Structure

Hull 15,000
Armor: 75

Armament

63 mm Flak Cannons x 2
15 mm Point Defense Turrets x 2
40.6 cm Cannon Turrets x 8
Heavy Missile Launcher x 5

Outpost Ship Upgrades

As if that weren’t enough, the Outpost Ship will improve as the outpost is secured. Outpost ships now have three upgrade levels: Standard, Upgraded, and Fortified. The upgrade for the outpost ships simply increases their hull points:

Standard: 30,000
Upgraded: 35,000
Fortified: 40,000

Torpedo Tweaks

Along with the addition of the sector upgrades you’ll also see some tweaks to the torpedoes. Their hit points and speed have been increased to make them more effective and worth the trade-off of swapping typical weapon.

In closing, we’d like to thank everyone for all the great feedback and input we’ve gotten from you over the recently, and we’ll see you on the forums. You’ll see this update on Kobol over the weekend, so please hop on and check them out.

Blog #14: Annihilation[]

February 14th

Hello pilots,

Javery_BP here. After updating the DRADIS loot table, the number of nuclear weapons being fired had gotten to an intolerable level. You have been asking us to fix this issue. Additionally, we have a couple of new mechanics that you’ve been asking for, but we weren’t comfortable with releasing it in the current state of the nuclear war.

To release these mechanics and continue to update the game, we had to find a solution to the abundance of nukes, but also expand gameplay opportunities. With next update, you’re going to see a whole bunch of new things in the game and in this blog post I’ll discuss:

New game mechanics: Area of Effect and Energy Drain
New items: Nuclear Weapon Launchers
Updated items: Decoy Launchers
Changes to the sources of nukes.
New Skills
What’s Next?

New Game Mechanics

With Update 33, you’ll see two new game mechanics: Area of Effect and Energy Drain.

Area of Effect damage allows us to create weapons that can damage multiple enemies at once. These weapons work on a basic idea of a primary effect radius and a secondary effect radius. If you’re caught in the primary effect radius of an area of effect weapon, you will take the full damage rolled by the attack. Anyone in the secondary effect radius will take reduced damage based on the range from the explosion.

As an example, let’s assume that a weapon has a 75 meter primary radius and a 125 meter secondary radius (200 meters total). If the weapon does 400 points of damage, then anyone in the primary effect radius takes 400 points of damage. Anyone in the secondary radius has the damage reduced depending on the distance from the point of impact. By the time the damage reaches the 200 meter edge of the effect, it is negligible. Now, when I say “anyone” in the blast radius is affected by the weapon, I literally mean anyone. Area of effect weapons effect both enemy and friendly targets (including yourself), so you’ll want to be careful when using them.

The other effect we’re introducing is Energy Drain. Energy Drain works just like damage, but instead of damaging your ship it reduces your energy. If you are hit with 40 points of energy drain, then you lose 40 points of energy from your reserve.

The great thing is we are able to combine these two mechanics together, so now we can create area of effect energy drain weapons. We can also give weapons both damage and energy drain.

New Items: Nuclear Weapon Launchers

When trying to address the issues with the number of nuclear weapons, we realized that we could fix the number of nukes in the game, while at the same time not destroy the existing nuke gameplay. The solution was to create dedicated weapons that fired nuclear weapons. These new weapons have both area of effect damage and energy drain. So when you are hit by these weapons you’ll take both damage and energy loss.

The idea behind these weapons is they are a weapon you lead into battle with. They’re more like artillery weapons than traditional missile launchers. These weapons are designed to create choices about how you will equip your ship. They have cooldown times that range from two to four minutes. Additionally, their minimum ranges range between 500 to 1200 meters. So while these weapons are powerful, they also have severe limitations that force you to make some hard choices about your ship’s loadout.

Additionally, these weapons don’t fire regular missiles. We’ve developed a new ammo type called Torpedoes. Torpedoes are used only with the nuclear launchers. This new ammo type costs merits, just like regular merit nukes, but they can only be fired by a nuclear torpedo launcher.

The other thing to keep in mind is that these nuke launchers are designed to attack larger ships. Strike launchers are designed to attack escorts and lines ships, as are escort launchers. Line launchers are designed to attack other line ships.

You’ll also see some new artwork to help you know what’s going on. The torpedo actually looks different from standard missile, and makes it a bit easier to identify. Also, the area of effect FX will be different from the traditional nuke effect, allowing you to identify what kind of weapon is exploding.

While we’re introducing new nuclear weapons, the old ones aren’t changing. They’ll still be in the game, but they will be found through different sources. I’ll go into that later.

Finally, the new launchers required some updates to the Nova/Ruiner to keep it a viable weapon. The updated Nova/Ruiner will do considerably more damage and have higher armor piercing with slight tweaks to cooldowns and power costs.

Updated Decoy Launchers

Back when we first took over this game, we tried to update the decoy launchers but the changes we made weren’t really effective. Technical limitations prevented us from doing the kind of decoys needed for the game, but we’ve overcome those limitations.

Decoy launchers will now affect multiple missiles at a time. When you fire of your decoys, there will be a test made against every missile locked onto you. If the decoy successfully spoofs the missile, then it loses its target and continues on its last path. Each decoy launcher has a range that determines effectiveness of a decoy. The closer the missile is to you, the more likely you are to spoof it. Since the missile isn’t destroyed, if it’s too close it might still hit you. To properly avoid a missile you have to also change course. Along with the new decoy mechanics, we also have a new effect so you can tell when someone fires off a decoys.

These new decoy launchers will only be available for strikes and escorts. Line ships will need to rely on flak and point defense to deal with missiles. Finally, for balancing purposes you are limited to a single decoy launcher per ship.

Changes to the Source of Nukes

You asked us to curb the number of nukes in the game, and that’s going to be achieved by changing the source of nuclear warheads. From now on, the traditional mini-nukes will no longer be available in DRADIS Contact. Those have been replaced with ammo for the new torpedo launchers, and the mini-nukes have been moved to lower level rewards for the Interdiction Duties. Also, the x20 Merit Nukes will be removed from the shop and only available through Interdiction Duties. Finally, the new torpedo ammo will be added to the shop for merits.

New Skills

There’s more in this update though. You’ve been asking for more skills for a while, so we decided to introduce six new skills into the game with this update. The nuclear weapon launchers will get a new set of skills:

Nuclear Warfare Specials: Improves Energy Drain effect by 1% per level
Nuclear Payload Training: Decreases the power cost of nuclear weapon launchers by 1% per level
Nuclear Launch Optimization: Decreases the cooldown of nuclear weapon launchers by 0.5% per level.

We’ve also broken out the decoy launchers into their own separate skill set. Munition Launchers, Guidance Theory, and Munition Efficiency have become dedicated skills for mine launchers, and we’ve created three new decoy launcher skills:

Missile Evasion Training: Increase decoy effectiveness by 1% per level.
Decoy Power Management: Reduces power cost by 1% per level.
Decoy Release Training: Reduces cooldown by 1% per level.

What’s Next?

There’s a lot in this update, but there’s a whole lot more coming. I wanted to give you some hints about what’s coming up in some of the next blog posts:

Carrier Update: One of our teams is hard at work updating the carrier and making it more rewarding to play. It will truly become a solid support role with a collection of new abilities, and you’ll have a ton more customization options including the first alternate paint schemes for both carriers.
Sector Fortifications: Another team is updating the sector control mechanics to make the battlefield more dynamic and less predictable. As you take control of a sector, defensive systems will spawn to protect the outpost and make it more difficult to destroy.

We’re really excited about this update, and the things we’re currently working on. We hope you’re excited too, and we look forward feedback and thoughts.

Blog #13: Dynamic Mission Expansion[]

January 30th - Javery_BP

Hey everyone, Javery_BP here. So we’ve been hard at work polishing the existing Freighter in Distress missions for you. There are some cool new additions you’re going to see, along with a nice spread of events across the game. I’ll go into some detail about how they are going to work so no one’s confused about what’s going on.

In this blog post I’ll cover:

Easy and Medium Mission Credit
New Enemy Behaviors and other stuff

Easy and Medium Daily Mission Credit Now that we’ve got these missions spread around every sector in the game, you’ll all be able to easily participate in dynamic missions throughout the game. You’ll see them in almost every sector including Battlespace. The only place you won’t see dynamic missions is in the home sectors for obvious reasons.

The mission have been scaled to reflect the expected levels of the players participating. The Freighter in Distress missions new come in three classifications:

Easy: Intended for players from level 1 -10
Medium: Intended for players from level 11-20
Hard: Intended for players 21+

There are some basic mechanics you need to understand to take advantage of these new missions. Each level range now receives a tailored daily mission that states what sectors the player should look for dynamic missions. If you do a mission in those sectors you will get credit towards your Regional Combat Patrol mission.

Also, if you qualify for an easy dynamic mission you get credit towards your Regional Combat Patrol mission if you complete any dynamic mission in the game. On the other hand, higher level players only receive credit for the missions that meet their level requirements. So, a level 11 -20 player gets credit for medium and hard missions, but not easy, and a level 21+ player only gets credit for hard missions. You’ll know in what sectors you will definitely get credit for the mission by looking at your mission log. The mission description will provide you with all the sectors that are designed for your level.

The reason for this is that we didn’t want people exploiting the easier missions to get through the RCP mission easily, but we wanted low level players to be fostered by high level players in those hard missions. That doesn’t mean that high level players can’t participate in the easy missions, and the missions will balance for a player in an escort or line ship. That way high level player can fly around with their friends who may have just started the game.

New Enemy Behaviors and Other stuff We’ve also revamped the enemies to make the more interesting and challenging. The enemies have been designed to work a bit better in conjunction with one another, and they now have equipment sets for their roles. You’ll see enemies using things like DC pack and debuffs. You’ll also be able to easily identify dynamic mission enemies via distinct names.

Finally, you’ll also notice the enemies in the missions count towards daily assignments. They provide experience, but not loot.

So that’s about it pilots. We hope you’ll have a great time with these retuned events.

Blog #12: The Roadmap Overview[]

January 14th - BP Caedmon

Hey All,

Over the last weeks and months the BSGO Team has been reviewing our plans for 2014 and we are now in position to share the resulting roadmap. This blog is necessarily a high level overview, more detail on individual items will be coming in separate devblogs.

Blog #11: Escort Tournament[]

November 6th - Tobias_BP

Attention pilots,

You guys have been asking for a little more love to be lavished on the non-strike class ships in the game. We have been listening and the first part of what we want to do is an Escort tournament.

Tournament Design

The rule set will be pretty much the same as the Strike Edition. There’s only a small change in terms of matchmaking – the escort tournament will only have four level brackets as we have a higher entrance level:

Bracket #1: Level 10 – 29

Bracket #2: Level 30 – 49

Bracket #3: Level 50 – 79

Bracket #4: Level 80+

But that’s not all. The tournament leaderboard got a new look to make it more accessible. The old screen had several issues in regards of displaying useful and necessary information in a proper way and time. Those are fixed with the new one. The new screen will display your performance, the performance of players that are close to you as well as the top players of the tournament. You will be able to see the information in full length and more frequently updated. So you are always up to date about the current tournament status.

Rewards

In order to promote the new Interdiction duties, we will exchange rewards for all tournaments from Tuning Kits to map packs from this release on.

We also removed AP and HESC rounds and increased the amount of HE and HERT rounds to compensate.

Reward changes will happen on a regular basis to keep them up to date and attractive in the long run.

Escort Sale

For those of you who don’t have an Escort ship or even those who do but want to try a new model we will also be running a special sale alongside the tournament to get you into action with one of a variety of options. These load outs include a nice set of upgraded items and will give you a solid base to let you get straight into the fight.

You’ll have the choice between 3 different ships this time:

Banshee/Scythe (advanced)
- Fast moving and lightly armored. This build is intended for intercepting fast targets and carrying out hit and run attacks
Glaive/Spectre
- Electronic warfare ship designed to remove your enemy’s ability to fight
Halberd/Liche
- Long range sniping ship including speed and targeting buffs

We also listened to your feedback on the discount levels offered in the last ship sale and as a result we have really ramped up the value on offer with discounts of up to 71% are possible this time!

It’s escort time! Become the next top gun! Please make sure to tell us what you think in the related forum threads.

Thanks,

Tobias_BP

P.S.: This won’t be the last type of tournament – so stay tuned

Blog #10: Content & Rewards Update – Part 1[]

October 18th - Javery_BP

Content is the core of any MMO, and Battlestar Galactica Online is no different. An ongoing goal for the BSGO team is to expand on the content within the game. Content makes the gameplay experience more fun for all users regardless of whether you’re fresh out of the tutorial or flying a line ship with level 15 gear. We want to do a wide variety of content and we’ve been discussing how we want to present content to you and how we’d like to do content in an MMO.

The primary source of content has always been the daily missions. The current system limits our ability to provide a variety of missions and provide compelling rewards for those missions. Looking at the limitations means we realized this required a revamp of some core game concepts including how you get your missions, what you do to achieve those missions, and how group play affects their completion.

If we’re going to build the robust content base that we really want for BSGO, then we have to start with a solid foundation. With that solid foundation in place we can build better and more varied content throughout the game that appeals to all players and improves group play.

Over the next few developer blogs, I want to talk with you about not only how we see content in the game, but how it will be presented and how you’ll experience it.

For this entry, I’ll discuss some intermediate changes to the following:

250% increase to the Daily Mission rewards
Addition of Cubits and Merits to Dynamic Mission Rewards
Hints of things to come.

Content Update Stage 1: Daily Mission & Dynamic Mission Reward Revamp

While we have bigger plans for content within BSGO, we didn’t want you to have to wait until they were done to start reaping the benefits of the upcoming changes. As we steadily make changes to the game, we also want to make sure you’re able to advance at a steady pace and stay competitive. Stage 1 focuses on improving the daily mission rewards and providing better rewards for the dynamic missions.

First we are removing the Tylium and Titanium Missions for all players above level 20. Those missions will be replaced with the following:

Regional Combat Patrol: Participate in 3 dynamic missions
Regional Combat Patrol – Strategic Victory: Win 1 Dynamic Mission

These two missions provide players with an incentive to participate in the Freighter in Distress dynamic mission. Players will receive rewards simply for participating in the dynamic missions, while those players who win dynamic missions will get additional rewards. These missions will replace your mining missions when you reach level 20.

The required missions for completing the objective are being set low at this time because we don’t yet have a wide variety of missions to play. As we expand the number of dynamic missions in the game, you’ll see that number increase, but with the current distribution that’s where we’re going to put it for now.

Players will see improved rewards for winning and participating in a collection of dynamic missions. Along with the new daily missions we are also improving the rewards for the dynamic mission individual rewards. You’ll now see cubits and merits in the dynamic mission rewards for Gold and Platinum levels.

You’re going to see an increase in the daily mission rewards, as we want to make it easier for you to make progress through daily activity. To give an example, a beginning player currently receives 150 cubits for completing a mining mission. In the new system, the player will receive 450 cubits for a single mission. If you’re already starting to do math, let me go ahead and beat you to it. With only 10 daily missions, that player will receive 4500 cubits where previously they were earning 1800 cubits from daily missions. That translates to a 250% increase in daily rewards for missions.

The rewards are changing for level 20 players also. Level 20 players will have 12 missions to complete. These missions will each reward 1,250 cubits, which means that players who complete all 12 missions will receive 15,000 cubits.

Finally, we’re streamlining the number of missions by combining the Titanium and Tylium extraction missions into a single mission. So rather than have two missions in your inventory, you’ll have one mission with the same rewards as the two previous missions combined.

What’s Next?

In closing, we think this will improve the balance and fun of the game while we get the foundation for content in place.

In the next blog we’ll discuss the new Daily Assignments system. That system will replace the existing daily and duty system providing a cleaner interface, new achievements, focused rewards, and better usability. BP|Toaster is hard at work designing this new system and we’re really excited about what we’ll be able to do with it.

Finally, You’re also going to see some improvements to the ammo system that Tobias_BP has been putting together. This should be a great revamp for the ammunition and consumable system to make it easier to use and more accessible to everyone.

So, keep your eyes open for the next blog and I look forward to reading your feedback. Please make sure to tell us what you think in the related forum threads.

Development Blogs 10-19

Contents

Blog #19: Shadow Wars[]

Blog #18: Upcoming Features[]

Blog #17: Akhlys's Fury: Part 1[]

Blog #16: New HUBs[]

Blog #15: Fortification[]

Blog #14: Annihilation[]

Blog #13: Dynamic Mission Expansion[]

Blog #12: The Roadmap Overview[]

Blog #11: Escort Tournament[]

Blog #10: Content & Rewards Update – Part 1[]

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