Alpha 5.6.0 — Shield of Souls

Alpha 5.6.0 is live, and the expedition it was built for — Bulla Animarum — is running now. The in-game year has turned 2160. This release is about fighting alongside other pilots, and the centre of it is a deliberate risk.

The Vinculum Aegidis

It opens a channel from your ship to another player's ship and pushes your own shield strength across it. Your shields drop. Theirs rise. That is the entire function — fitted to a ship flying alone it is dead weight in the cargo hold.

What you spend is time. One unit of the Minus holds the channel open for one second, and the two ships must stay within 5 km. One unit of the Maius holds it for five seconds, at up to 20 km. Units burn for as long as the channel is live, so the decision is never simply whether to help. It is how long, and how close you are willing to stand. Two rules matter more than the numbers. The source has to absorb the whole incoming hit — if a shot arrives your own shields cannot take in full, the transfer fails rather than partly working. And two ships can channel into each other at once, in which case their shields pool.

A mission one pilot cannot finish

Three new mission types: Absorb, Channel and Beacon. A Channel mission cannot be completed by a single pilot. Not harder. Not slower. Impossible. We know what is wrong with this. If nobody is online we have shipped an objective nobody can clear. Every instinct says make it work solo at reduced efficiency and let co-operation be the bonus — and that is almost certainly the safer call. We went the other way because the complaint we hear most from our own players is that there are not enough people online, and we do not think you fix that by making the game steadily more comfortable to play alone.

Minor Stingers, and the tactic that stops working

The new alien drones do not arrive alone.

Put every cannon on one drone and you will lose the fight — the rest of the swarm keeps working while you are busy. Split your fire. This is the first enemy in Zero-G that punishes focusing, which has been the right answer to every fight until now. Their jumps now predict where you are going rather than where you are, so flying in a straight line stopped being a plan.

A command card, and two destroyers

Combat has a proper interface now. Your ships down the left, aliens down the right, and selecting one of yours opens a card with stance, per-cannon targeting, escort distance and special items on a single panel. Double-click an alien and every cannon switches to it at once — learn that one first.

The Velite carries six cannons, 6 km of range, 5,000 armour and 12,000 shields. The Velite Custos carries eight cannons, 10 km, 6,000 armour and 15,000 shields. Read those together: more than twice as much shield as hull, and far more shielding than one ship fighting alone could ever use. It is not a hull that happens to suit a Vinculum. It was built around one.

Also new: Clepsidra time artifacts, Minor and Maior, recovered in the field rather than built at a yard.

One thing nobody has solved

Alien ships carry a hidden property we call a Trait. It is visible in the combat simulator. It is readable. As far as we know, no pilot has worked out what it does. We are not going to explain it. The first correct account gets named in our next newsletter.

If you have not flown since September

Combat is not the system you left, and three things will look like bugs without warning.

• Energy weapon ranges are drastically shorter. Open fire at September's distance and nothing happens. Long-range fighting returns with missiles; the gap is deliberate.
• Fights last much longer, on purpose. A fight that ends in four seconds cannot be played well, only won or lost.
• Stances cost something. Manual doubles your top speed; Evasive triples it and stops your shields regenerating entirely.

And from the releases either side of this one: landing damage now applies even if you were Q-braking, and you cannot explore a quadrant without a pilot landed on it. The full release story: Shield of Souls — Alpha 5.6.0

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