Gotta say, I'm super stoked to see this game getting some traction and to see the discussions going on here. I was worried it got buried, especially after Apple didn't feature it in N&N even though it was very much deserved. It's funny, I've reversed my position on every initial complaint I had now. I absolutely love the stress free battles. Even though they aren't exactly stress free... I don't want to control the ship, it's just fun to watch the battles. Now... A 2v2 battle or a 3 player battle would be amazing to watch someday... But that's just one for my wish list. The initial onboarding process for the players needs a little love so they see how much fun the mid-game is and have something to look forwards to. I think that would help a lot with player retention. I look forwards to seeing how the game evolves and it is now #1 in my game list. Way to go guys!
Anyone have any good Hawk setups? Anything I do with this ship fails hard. I am seriously thinking of scrapping it for a lower ship like a Wanderer that I can actually win with. I'd post one of my builds but honestly they're all terrible. I let my wife design my latest one and it's having as much success as any of my builds, and she has never seen this game before. The best success I think I had was with lasers and a torpedo on the support ship and ballistics and 2 torpedoes on the Hawk, but everything just dies. I think I'm just bad with ships that have support ships...
Hey All! Back again with some answers and thoughts. It does indeed seem the Laser-meta is quite strong. Usually when it comes to balance issues the best thing would be to buff everything else to be in line with what's notably strong, but in the case of having such a million moving parts, I might have to resort to just a slight power curb for the lasers. Their design challenge is particularly evident in smaller ships where it's difficult to cover the sides. Since technically you're going to have to rely on shields for protecting those parts, lasers are at a natural advantage. That edge falls off the later you get, but they're still the only weapon type to have a common "overpowered" effect to them. I'll see what I can do in the next patch for smoothing this out. I'm really happy to hear you people are enjoying the game. A lot of highly risky and experimental decisions were made when building Starside, mostly because we wanted the mobile platform to actually get something different and new. A lot of the design has had zero reference from anything, so it's been an experimental process for most parts. It warms a designer's heart to know that some of those tough calls were worth it. Group battles with friends, or even several of your own ships, have often been a point of discussion. Design-wise they are a great idea. The problem comes from performance: the game is actually quite heavy to run on the platform (due to the immense amount of calculations and variables attached to every individual performing module). If we find ways to ease the strain on the platform, this would natrually be one of the first big new things we'd work out. As things currently stand, either we make a magical breakthrough in performance improvement, or the next generation of mobiles replaces our audience's low-end devices. Ah, and for a more particular one. The Hawk. The large support opens up a whole world of new strategies. It's not my personal ship of preference (I like the thick, bulky ones), but it does have great potential for power. I've seen some pretty wild designs work miracles, such as making that Ironwing support nothing but a slab of armor full of shields (to draw and soak enemy fire), to placing 2x2 Reactors in the twin nose of the main ship. But - I digress - it is a tricky one to build. Let me know if you find something really good on it! -Ribatzki
My experience is that ships like Hawk that have support are a bit underpowered compared to ships without support in the same levelrange even when they have quite a bit higher combined size. I guess one reason for this is that you effectively lose blocks because of the need to use small reactors and shields which are less cost/size efficient than their larger counterparts. Also supports tend to be very vulnerable because you can't protect their sides and rear with armor due to their small size. This means you might very easily lose a chunk of your firepower very early in the fight which pretty much never happens with well built large ship. The positional advantage you gain when having supports is outweighted by the cons especially when most supports have too little space to fit enough firepower to actually destroy something in decently armored ship unless multiple supports focus their fire in the same spot which almost never happens. Now that you've already gone and bought the Hawk I'd probably try fitting a couple of Fusion Ray's in your support Ironwing and hope it doesn't get focused early on so it can float behind your enemy and hopefully find a spot without armor to shoot on. Since your support is all lasers you should go for laser + warp build in your main ship as well. Make sure you have good enough defence though so your support has time to hopefully find a weak spot.
Hey all! Just dropping by to let everyone here know that I've lowered the repair times on all ships by drastic amounts. This means repairs are also cheaper to pay for (as we want the time to be in line with the price tag), but it also means the Celestium rewards from emptying ships are lower (as you'll now receive the currency more frequently). Celestium rewards from Daily Missions and the Fleet Arena are relatively unchanged. All in all I intend this change to encourage more frequent sessions and to curb some of the excessive influx of Celestium through normal play. I hope these quick changes make for a more compelling in-game economy and less frustrating experience. More features and thorough quality-of-life improvements are on their way as soon as we get the next patch finished. Thanks! -Ribatzki
Nicely done on the repair times! I guess I've made my peace with the game, feeling fun again. Might have something to do with racking up a few more wins and am gold league now. But still... 575 wins vs 777 losses at time of writing. That's minus 202, so an improvement over my last post!!! Triple Morning Stars are kicking a bit of butt! Broadsword not too fond, but ok. Warrior is pretty awesome though! Now for some sensible(ish) ideas/requests.... Have the ship configuration remain after every battle. Annoying having to sometimes re-build the exact same format when a particular set up seems kinda successful. Glad I took a screenshot of my latest warrior build! Ability to rename ships, or give a nickname. Repeat of a previous idea - block size of next upgrade eg 2 by 2 in the item description. More stats - simply an endless database on success/loss by ship type, damage dealt by particular weapons etc. New mechanic - melee! How about the ships can't pass over each other but can collide. Could be a new weapon type / armour consideration - adding spikey things or prodding things or grappling things. More ships and more upgrades. Am level 26 and don't want level 50 to come too fast. Am sure it's still gonna take ages, but we can be greedy right!!! Defense and utility upgrades look a bit sparse later on the upgrade screen.
I agree on all of the ideas above. Melee collisions would be kinda cool and could add another layer to tactics which are getting a bit stale after couple of weeks. Right now it's either full lasers with warp drives or ballistics+missiles. Ship speed doesnt seem to affect things much so highly manouverable ships still aren't an option. Only thing that really matters is turning speed so you wont get hit on your less armored spots for too long. I'm really starting to hate the fact that ships can overlap because nothing is as frustrating as having your ship blown to pieces because your shields went down right when ships started overlapping and enemy's frontal missiles hit straight in your ships rear even though you still had massive blocks of armor in the front of your ship. That really shouldn't happen in my opinion. Other than that I haven't really noticed any other new annoyances. By the way I've reached rank 10 on the leaderboard now with rating of 754 and level 31. It would be nice to see player levels along with their name on the leaderboard to see what kind of tech others around your rating have access to and to just compare. Also I've been wondering what the Profile page stats are about. The experience and techs unlocked are clear but I don't really understand where the Victories and Defeats stats on that screen come from as currently its showing 30-10 for me whereas the "League" tab behind the 'trophy' button shows my total stats as 556-497.
Agreed. Collisions would be awesome. Mostly so I could shout "Ramming speed!!" When I hit something. Lvl 21 now and have finally cracked the top 100. Noticed the reduction in repair timers and it is much appreciated. Though now I wish I hadn't wasted my celestium on the Wanderer and gone for my 5th ship slot instead...
I haven't unlocked any ship slots after getting 4th slot pretty early on in the game. Most of my celestium has gone into upgrading my ships so I actually earn something with each one. With 5 ships i feel like I'd have even more deadweight ships in my armada that lose a lot more than they win and don't really earn me any extra xp, credits or celestium. Now after lvl 30 it seems leveling speed has gone down a bit so I might have enough celestium to spare for fifth slot soon. Currently using 2x Therion, Wraith and one Wanderer which I could already upgrade with credits only if I wanted to. Got like 3 mill credits and 250 celestium atm. I'm pretty much waiting to level and unlock Cerberus so I can get it to replace the outdated Wanderer.
Glad to see timers lowered. The only thing that was keeping me from loving the game was the fact that I could not play it more often. Collisions would be nice. At least it will stop ships from floating over each other and then the guy with lasers(most of the time me) Wont get any cheap shots by bypassing armor entirely. It would also probably stop supports from throwing itself into enemy ships just to die.
Hey all! Back again for some discussion. Great to hear the game's got your interest back! Now for some observations: The next update will tweak the Engineer-dude feature. Instead of unquestioningly emptying your ship every several battles or so, the player will now have the option to "sell" the ship's design for a guaranteed Celestium reward. This is optional, so it's going to be up to you whether you want to keep your layout or build a fresh one with a little extra reward. Quite early on one of my design ideas was to give ships unique names. I mean, that's pretty cool and proper, everyone loves naming ships. Especially warships. However, I erased this design in favour of clarity: there's going to be a lot of players who play less actively (or attentively), and for them it would be harder to associate the power of that "Broadsword" ship they're about to buy. When the ship names are consistent, it's easier to understand your own progression and the power levels of the enemies you're facing. A different implimentation might work (such as having the ship name as a "subtitle" of the actual class name), but we haven't found the time to prioritize this yet. If a good window comes up, I see no reason not to consider it. We're also looking into putting the module size visible in the module info panel. It should be a fairly quick tweak, and I hope to push it along into the upcoming update. No promises though I like the idea of in-depth stats you could check out in your profile. I've actually got a design for a feature that incorporates this, so it likely won't make it into the next patch, but perhaps in one form or another could make an appearance after that. Melee has a lot of difficulties we should tackle. It would require extensive rewriting of the pilot AI to purposefully ram the target, or dodge. It also creates situations where close-range weapons (such as the shotgun) become excessively powerful once ships collide. This balance issue also affects other straight-firing weapons, but at a smaller degree. Support ships with collision would be chaotic. All of this could be managed, but it would, at this point, require too much effort from the programming and design points of view to be feasible. I'm sorry, it's not the reply you'd want. Weapons designed for ramming (such as a reinforced prow) sound awesome. It has a few challenges though: the weapon should logically be always placed in the very front of your ship, and this might require redesigning how the ship grids fundamentally work. At present any module is placeable anywhere in your ship (except for engines), and ramming tools should have their own designated slots as well. Weapons such as grappling hooks, however, would be amazing. They've been on the table for long, but programming time has been a blocker so far (they require prominent refactoring of the entire ship physics). If we get the opportunity to focus longer on a single feature, this is definitely on the top of our list. And about more ships and modules: this is something we're always looking to extend and improve. I'll explain the process to help you understand the choices we make. I've got a huge list of module ideas with unique mechanics and gameplay impact. I go over that list with our programmers, and they evaluate how long each module would take to realize. Given our team size and other constraints, we take the lowest effort modules from on top of the list whenever we can and work on those. A lot of times I need to reduce an initially more ambitious design for the sake of production feasability. But - whenever we have excess time - new elements are a high priority. The more sparse options in the latter parts of the game are a consequence of our practical limitations: time and money. With our players taking some time to reach late game, we hope to have enough time to beef up the content on that end. The overlapping and damage taken in that instance is a feature that doesn't really have a good solution. We tried three mechanics in total. In the first one, damage was applied precisely where the weapon hit, even if you were firing "inside" an enemy ship. This caused small ships to fly into large ones and blow up their reactors in an unfair manner. The second iteration had damage applied to the outer edge of the ship according to the vector from which it was derived from (opposite to the one in the live game). I can't remember exactly what the gripe was here, so you're going to have to take it on faith when I say that it didn't work out as well as we hoped. The third iteration had shots fired within a ship "travel" through the ship and hit whatever edge they first come in contact with. This is what you're experiencing now: the engines blowing up when someone breezes over you. It may not be optimal, but in the light of all our experience, it was the best option available. I agree mobility and engines do not play a large enough role in the battle. I'd like this to not be the case. If our programmers and me have the time and nothing critical in the way, I'd love to revisit this design and make mobility a more prominent part of the game. The Top 100 list omitts levels and techs for actually quite a simple reason. We're trusting that board will eventually be filled with people who are all at level 50, with all tech open Lasers will be looking at a slight nerf come next patch. They're way too dominant in the meta in both winrate and popularity. Apologies to all you laser-lovers out there, but this change will be for the good of the ecosystem. Our future focus will be largely on improving variety and the meta-game. We want to build around the core mechanics first, flesh out some parts that are sketchy at present, and once we're happy with the state of the game, there's plans for adding levels 51-60 (and the ships & tech to go with that). With this in mind, it's great to hear you're enjoying Starside, and we'll continue working hard to make this your favorite mobile experience. Keep it cool! -Ribatzki
Could an option be to increase power consumption of laser weapons rather than nerfing damage? Or maybe increase laser deflection on certain armour? I suppose overall it's the same sentiment - lasers too powerful? Having fewer powerful is similar to having many weaker! but I feel the risk with lasers is that you need a good load of them to make it count currently and therefore less room for shields, missiles etc. Saying that, most of my successes have been with pure laser builds, but I sometimes get destroyed 'perfectly' against ships with decent armour arrangements. Tricky one to balance, but hopefully makes the overall game better and force more creativity.
Ram weapons sound like a cool idea and like you said they should have designated slots in ships where you can place ram weapon or any other module. This is just a suggestion but their damage could scale with current speed of the ship with ram and also ship weight. This would promote using engines with lots of thrust power. I know it's a tough thing to communicate to players like my earlier suggestion of warp drives power requirement scaling with ship size but I don't think it would be too hard. Especially since even at the moment there are lots of things that aren't really communicated to players in the game like how weight affects ship movement (I know you say it does affect but there's no more info to go with so it remains mostly a mystery) and several weapons real damage potential like shotgun. Another rather big suggestion I have in mind would be designing new feature that would allow player's to choose battle tactic from a short list before going into fight. This tactic would then decide what kind of AI your ship would have regarding movement. Right now I think all ships have same kind of AI and that really doesn't work with specialized ships. For example having a fast ship with lots of 360 degree turrents you could choose a tactic ("Outmanouver" for name example) so in the fight the ship movement AI would try to pass the enemy ship all the time and get behind it. Another example would be the "Sniper" AI which would try to keep distance to enemy. I think this could be pretty easily balanced by making thrusters work at 50% power or so when going backwards so the ships couldn't keep the distance by just backing away. Tactics could involve orders for support movement too so you'd have a hand in how they actually engage. Right now its frustrating to see your supports fly straigth ahead in the beginning of the fight and get annihilated before the fight even really begins. Sure the suggestion would take a lot of effort to implement but I think it would be a feasible way to correct most of the current issues in the game and also add a ton of strategic depth without making the game too complicated for beginners either since the tactics would be preconstructed.
Some good ideas coming through all round. Can't wait for next update when these are all implemented!!! Melee So wed need to re-programme the ships behaviours. Default setting would be for ships to avoid each other but get close or give each other the run around. If you equip melee items, then ship would periodically attempt a ramming. We could avoid constant collisions generally by having the battle field as a multi-levelled area. Weapons would have to be given vertical angle coverage as well the current horizontal range. I guess issue is that mostly makes sense to front load melee stuff, but still could work as side panels for nudging or countering if you get rammed, or some funky side swipe manoeuvre. Spikes a new defence type. Low cost, no power required, low damage, but more than a normal collision. Counts as slightly higher defence against missiles as they protrude from the ship. Taser an electrified prod of some sort. On contact with enemy, it will power down the weapon or item it touches momentarily. Doesnt damage as such, more a localised stun. Tractor Beam slows down enemy ships trying to get away, draws them slowly in. Pulse opposite of tractor beam, helps push enemy ships away. Ram a pneumatic thing that hits out. Could have a quick version that hits multiple times or a slower more powerful version that punches the other ship away. Chainsaws - self explanatory! Spacemen - tiny little space soldiers who jump across if the ships are locked together for long enough. They can then attack stuff or take over weapons. Trade off is that melee items are bulky (could be in terms of blocks or in terms of weight) or cost a lot of power maybe. Other Weapons/Items Javelin basically a slow firing weapon that shoots large metal spikes. These spikes stick into the enemy to disrupt them. The spikes can get in the way like that debris launcher does, but these are actually stuck in the enemy ship and need to be destroyed to clear. Or go crazy and have them weigh down or anchor enemies temporarily if enough get built up. Deflector something to absorb and shoot back damage, or maybe take control over incoming missiles and shoot them back. Cloaking Device activates like the warp drive. Takes a lot of power, quite bulky, but gets you out of the action for a moment thus giving you time to heal up, move away, sneak round the back. Disruptor - with sufficient constant targeting, this laser can disable weapons and maybe turn them on the enemy. Multi-levelled Ships : to go with the multi layered true 3D battle arena, we should probably have multi layered ships. Yes, we want to armour-ise and weapon-ise the top and bottoms of the ships! Lets max out at 3 levels otherwise itll take 20 mins to configure one ship!!! And then now we have multi-layered ships, maybe a new item you have to place is the Bridge. These could be different in terms of effect on steering, speed, handling etc. Test Mode : no rewards of course, but a test area to try all your serious or crazy configurations. Option to choose random enemy or actually configure the enemy ship too. So you could do some real good research and tweaking, and helps fill the void between ship repairs. You can mess about with those weird builds that you would never take into real battle such as no armour, no shields, all shotguns!!! Design Mode : this is actually choosing the layout of the ship block by block. Could end up with some really cool and crazy designs. Combine with Test Mode or have a separate mode where only design-mode ships battle each other. Battle Interaction : this is a good idea from post above and something to get carried away on. Could tie in with the melee thing....an activation button where you attempt a ram. And then theres a cooldown period before being able to use again. Could apply same activation/cooldown thing for many things.....warp, boost, unleashing certain weapons. I do like the tactic option mentioned above by Dsdnv. Would just need to be very broad themes like sniper, evade, melee, close range, mid range, hit and run, full blast etc. Choose before battle and let it play out! Colouring and adding call signs - just more customisation for the ships, as well as nickname as mentioned before. More background variety - still space, but chuck in a few planets or asteroids. Text - have that creepy old pimp dude who fancies you say something different, even if it's just 5 different phrases, before paying you cash coz he likes to watch you Speech - add actual voices to help add to the action eg "Shields at 50%", "Engines Critical", "We destroyed their repair bay", "Well done Captain" etc. Just a few thousand situation specific sound bites, that's all!!! And to top it off....option for a first person view please and fully rendered 3D graphics. Final comment for now - the music is really cool!
Is it possible to buff the ballistic weapon a tiny bit? I still find myself still using the vulcan cannon because it is more effective that its upgrades. For its size even the chaingun is still decent granted if you can keep it alive. Also a question about the quantum rifle. Its description says it pierces through defenses but I still find it being stopped by shields. On my head I thought it would only be weakened by shields or armor and still do a wee bit of damage to a ships innards.
Hey! All balance will be the result of careful deliberation. I acknowledge that some of the larger ballistics don't feel like good value for space. Their low energy costs are meant to offset this (so you can make more sturdy ships, less space required for generators), but perhaps this intended design isn't realized as well as it could. I'll have a look at that. The Quantum Rifle does pass through shields as well as armor. However, for every collision the bullet makes, the damage drops off by a given percentage. This means that the shield will absorb the worst of the impact, and the following damage applied is lower. The projectile keeps producing damage as long as the minimum damage after each step is more than 1. These weapons proved very challenging to balance, and at present they are far too expensive and large in relation to their value. As an extra note for all you gamers here: we're looking to encourage our players to share / tweet / vlog / blog their experiences with Starside Arena. If this is a part of your hobby (or you want to give it a shot), do your best and let me know where I can find your work. We reward this manner of promotion with in-game rewards. You have the power to help us spread the gospel of the hottest game on the mobile! -Ribatzki
Anyone had enemy just explode as the game starts? Happened only twice in c.1700 matches. No weapons fired, enemy just explodes immediately. Just now was versus a Morning Star, player was called "eXe".
Yeah I've encountered the same thing a few times when matched up against "eXe". I think he might be some kind of hacker as I think I saw him suddenly almost at the top of the ladder and ships I've seen from him include only MorningStars and Rapiers. Sure it might be possible to go up hundreds of points overnight if he spent massively on repairs but I don't think that's the case especially when all his ships seem to be ones that absolutely can't win against ships you face after 900ish rating.
Therion has been very successful for me. 790 wins 916 losses So the gap is closing believe it or not. Got 4 X Therion and a lone Warrior. Can't remember what it was called but I think it will become visible after my next level, but next ship I'm after looks just like a bigger Therion. It'll be the one after Myrmidon.Saving hard to stockpile currency and celestium. Disappointed with the higher level weapons don't seem to be worth their price or the space they take up. Unless I'm messing about, I haven't used any weapon greater than a 2x2 block - which is essentially the 360 degree versions of gun, missile and laser. Sure, it's fun to try 10 torpedo launchers at once, but not regularly for your own A-team. I've got everything to level 32 unlocked, so might be a bit more adventurous when I get a bigger ship than Therion. Until then, it's rare I will use those higher level weapons - even though they look cool, sound cool and have good stats.
