Battlestar Galactica Online Wiki
Register
Advertisement

Battlestar Galactica Online - Developer Blog 18 - Upcoming Features

14 May 2014

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.

Blog 18 - 1

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.

Blog 18 - 2

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

Advertisement