Standing jobs, wrecks worth ore, and squadrons from 1 to 60 jets
Published
In short: this space RTS now lets you hand small craft a standing job instead of orders. The first job is gathering, done by a new craft, the Prospector, from ore patches and from the wrecks every battle leaves behind. And squadrons are no longer fixed at 12: grow one to 60 jets, or shrink it to one.
Work instead of orders
Telling a gatherer “go there, dig, come back” every few minutes is not commanding, it’s chores. So a unit can now be given work: switch it on (Shift+W) and it gets on with the job round after round, until you give it an order. Any order turns the work off. The work panel (F11) lists your ships with a switch per job.
The one job so far is Gather. You choose which ore patches and salvage fields may be gathered: a green dot over a node means yes, red means no. A gatherer goes to the allowed node nearest its carrier, claims the tonnes it will take so gatherers don’t all chase the same last few, fills its hold (topping up at another node within 1 km if the first runs dry), and flies home. Beside the carrier, a tractor beam from an open hangar bay draws the ore in, on the move if the carrier is travelling. More: work and gathering.
The Prospector
The gatherer is a new craft: slow (150 m/s at Mk1), unarmed, with three times a fighter’s hull and tank armour, and a hold for 37 t of ore. Hawkeyes are scouts only now. Enemy fighters shoot armed craft first, and nothing fires missiles at an unarmed one. More: the Prospector.
Every kill leaves ore
Every craft destroyed over a planet now leaves a wreck worth a third of what it cost to build: 8 t of ore for a Mk1 fighter. Wrecks near each other gather into salvage fields, and fields that reach each other merge, so a long fight between two places slowly lays a long field of scrap between them. A field nobody touches for 30 minutes is gone. More: salvage.
Squadrons from 1 to 60
A docked squadron can now be resized on its card. Each new jet costs its ore and takes 2.5 seconds to build; taking jets away gives back only 75 % of their ore, so growing is a commitment. The game now starts you with two squadrons of 6, to grow as the ore comes in, a unit of 3 Hawkeyes and one Prospector.
Big squadrons fly as a cross of 12-jet blocks, and Hawkeyes and Prospectors in threes. The Hive flies as a cloud: its jets spread through a flattened egg, each on its own slow loop, so a big swarm looks like a swarm. Its siege of Bangkok now comes as one swarm of 60 Mk0 jets instead of five squadrons. More: squadrons.
Smaller changes
- Repair & rearm: right-click your carrier to send craft in to refit; they launch again by themselves when whole and full. A Retreat now does the same, so a squadron that breaks off comes back ready to fight.
- Fighters launch cautious.
- Missiles: a squadron fires them faster the more jets it has.
- The carrier’s ammunition is unlimited, so its ammo bar is gone.
- The cargo screen (F2) now updates live, so you can watch a hold fill.