18 enero

Community Update - 18 January 2019

Admirals,

BFGA2 Game Director Romain Clavier here. It’s been three days now since the release of the beta. We’re delighted to see thousands of players jumping into games and providing feedback on everything from faction balance to the campaign flow, and much more.

The Tyranid invasion and the green Krusade may seem unstoppable but do not abandon hope and praise the Emperor, for he is the salvation of mankind. Here’s what we’re currently planning to do in response to all the feedback and data we’ve received during the week.



Let’s start with the two most common pieces of feedback regarding the campaign gameplay.

• “I don’t like the domination mode in campaign.”
  
  • Well, It will be pretty easy for us to add a game option that allows the player to remove capture zones during campaign battles in order to play with just the “extermination” win condition. We still believe that domination mode provides a better in-game experience, as it adds a tactical layer to battle as well as improving the game balance, but we understand the desire to annihilate your enemies.
    
  • We’ll do our best to deliver this change for the release. If we cannot, it will be implemented with the first patch shortly after launch. We will keep you updated on this as regularly as possible.
• “I feel under pressure from the urgency gauge”.
  
  • Fair enough, we don’t want anyone to feel anxious during their solo game experience of the grim dark future. We will be adding an option at the start of the campaign that will disable the urgency gauge. For clarity, we would advise against disabling this feature, as we think it provides incentive and pressure for pushing forward as well as offering a good representation of the critical situation in the Cadian Gate, and being part of our difficulty balancing. However, we’d rather it was your choice.
    
  • It’s possible we will have this implemented by release, but more likely it will be a part of the first patch.

The main feedback we’ve received here is that you would all like to be able to level up factions in Skirmish. Well, we don’t see any good arguments that go against this request. We will implement this for release! Portrait rewards will still be exclusive to ranked matches, as they’re purely cosmetic.

We’re also looking at ways to continue to improve the skirmish game in post-release content. We’ll talk more about this in the near future as we start to explain our plans regarding post launch content.

Well, balancing is still not perfect but it’s better than ever. With thousands upon thousands of battles concluded (and with mirror matches excluded), let’s check the stats up to now:



First to talk about this data a bit. Clearly there are two major outliers in Corsairs and Tyranids, which we’ll discuss in a moment, alongside the higher-than-perfect Ork winrate. However, we’re very happy that 10 of our 12 factions are relatively well balanced, especially given we’ve yet to release. Obviously, it’s currently imperfect, so here are our goals going forward.

At first we want to get everyone between 40% and 60% global winrate. Of course the closer to 50% the better, and we’ll continue tweaking beyond that, but it’s our initial aim. It’s important to note these numbers do not represent with perfect accuracy how balanced factions are. For example, some factions may perform better or worse depending on the skill level of the players, the exact fleet compositions being used, and so on. However, we’re happy to use this data alongside your continued feedback to improve things.

As mentioned, the most problematic factions are the Corsairs and Tyranids. Orks are borderline.
Therefore, you should expect in a patch on launch day:

• A nerf for the Tyranids. Should be mostly based on ship point cost.
  
• A buff for the Corsairs. Ships will be cheaper and will have access to the shroud hull attribute, which cloaks ships at the start of battle.
  
• A very slight nerf for the Orks.
  
• A lot of small adjustments to make the battle experience less frustrating in some cases or with some factions.

Of course, we’re still finalising the specifics here, and will keep you updated with full patch notes once the patch is ready. We hope to continue sharing matchup data with you in future, and are looking into ways to split the data by league to make sure we’re using it in the best way possible.

We have found a way to improve classification of players in the leaderboard, as it’s currently very hard to get out of Bronze league. This update is now live, so please let us know if it seems better and fairer to you (or not!)

Ouch! A nasty bug regarding weapon stats modifiers bypassed our vigilance and is present in the beta. A few bonuses are not being applied properly. We will be fixing it for release - we’d like to do it sooner, but ensuring that our release build is as good as possible is our current priority. Post-launch, we hope to patch issues such as this (or, hopefully, more minor ones) quicker. It’s important to note this particular issue will likely have a positive impact on the game balance, also.

Thanks for all the feedback, positive and negative! Continue to help us in making the best game possible for the 24th!

Dismissed!

Ravensburg

https://store.steampowered.com/app/573100/Battlefleet_Gothic_Armada_2/

15 enero

Play the second Beta today!

Hello everyone,

We’re happy to release Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 Pre-order Beta 2 today!

We are currently aiming for a 6PM CET / 5PM GMT / 12PM EST / 9AM PST launch, but stay tuned as we may do a soft release a few hours earlier to make sure everything is working as expected. This Beta will last until the full release of the game on January 24.

In case you missed it last week, you can take a look at our new campaign trailer, breaking down every facet of the 100+ hours that can easily be spent in Armada 2’s single-player offering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnAEk0Kj8Y4
This second beta features:

• The 12 playable factions
  
• The 80+ subfactions
  
• Ranked play
  
• Updated custom map options with special environmental effects from the first beta.
  
• Prologue of the campaign
  
• First sectors of the Imperium and Necron campaigns

The team has worked hard on your feedback from the first Beta and this second Beta will bring a lot of balance tweaks and bug fixes. You’ll find some highlights and a patchlog at the end of this post. Make sure to read our Quick Start Guide and the more detailed How to Start guide to prepare for the Beta.

Much like in the last Beta, we’re really interested in getting your feedback about all aspects of the game: balancing, technical issues, and now also the campaigns, including the Necron and Imperium first sectors.



We’d also like to tackle an important topic as we near the full release of Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2. This game is an incredibly ambitious project for our small team and we’ve worked hard to release a sequel improved in every way over the original. It includes 12 factions and three massive grand campaigns playable in co-op. But as we’re working around the clock to polish every part of the game, we will be forced to release the co-op mode in an early access state on launch. It will also not be available during this Beta phase.

This means that we’re simply not entirely satisfied yet by the level of polish on offer in the co-op mode. It will be available at release but we will continue to improve it and fix technical issues in this mode after launch and our current estimation for the full release of campaign co-op is during March. In the meantime, the co-op mode will be playable on launch but you might experience some technical issues. Your feedback about this mode will be instrumental to make it stable as fast as possible.

Join us tonight for a campaign livestream on Focus Home Twitch channel to discuss the update and give us your opinion!



Pre-Order now to receive access today to the Beta until the release of the game on January 24: https://store.steampowered.com/app/573100/Battlefleet_Gothic_Armada_2/


New Content and features

• 1st Sector of the Imperium Campaign is now available
  
• 1st Sector of the Necron Campaign is now available
  
• Added Ship Viewer
  
  • When you create a custom fleet in skirmish, you can access the ship viewer with the associated button
• Added leaderboard
  
  • Available from the main menu
    
  • Filter by factions and leagues (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Adamantium, Epic, Legendary)
    
  • Standard ELO system
    
  • Will be reset at full release

Balancing

• Reworked armor mitigation calculation
  
  • Stronger armor and hull are now more resilient and more in-line with what we originally intended
• Board actions:
  
  • Surgical Strike (SM, Drukhari, Necron) crit damage chance increased from 30% to 60%
    
  • Planned Strike (Tau & Aeldari factions) crit damage chance increased from 20% to 30%
• Torpedo hit points increased from 2 to 4
  
• Unstable Pulse Core upgrade bonus decreased from 100% to 50%
  
• Necron Starpulse Wave damage decreased from 300 to 250
  
• Augur Disruptor Bomb reworked:
  
  • Now removes the detection zone of all enemy ships on the map for 45s
    
  • Scanning range is unaffected
• Disruption Bomb damage radius increased to 4500 units from 1500.
  
• Adeptus Mechanicus ships no longer receive melta torpedoes
  
• Imperial Battleship Oberon no longer has a nova cannon
  
• Aeldari Pulsar weapons and Phantom Lances now have a slight angle of fire
  
• Tyranid ships are now vulnerable to lightning strikes even while shielded
  
• Space Marine escort ships armour value increased from 67 to 83
  
• Call to Arms order reduced to one charge
  
• Brace for Impact stance turret accuracy bonus reduced to 50% from 100%
  
• The Mercenary attribute now means the crew of this ship cannot be executed
  
• The Rally order on admiral ships grants 400 morale for itself and 200 for allied ships in range

Multiplayer

• All profiles have been reset for Pre-Order Beta 2
  
• The game will allow more time for slower players to connect to a game before invalidating it
  
• Fixed multiple connectivity issues
  
• Improved netcode to reduce desynchronization issues
  
• You can now ping on the map in 2vs2, which will be shown to your ally

Bug Fixes

• Multiple localization issues fixed
  
• Fixed and cleaned several issues in the prologue
  
• Added mouse and keyboard input in the prologue
  
• Giant asteroids are now properly displayed and available in custom games
  
• Multiple optimizations on VFX to improve performance
  
• Multiple performance improvements on the battle map
  
• More than 200 bug fixes on gameplay/campaign/graphical settings.
  
• The AI will now properly ignore Asteroid Fields if they are immune to them
  
• You can no longer use burn retro while a ship is in mutiny