We have run the Community balance council 2 and gotten a series of results guiding things ever so slightly towards a new and more mobile meta. Jump changes, heavy PD-able changes, and some minor tweaks are in this round. We look forward to seeing the effect on the current meta.

by Owlfeathers

These are a modest rework increasing the general quality of PD-able weaponry. The missile changes are somewhat contentious as high speed ‘Premium’ ships have few clear counters, but it should be within tolerances.

• Reload Time 2.06 → 1.93 (6.5% faster Rof)
  
• Projectile Speed 352 m/s → 304 m/s
  
• Energy use 2860e → 2650e
  
• Mass 30t → 20t

• Range 1100m → 1250m
  
• Energy use 1250e → 1100e
  
• Health 10 → 15

• Range 1600m → 1700m

Inspired by blaze/nulitor

There has generally been a sentiment that phase bombs are slightly too good, but there have been mixed feelings on how to nerf it. This is a general minor nerf to damage and a slight normalization.

• Damage 160 → 150
  
• Reload Time 3.75 → 3.56 (5% faster RoF)
  
• Weight 20T → 22T
  
• Energy use 3600e→ 3500e

by Owlfeathers

Jump changes seem to have been mostly in the right direction, but it seems a hair weak. The official proposal by Owl was requesting a sharper decrease to min distance, but because of the jump-delay currently present, min distance is only being reduced to 150 for now. This is a much larger buff than it seems at first, roughly improving the part by 50% for ships that just wanted a jump-turn.

• Jump Distance and Recharge Rate: +10%
  
• Min Distance: 200m → 150m

Other minor changes are in, including a reduction to shield capacitor Tanks while buffing them for use with Heavy Shields, and a slight reduction to Flamethrower cost.

• Shield 8 → 9
  
• Mass 5T→ 5.5T
  
• Shield Recharge 1.2/sec → 0.65/sec
  
• Energy Cost 16e/sec → 8e/sec

• Cost 5 → 3

It’s finally here: 1.0.0. I don’t know what I expected this would be, but here we are!

When I was a kid I was captivated by computer games. I had no clue how computers worked. I created a paper box to be “the screen” and cut out stuff to move inside “the screen” with little handles. Istrolid started out as a game out of LEGO where one would build fleets of ships and have them fight. It's been quite a journey getting from there to this point. Learning programming to make games. Making 100s of other game prototypes. Going to college, getting a job programming. An entire lifetime has passed. Then finally I realized my dream. I released Istrolid. Don’t let your dreams be dreams.

At first I showed the alpha prototype to Saktoth, he convinced me to add part building mechanics to make this a more interesting game rather than “a regular RTS”. He brought RyMarq on board to help with the balancing of the game. This game would have been nowhere without Saktoth and RyMarq. Other members of the community Rio6, PurpleGhost, JWDE volunteer to add some features and provide bug fixes. Thank you very much!

It's been fun watching the community discover new ship types and new strategies. It’s been interesting to watch how the player base evolves over time. After the initial launch, Istrolid somehow managed to carve out a niche for itself. Some people have spent 1000s hours playing this game - this is amazing! This is only possible because of you - the istrolid players. I hope I can be there for you when you were there for me.

We talked with the more experienced members of the community, and did some refinement off the first Community Balance Council Changes

• 100d → 90d Damage, 100m → 110m AoE, improved reliability
  
• 20t → 25t Mass

Shaped Charge has been in testing for the last week or two at a new 100 damage level. It\s proving slightly too strong with jump-nukes, and is being brought down a bit.

• 12% More jump power
  
• 16% Faster recharge

Jump Changes have been overall positive, but slightly too extreme with the higher minimum range.

• 12 HP → 15 HP

• 10 HP → 15 HP
  
• +5 Range
  
• -2.5% Energy Use
  
• +5% Bullet Speed

Both weapons were a hair weak at the new 10$ price point, and have gone to 15HP to help compensate for the structural implications.

Sidewinder is very nearly where its stats want to be and got a broad set of very minor buffs.

AI Recharging behaviors with carriers should be much better.

We went through a number of the older AIs, fixing up some broken behaviors and updating them a bit for the modern game. This will mostly affect the campaign, where many lesser used AIs dwell.

• Alpha Striker
  
• Beam Man
  
• Fireshower
  
• Liberty
  
• Mastermind
  
• Nayenne
  
• Razorback
  
• Battlestar

• Fixed AI rule bug where charging fighter would not follow carrier ships.
  
• Fixed an issue where ships could go into a “special dimension”, disappear and shoot anywhere on the map.

We ran the [Community Balance Council](https://www.reddit.com/r/istrolid/comments/lxp3i3/community_balance_council_1/) reddit thread where you voted on the balance changes. We took the highest upvoted balance changes with slight tweaks and here they are:

by Owlfeathers (with influence from No-Personality 4982)

These changes are a large rework to the range increments of the current game. They improve range mods for low-range use, diminish them for high range use, and generally increase some of the nuance in the range game.

Generally speaking this is a broad normalization of range based effects. I look forward to seeing what options this opens up for classically ‘mid-range’ weapons.

• Range +600m → +500m
  
• Energy use +50% → +25%

• Cost $5 → $7
  
• Energy use +25% → +10%
  
• Weight 10T → 15T

• Range penalty -34% → -25%

• Range +25% → +20%
  
• Flat range N/A → +80m

by Zango

This one is going to be one of the larger changes to the game, despite only affecting one part. It represents a dramatic rebalance in what is viable cloaked and why. Light cloaked ships, especially Bombers that were only sometimes cloaked, they now have to pay a very real price in additional Weight to use the cloaking device.

Short-Range Cruisers, especially more armored ones, should now be able to sustainable be cloaked, nullifying ranged attacks.

There is some irony here that it comes at the same time as the range normalization, as this would indeed allow super-high range weaponry with less degeneracy, but I am sure it will find a powerful place enabling slower cloaked vessels that are still able to close on longer range targets.

• Weight 10T → 60T
  
• ‘Cloaking Power’ 165T → 420T

inspired by Owlfeathers

A special note to the Dreamlight proposal. It indeed scored higher in the voting, but neither jump change was tremendously popular, but Owl’s represented something that could be altered to deal with the Heavy Cloak changes and the Game Engine changes that are making low-range jump turn more difficult.

• Jump power 100% → 250%
  
• Cost $25 → $50
  
• Weight 6T → 15T
  
• Min Jump Range 50 → 200

The proposed change got a moderate amount of votes, but was not wildly popular enough for us to break open the code to implement a possibly buggy change. Instead the proposal has been trimmed to its core aspects, weightier jump drive to diminish cheap bombs, implicitly lower energy cost, and a more concentrated jump strength.

There is some additional Jump Drive strength and a large increase to min jump range to help compensate for the very real problems with microing jump-turns on tiny jump circles. This was really never the point of Jump Drive, even if it was an interesting byproduct, and is not being protected now that it’s somewhat problematic.

by Blazeroflasher and Dreamlight

Two significant sidewinder buffs were proposed with near identical votes. To reconcile them and keep it reasonable, sidewinder was increased to 10$, along with autocannon (it seemed lonely).

Both weapons get a 20% DPS increase from the change, along with mass reductions. This should help make them both interesting fighter weapons and keep them

• 5 → 10$
  
• 10t → 7.5t
  
• Reload Time 6.00 → 5.00
  
• Sidewinder Range 780 → 795

by Owlfeathers

Tesla change did not receive the most votes, but nerfs were brought up in a couple places.
We are therefore going with a somewhat reduced Tesla nerf, a sort of weighted-average of the Tesla changes.

• Tesla Damage from 13 → 11
  
• Tesla Energy 1600 → 1375
  
• Tesla Bounce Distance 540 → 400

by Zango and Kyuriam

• Cost $15 → $12

• Cost $27 → $21

There wasn't broad consensus on the specific changes, so the most mild reductions to these mounts was taken.

by ProfessorUlf.

• HP 8 → 9

In order to prepare player coming from galaxy single player we are adding new design challenges to some of the early missions:

• Fixed a bug with getting a new design in Galaxy Camping mode.

I would like to get some bug fixes out for you as we make our way to 1.0.0.


We are now going to do area-center instead of mass-center:



This makes ships way more centered but it takes away this mass centering puzzle. It’s true some people did like, but mostly was a kind of chore that did not do much to balance anyways. It ended up not mattering that much after we made the weapon ranges in game longer and longer.


Your ships with stasis fields will now ram targets when you order them with the F follow/focus order. This will make stasis equipped ships much easier and fun to use as they will just chase down their prey and kill it. Just like you designed them to!




Artillery no longer sounds like it came from WW1. I made it sound more sci-fi. That arty sound always stood out to me as not fitting. I hope you like the new one.



I also made ship explosions to be deeper. You still get that same short explosion for fighters, but for bigger ships there are medium for medium HP ships and super deep explosion for high HP ships.


I removed all of the annoying drones. I don’t know what I was thinking when I added them. They were pretty annoying. I added two new action tracks though and deleted that one annoying action track. Music has never been strong in Istrolid - I hope it just makes it a little bit better.

Who am I kidding, you have disalbed all music long ago!




The earlier tutorial levels did not prepare players sufficiently. We have added a design checklist, to guide players to better designs. We hope the new ship-building tutorials will better guide players to design sound and useful ships, highlighting the aspects that will be important to them as they grow and develop their fleet in the future.


We still have not made significant balance changes for 1.0.0. That is still ongoing please vote for your changes here: [Community Balance Council]
(https://www.reddit.com/r/istrolid/comments/lxp3i3/community_balance_council_1/). There is still time to vote for the changes you want to see!

• Fixed chat links not opening.
  
• Fixed Escape doing odd things with full screen.
  
• Fixed “Quit Game” button disappearing (you can never leave).

I know, some of you had trouble running the game. This is mostly due to aging underlying technology called Electron. Well good news I have updated it to the newest version to enable the biggest compatibility for you across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Wow… so exciting… well not really… what is exciting… is:




I want to try something new, something radical. Many of you have expressed your frustration with balance. But it’s very hard for me to know what the general community wants…

Go to this reddit thread and make a top level comment with your balance change, please follow this format:

Heavy Beam:
Damage 38d -> 36d
Energy Use 4000e -> 4500e
It's going to make heavy beam less dominant in the meta. Right now every game has to have one.

If balance change gets enough votes it will get approved and make it into 1.0.0! That’s right 1.0.0 is right around the corner.
I want for Istrolid to continue to evolve, it refuses to die no matter how much you say that in the discord channels. Istrolid is part of me as much as it is a part of you.

We are excited to introduce fleet tabs! Our fleets have been getting a little too full lately. With players having hundreds of ships its been getting pretty crowded. With fleet tabs you can organize your fleets in the way that works for you. Even more ships now!




Jump drive is being changed to be more dynamic and varied in its usage. Since its inception, Jump drive has been used primarily to bomb targets, or engage very rarely. The “burst” turning for larger ships has also been interesting, but it doesn’t really fulfill the fantasy of a Jump Drive here.

Jump drive now doesn’t cost energy to jump and can recharge much faster for short range jumps. A new indicator also means you can control and understand the new Jump Drive a bit better. The hope here is that ships that make many smaller jumps will become more valid. We will keep an eye on how designs progress after the patch, and may continue to buff it to keep things in mind.

Jump drive now has dotted-black markers showing its range when you select a specific unit. The range is now also 25% larger.







Importantly a unit’s jump range now grows gradually as it recharges. After just a few moments, the fighter can already jump again here.



This enables smaller ships that can engage and then retreat more quickly, making jump engine more powerful for dynamic hit and run.



Beware, Jump Drive now costs energy and some cloak energy constantly in exchange for its “free” jumps. You will want to be using it on ships that Jump often and meaningfully, or you will be paying a bit of a tax from the extra energy costs.


Pressing I will now toggle a unit stat menu on the upper left.



All units selected will be added up together, making it easier to calculate just how big a swarm of units is, and what it can do.



The stat panel also make it much easier to determine health or range of specific enemy units, no longer will players need to copy a unit to see its information.


This patch introduces a slew of quality of life updates in addition to a set of balance updates to hopefully increase ship variety a bit by emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of Spinal and Artillery weapons.

• Spinal: 40t → 50t , 450 → 600 range, +50% energy costs.
  
• Demispinal: 7→ 5$, 15 → 10T, 2 → 1hp +25% energy costs.
  
  Reasoning: Give more real and substantial trade-offs for spinal use, especially compared to 30/90 mounts. Should increase variety of spinal weapons, in theory, and diminish the potency of the strongest ones.
  
  
• Light Point Defence: 20→ 18 damage.
  
  Reasoning: Changes are going to improve the general power of PD by upscaling arty and shields that are weaker against burst. This might be necessary to ensure PD is kept in line.
  
  
• Artillery: 220 → 210 AoE, 500 → 675 min range, 112 → 144 velocity, min range scales with projectile speed at half-rate, weight reduced by 5T.
  
  Reasoning: Current arty hit goals, but needed too many speed mods to be valid. Now starts off nearly as good as 2 speed mods, but will increase in min-range with speed, to stop squads from being deleted with no reaction time.
  
  
• Flak: 17.5 → 18 dps, half damage, twice fire rate.
  
• Orb: 3.8 → 4 dps, 15 → 8 dmg, 4 → 2s reload, 2000 → 1400E, 624 → 704 m/s.
  
• Missile: 5% energy cost decrease.
  
• Flame: 2→3 damage, 24→21 burn, fire burns 33% faster (3-4% per second).
  
  Reasoning: Flame doesn’t seem to be fighter’s problem these days, and it feels a bit weak generally, but doesn’t need to have its ability to delete large ships enhanced. Newer shields are also sufficiently better against fire that a small buff here seems reasonable.
  
  
• Reloader: 20$ → 25$ cost, 10 → 15hp.
  
  Reasoning: Widely viewed as too strong, mostly changed to change the feel of the meta.
  
  
• Dampener: -25 → -26.5% energy reduction.
  
  Reasoning: Self-sustained ships using dampeners will see a bit of weakening from the changes, this was the largest buff to them that wouldn’t disrupt anything else.
  
  
• Volumetric Armor: 1.3t → 1.5t.
  
• Scout Thruster: 144 E/s → 160 E/s, 5% thrust increase.
  
• Cruiser thruster: Now has turn rate, roughly equivalent to 4$ of wing added to it.
  
• Jump Engine: 20$ → 25$ cost, 160 e/sec, +25% Jump distance and recharge rate. Now jump range scales over time as it recharges. Drains 2% current cloak at all times.
  
  Reasoning: These Jump changes have been done to hopefully increase the power level of ships that want to jump frequently, while weakening units that are just kept in ‘the pocket’ until they are needed.
  
  
• Stasis Field: 10 → 25$, 50 → 60% slow, 15 → 30hp, now decloaks and de-jumps targets gradually. Does NOT conflict with your own cloak, but instantly decloaks you on triggering. Drains 2% current cloak at all times.
  
  Reasoning: Stasis drones were inexpensive defense units, now they are stronger, but it’s easier to make cost by picking them off (increasing their power on large rushdown units where they were interesting, and decreasing it on random drones to defend against bombers).
  
  
• Heavy Shield Generator: 25t → 40t, 2160 → 1760 e/s.
  
• Advanced Shield Generator: 2t → 1t, 3.2 → 1.6 sh/s, 15 → 20 sh, 288 → 144e/s.
  
• Shield Capacitor: 0 → 6hp, 15 → 12sh
  
  Reasoning: Shields are being reworked to be a bit weaker to burst, but stronger against light harass. We may move onto more extreme changes in the future, but for now they are just being differentiated a bit more strongly.
  
  
• Explosive Warhead: 5 → 6$, 20 → 16 dmg, 325 → 390 AoE.
  
  Reasoning: Part of general rebalance discouraging instant delete of fighters, and helping fill out shield role.
  
  
• EMP Warhead: 10 → 15$, 360 → 300 AoE, 4000 → 6000 EMP.
  
  Reasoning: Emp warhead doesn’t need a full hit to ruin a fighter. This means that emp-warheads are much better vs swarms than they would appear. Decreasing AoE while keeping emp/$ consistent should improve it against single targets where it is weaker and slightly decrease how oppressive it is against fighters.
  

Introducing survival mode: battle waves and waves of enemy ships as you try to stay alive and hold the control points. You can fight either single player or multiplayer. You can add any AI or AIs you would like to survive against. The waves increase in their number and their ferocity, there is no end.




You can now drag and drop fleets. If you have a ton of ships in your fleet screen this will greatly help you sift and sort them.




Some slight tweaks to a variety of weapons. Overall balance seems very good generally, Tesla is overperforming slightly, Artillery is a bit weak but coming into its new role, and Flamethrower and Sidewinder are having their weaknesses covered just a bit more. Overall this should open up more variety in weapon selection among the less used weapons.

• Torpedo Shot Energy 1300 → 1250
• Tesla Shot Energy 1500 → 1600
• Artillery: Shot Energy Cost 4500 → 4100 and Mass 70 → 65
• Flamethrower Range 350 → 360
• Sidewinder base speed 272 → 304
• Push/Pull Wave Push/Pull Effect 10% stronger

Demi-spinal was overperforming a bit on fighters, this is to help keep both demi-spinal and standard fighters as valid while minimizing the impact elsewhere.

• Demispinal Health 5 → 2

2x1 (and 1x2) Reactors had a supposed niche, but failed to shine at it as a real choice. This will bump up their space-efficiency as a battery to be higher than, well, batteries and might make them a more real choice among heavy-fighter style craft. Incidentally it helps spamming 2x1 reactors be a bit more correct of a choice for newbies.

• 2x1 Reactors:Energy: 10k → 20k and Output: 400 → 250

Adv shield rarely saw use, this is a fairly significant buff that will hopefully help its role as light shielding.

• Adv Shield Gen Energy Threshold 75% → 40%

Energy Transfer was fine, but was a hair weak for smaller carrier choices, this should help those very slightly.

• Energy Transfer Health 0 → 10

• Prevented wiggling while capturing command points.
• Return to spawn charging command now causes the ship to wait at spawn until charged, preventing it from expending energy with conflicting commands.
• Better prioritize resting in AI commands that require it, improving some interactions with commands like follow player orders.

• Remove most offensive map colors from the game.
• Fixed a bug where players could lag the game by editing their ships.
• Fixed one of the Zyro AI’s broken commands.
• Tweaked the formula that determines the distance ships use to follow such that they should more accurately stop one capable of shooting.
• Improved performance on handling large ships.

In this patch we are simply tuning previous changes. Sidewinder and Artillery are being brought a bit more in line, Push/Pull wave as well were underperforming, and should be easier to justify damage or reload modding. Overall goals are a continuation of the previous, to ensure Artillery is used in a balanced fleet, and to decrease the power of single-weapon spam.

• Artillery: Reload Time 6 → 5.5, Speed 104 → 112, Energy 5000 → 4500
  
• Sidewinder: Range 740 → 780 Speed 256 → 272
  
• Heavy Beam: Damage: 37 → 38 Energy 5200 → 5000
  
• Push Wave: Range 750 → 775 Damage: 4 → 5
  
• Pull Wave: Range 825 → 850
  
• 1x1 Reactor: Energy 1800 → 2000
  
• Advanced Shied: Mass: 10 → 8
  
• No Overkill: Cost: 5 → 1 Health: 5 → 4

• Jump Drive now uses Mass x 15 for both energy cost and indicator check. Functionally a balance change as well, though was intended long ago.

Artillery has long been a source of fairly swingy behaviors in the game. This is in large part because of its small, but technically AoE hit location. Rather than trying to minimize that, these changes seek to accept the area of effect, making artillery shots more rare and dramatic, therefore more dodgeable, but still very potentially powerful. PD and missiles are both rebalanced to reduce the impact on artillery from this change.

Additionally, shields and range are being changed to allow more long range spam as an option while also making it more counterable, increasing maximum range, reducing DPS at that range, and improving regeneration options.

Finally, components that are traditionally used on more expandable craft have had their price increased, as well as their health, in order to reduce the power of the most expendable versions, and increase the power of potentially re-usable options.

These three things form the core of this set of balance changes.

• Micro 360 Mount: Cost 10 → 15, Health 5 → 20
  
• Demispinal Turret: Cost 8 → 7
  
• Stasis Generator: Health 1 → 10, Mass 5 → 6
  
• Heavy Shield Gen: Generation Rate 12 → 16
  
• Adv Shield Gen: Generation Rate; 2.4 → 3.2
  
• Shield Cap: Mass 8 → 10
  
• Cloak Gen: Cost 20 → 25 Energy Use 440 → 400
  
• Jump Engine: Cost: 15 → 20 Health 10 → 25
  
• Fighter Thruster: Thrust 2080 → 2160
  
• Weapons
  
• Light PD: Reload Time 2.0 → 2.5 Energy Cost 1000 → 1100 Damage 16 → 20
  
• Heavy PD: AoE: 6 → 12
  
• Torpedo: Reload Time 3.0 → 3.25 Energy Cost 1200 → 1300 Damage 22 → 24
  
• Missile: Reload Time 1.87 → 2.06 Damage 25 → 27
  
• Artillery: Reload Time 3 → 6, Speed 192 → 104, Energy 2000 → 5000, Damage 60 → 120, AoE 75 → 220, Mass 100 → 70T, Leads from outside of Range
  
• Sidewinder: Range 700 → 740 Energy Cost 1500 → 2000 Damage 34 → 35
  
• Plasma: Reload Time: 3s → 3.25
  
• Heavy Beam: Damage: 35 → 37
  
• Emp: Range 610 → 620
  
• Orb: Range 1300 → 1400. Min Range 400 → 450. Reload Time 3.81 → 4
  
• Phase Bomb: Damage: 150 → 160
  
• Flame: Energy Cost: 200 → 400. Burn Damage: 20 → 24
  
• EMP Warhead: EMP Damage: 5000 → 4000. AoE 325 → 360
  
• Targeting Mod: Range Boost 20 → 25%. Reload Reduce: 25 → 30%
  
• Dampener: Cost 10 → 5. Energy Reduction 30 → 25%

• Fixed AI Rally Point Interaction
  
• Fixed a bug where decals could effect ship size
  
• Improved Safari compatibility
  
• Fix the sound setting bug
  
• Fix challenge best time not saving
  
• Patched exploit where a player could disconnect other players
  
• Fixed the issue where too many ships or projectiles on screen could cause things to flicker./

• FireShower

• Sidewinder Damage 30 -> 34
  
• Orb range 1400m -> 1300m, minimum range is now 1/3rd of max range, instead of depending on speed (an overall increase)
  
• Tesla damage 10 -> 12, energy cost 1300e -> 1500e, energy drain removed
  
• Heavy Point Defense projectile speed 560m/s -> 880m/s, energy cost 4400e -> 4000e, reload time 3s -> 3.25s, radius 18m -> 5m
  
• Overshoot of all projectiles except Sidewinder and Missile changed 50% -> 30%

• Artillery/Phase target indicators better fit their AoE
  
• Carriers now transfer to targets that have run completely out of energy
  
• Unit names are now limited to 50 characters
  
• AI will no longer have a chance of stalling when its targets are destroyed
  
• AI DPS conditions are now evaluated correctly
  
• Following an enemy ship will now get close enough to shoot even when that ship is running away
  
• Game rooms will now change modes correctly
  
• Weapons can no longer be placed between spinal mounts
  
• Build queue numbers update faster
  
• Ships can no longer be deleted if a player is in the fleet screen when a game starts