Equipment for spacecraft
For VERZ ongoing development efforts are finally rewarded with functional equipment system. All spaceworthy craft, including in future station modules, are able to install equipment into a set of slots. Each piece has certain requirements that need to be fulfilled before being installed. Likewise equipment slot also carries a set of restrictions which limit what kind of equipment may be installed there. It is a mix and match setup which sounds possibly complicated but in practice is easy to grasp.
Picture above shows corvette favoured by Ta’ac for its aggression, the Asunder V. It features four weapon mounts but such near exclusive focus ends up having place for only one additional combat equipment. These vessels are seldom lacking for firepower but can have low versatility. Prospective captains compensate for this by storing equipment in cargo holds of owned space stations. Perhaps later alliances can dedicate some space for private storage in trade outposts.
Equipment sale and purchase
Spaceports offer variety of equipment for sale. At the moment we have not limited availability and you can find any type of gear anywhere. In future you can expect factions offering specialised gear and remote places dealing in items not found elsewhere. For ease of testing and playing with equipment loadouts the pricing of everything is decidedly too low. We want respecialising your spacecraft to your desires to be easy even if you have just started out.
One thing we are not particularly happy with is the equipment purchase interface. It feels clunky and somewhat rough. You will find out that some equipment pieces do not have images representing them. We still have to fix that but at least all the actions are visible. You can decide what is good for your spacecraft.
Combat enhancements and expansion
Another long awaited enhancements are passive actions which can trigger both in combat and out of it. Most importantly this gave us passive shield regeneration! Besides that we have slightly better convoys, a slew of bug fixes and improved interface.
Finally …
We have a request. Since the change set is rather massive we are in need of extra testing for this phase of development. Especially desired is feedback about good and bad combat loadouts, present balance and the overall feel of combat. On our roadmap is extending the combat system to space stations but if it does not work well for ships we should fix that first. To anyone who has time and wishes to help, please reach out to Zac Quicksilver who can organise new accounts and help out regulars.
