Caretakers are now communist. For those of you not worried about Caretaker farms there are a few other improvements for Overdrive. The main fix for this release is the Geothermal morphing bug.

Balance

Minor balance changes:

• Dagger Damage 110 -> 110.1 (for 0-ish health cases)
• Increased Scallop and Duck torpedo turnrates so that they can reliably hit targets while in water which is just over their head.
• Tick sight distance 160 -> 240 (to reduce frustration and match Roach).
• Grizzly Range 550 -> 600 (it was supposed to have 600 but sometimes thought it had 550).

Overdrive/Communism

Some parts of overdrive have been rewritten to fix a few bugs and issues. As a side effect constructor and commander metal income is fully shared.

Energy sent to overdrive is now:
(Energy Income - Energy Expense)*(Energy Stored)/(Energy Capacity)

This equation is for the entire team. Those values are the total stored energy, capacity, income and expense summed together from each player in the team. The contribution by individual players is split proportionally based on their personal spare energy (Energy Income - Energy Expense). A player makes no contribution if they have no spare energy. Energy Income does not include reclaim (it was a messy edge case) but otherwise the system is unchanged for 1v1 purposes.

Old overdrive had a confusing taxation system which would partially equalize energy incomes across the team. This has been removed because it was opaque and could cause energy fluctuations. The new sharing system uses the fact that (Energy Stored)/(Energy Capacity) < 1 unless all players have full energy storage to share energy to stalling players. It is a result of the new equation that players with full storage will not spend all of their spare energy on overdrive unless all players have full storage. This causes them to share the excess energy to their allies.

In short:

• Automatic energy sharing only occurs at full storage. Take care of your own energy early in a teamgame.
• Constructor and commander metal income is shared.
• No energy fluctuation bugs.
• Reclaim does not contribute to overdrive. Otherwise the system is unchanged for 1v1.

Interface

• Set blue-green radar to be the default.
• Extended team summary in Deluxe Player List.
• Fleshed out and improved the accuracy of the extended economy tooltip (mouseover the images on the resource panel). Made possible with the change to overdrive internals.

Fixes

• Fixed large overdrive bug caused by morphing Geothermals.
• Starlight now ignores terrain while aiming.
• Fixed Grizzly range problem (it thought it had more range than it did).
• Fixed rare particles crash with specfullview toggling.
• Units can no longer fire while dropping in from space (post gamestart commander choosing).
• Fixed icon height widget to work with COFC.
• Fix for rare selection panel crash.
• Removed Ore Mex (it was broken).
• Fixed spectator mute defaults (now enables in FFA automatically).
• Possibly fixed rare 0 damage beam laser hits.
• Fixed mex death visuals.
• Context menu handles Wolverine and Claw properly.
• Fixed edge case in set target command cancelling.

Interesting. I look forward to seeing how teams play differently.

Players are no longer incentivised to keep their coms alive compared to team mates, and also incentivised to keep their team mates coms alive.

:speculation/prediction:

If people no longer feel the need to prioritise their coms survival, anyone with low team focus (or high personal focus) will now have the opportunity to do a com rush with little personal consequence.

Since these players aren't uncommon, the people who act towards the good of their team will also now be motivated to com rush. Why? Because sitting back and not supporting aggressive team mates basically guarantees that that aggression will fail (being outnumbered in enemy territory) which will hurt the entire team a lot (think reclaim as well as commander income).

You've now got every player in the game wanting to com rush -> perhaps they should coordinate their efforts? The self oriented players will attack, and the team players will work around them to compound the aggression into a more decisive game ending push.

If both teams do this they'll trade bases or meet in the middle.

If this pans out as predicted, and I'm also right about com rushes being a meta shift on the horizon, players will now be accidentally playing better. Huh.

Of course, if this happens then games will more often be single sided affairs where the first battle decides the pace for the rest of the game, since the winner will have enormous reclaim and large passive income advantage.

The current energy/overdrive system bothers me. It means players will have to manually share energy structures when allies are Estalling and that overdrive is active even when excessing metal while low on energy.

quote: The current energy/overdrive system bothers me. It means players will have to manually share energy structures when allies are Estalling and that overdrive is active even when excessing metal while low on energy.

Do you mean it still bothers you? Manually sharing energy has always been useful because the tax system was very inconsistent. Overdrive has always been active when excessing metal on low energy. The equation is unchanged for 1v1 and the difference for teamgames is:

• Removal of tax system.
• Energy contribution is based on entire team stats, not just individual players.

The old energy system had each player calculte
(Energy Income - Energy Expense)*(Energy Stored)/(Energy Capacity)
with values based on on their own economy. This amount of energy would be shared for tax and overdrive purposes. Some amount of energy would be given to stalling people and the rest would go to overdrive.

I prefer the current system because the energy for overdrive in teams is now exactly the same as in the 1v1 case. Sharing between allies is achieved by the fact that a stalling player will have empty storage as well as reduce the total spare energy of the team.

Here is an example. Every has 500 energy capacity.

• Player 1 with 550 energy, 200 income and 50 expense.
• Player 2 with 350 energy, 150 income and 100 expense.
• Player 3 with 0 energy, 50 income and 100 expense.

The energy system lets players store a seconds worth of spending for smoothness purposes. That is why Player 1 can have 550 energy.

The energy storage of the team has a fullness proportion of (550 + 350 + 00)/1500

0.6. The team has (200 + 150 + 50) - (50 + 100 + 100)

150 spare energy. This means that 150*0.6

90 will be spent on overdrive. The team has (200 - 50) + (150 - 100)

200 spare energy coming from players with positive spare energy.

• Player 1 is contributing (200 - 50)/200

  0.75 of the spare energy so pays 0.75*90

  67.5 energy towards overdrive.
• Player 2 is contributing (150 - 100)/200

  0.25 of the spare energy so pays 0.25*90

  22.5 energy towards overdrive.
• Player 3 is contributing (50 - 100) < 0 spare energy so contributes nothing towards overdrive.

Now the energy is redistributed if anyone is excessing or if some of the 90 energy sent to overdrive was not used (due to a bad grid).

• Player 1 now has (200 - (50 + 67.5))

  82.5 spare energy and ((500 + 50) - 550)

  0 spare storage so contributes 87.5 energy to their allies.
• Player 2 has (150 - (100 + 22.5))

  27.5 spare energy and (500 + 100) - 350)

  250 spare storage.
• Player 3 has (50 - 100) < 0spare energy and (500 + 100) - 0) = 600 spare storage.

So

• Player 2 gets 87.5*250/(600 + 250) = 25.7 extra energy income.
• Player 3 gets 87.5*600/(600 + 250) = 61.7 extra energy income.

*spits out food

WHAT THE HECK IS THAT STRIDER FAC WEARING

How did my posting from earlier get deleted here, as well as my "-1" vote?

Very well executed migration then, what else would I expect? ;)

My posting was something like: "I disapprove the changes, but I like the screenshot"

Actually Skasi the flag of communistic Canada would prolly look something like this:

quote: - you have discribed how each player is contributing. Could you please give us the formula of how much metal each of those player is getting back from OD?

Equal metal because I have no described the currents state of the payback system.