We will be resetting the main game later today if things go right.
There have been a number of back end changes to the game and one major change that will affect everyones game play.
Sector Genesis Created SectorsYou can now easily find your way OUT of an SG Pocket Universe. One of the big complaints about the new sector naming is how it can be hard to find your way out of SG sectors without using an Emergency Warp Device. In 0.21 you could easily find your way out by how the sectors were ordered in the warp list. With the changes in sector naming in 0.30 this went away. The game now keeps track of the sector an SG sector was created from. This will allow easier backtracking to the gateway sector from Real Space. It also greatly reduces database server load in finding the gateway sector path when creating a new SG Sector.
On your warp link list you normally will see either
=>or
F=>prefacing a sector name. We have added a third designation that will denote the sector that leads back to the gateway sector. When you see
<=>before a sector name in your warp link list that is the sector you need to warp to if you want to take the path back to the gateway sector. No matter how convoluted you make your SG pocket universe the path back to the gateway will always be easily found.
Sector Fighters and Planet EnergyThis is the HUGE change that will affect everyone.
Sector Fighters no longer use energy from planets when they are idle. The reason the main game dropped off the server list is because there were too many sectors with sector fighters. The game was running out of memory processing the massive numbers of sector fighters every 5 minutes. The sector defense degrade schedule was one of the longest, taking 10-15 seconds to process. One of the things we had planed for 1.00 was removing the sector defense degrade scheduler. Since the main game had problems we decided to move this feature up and include it in the next update to 0.3x.
You will still have the same restrictions on the number of fighters you can place in a sector but they will no longer drain any energy from planets while they are idle.
Since sector fighters are no longer draining energy from planets all of the time we have greatly reduced the energy production capabilities of planets. Planets will now produce 1/100 of the energy per colonist as they did before. This is still more than enough to support anything on the planet and most planets will still create massive amounts of energy as they get bigger. This change will also make the fuel scoop more useful. New planets or planets that are attacked frequently will need energy infusions from ships carrying fuel scoops or from ships trading energy from energy ports. This should have a side effect of bringing back more trading to the game.
We didn't completely remove the need of energy for fighters.
Fighters will drain energy from planets in the sector when they are attacking any intruder to the sector. The amount of energy per attack is the same amount of energy used before when the fighters were draining energy every 5 minutes. This is why the planet energy production was greatly reduced. If there isn't enough energy to power all of the fighters then only the fighters that can be powered will defend the sector. If there are 50 million fighters in a sector but only enough energy on the planets to power 10 million then 10 million will defend the sector. The other 40 million will do absolutely nothing and may be destroyed. As long as there is energy on the planets the sector fighters can defend the sector.
Another change to planet production was made to goods and ore production. It has been reduced by 30%. Organics production is still the same as it seems to be perfectly balanced for colonists.
We will be resetting either late tonight or tomorrow. There are still a few minor tweaks that need to be ironed out.