We’re dropping a sort of an intermediate update with a few new things and quality-of-life improvements. We decided it’s important to release those now, to give the new players the best experience possible, before we roll the more experimental stuff out in a couple weeks.
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Territories and boarding
One of the coolest parts of AFF is boarding and destroying the capital ships. You guys and girls do it even when it’s not an objective, even when it doesn’t contribute that much to winning the match. Recently we’ve released the Kerrat Territories map, which puts objectives on the battleships - and the way it plays ultimately convinced us this is the best way to highlight the capital ships-focused nature of AFF.
So we’ve now made all carriers (frigates and battleships) into objectives in the Territories mode. Destroy the carrier to remove one objective from enemy team’s pool of owned objectives, reducing their score income.
The art of balance
We’ve been going over the statistics recently and noticed AFF got a bit defense-heavy. After the last couple updates the balance of the game seems to favour defenders - or specifically defending objective locations by fortifying them - a bit too much. We definitely don’t want to punish defensive play in any way. But at the same time we don’t want to see the attackers bouncing off a wall of deployable turrets and heavy armour every time.
To counteract the situation we have rebalanced some of the gadgets and made others require more thought and interaction. Deployable shields are a bit weaker now and the underbarrel shield now takes some practice in timing to use effectively now. At the same time the underbarrel rocket launchers now support different types of munitions - incendiary, corrosive, smoke, flash and EMP in addition to the normal fragmentation missiles. This creates an interesting interplay of being able to break through a heavily shielded position as an attacker or block an area off temporarily as a defender.
In addition to that we’ve also rearranged some areas across the more problematic maps to lower the chance of setting up permanent chokepoints (and we are still working on a few other maps in that regard too)
Changelog:
- Carriers in Territories mode now also count as objectives. HUD will now display which objectives are currently active.
- Capturing neutral objectives (for example at the start of Territories mode) now requires undoing enemy's progress on that objective first
- Anubis, Khamun, Huginn and Ranger now have 25% more hitpoints, between their health and armour
- Faction choice screen now shows some basic information about the progress of the match, plus a quit game button that was missing
- Gameplay hints now displayed at the top of the screen while in briefing
- Camouflage settings can now be copied and pasted between different items (infantry to vehicle to weapon etc.)
- Camouflage pattern colour customization on guns no longer incorrectly restricted to faction-specific range of colours
- New loadout defaults - when running the game for the first time or creating a new loadout, the default inventory choice will now be more sensible and up-to-date
- Rejkhart and Javert destroyers now have basic configurable loadouts just like fighters and corvettes
- Deployable shields have 1/6 hitpoints less now and regenerate much slower
- Underbarrel shield now activates automatically after holding the gun for 4 seconds and regenerates like deployable shields. No more mashing the firemode key. Movement penalty with the shield active now up to 30%
- Underbarrel rocket launcher now has all the grenade variants - frag, incendiary, corrosive, smoke, flash and EMP.
- Underbarrel frag rockets damage buffed 25% damage, firerate adjusted to 2s total, the rest of the variants have a firerate of 3 seconds to avoid superspam.
- Adjusted the questionable trajectory of the underbarrel rockets, weren't arcing properly before
- Multiwrench rebalanced - now supports mods but can overheat from prolonged use
- Tannhauser changes: - Various snags smoothed out - Added line-of-sight interrupters between ULA spawn in Phase 1 and the droppod on lower deck - Added vehicle ramps to hangar sides in Phase 2 to allow for mechs to get topside - Added a ramp to side route to improve the accessibility of one of the major assault paths - Relocated another piece of aerial cover that was too far for defenders to shoot at - Fixed Phase 3 spawns
- Lukather changes: - Removed central bollards from tower entrances - Added stairwells on dark side of the main terminal to allow for more pathways inside - Improved collision on some support struts - Various AI pathing fixes
- Fortress Incursion changes: - Catwalk over the gate now protected from cheese shots from inside the fortress - Collision removed from electrical wires that completely blocked shots - Small ramp added in Phase 1 to aid in traversing an area that was accessible mostly by jumping - Yellow truck in Phase 1 rotated slightly and moved slightly to better protect attackers from gunfire
- Delta Territories changes: - Fixed rock collision - More routes in and out of a couple "control posts" added, specifically D and A, thereby adding slightly more maneuvering room in some areas for footsoldiers - Added more cover surrounding A - Added more cover near ULA spawns - temporary tents etc. - Added line-of-sight interrupters between spawns and objectives for both sides - Added line-of-sight interrupter between D and B - Rearranged some cover to facilitate tank movement in areas affected - Miscellaneous AI pathing fixes - Optimized the skybox meshes and fixed some unnecessarily-colliding effects
- Irega Incursion changes: - Moved objective C in Stage 2 to area that utilizes more vertical gameplay while still being about the same travel times for ULA as objective D - Added a couple ramps to facilitate better movement towards the new objective location - Smoothed out some collision to reduce snags around the final objectives
- Improved some collision and pathing in Yin Tao Shan and Igneous, disabled the Garrison spawnpoint in Yin Tao Shan's Phase 3
- Time after which players are re-offered a vehicle got reduced 25%
- Increased damage of fighter plasma alt-fire (blob) by 25%
- Fighter-mounted variant of the S77 shotgun now given the same treatment as the infantry version - double the magsize, accuracy increases with sustained fire
- Very slightly increased S77's damage output and fixed its overheat animation
- Set Griphon's ion beam loadout cost to zero as intended
- Tweaked FKR's recoil and mesh recoil to bring the feel back to how it was (more visual than gameplay-impairing, especially in burstfire)
- EMP bullet effects toned down, especially the muzzleflashes
- Adjusted suppressor loadout description to indicate no chance of being heard rather than the incorrect hearing range reduction
- C30 increased fire interval 6%, reduced mag size by one, increased spare mags by one Increased the range for MLI and RID by 40m
- Magsize mods no longer incorrectly available on S77 and UDP
- Fixed incorrect muzzleflash scaling on the YAS
- Fixed a rare issue of the camera getting stuck in vehicle drop animation
- Fixed fire and corrosion pools very often not registering players running through them
- Fixed "help me" animations not playing after last patch
- Fixed AI not understanding how to repair land vehicles when ordered to
- Fixed firerate/DPS info display in the loadout menu for weapons that reload after one shot, for example Partisan's C120
- Fixed sorting by KDR on the scoreboard screen
For feedback, or just a lovely chat with the devs, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!
