I just wanted to share a quick word on development progress. We haven't had a sync in a few weeks but I assure you we're still working on things. This is finals time and then holidays snuck up, so the team hasn't had as much availability, and we've also been transitioning to a new version control system (git, from svn), which has taken a lot of time out of useful feature production. But, in the future this should improve the build stability because it provides more careful control over which code is slated for release and which is still experimental.

Apart from that, I've also got some new rules announcements. The first version of the new set of force skills and mechanics has been created, and Mikel will be posting more information on the details shortly. The rules pages will be updated no later than the actual release of any in-game mechanics but likely much sooner. We're also introducing a new mechanic known as "stochastic rounding," which will be used (almost) everywhere that we currently have a round mechanism for integer stats. Stochastic rounding rounds a number like 4.3 to 4 70% of the time and to 5 30% of the time, such that if we take a large number of 4.3s, round them in this fashion, and then take the average of the rounded values, it works out to 4.3 (rather than normal rounding which works out to 4, or ceiling rounding which works out to 5).

This was motivated by an issue identified during repair development, but it should improve the "smoothness" of other game behavior (such as combat). In particular, repair works by creating an action that ticks every 30 minutes to heal the building partly and then deduct credits and RMs--however, by rounding, we either always take too few RMs or too many, resulting in a total repair cost that is very different from the expected amount. With the stochastic rounding you will fluctuate in how much you pay per step in the repair process, but across repairing the entire building you will see the correct average cost. In combat, this will reduce the quantization effects that plague several weapons: it will be possible to have actual fractional DPS values based on a several-round observation, rather than being binned to a lower damage output with several weapons until you cross the next rounding threshold.

Finally, we are also changing the underlying mechanics of combat, but the objective is to have it play (almost) the same way. Specifically, we're changing dodge into a roll-vs-threshold system (similar to how stealth works) in order to allow for accuracy and dodge buffs that aren't tied to stats. For instance, currently you roll a 0-5 value, add it to your skills, and compare against your opponent's skills. Unfortunately this has no (clean) way to "add 10% accuracy." Using a threshold system in the future, we will take the skills, index them into a table to select the threshold, apply accuracy and dodge modifiers, and then roll 1-100 to compare. The thresholds will be chosen to provide the same distribution of hits and misses as we have currently. This change shouldn't affect gameplay right now, but it provides opportunity for more items in the future (think R&D) and for Force Skills to work more reasonably with combat.

We are also changing how armor absorption works, very dramatically. We will no longer use a subtractive armor system where the AP functions like additional HP that must be removed before actual damage happens. Instead, all weapons will be gaining a new stat called 'firepower,' and armor reduction will be a percentage of incoming damage, based on the armor points of the target and the firepower of the attackers's weapon (plus buffs and debuffs for both sides). Initial values for firepower stats will be chosen based on numerical optimization in order to provide the "closest" possible behavior to the current system, in terms of effectiveness, although you should be aware that it is impossible to achieve a perfect match. This change accomplishes two things: it simplifies traditional "effective HP" calculations as you might see in an MMO or ARPG (with the dodge changes, real eHP is now calculable in a general form), and it makes it possible to have R&D for weapons and armor at all. By adjusting the firepower and armor points in a way that affects absorption but not raw output damage, our in-game weapons will not scale to the point where unarmored targets die instantly. But, the system will retain the constant struggle between new weapons that do more (effective) damage and new armor that blocks more of it.

These are just initial "heads up" or preliminary warnings about upcoming changes. More details will be announced as code changes actually happen to implement these things, and a rules page with modern combat equations to reflect all of the changes described above will be posted before anything changes on main.