With the latest update to DarkSpace, there are a few significant tweaks and changes that have been implemented.

The most significant to users in terms of game play will be the reduction in "Resources Lost" on ship destruction. To explain: whenever a ship a player is piloting is destroyed, the value of that ship is added to their game profile as the "Resources Lost" stat, which in turn is deducted from their prestige (experience) calculation as a negative modifier.

Reducing the amount of "Resources Lost" applied to a players profile therefore decreases the prestige penalty whenever you die. Prior to this update, players piloting smaller ships were losing a much higher proportion of their prestige value for each death than was intended, and this was causing a significant barrier for new players in terms of actual prestige gain.

Players piloting Cruiser class ships and above were also losing slightly more prestige per death than we were happy with and in turn this was felt to be discouraging PvP, although we still need to maintain a significant penalty for each death in order to encourage the use of the smaller class vessels for experienced players. So although the same 75% reduction has been applied to these ships, the basic spawn cost of these hull types has also been scaled up as we feel is appropriate. Overall, the death penalty is lower, but only by 10-20% for stations, and scaling to 75% for destroyer class ships and lower.

We have also reworked torpedo damage values, which will bring them back into line with the primary cannon weapons. In terms of average DPS versus static targets, torpedoes now do around 15% more damage compared to primary cannons, although damage per volley is between 2-3x more than primary cannons.

You will also find that weapons on smaller ships should be more efficient than their larger counterparts in terms of real-term damage output, although they still do less damage per individual volley. This makes fleets of smaller ships much more effective than before, as a group of scouts with the equivalent weapon capacity of a dreadnought will actually be able to out damage the dreadnought and avoid most of its weapons fire, although individual ships will not be much of a threat.

As always, we hope these changes help everyone to have more fun.

Enjoy.

- The Development Team

P.S. The full list of changes can be found in the Development Log, as usual.