Today I want to talk about an old, beloved friend. It's been a while since all the Steamrunner vessels left in service were pulled back to the yards and were transferred to the Paulson disassembly yards for retirement. Yet, that's just the official story. At the Paulson Center, they were indeed dismantled. Their energy cores were extracted, their Tricobalt launchers were sent to Vulcan, where they found good use in the latest series of Teutoburg Class ships. But then the official story ends. Instead of retirement, the ships underwent heavy internal refitting. Most energy systems were replaced by compact and fail-safe combat systems inspired by the Defiant Class chassis blueprints. A new warp core offers sufficient energy to power both powerful phaser arrays and a Heavy Quantum Pulse fitted into the main deflector casing.

It was quite silent around here for a few weeks, due to our intense development of the next, big patch. Today, I want to start a series of news posts introducing all the new stuff we are working on.

Fleet Operations tries to keep close to the Star Trek shows, especially for graphics and visual effects. Yet, we always had a slight but important issue: a starship's name and registry. Both are very prominent markings on a ship and were seen in many show and movie flybys. What would the Enterprise have been without the famous "1701"? Yet, we had to skip the nameplates entirely.

We finally managed to squash a bug, allowing certain weapons to fire far too many projectiles per volley in games with high pings. The patch also includes some bugfixes concerning the new Borg Adaption. Thanks for your reports!

Merry Christmas from the Fleet Operations Team!

What a busy week!

Fleet Operations started as a mod years ago, with the modding possibilities that Armada offers. We had to map our ideas and gameplay concepts on what was possible in Armada and it was unavoidable to hit some borders sooner or later. Now, by the year of 2010, this situation has changed, as we spent the last years to develop a lot of functionality. The faction redos, while heavily influenced by the community, also include a lot of the gameplay ideas and concepts that we originally hoped for in the Beta1 and Beta2 releases. And now they are inbound! After a year of throwing out small posts about their development, the first faction redo, the Borg, will come in 3.1.4, together with a lot of general game mechanics overhaul.

The last patches brought a lot of innovation in both the graphics and the game play sector, and we already announced a ton of upgrades in these fields for the next major versions. Still, there is an important sector we left alone for quite some time: sound!

In the recent 3.1 patch we redid the whole user interface, as it was one of the elements in Fleet Operations, that was years old. But hey, there are other parts of the game, which are beyond their golden age, too. Some of them are definitely the weapon effects and damage visualization.

If you followed the forums, you will have noticed that the next patch features a lot of balancing changes. Today i want to introduce some of the vessel and ability changes in a small scenario.