Cosmoteer 0.15.2 - Reactor & Factory Assignments

Cosmoteer update 0.15.2 is now available for direct download and auto-update via Steam! This update allows you to assign reactors, factories, and storages to supply other parts on your ship, prioritizing supplying ammo or power to those parts and preventing them from supplying any other parts. It also improves the camera by adding auto-tracking of on-screen ships, plus a handful of other improvements and fixes.

What's New

Reactor & Factory Assignment

The previous update, 0.15.1, added the ability to assign squads of crew to exclusively prioritize specific weapons and other ship systems. Now, the 0.15.2 update brings a similar feature to reactors, factories, and storages:

If you open Crew mode and click on the "behavior" tab, you will now be able to select a supplier (reactor, factory, or storage) by left-clicking on it and then right-click on another weapon or ship system you want that you want to supply. The targeted weapon or system will then prefer to get its power or ammo from that supplier whenever possible, and the reactor, factory, or storage itself will then never supply anything else which it isn't targeting.

You can use this feature to further optimize your ships. For example, if you want to make sure your crew will never go to a farther reactor to pick up power for a laser blaster, then you can simply assign the closest reactor to that laser blaster and then any crew picking up power for it will only ever pick up power from the assigned reactor. You can even use this to create "storage chains", such as assigning a factory to a storage, that storage to another storage, and so forth, reducing the distance that any single crew has to walk across your ship.

Related to this feature is a change to the behavior of when you assign a crew squad to a factory. In the previous update, a crew squad assigned to a factory would only ever pick up power for that factory and would not pick up ammo from that factory to deliver to other weapons, unless the squad was also assigned to those weapons. But in this update, a crew squad assigned to a factory (or reactor or storage) will now also pick up ammo or power from it and deliver to any weapons or other systems, even if they aren't specifically assigned to those. If you don't want the crew to either supply power to, or pick up ammo from, a factory, then you can simply disable those jobs in the crew's role's job priorities.

Camera Auto-Tracking

One of the big things I learned playtesting Cosmoteer at PAX West was that new players often struggle to control the game's camera, especially during combat as the ships are almost always moving. Yes, the game for a long time has had various features for locking the camera on ships, but it takes a while to learn how to use those features, and until you do, trying to keep the ships on screen can be pretty frustrating.

So in order to make the game less frustrating for new players, this update also adds a simple "auto tracking" feature to the player's camera. Basically, unless you have specifically locked the camera on a ship or the eye icon, the camera will now automatically match the velocity of and move with any ship on the screen, keeping it in the same relative location. If there are multiple ships on screen, it will simply match the average velocity of all of the ships. This feature should greatly reduce the need to use the other camera-locking features (which of course are still available), but if you don't like it, you can simply turn it off in the camera settings.

... And more!

This update also has a handful of other fixes and improvements, which you can read about in the changelog.