Hey everyone!
We hope has had a good start to 2018!
This year’s first update will be about the mighty flagships that are at the head of the fleets in HADES 9.
Introducing Flagships
These super capital ships are the core of your fleet. From this ship, you command and control the rest of the escort fleet under your control.
The Flagship is designed and equipped as it was in Novus AEterno. Your ship's Hull is basically your class, while your Commanders and Components are your equipment and provide you with most of your special abilities. Your hulls, components, and commanders, can all be obtained with various levels of rarity and power, through exploration, missions, trade, research etc.
Players can own many different Flagships, designed to fit their play style, with the ability to switch between flagships at HADES 9.
We will go more in-depth on each of these topics in dedicated future updates.
Flagship hulls
As stated above, the hull of your flagship (often loosely) dictates what kind of general class your flagship falls into. The hull you choose to use dictates the default HP, armor, engine efficiency (heavy ships get less out of their engines!), components slots of each type, and sometimes in-built abilities or components that the ship may have.
For example, the supercarrier hull we have shown in the video has a component that came in-built with the hull: oversized hangar bays. These bays are part of the hull itself, and as such cannot be removed from the design. Aside from those, however, the hull is completely customizable with whatever components the player wants to fit onto it.
Components
While at HADES 9 you can modify most aspects of your Flagship with components, mitigating weaker sides of your Flagships, adding more activatable abilities, or maybe just going pure offensive firepower.
There is a wide variety of component to help you do this, including weapons systems (ie. missile bays, mass drivers, and beam emitters), engines, hangars, cargo bays, command and control structures, and more.
The oversized hangar bays and various weapon components on the flagship.
Activatables & fleet composition
Activatables are abilities that you can use from your flagship, comparable to grenades that you can throw in Company of Heroes, for example. What activatable abilities you have available, and how strong they are, is determined by your escort fleet for the most part. Depending on what components you have on your flagship, it can provide buffs to these abilities or even form combos between different ones. This promotes varied and changing fleet compositions as having, for example, a buff to heavy torpedoes in your fleets is fairly pointless if you have no torpedoes in your fleet to begin with.
A couple of examples of activatable abilities you might come across in HADES 9 (each type can be offensive or defensive in nature):
Fleet Activatables:
This type of activatables relies on the escort ships more than the flagship. The more escort ships that contribute to this ability, the more potent the ability becomes. An example of this could be a “Shield Bubble” ability, creating an area of effect shield centered on the flagship, providing more protection and increasing in size as the ships contributing increases.
Ship Activatables:
There will also be activatables that rely one on the flagship itself (or in some cases, an escort ship). An example of this could be a be a Deathstar-style Shoop Da Whoop! laser of death that hits everything in a line in front of the ship. Another example is “All power to the engines!”, which lowers damage output and shield efficiency in return for much better mobility.
The way you designed your Flagship and the way you plan to use it (and how your allies are using their fleets!) will also help dictate how you want to set up the escort ship you take out into space.
For example, a player who likes to ambush might want to take out the supercarrier and fast, cheap, escorts instead of the lumbering powerhouses like the Dreadnought escort. These fast escorts could use hit and run tactics, supported by waves of fighters and bombers from the flagship, as well as coordinated torpedo strikes to soften up the hostile ships. Should things go south, these ships should also be able to make it back to the more distant, retreating, flagship for support.
This fleet has equipped with many light and heavy torpedoes to provide a strong "torpedo barrage" activatable!
Economy
One of the main motivating factors for the expansion of the component system, as well as the addition of component rarity levels, and ultra-rare components which can be found but not produced by players is to ignite a dynamic set of player run markets.
Thanks to this system every player has the ability to acquire or produce things that every other player would want (commanders and components). This system expansion was inspired by the tried and tested MMORPG gear system.
It focussed gear into categories like weapons, shields, armor, etc. We are doing the same with our components (shield arrays, turrets, hangar bays, etc.), which creates a very simple and clear demand for higher rarity gear, as well as heavily rewarding the people who rise to meet that demand.
Other than components, player-ran markets will be dealing in a variety of other things, such as escort ships for your fleet, and experienced commanders who are being sold of my their admiral.
We will go more in-depth into the economy as it is a topic which merits many updates just to itself.
HADES 9 slums concept art
That’s it for this update, but before we close this update we want to give a shout out to the people who have been volunteering to help us out in various ways, such as with the lore and website development. We are extremely grateful for the support they have been giving us!
If you have some specific skill and would like to help us out in some of your free time, please come in contact with us so we can see if there is something you can help us out with now or in the near future!
Again, we hope you all have had a great start to the new year!
- Nick, Matt, Dan, and Luuk
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