Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Next ship(s) and a new rocket

2 new ships:  Missile Cruiser and Elite Missile Cruiser

Both are "large" (strike cruiser size) with 6 weapon slots.  

No pics available yet, but entries are in the files.  As soon as they show up out there I'll post some pics.

Something else showing up (and still no picks yet) is Depth Charges!  Looks like a new type of rocket you can have that drops depth charges when it hits. (added 11/29/12 originally posted about 11/20/12, so looks like things show up at least a week ahead).

As always, no idea when these will show up, just know there is some code in place behind the scenes for it!

Friday, November 16, 2012

Fleet Ghosting/Cloning

Interesting, Kixeye finally has taken a stance on this.

http://forums.kixeye.com/showthread.php?t=293028&page=19

19 pages, but ghosting fleets is a bannable offense on a case by case basis.

Back on September 1, something like 3 or 4 raids ago I found out how to ghost a fleet.  As they have now fixed it I feel I can post how it was done.

(There are programs to do something similar to this also, this was with just fast clicking and a slow computer)

I was forced to use my old laptop (5+ years old) for the morning of the raid as my family was all using the normal desktops in the house.  I fired up the laptop, grabbed my first fleet and hit launch.  Looking at what was in the fleet I thought, oops, I don't want that ship in there.  Without thinking I went up and clicked remove.  Now being on a really slow laptop it takes awhile between hitting launch and the fleet actually launching!  I clicked remove on 2 ships, the fleet launched, and low and behold, the launched fleet had all 5 ships in it, and I had my 2 most powerful ships still sitting in my dock waiting to be put in another fleet.

Thinking it a one off glitch I decided to try again. This time though with some decent fleets for the raid.  I dropped my only 2 BC's into the fleet with 3 SW's.  I launched fleet 1, moved my mouse around and fast as possible and was able to remove 3 of the 5 ships.  Put them in fleet 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the end and started hitting the raid fleets with fleets 1-4.  They all died and I sent fleet 5 back in.  My 2 BC's which were in all 5 fleets came out unscathed.

One funny piece in this, was if you clicked on fleet 1 in the dock, while it was out, at sea, any "ghost" ships were blank.  So Fleet 1 had the first 3 slots as blank and only 2 ships in #4 and #5 slots.  Made the screen shots much more useful!

After proving I could do it, I reported the issue to kixeye and they of course wanted more info as this was a new glitch to them.  I supplied screenshots and was told thanks and watch the forums for a fix.  I understand they don't want to follow back up with everyone, but watch the forums?  Have they really ever watched their forums from a users perspective. 

My suggested fix was since every ship has a unique ID for the player, when you hit launch, just check to see if that ID is already on the map, and if so throw an error about fleet creation.  This would take more programming on their part than I think they were willing to do and so the problem was still there in the next raid and the next.  Today though it is fixed and in a little different way than I would have thought.

Their fix.  When you click the launch button, if the remove button is clicked, the launch process stops.  A fairly efficient fix!  My concern though is, I'm pretty sure I could write a program to launch a fleet over and over in a different manner than what I found here and based on forum posts, there must have been other ghosting options as ppl are saying they still work.

One thing I am bummed about is that when I asked for a reward on this, as it is now fixed, and according to what I was told at the time, it wasn't one they were aware of, I was told this isn't something they can compensate for.  It really defeats the purpose of me going out of my way to report a glitch to them that can be greatly abused, if their is no incentive at all to me.

Oh well, so is life.  Nice to see they fixed it, but I was hoping to use it to win that new ship this weekend!  :)

I did try this glitch on a fast computer and it didn't work, it only worked on my ancient laptop due to the slowness in which the game launched a fleet and the time it stayed on that screen before going to their loading screen.

With that said, and the number of ghosting issues, there has to be quite a few other known ways to do this also!

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Flak guns for ships

We all knew it was coming sooner or later.  Later may finally be here.....


Not sure when it will show up but there is plans for the following:
  • Flak Gun A (Quota 1)
  • Flak Gun B (Quota 2)
  • Flak Gun C (Quota 3)
Unknown specs or when they will show up for sure, but they are sitting out there and will be coming sooner or later!  Will it be this weekend?


Saturday, November 10, 2012

prizes for the next raid?

I can't believe they are doing another raid already....  I may have got 2 boats built from the last raid, oh wait, that is the idea, get the coiners to coin.  Anyway, here may be some info for the upcoming raid, or may just be things sitting out there for the future that haven't been implemented yet (or that I just missed so far)

1.  Juggernaught, seen here may be the top prize in this next raid.  Just my guess. 





Looks like 4 Weapon slots.

2.  Last time we got the Halo Missile, there appears to be a Halo Warhead now also.

3.  I know I have Compound Panels A-D, not sure if E was an option in a past one or not, but I see them out there also.  I assume they are 33% protection for your turrets vs the 28% of D's.

4.  There are also a number of the Zynthonite Armor that I haven't seen previously, but they may be available as Blueprints and not raid items, here is the list of ones I don't currently have pieces of:
  • Zynthonite Armor D2-T
  • Zynthonite Armor D4-N
  • Zynthonite Armor D4-T
  • Zynthonite Armor D4-E
  • Zynthonite Armor D4-X
  • Zynthonite Armor D2-HP
  • Zynthonite Armor D3-HP
  • Zynthonite Armor D4-HP

5.  I assume this is the main platform we'll be going against this time (or protecting or whatever they are doing, I didn't check out the beta or play with them last time):



Wyrm Commander:
Weapons: 4
Tactical: 2







And I think that is all the wisdom I can impart at this time.  If anything changes I'll post.