Public Changelog
Combat Polish — Enemy Intel, Audit Trail, and Real Weapon Upgrades
You can now see enemy hull and shield stats before combat. Every action is logged for auditing. Weapon upgrades finally affect combat damage.
What changed
Enemy intel before combat. The CombatView screen used to show Hull: ???/??? for raider NPCs — you went into every fight blind. Now the enemy’s current hull, max hull, and shield values are displayed before you commit to an action, color-coded so you can instantly gauge the threat level. The manual ”⚔ Attack” button was also removed from the sector view — combat is auto-triggered when you warp into a hostile sector, so the button was redundant.
Combat audit trail. Two new database tables now record gameplay events. combat_events logs every round of every fight — before and after hull/shield values, damage dealt and taken, credits gained or lost, and the final outcome. player_action_log records moves, trades, repairs, and combat as a general audit trail. These are fire-and-forget inserts that never slow down gameplay, but they give us a persistent record for debugging and dispute resolution going forward.
Weapon upgrades now matter. Player damage in NPC combat was hardcoded at 10 regardless of your ship or upgrades. That TODO comment is gone. Damage is now calculated from your ship class base damage plus weapon upgrade bonuses:
| Class | Base | Mk I | Mk II | Mk III |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Merchant | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 |
| Scout | 8 | 13 | 18 | 23 |
| Interceptor | 12 | 17 | 22 | 27 |
Your Interceptor with Pulse Lasers Mk III now actually hits like one.
Why it changed
The hidden enemy stats made combat feel unfair — you never knew if a raider was battered or fresh. The audit tables were requested for operational reasons (debugging, support, analytics). And the weapon upgrade fix was the most embarrassing // TODO in the codebase — you could spend 18,000 credits on Pulse Lasers Mk III and do the exact same damage as an unupgraded Merchant. Not anymore.
What’s next
Combat’s foundation is solid. The next layer would be multi-round combat state on the client side (the server already persists NPC hull between rounds), faction-based hostility filtering for PvP, and deeper combat mechanics like stances or evasive maneuvers. Those are further out — for now, the fights are honest and the numbers are real.