Woo thought the time was right to announce this, so I'll nip in and do it.
Basically the whole format of Inferno is changing.
Virtually everything on the statistical side of things is going to be torn up and casually discarded in favour of a clearly defined, strict specification to be applied to our assets.
In other words, we're gutting the ships and weapons TBLs and going to make things a lot cooler.
You'll be seeing new innovative weapons (with a bit of help and bit of hope from the SCP) and far more specialisation. There will still be general purpose stuff that's good in a jack-of-all-trades way, but using the specialised equipment will be balanced to pay dividends in effectiveness. I don't want to give away too much at this stage, partially because I want you fans to be surprised and mostly because we haven't put most of our ideas into practise yet, but the list of cool new stuff includes fighterbeams, hypervelocity missiles, multi-stage cluster missiles and implosion bombs.
As for the ships, we're giving each class of fighter, bomber, non-combatant and warship its own new set of statistics that will set them apart much more clearly. Cruisers, for example, will be predominantly anti-fighter and have the most advanced point defense armaments. Corvettes, in contrast, will focus more on supporting attacks with their anti-subsystem, disruption and dispersion weapons. There will be much larger performance gaps between light and heavy fighters, and bombers will be suitably balanced so as not to be able to go one-on-one with most of them. Anti-warship destroyers will be able to smack down any cruiser or covette without much effort, but will be virtually helpless against heavy bombers.
As things stand right now this will undoubtedly cause compatibility problems with R1. We may re-release the first chapter's missions to take advantage of the new order of things, but our priority now is designing chapter 2 from scratch. More to come...
