The Research, alongside The League and The Challenges, make up the new progression system we've been working on to introduce to the game. BattleTabs has always been pretty light on progression, and we wanted to add a progression system that's comparable to some of our favourite mobile F2P games so that there's another element to enjoy from the game - the sense of growth and advancing in the game.

As we previously mentioned, we are releasing these features one at a time so that we can get feedback sooner and iterate on them. Thanks everyone for being patient with us while we continue to work on the new progression systems. There has been a number of discussions on Discord, and we've also been discussing this yesterday and today. I'd like to provide more information regarding some of the changes:

Ships and Blueprints

To provide some context, let me start by explaining how the ship systems used to work, and what's changed.

When ships and fleets were first introduced to the game, there was no concept of ship ownership or unlocking individual ships. The game was based around pre-designed fleets, which could be easily unlocked by playing a few matches. The goal was to add more variety to the previous design by introducing abilities into the game. There was very little progression other than a basic scoring system (which is still in place today).

Very quickly, the community wanted the ability to create custom fleets. It's such a popular suggestion that we prioritised adding this feature to the game and released it a few months later. This is when the concept of individual ships are introduced into the game. However, there was no ownership of ships. We essentially retrofitted this system on top of the previous, fleet-based system, and the way ship access was granted were based on multiple rules to check if a player has access to it. This logic was run every time a battle is starting, which was prone to bugs.

When Season 1 was released a year later, we had added a new system to handle ships so that we can build on top of the popularity of custom fleets. This is when Blueprints were introduced. All season 1 ships were on this new system with proper blueprints associated with the ships, and the ability to rent or purchase them. Unlocking a ship = getting a blueprint of that ship.

However, we never got to apply the new blueprint system to ships released before Season 1, which meant we had two separate systems that managed access to ships, and this wasn't ideal for adding new content, or managing how the game progresses.

With the new research update, all non-starting ships are finally on the new blueprint system, where by an unlock gives you the blueprint of the ship.

We have given active players who had unlocked ships from preset fleets the blueprints for those ships. If you don't have these ship blueprints, please let me know and we'll look into it.

If you have ever spent any gems to acquire ships, you should still have the ships. (let me know if you don't and we'll look into it)

Note that we are still discussing and are in the transitioning phase, and are considering additional benefits for active players. Welcome any feedback and comments! Let us know on Discord in the Suggestions channel.

Research Points

Research points are earned primarily from levelling up from the League. This isn't super obvious right now but will be when the new UI is added to the game.

Playing matches will also grant you some research points if you are stuck on the League ladder.

Winning best of 3 matches will also grant you Research Points (not yet added to the game but in the design)

Fleet Slots

We are increasing the free fleet slots for non-Battle Club players to 3 (unlocked through research), and Battle Club will still give you extra slots. However this change is not live yet, this will be launched with a new UI update that's still in the works.

Gold and Gems

There are various places for you to earn gold and gems - The Research Tree, and also playing battles. This isn't super obvious at the moment but should be a lot more easy to see with the new UI that's coming.

The Research tree, The League, and the upcoming Challenges all add complexity to the economy of the game, and we need the amounts to be of a larger number to avoid having to work with fractions (decimal numbers). Therefore, we are in the process of updating the rewards and cost of things in the game. This is an on-going process and we are going to iterate on this a few more times in the coming weeks.

Battle Club

Existing Battle Club members should have gotten the blueprints for the current Battle Club ships since yesterday. If you haven't, please contact us. We know there is a bug somewhere where this isn't applied to everyone.

We are working on some new benefits to Battle Club members. The second research will allow BC members to advance on the research tree almost twice as fast, and BC members will continue to get discounts on items in the shop. We want to come up with more interesting benefits too so let me know if you have any other suggestions!