Fun Changes 12/24/12

Whilst things have been quiet on the home front, things have been busy elsewhere-
We've been doing a lot of detailed changes in order to both balance the game more and expand content available to players, notably that of 'superior' weapons which come with a (!) suffix. These weapons are assigned a number of 'points' during generation and these are randomly spent on various stats on the weapon to improve it over a non-superior weapon of the same type. Note that these 'superior' suffixes are not mutually exclusive with existing weapon prefixes so you could find a 'sawn-off m78a1 plasma rifle (!)' or an 'artillery judge-brand pistol (!)' with crazy-high stats and mad damage output.
Here's a list of a portion of the things that have been done:

- Superior weapons now come in six delicious flavors (levels), ranging through cyan, green, blue, purple, yellow and red. Each of these levels have different improvement levels and higher level superiority is exponentially more difficult to acquire in comparison to a lower level.
- Superior weapons now appear in your inventory and on the ground with their suffix correctly shown.
- Superior weapons now generate with more 'points' to spend depending on how high the quality of the weapon is (higher quality means better stats).
- Attacks will now hit bodyparts rather than ambiguously hitting a target somewhere on their body, if they have a body.
- Hackable treasure containers such as those found in pirate bases will now spawn items within a quality range rather than quality 0 which sucked.
- Respawn matrices such as the Kerkove organic regeneration matrix will now display a fun message whenever you respawn at the matrix, thanking you for your patronage/telling you not to die again/etc.
- Civilians bearing a paramedic AI package will now use any medical supplies they are carrying (such as bandages and medicare health injectors) before they use their standard equipment, so they will use any health injectors and top-tier bandages you give them in order to improve their healing abilities.
- The ammo capacity modification of weapons during superior weapon generation has been changed in order to scale with the weapon's standard ammo capacity (weapons with high ammo capacity will gain more, whereas weapons with small ammo capacity will gain less) and weapons with an ammo capacity of 1 will have their superiority 'points' spent in other stats.
- Civilian building construction now works, if you enable civilian building rights then construction sites will appear in the 3x3 section around your sector center (including the center tile) and these construction sites will slowly be completed and then finish regularly.
- Diseases such as spore cough now pay attention to if you're wearing a gas mask or headgear bearing a rebreather module and do not affect people wearing such things.
- Explosives set off inside vehicles will now damage the containing vehicle (frag grenades and such will do little to harm the vehicle, but a pile of proximity charges will make a royal mess of things).
- Sector centers now bear sensors to warn civilians during attacks from vehicles, warning them to take shelter inside the sector center or to man turrets in order to repel the vehicle threat. The civilians manning turrets may also be able to identify the individual controlling the attacking vehicle and attack them if they leave their vehicle.
- Various new consumables are available to players.
- You can now construct tractor beam modules, which can be installed in solar carriers to drag ships inside the integral hangar.
- You can now use drug injectors on both yourself and other people.
- Bandages and injectors now employ a medical skill roll to reduce the duration of their use (the more medical skills you have, the shorter the average time it takes for you to use a bandage or injector on someone).
- NPC factions have received various updates which allow players to operate under them, allow them to perform ground assaults on locations, man turrets and use them to attack, reload vehicle weapons and perform planet travel to inside-a-building/vehicle travel without fault.

There's a bunch of other stuff I'd like to share, but some of it's secret and the rest I'm just too lazy to report B).