Major Lines
Major lines represent major, more generalized shipping lanes rather than individual opportunities. These do not require the matching of a delivery source and a destination. Instead once you have connected both economic centers together with your own company's lines you will receive a major increase in profits. Typically this will be a combination of standard declining profits and a lower amount of permanent profits.
New Terrain Types
There are now nebulae and rough nebulae. These are expensive to build on and more colorful than asteroids.
Scenario #5 - The Cradle
The Cradle is a much larger map and a more open scenario than the previously created ones. It also implements the new major lines feature. Profits will be tighter as local traditional shipping is robust and local nebulae make construction more difficult. The scenario's goals are centered around major lines.
Difficulty Rebalance
The difficulty difference between hard and painful was enormous. Balancing maps to make painful onerous but still doable would sometimes make hard easier than it should have been while normal was quite simple. Though this was acceptable on the earlier scenarios as they were intended for learning this caused problems in later ones. This was especially an issue when developing The Cradle.
The difficulty increase was partially handled by a penalty to the initial profits of all deliveries made. This lead to massive differences between early game profits but once a snowball was established there was no meaningful difference. The issue was that this penalty ended up reducing as longer, more profitable deliveries were being made. Scenarios have been rebalanced in some minor ways while hard and painful difficulties now have some penalties to the per lane bonus amount rather than the initial delivery. Both hard and painful have a -500 penalty to the initial profit. Hard now has a -100 penalty to the profit from each linked used while painful has a -200 each. This will ease the difficulty applied to the early game while maintaining penalties as the game progresses.
Further rebalancing will be done in the future.
The Dark Pass Difficulty Fix
Testing showed that completing a diamond victory on The Dark Pass on painful difficulty was typically impossible. While you could potentially get lucky the intent was never to rely on pure luck. The amount of profits available from the get go was slightly increased while the diamond victory condition was modified. You must now complete 6 purple deliveries in 13 turns instead of 5 in 12. The bond limit is unchanged.
Jump Lane Priority Fix
Sometimes if multiple companies owned jump lanes between two specific economic centers the delivering company's lane would not be used. Generally speaking when choosing the next economic center during a delivery the delivering company should use their own lane when possible. This now works properly.
AI Improvements
The AI routines were not always making the best delivery they possibly could when a good enough delivery was available. This has been fixed. The AI also has a new subroutine where certain companies will make any possible delivery even if it makes zero credits in profit so long as at least half of the lanes that would be used belong to the acting company. Lastly some minor changes were made to the Seek Grants action. Now if the AI company is in debt its debt is erased. This is to prevent an AI company from being trapped in a debt spiral.
For clarification Seek Grants is a special AI action that serves two purposes. First is to give the AI something that it can always do as the AI companies have a hard limit on how many bonds they will issue. Second is to program some companies to perform fewer useful actions to slow down their progress when a sleepier, less aggressive AI company is desired. This is meant to be the least useful possible action that AI companies should do uncommonly unless explicitly programmed to do so. Now this also serves to prevent AI companies from ending up in debt spirals where they do nothing instead of gobbling up opportunities.
Further AI improvements are coming.
Random Incorrect Highlights Fix
Sometimes a random delivery source pip would be incorrectly highlighted which would persist for a while. This has been fixed.
AI Action Delay Setting
The amount of time the message displayed for each AI company action may be changed in the setting's menu.
Currently In the Works
Scenario #6. This will be a rough terrain scenario in a partially developed sector. Many economic centers start with neither sources nor destinations.
Terrain graphics improvements.
New AI actions and a new AI company.
AI improvements.
Economic fluctuation and scenario events.
Achievements.
More difficulty rebalancing.
