Hi,
I have been busy working on the 1.1 version for the past month. My main objective was to balance/variate the battles. I got feedback that too often the best strategy was to just directly attack the queens with motherships main weapons. So I tried to come up with ideas to counter this. Here are some of the changes I have made:
-Queens separated to two different classes: Supply and Attack. Supply queens don't move. They only spawn supply ships that repair and resupply Attack queens.
-Queen health/strength/shield logic is completely rewritten. Queens have single "strength" value that includes everything. Queens start with MUCH more health than previously. This health is then decreased with each child ship they spawn. Queens also spawn ships faster if they are under attack. These changes should add more complexity to the battle and prevent the "instant win" strategies. So now it's not always good idea to just attack instantly as there is a penalty for attacking and it might make sense to wait for the queen to get weaker before attacking.
- Players max number of destroyers increased from 6 to 7
- Max queen fleet size in Survival game mode increased from 4 to 5
- Max number of large turrets in Survival game mode decreased from 8 to 5
- Ship parts balanced. Missiles are not so OP as before.
- Completely new queen shield logic. Queens can have different types of shields. Shields only block damage from certain weapons. So for example queen can have shield that decreases damage from missiles and lasers but not from artillery.
- In the galaxy map I have made many changes to the gameplay. For example only certain queen strongholds are active at once and send attacking fleets. This number increase when game progresses. Also the resource system that spawns queens affects the queens characteristics. So for example small star systems spawn smaller queen fleets etc.
- Queens in the galaxy map now have a determined target that is shown to player (paths). This allows player to better plan his defenses. Also, Queen fleets now do more damage to Home system.
- Queen strongholds now spawn attacking fleets more often so you have to think about your Home System defense
- Player can now warp three systems per turn. This should encourage expanding your presence in the galaxy.
- Resource Forts now do small damage to occupying queens
- Fixed memory leaks and other bugs
There are plenty of other changes that I have made. I also did major work on the backend that you will not see.
One thing to note is that unfortunately the changes made to gameplay were so big that the new version can't support continuing your old saves! But I have enabled the previous version of the game as "beta" in the Steam options. So if you have game that you want to complete before jumping to the new version you can download the old version that way.
I still have MANY other ideas I would like to implement in Navalia! My next objective is to make more changes to the Galaxy Map that will enable me to allow larger galaxies and more variance to gameplay. Maybe even add/change the game modes.
If you have any feedback or problems just head to the discussion board! The design/programming/testing is all done by me so there might me some things I have missed :D
-Antti
