Patch 0.8.1.0 ( Tuesday December 22th 2020 )
After we released the ship upgrades and custom loadouts patch a few days ago, we fixed a number of issues (some of which are pretty important) and added a polish pass over the loadouts interface. We also addressed some of the most urgent balance issues related to the two new weapons, the Halcyon and the Plasma Cutter.
General and gameplay
- Introduced carrier spawns (compatible with other capital ships too) and updated station layouts to allow carriers to spawn at docking bays that have enough room for a carrier. Carriers will no longer spawn in space far away from stations. Note: we introduced a new icon to represent the carrier spawn. It currently uses the 'L'arge character, like other capital ships. In a future patch we'll replace it with a dedicated 'C'arrier icon
- Starmap list now takes compatible spawns into account when displaying "deployable" vs "non-deployable" hints and icons. This means that if you're an interceptor trying to deploy at a base where all fighter hangars are destroyed but corvette bays are still intact, the list will now show "deployable" instead of preventing you from being able to deploy there
- Reduced amount of chaffs on Interceptor to 10. This should make the chaff upgrade more interesting
- Added a new upgrade: Efficient Booster. This upgrade reduces the booster's energy consumption by -30% at the expense of a small piece of the shield's recharge rate (-15%)
- Doubled the amount of hitpoints on MK5 Flak canons, as they were too easily damaged in combat
- Reduced Halcyon shot speed, range and damage. It still has slightly more DPS than gimbaled machine guns, but you'll need good accuracy to fully exploit it
- Reduced range and damage on the Plasma Cutter (although less than the Halcyon nerf). Shot speed is unchanged
- Reduced spread on Halcyon and Plasma Cutter, making them more accurate at larger distances
- Reduces heat (Halcyon) and heat+energy consumption (Plasma Cutter) to allow firing them for a longer time
- Fixed some Halcon and Plasma cutter settings which made their converging mode useless. The new settings should make it more easy to hit a target
Bug fixes
- Fixed HUD icons being messed up at "low-quality" texture level
- Fixed a bug with the deploy panel that didn't refresh the ship screen's upgrades/components panel after changing the selected deployment loadout
- Fixed a propulsion issue caused by introducing a ramp-up factor at very low speeds. This made ships unable to take-off from planets when they were at zero/very low speeds
- Fixed custom loadout's automatic weapon groups being messed / mixed up together sometimes (or even having missing weapons..). Weapons are still assigned to groups automatically, but we'll provide a weapons configuration screen in a future patch
Improvements and UI tweaks
- "Not enough credits" flashing text on the ship screen was moved at the top of the screen instead of occluding the center; loadout credits text is now smaller to fit on a single line for large credits values..
- Selecting a specific component's category in the ship's loadout panel will now filter hardpoints that match this category in the 3D viewport
- Changed weapons hardpoints to a diamond shape (the hexagon was too close to a circle and be confusing)
- Weapon's details info panel text is now colored the same as the weapon card in the upgrades panel
- Fixed some incorrect weapon details that appeared in the info panel, like for missile/torpedo launchers
- Added locking range information for missile/torpedo launchers in the info panel
- Duplicating a loadout will now automatically pop up the rename window
- Deleting a loadout will now pop up a confirmation window to avoid doing it accidentally
- Icon tweaks (ex.: info panel's dots are now smaller; added an up/down icon to match whether an attribute improves or hurts a ship's attribute)
Misc
- added final version of the new musical tracks with smoother transitions
- added a new audio effect for the Plasma Cutter weapon