Thank you for a great first day of battles, and for the extremely helpful feedback you've been sending us on Discord! We are happy so many of you have seen the potential of BATTLESHIP APOLLO, and we can't wait to show you how the game will become better because of your help.
We will be aiming for weekly updates, and will be posting the release notes here. We'll try our best to tell you not only what changed, but why it changed. The goal is to help you understand design intent, so you can better see if what you are experiencing in the game is compatible with that intent. Again, your feedback is critical to this process - if you haven't already, please join us on the Discord server.
RELEASE NOTES (Tuesday, February 23 2021)
- For levels with respawn, all enemy fighters and Battleships within the respawn sector at the moment of the respawn are instantly destroyed
WHY: Especially in Sector Capture, players could get stuck getting destroyed by an enemy army that has entered their respawn sector. We are aware that additional respawn protection may be needed even after this change. With respawn sectors now clearly marked, this also adds an additional tactical element to the map: avoid moving through enemy spawn sectors when possible.
- Influence is now awarded even for loss in very early game
WHY: Influence serves a very different need at the beginning of the game, and should be abundant for players to progress and earn confidence.
- Matchmaking change: When using a team mate, the highest zone between you and your teammate is used for matchmaking
WHY: Generally, nobody should come up against higher zone modules. We are choosing to allow teammates from different zones for now, but the lower zone teammate will need to understand that they may come up against higher zone modules because of their teammate. This should fix the bigger problem where someone from a lower zone could match an enemy team that has a player on a higher zone.
- Matchmaking change: On team modes, 3 human players will now be split between 2 games.
WHY: This is a temporary measure until AI ships can get better at playing the team modes. Currently being put in the same team as an AI against two human players was a big disadvantage.
- Matchmaking change: For Zone 1 only, you will never encounter a different Battleship than yours.
WHY: A big distraction during Zone 1 that causes a lot of players to quit is matching an enemy with APOLLO when they haven't unlocked it themselves. We still aim to make Artemis able to go head to head with bigger Battleships, but even when we accomplish that, Zone 1 is not the place for that confrontation.
- BOMBER: blast range slightly increased, fire rate increased, damage per hit lowered (same DPS)
WHY: Bomber needs to be better against swarms of fireflies, including poorly placed stealth fireflies. Still, it should still be possible for the Bomber to get overrun by very big firefly armies. This is a delicate balance that we'll keep working on.
- STEALTH FIREFLY : Reduce HP to match regular firefly. Reduce deploy cost to 20
WHY: Stealth firefly was designed to be a key cheap counter to many expensive modules that look overpowered at first glance. At the previous price it wasn't cheap enough.
- ARTEMIS: Motion shield protection significantly increased
WHY: The initial values were too small for players to notice Artemis' greatest strength
- TITAN: spawn time doubled to 8 seconds
WHY: To give defending players more time to counter this very powerful ship, especially when it is launched close to their Battleship. We are looking into additional ways to either inform an enemy player has TITAN, or prevent it from getting launched too close to other Battleships. We are also in the process of implementing additional weapon charge delay and warning before TITAN fires (this will possibly apply to other fighters too, including Colossus)
- Bug fixes and interfact improvements, including fixing progress for the "win combat with teammate" objective.