Hey people, it has been a while!
I have been playing this game for a while now and I've saw some issues, so I got to fixing them. For this update specifically, I've set a rule for myself: "No new content, thats for 1.5!". Well, I've bent that rule as much as I could to introduce some things that I really thought the game was needing. Have fun!
Big Changes
Experience System reworked
Level is no longer capped at ~1600 due to floating point arithmetic
Experience multipliers now apply to everything, including now passive experience and experience from supply drop.
Several upgrades related to experience were modified, see more in balance changes.
Lair Sealing
It is now possible to seal boss lairs, so that they won't spawn bosses anymore.
When sealing the lair, several buildings will be built around the lair, if they're destroyed the seal will be broken.
It takes 15 seconds to seal the lair for the first time, a time which increases with every breach
You can always break the seal with a Nuke or Armageddon strike.
Additions
Added a small surprise for those who value drift a lot
Added an equipment that lets you ban upgrades
Reworks
Machine Learning
Now applies to all sources of damage, including active abilities
Now a yellow upgrade
Scaling increased from 0.25% to 1%
Death Mark
Now has a base damage and a percentage from current HP damage
No longer has diminishing damage, instead, has a fixed duration
No longer stacks
Now affects bosses
Death Spark
Greatly simplified
Now when a kill happens, it recharges barreirs in radius
Pandora's Box
All existing attack patterns rewritten
Now has 11 attack patterns
Starts with 3 attack patterns unlocked, unlocks more powerful ones after getting more of the upgrade
Balance Changes
Deep analysis scaling heavily reduced
Supply drop experience is always a certain percentage of your current level
Productivity Modules now slightly increases how much EXP is needed to level up
Heavily increased how many enemies are needed for extermination missions
Money acquired by forfeiting upgrades is no longer tied directly to the exp needed to level up
Number of rerolls granted by reroll equipment reduced. Reroll charges slowly replenish based on your level.
Greatly reduced how many lava balls are needed to drain lava oceans
Greatly reduced wyvern's HP and damage
Increased overall enemy level, their HP and damage was downscalled to remain the same
Added caps to the following upgrades, since they were known for creating issues at higher numbers:
Extended territory
Bullet Buffer
Overclock
Armageddon
Special Upgrade "Slow but Steady" now only applies attack speed multiplier as damage to buildings, level based damage multiplier is still aplied to every source
Reduced how much bigger explosived and primed shot increases your AoEs
QoL Changes
In-world upgrade notifications now have a cooldown
In-world upgrade notifications now don't show up if they aren't within view
Value Drift and Nuke animations are no longer tied to game time, this should make it still while the game is paused and/or menus are open
Value Drift animations are shorter, to compensate for the fact that the speed menu doesn't work on them anymore
Value Drift animations get 20% shorter with every value drift
Hex shards now still render in the map view
Hex shards grow with zoom out so that they are easier to spot
Boss lair will no longer attempt to spawn a boss if a boss is alive or a hex shard is on the map
It is no longer possible to build within a boss lair
Boss lair fissures are now always visible through the ocean, regardless of view mode
Special upgrade selections such as ability replacement and clone factories will now have a slightly different background
When attempting to build, there is now a message on failure containing details of why it failed
Fixes
Fixed Earthquake tower's attack being invisible
Fixed Earthquake tower's visual being weird when the player has bullet buffer
Fixed Frenzy's damage increase being 10 times stronger than the tooltip suggested
Fixed hex shard on top of nuclear crater not being clickable
Fixed selected active ability going on cooldown when another active ability gets autocasted
Fixed some active abilities being autocast on mouse position when there are no enemies around
Fixed multitile buildings not properly updating buildings around them
Fixed multitile buildings destroying themselves on update
Fixed multitile buildings not updating their visuals fluidly
Fixed failing to build halting all your building capabilities for 2 seconds
Fixed prodmod and charged trigger being always available despite them having clear unlock conditions
Fix bug where regions of yunuus would not render properly
Optimizations
HEAVILY improved unusual lubricant for active abilities with big radius.
Changed the code for checking AoE, should speed up drastically every AoE bigger than 1 tile
Reduced the drawing time of map objects in regular view
Added several visual-only objects to the particle cap