Land Battles Overhaul
The next major update changes land battles from entirely 2D UI based to 3D with land units that can rank up and be built out with modules like ships.
This update is continuing along the lines of trying to improve the things players say are the weakest links in the game. (With the last update being highly requested 3D buildings instead of 2D icons.)
Fresh Start + Final Season
Along with the land battle improvements, this update will ultimately come with a fresh start for the server, which is something it seems at least half the playerbase wants. (And the land units are changed in a way that busts everyone's ground defenses.)
What this means: The game was supposed to be seasonal with really long "seasons", that's why it said "Welcome to Andromeda Season 2" when you login.
The idea was to give everyone a fresh start once things start stagnating (Which could take years), and allow new players to join without being over a year behind.
So basically the next update will be the start of Season 3.
BUT this should* be the final season.
*Barring the off chance of something catastropic happening without a viable backup.
The Beta
A Beta build has been uploaded to Steam Betas on the "testing" branch and a test server seperate from the live server is running for people to do some testing on and kick the tires before release.
The save data on the test server is from the live server a month or so ago, so existing players should have their stuff from then to test with.
The test server may be rebooted to apply the latest changes, so if you are kicked from the server it's probably that.
More Info About Land Battle Changes
Land units and land unit modules can now be build on the production screen.
Once created units are not lost in battle like before, they just need repairs when they die, allowing you to rank them up from combat and equip modules to them, and setup a permanent army.
The defender that holds the planet can build stationary defenses that can fight alongside their defending army that are comparatively cheap with high stats but are fully destroyed when they die.
These stationary defenses completely replace "Planetary Units" that were locked to a planet before.
Other Changes with This Update
Star Movement Freedom:
Starmap level FTL blocking seems a bit overpowered, allowing one person to wall off an entire section of space for themselves. (Which is how it was intended to work)
With the goal of removing stuff that makes it easy for large corporations to snowball, and reduce the need for seasons to level the playing field again, Overclocking FTL disruptors to block starmap travel has been removed.
Since starlanes mostly exist because of overclocked FTL disruptors, starlanes don't have to exist anymore either, meaning you can jump to any star you want like it was originally.
FTLs will continue to fulfill their planet-level role allowing you to make a "Gate" planet with an FTL disruptor on it and put a fleet and army on that planet to defend all the other planets in the system.
Many of the changes made including the land battles overhaul are intended to make PvP viable again like it was in the old days.
Several other changes such as nerfing Citadels a bit already happened last update to make PvP more viable, while giving the defender a large home-turf advantage.
Performance Improvements and Refactoring
This update contains major refactoring to reduce the number of objects in the scene, and asset loading improvements to only load stuff in when it's actually needed to reduce memory use.
Several UI screens such as the production screen have been converted away from being in the scene disabled to only being created when needed, resulting in hundreds fewer inactive objects in the scene.
Lots of optimization tricks have been applied, like merging all the land battle scene rocks into one object.
Land battles are the heaviest performance addition yet, but the game still runs medium/high settings at 40-60 FPS on a Samsung Galaxy Note 8, a phone from 2017, so people on Steam hopefully shouldn't have an issue.