This patch comes with a large number of changes.
1. You can now search for cards by name in the Encyclopaedia
2. There is now a run history. Only new runs on the new patch will be recorded.
3. There are many balance changes.
4. The "+?" effect has been renamed to "Mystery".
Here are the most significant balance/gameplay changes. There are also a number of small tweaks to numbers which are not listed here. The overall goal is to allow for a large variety of strategies, encourage fun combos, and to have the most powerful combos be rare or difficult to pull off.
Nerfs:
- "Booster" will no longer give energy.
- "Polish" has been capped to giving at most 50 damage. The damage cap increases by +5 with Mystery.
- Mystery will no longer give additional repetitions to satellites' attacks, unless the attack already repeats multiple times. (This is now the same behaviour as for regular attack cards)
- Superb Mystery will now give +3 Mystery instead of +4.
Buffs:
- Some card effects which interact with energy (such as the 'set energy' of drone swarm) will now interact with Mystery.
- Ablaze has a couple of new cards, including a pretty good healing card.
- Frozen no longer reduces by 1 per turn, and the amount of shields given by Melting has increased by +1 per tick.
- Mystery can now reduce the amount of burning you apply to yourself.
- The probability of finding a "Combine" from high threat levels has been halved. This means you will be finding more upgrade/insert rewards. The probability of finding Tech has also been slightly reduced.
- Enemies which had a limit on how much damage they can take per attack, have had that limit increased.
- Difficulty 6, which increases enemy attack strength, will now only increase projectile damage and not projectile count. This should make the gap between 5 and 6 a little bit smaller.
Prioritised future plans:
- I want to improve the UI more. For that purpose, I'm thinking that I might need to overhaul the starmap.
- More enemy types are in the works. Ideally I want to have many enough of them so that there are specific challenges at specific points in the run, instead of enemy encounters being mostly random.
- I'd like to create some way of collecting statistics from users (opt-in), so that the game's balance can be better understood.