Difficulty Changes
From watching some closed beta games it became clear that jump between tutorial and "easy" mode was MASSIVE. To provide a smoother ramp for new players we now have 4 difficulties.
- Beginner (much smaller map than easy)
- Normal (same as old easy)
- Hard (same as old normal)
- Insane (unchanged)
New Content
As promised we're adding a bunch of new augments this patch. We will likely add even more before release just to provide enough variety between games augment-wise.
- Charged Vegetation - Buildings that you construct on grass are remote.
- Precarious Symbiosis - After a storm, grass tiles with a structure on them convert all adjacent tiles to grass. At the end of every turn all unoccupied grass tiles convert to sand.
- Reactive Lava - This augment has been reworked completely and added back into the game. Lava tiles hit by an explosion then also explode all tiles in radius 1. In a previous patch we made dynamite and timed explosives valid on lava to further interact with this.
- Abrupt Transformation - All relics on the map randomly transform into new ones.
Balance
- Mitigation Module - no longer has its own shield but instead converts the tile it was placed on to grass.
- Irrigation Pump - was very underpowered and we didn't like the fact that it was being removed after placement to provide more space for grassed buildings. Now has +1 water storage and +1 energy storage effectively making it a hybrid econ/defense building
- Solar Mirror - same as above. Now provide +1 energy per turn effectively making it a hybrid econ/defense building
- Core Mine - core mine has consistently overperformed compared to all other deployments. The wasteland generation isn't enough to offset its absurd +2 free metal. Metal income per turn has been reduced to +1. All other behaviour remains unchanged
Misc
- Trying out new validity list tooltip in a few places. When you inspect a tile now you'll be able to hover this to see a list of all buildings you own that can go on this tile.
- New stat in post-game tracking % of map converted to grass
- Lots more tutorial changes (not going to list them all)