Welcome to this week's patch notes!
--added fleet carriers
Fleet carriers bring the number of ship classes to eight I believe, not counting stations. They bring a couple unique mechanics to the table that have the bonus of giving frigates a purpose beyond being just corvettes but stronger. They are weaponless like Oilers, but give you some interesting new gameplay options. FCs are, in the lore, a middle-war new technological development. Stealth tech has finally advanced to where teams of drones in stealthy shuttles can sit, waiting, in a zone to ambush an enemy fleet, using over-pressure cold gas thrusters to close in fast when an enemy fleet is within range.
There are three different types of attacks a fleet carrier can launch: beam rifle mechs, railgun mechs, and then a faction specific one. For the UN-SOLEXFOR, it's a megaton interdiction team; any megaton missiles get fired at your fleet and it's between them and you, they'll destroy them. For the MCVCM, using their more advanced technology, theirs can cook off the megaton warheads in enemy vessels, neutralizing their ability to carry out megaton strikes.
These play out on a specific screen where you choose the approach or detection methods, depending on if you're attacking or being attacked, and then see the result. (No battle animations for this one, just an interface. Couldn't figure out a realistic and reasonable way of displaying it. Maybe I'll do stock image pop-ups in addition to the text result display. Let me know your ideas!)
Further, as another anti-deathball mechanic, all mech assault shuttle attacks have a chance to split larger enemy fleets.
Frigates have a bonus to detection against fleet carrier mech assaults, reducing their efficacy.
In battle, fleet carriers have little mechs flying around gundam style instead of PDC cannons! Fun!
Also, I'm very happy with the fleet carrier designs themselves. I really wanted to do unique ship designs for the carriers, and the UN-SOLEXFOR design, with the curving external launcher, is something I've never seen any other ship have. You may think it looks like an out of place slip-n-slide, and well, fair!
--buffed UN ground unit health to 15 across the board
--nerfed robot dog again, 2 moves instead of 2 attacks
--Gave the UN more ground units for missions 2 and 3
--Orbital strikes can now be used after 9 turns instead of 13
--fixed a bug where enemy units were getting to attack more than they should
--fixed an edge case bug preventing mission 2 from being unlocked
--fixed units being researched broken
--fixed unit buy and ship buy cancel not actually cancelling
--fixed crash where controller object was trying to clean up ground units... while in space...
(To clarify, these patch notes just reflect what's in this specific update; that is to say, I'm not sure all the other patches show up on the store or community page; rest assured I've been updating the game frequently if those don't show up anywhere and you don't own the game.)
In other news, work continues on the Mars campaign, and I'm also working on spin station battles. At least one Mars campaign mission will feature this, but I'm currently contemplating having these auto-generate in the systems as Gaia stations so you can land troops and have a fun ole ground battle on them. Regardless, building the tech to make battlefields on top of objects like this will let me do other fun level designs too. Did anybody watch Tartakovsky's the Clone Wars? I've always loved that, and the "PREPARE TO BOARD" bit was awesome. I know ship boarding is completely nonsensical, but I'm thinking a campaign mission could have it for funsies somehow.
And big, big thanks to deeweechaz, fleetgothic, lise hohenstein, and RedOneAlpha for their dedicated bug fixing and feedback. The game would still belong in a flea market trashcan like it did at launch without these folks giving me the information I needed to make the game better. I'll figure out how to properly reward you guys/gals somewhere along the line.
And if you hate the fleet carriers, you can specifically blame fleetgothic for discussing them with me until I saw a viable path forward for their inclusion that was balanced between Rule of Cool and "okay that's plausible"-realism. :)
That's all for now! Thanks for reading.