Hi!
There are some big under-the-hood changes here along with some bug fixes and balance tweaks. These have been tested for a short while in the beta branch and all seems well, so they are going live:
- ENGINE UPGRADE -- This should solve the black screen soft crash that some people were seeing, especially on 970+ cards with 3gb of VRAM. The previous workaround was to use the DX9 launch option, but that should no longer be necessary. Please let us know if it helped!
- DRONE: Imperial drones cannot heal each other
- WEAPONS: +RANGE for allied destroyer artillery
- WEAPONS: +HULL DAMAGE for allied destroyer artillery
- WEAPONS: -SHIELD DAMAGE for allied destroyer artillery
- UNITS: -HULL for allied destroyer
- CHALLENGE MODE: Drones reinforce faster
- LEADERBOARDS: Handled case where Steam is down
- CONTROLS: Only mouse movement will switch to KBAM mode, letting you use the keyboard & simple joystick in tandem
- AUDIO: Normalized all radio chatter, tweaked starting volumes in the options menu
- WEAPONS: Slowed down enemy supercapital artillery
Imperial Destroy Balancing
The destroyers always had a muddy role in the combat encounters, so we're trying to fix that.
Destroyers now act like your own set of archers instead of tanky brawlers. They can engage at +100% of the range, making them short-range snipers, but they do more damage to hull and less to shields. This makes it important for you in your fighters to move ahead and drop shielding on their targets, and also to protect them. Their increased range buys you more time.
They start off somewhat inaccurate at low rank, but at max rank they should be excellent shots.
Next Update
The next major update will be 1.0, and we're shooting for sometime near the middle of September. There will be some small extras in this update that we'll talk about as we get closer to the date.
If fires pop up in the meantime, especially due to some unforeseen engine upgrade complication, they will be addressed.
Thanks for your support!
UPDATE 8.11.2016 @ 9:53 PST
Some users were reporting upside-down VR displays, so we're reverting this build until this is hunted down. Thanks!
UPDATE 8.11.2016 @ 10:22 PST
Looks like the problem has been isolated. We're going to push it to the beta branch and give it a few runs to see if it's good to go.
UPDATE 8.11.2016 @ 11:06 PST
A few intrepid players have verified that the fix is working, so the main branch is being updated with this version. Thanks for your patience!