New Features
July Demo
Polish and bugfixe focus to get ready for the demo. By all accounts we’ve heard, it was a good success.
Massive Economy Overhaul
We’ve had a lot of nagging things we did not like. The playtest feedback helped convince us to pull the trigger on many of those. As you might imagine, this has thrown the whole game into a state of worse balance. We are rapid fixing that, though. It will be sorted out here in the next couple of weeks.
The highlights:
Resource mission rewards are no longer done with crates. They’re awarded as you finish the mission. Moreover, the exact rewards are shown on the Starmap to create another layer of gameplay with player choice.
Extractors are no longer limited by charges. Instead, they cost prisma like everything else you build in the game. This removes frustration about not being able to gather at more than a couple of prisma sites in each mission (at the cost of potentially hanging oneself with poor prisma management).
Crates in missions are now more about extra prisma and in-mission bonuses (heals, buffs for squadrons). Credit, Science, and Flux crates may still drop, but they are more rare.
Post-mission crate gathering is gone. Any resource crates that were uncollected during the mission are automatically granted to the player when the mission is over. This is a huge boon to the game’s pace and fixes the balance issues for players who were not collecting those crates.
Here’s a pic of the zone with their resource rewards showing. This really improves the strategic layer of the game since players can decide which resource areas to go after with more purpose and expectation
Nexus V2
The Nexus is our ship/relic/etc. Inventory. It was overly complex and, in some cases, downright confusing. Players would often accidentally equip a squadron without meaning to. We’ve fixed all that with a streamlined layout. It’s like a dream. It’s really great.
Massive overhaul of Bosses and Boss Meter Techs
All bosses work in Free Play with any faction
All bosses jazzed up with better phases
Bosses have much more unique feel/vibes. Roughly 35 new sets of techs to make that happen.
Giant Relic Pass
We killed some lame relics, added better relics, and jazzed up a bunch more. All told, we hit about 35% of the relic content with the goal of highlighting more gameplay areas, helping to differentiate runs, and drastically improving synergy potential. The new starting squadron relics (relics that buff whatever squadron is in the starting slot) are particularly exciting and work very well to make each run feel different than the last.
Drones V3
Refactored drone design to inherent vs. bonus drones. Carriers come with inherent drones. Most everything else is bonus drones. Droneries add bonus drones (on top of inherent drones). Rebalanced whole drone economy (Drone stats, Dronery stats/costs, Incubator colony stats/costs/techs).
Boss Oserath (Boss 5)
Administer Oserath is playable in story and free play modes complete with a unique boss model and behavior.
CPAI can build Droneries and Passages
They dynamically buff the AI’s play which means the player can affect things by destroying them (like shield generators when the AI is Cobalt)
Iteration
Loads more icons (relics, enhancements, colony techs). Still loads to go.
Many perf improvements. More to go.
Fixed big hitch at end of missions
More pooling (projectiles, impact FX)
Pathing/movement performance improvements
LOS perf improvements
Mine perf improvements
Many fixes for across-the-board slowdowns
Swizzled bosses so that all the bosses can work in Free Play mode with any faction
Computer Player AI changes with base spawning to support new boss behavior
Savegame file size reduction
Acid bubble visual improvements
We only play the reinforce train sound for selected squadrons
String iteration to fix/unask plurality issues
More teaching (ships heal between missions, forward spawn teaching, teaching objective to build a warp conduit colony)
Pass on all maps for general improvements
Various in-mission art improvements
Health crates and icons
Improvements to the 4th sector environments
Acid bubble improvements
Iteration on impact FX, particularly to make them scale for fancier relics
UI improvements
Discovery tree can be zoomed out all the way
Font improvements
Start of new UX flows around end of mission rewards and bounties
Corrupted faction name back in the sector map UI
Fixed several bad word wrapping instances across the UI
Convert more strings to have embeds so we have less issues with rebalancing and loc
Construction ability costs now show everywhere you’d expect them to
Spent extractors convert to a different minimap icon
Number-based content
Achievements (19)
Missions (3)
Encounters (5)
Enhancements (-3 net, roughly 20 changed/improved)
Relics (20 new, roughly 40 changed/improved)
Sector backgrounds (1)
Bosses (1)
Discoveries (3)
Key Balance Changes
Chapters 1 and 2 are easier
Boss Ciron is easier
Notably OP things knocked down (launchers, shredders, stingers, acid bubbles)
Single ship upgrade option in the upgrade encounters now costs Science
Corrupted energy nodes back to buffing bosses
Mel’s black market encounters can happen more often
Onslaught missions can only happen once per sector
Runs Completed achievements changed to Runs Won to avoid cheesing
Armory colony down to 1 science with a few cheaper tier 1 techs
Resource Center colony requires extractor unlock
Mass Repair mothership ability is purchaseable in Starbase tier 1
Upgrade slot machine option averages risked rarity with a change at +1 or +2 rarity rewards
More relic encounters in Chapters 1 and 2
Enemy tanks train slower
25% resource burn when collectors (extractors or assimilators) are destroyed is turned off
Enemy Agents cannot start within 3 hexes of the player
Key Bugfixes
Fixed various achievement tracking bugs
Fixed motherships not getting updated stats in the Nexus after colony tech purchases
Fixed upgraded ships getting their enhancements re-applied (making them OP)
Fixed defense drones and fields being attackable
Fixed bug where first convo step was needlessly delayed
Motherships and stations show drone details
Fixed issue where too many acid bubbles could spawn per squadron
Fixed issue where AI could get stuck and not build things
Tiny Stun ability no longer stuns everything
Fixed stunned Shredders doing damage and making noise like they are doing damage
Death Bloom projectiles home again
Fixed several embeds not working
Fixed a few techs/relics not showing the correct affected units
Fixed bad logic in CPAI that was causing them to not build the primary focus units in the right quantity
Gather missions require an extractor ability to be equipped on the mothership
Default attack relic no longer buffs all attacks
Fixed bug where the mystery crates were not revealing correctly when the mission started
Fixed some bugs where conflicting enhancements could get put on the same ships
Fixed bug where the fail message for the Warp Conduit limit was not showing up on the UI in the colony build menu
Several crash fixes
Lots of fixes to push things out to later acts and restrict things with ordering so players don’t get content (boons, stories) before they are meant to
Loads of map-specific fixes and generation improvements
Loads of string bugfixes
Fixed some unlocalized pieces of the game discovered by the playtest