Greetings Community!
We are bringing to you a new patch today and it is all about game rebalance. This is only our first step in the process, so we keep waiting for your feedback and suggestions after trying it. So, without further delay, next are the details for the 2.96.2 patch:
Please note you need to join the game's test branch to play this patch. You can find here instructions about how to access it.
Changes to market
We have made major changes to market in order to make it more interesting and to start to approach the survival factor:
• The number of available items have been greatly reduced.
• Your colony's starting money has been reduced, The final amount will depend on your difficulty level chosen.
• Your colony's relationship with Corporations will determine the available items for sale at their respective markets.
Very bad Relation <10: Will close its market for you.
Bad Relation <40: You can't trade influence with them.
Neutral Relation <75: Will sell you only the basic materials.
Good Relation >75: Will sell you Corp's security boxes.
Very good Relation >90: Will sell you Corp's core-security boxes.
*The corporation you have affinity with, will sell you an additional object in the market.
Check the wiki for more info: http://en-wiki.projectaura.com/Market#Available_Items
Changes to Diplomacy
Corporation buildings built in your colony will have a negative effect on your relations with their rival Corporation only if you have the rival's diplomacy tech developed E.g.:
An Eco Corp building will sub 1 reputation point with the Neo Industrial Corp (Eco's rival) only if you have Neo Industrial's diplomacy tech developed.
Monuments become highest tier buildings and now they have only a positive effect on reputation. (+0.1 Reputation daily) Effect which you can increase by improving your relationship technology.
Colonists' compatible profiles
Any work position has an ideal profile to be developed with. This way, Farmer profile will be ideal to work in the Greenhouse; The Heavy Operators will be ideal for the Electro Refinery, etc.
A worker in an ideal position earns a morale bonus daily but, on the other hand, if the place is inappropriate he will receive a morale penalty. However, there is also the compatible profile, where the colonist will receive neither bonus nor malus.
The profile compatibility table has been updated to:
Versatile: Compatible with any profile.
Artisan: Operator.
Recycler: Technician.
Programmer: Researcher.
This way next profiles have no other compatible one but versatile:
Director.
Farmer.
Medic.
Pilot.
Heavy Operator.
* Note versatile profile can go in any position being always compatible.
* For this patch we have updated again the Resource Scheme Guide, which now includes also information about the ideal profile for each work position.
Changes to construction materials
• We have reorganized buildings' tiers, with the goal to make the game play more fluent.
• The plastics quality required by buildings in Tier 1 has been reduced from plastic prefab modules (craftable in the Prefab Factory) to polymers (craftable in the Plastic Factory).
• All the construction materials for buildings have increased their cost in ingots.
*We will update wiki ASAP with detailed information about building tiers.
More Balancing
• Innovation points generation has been increased on first colony levels.
• The experience required for junior colonists to level up has been increased.
• Colonists recruiting price (SC) has been reduced, but its price will increase by a 50% for each colony level.
Junior: 500 SC
Senior: 2,500 SC
Master: 5,000 SC
Super Engineer: 10,000 SC
*In the recruiting panel you can choose a profile to recruit or just go for the first available. Doing so, will bring to your colony a random profile reducing the default cost in SC by 1/2 and, in the case the recruit would cost influence, would turn it to white color.
• Ideal profile for Plastics Factory is now: Operator instead of Heavy Operator.
Beta testing
• Attending to community feedback we have:
Reduced by another half the energy required by shields.
Reduced the duration of climate threats
Restored Diplomacy technologies to previous values.
Other Changes
• Electrum is a new item alloyed in the Assembly Tunnel building and used to build the highest tier buildings which include a bit of "luxury" like the Estate residential and Corporate Monuments.
• To use an item in your inventory now you just need to click on it. Previously it required the combination: Ctrl + Right-Click.
• New shortcut to add all the available productions in a blueprint to its queue: Hold Shift key and click on "Add To Queue button". If you wish the opposite, Hold shift and click on the Remove production from queue button.
• Stockpile and other packings available have been updated.
Check the wiki for more info: http://en-wiki.projectaura.com/Colony_Packing
• The initial value for colony's maintenance and comfort points is now 50 for every difficulty level.
• Energy/Maintenance/Comfort estimation values for the next cycle are shown now in red when negative.
• Available productions listed in Blueprint and Resource panels are now ordered by unlock/lock status and then alphabetically.
• The Eco technology: Dome Setup is now a default tech instead of core-tech, so you can obtain it with simple invention docs instead of Core ones.
*Check the wiki to know more about how your dome grid setup can help you to resist climatic disasters: http://en-wiki.projectaura.com/Colony_Shields#Dome_Grid_Setup
Bugs
• Shields were always fully protecting your dome, even when not receiving enough energy. From now on, the shield power assigned will be reduced in the same proportion than your dome is lacking energy. E.g.: If your energy is only covering your dome a 20% and you had assigned to a shield: 5 power points, your shield will be really covering only 1 point (a 20%).
*Your dome protection is indicated in the Energy panel and should be always 100% :).
• There was a bug with sabotages, where they were wrongly triggering under some weird circumstances.
• Sea worm processing blueprints were displaying an error message on use.
• Accidented Alpha Ships, when rescued by your drones, were returned to inventory in a wrong position.
• Assembly Tunnel building was asking for Artisan profile instead of Heavy Operator.
• Resolved issue where being outside the colony, the button to return to colony wasn't appearing in all cases.
• Blueprint panel had a performance issue when being displayed with a queue set.
• Resolved issue where buildings appeared misplaced in construction menu. (need to test further).
...What is next?
After this patch, we will keep testing the changes applied and listening to community. Meanwhile, we are going to update tutorials and focus in the ingame-assistants, to make it easy the approach to new players and help understand all the new features to the current ones.
And we have already started quests!
We are happy to see that, day by day, things are getting close to the release version! And, as always, we thank the community for the support on Project Aura development, its feedback and suggestions ;)
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Pixel Quality Games
www.projectaura.com
Twitter: @ProjectAuraGame
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