To cap off this weekend, we've returned to a few of the features we added throughout the Early Access process and worked on adding the bells and whistles they didn't get on their first pass. We've also fixed the last reported Arbiter Estelle bug, tweaked the balance of Blockading and finding Contacts, improved the stats of the story officer Elsa and differentiated two closely related types of Talents.
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Bribe and Tribute Scaling
The values required to bribe enemy captains and that you can extort from captains in the void now scale up with their ship captain's level. These values are already affected by captain type and faction, but now are modified by scaled by captain level and ship mass. Notably, large ships give less tribute and small ships require less bribe. While these values still have a pretty low cap, they do now increase throughout the game and have more dramatic stacking increases as the factors all work together.
Unlocks Recognize Custom Difficulty
Unlocks are typically earned on either Normal or Hard, but many players are using Custom Difficulty with a mix of settings. The difficulty checker for Unlocks is now aware of Custom Difficulty and can detect "Normal or harder" and "Hard or harder" so that you can now earn Unlocks from your Custom Difficulty. Just be sure not to make any aspect of the game easier than these difficulty's default values.
Landing Zone Memory
Between loads of your saved game, your ship now remembers its landing zone. This will enable the Land button in the HUD and also allow you to land on that zone without any fuel cost, landing save or any other hindrance. It is a small bit of plating, but caps off the landing zone feature in a very nice way.
Late Return to Estelle
You may have encountered an issue where Estelle refused to accept one of the missions she had given you. This was due to returning after the eras related to her storyline started moving forward. We've now fixed the issue so that there is no invisible cut-off -- she is willing to accept these completed missions regardless of the timeline.
At Port and Landing Talents
We've made a needed distinction between "Landing" Talents and "At Port" Talents. Landing Talents are those Talents like Orderly Drop that help you reach a faction holding safely, perhaps faster or with less fuel. At Port Talents are those like Generous in Service or Port Maintenance that fire once per arrival in a starport. It is important to separate the two categories (which were both previously called "Landing") as one of each can fire per landing and arrival in port (which happens at the same instant in the game)
v2.3.59 - 9/16/2018
- Bribe and Tribute values scale by enemy level, mass of enemy ship, captain type, faction
- Achievements and Unlocks recognize when Custom Difficulty qualifies for Normal/Hard/etc
- Current landing zone is remembered between different loads of a saved game
- Fixed story bug preventing Arbiter from accepting story quests once the Coalition era moves ahead
- Less likely to draw Learn Contact card during Blockade orbital ops
- Learning a Contact during Blockade will most often learn a foreign Contact (not local faction)
- Improved story officer Elsa Nariman's Attributes for future hires to improve combat Initiate and viability
- Improved type label on Talents that fire "At Port" such as Generous Service and Port Maintenance versus "Landing" which help land the ship safely or efficiently
- Improved click and hover scheme in New Game > New Template
- Fixed starting/ending event lists entries for Faen Duel being flipped