With Update #39, we are rolling out the major new addition of Custom Difficulty. The first big feature from the v2.2.x family on the development roadmap lets you tweak the game's difficulty settings exactly as you please, making the game as easy as possible, as hard as possible or mixing and matching to fit exactly what you enjoy.
Custom Difficulty
You can now choose to customize every facet of the game's difficulty. You may decide if only crew suffer permadeath, officers (and crew) suffer permadeath or if your Captain (and therefore, everyone else) suffers permadeath. You can set the exact Death Save % you'd like to have applied when a character is killed -- giving them a second chance at survival.
In terms of game challenge, you can tweak the ship and crew combat boosts (which give you extra successes on all rolls in combat) or the risk level (driving the risk of all environmental and travel factors) as well as the level boost given to enemy captains.
For rewards, you can decide if you want to gain Experience or Profits at higher rates than usual.
We know some players will chose to use Custom Difficulty to make the game as easy as possible, others to make the game worse than Impossible, but that most will use it to setup a good difficulty and then configure permadeath setting to their liking. You can now basically play a Normal Difficulty game and turn on Permadeath.
If you elect to use a custom difficulty, your score is never posted to Steam leaderboards.
Starting v2.2.x
The engineering team (Cory) has gotten a little ahead of the story writing team (Andrew) and started on v2.2.x before we finished the final storyline of v2.1.x. Thankfully, roadmaps are guidelines, and we've decided not to let the arbitrary dev families slow us down from moving forward.
That said, the two missing Faen story arcs (Erik and Zette) are in content development and testing right now, so they will be coming out soon. That will allow us to officially scratch the v2.1.x title and move on to the next planned eras!
A number of players with using very wide screens, such as those with 21:9 aspect ratio were hitting layout issues in crew and ship combat which are now fixed.
The service icons like Doctor and Spice were not updating in the orbital screen as you took action like Patrol or if actions you took in the zones, like buying a Pardon, changed your Rep. Now, they do!
If you're looking to check your difficulty settings during play, just hover over your game's difficulty in the ship's status screen.
v2.1.19 - 2/24/2018
- Added Custom Difficulty - set up the game difficulty, boosters, challenge levels and perma-death mode exactly as you please
- Fixed support for wide-screen monitors and 21:9 aspect ratio in crew and ship combat
- Service icons shown in orbital screen update based on planet-size or card game changes to Reputation
- Fixing incorrect Rep Loss icon in ship combat victory when Conflicts involved
- Improved consistency of colors used in Crew Combat Talents for attacks, crippling orders, buffs
- Improved description of selling Intel during a Trade Alliance or Alliance
- Fixed formatting issue causing trimming of Starport Upgrade options on some screen resolutions