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This is our fourth content update of 2015 and there’s a lot of new content and improvements this time. Remember you can check our Development Roadmap for an overview of what’s still to come.
Experience System
One of the most commonly asked for features has been unit experience and we're happy to announce that we've added an experience system to the game. As your fleet progresses through the game, your ships will gain experience and level up. When they do, you can choose skills for them that will quite significantly improve their performance in combat.
Galaxy Map
Previously, there was only 1 sector of space to play through – we’ve now unlocked the Galaxy Map which will give you access to more content when you “exit” the starting sector. There are now 3 sectors opened in total with some more coming later this month. We had hoped to have the save feature ready for this patch, but it’s still being worked on so that should come with the next patch – apologies for any inconvenience until them.
New Mission Types
We’ve added “Defence” and “Escort” mission types to the game. There are several versions of each and they are further randomised the same way existing mission types are. Let us know what you think of them.
Ship & Combat Improvements
We’ve listened to the feedback from players and made a number of improvements to ships and combat. This guide to A’Kari ships will give you some details on the new stats.
The main changes are:
- Improved shield and hull for most ships.
- A’Kari shields take half damage when stationary.
- Reduced shield “full regen” to 20 secs from 15 secs.
- Energy regen greatly reduced.
- Abilities will use either energy OR a cooldown.
- Some abilities require the ship to be stationary to use (or charge up).
- Balanced the damage output of a number of weapons.
With these changes, we hope to have toned down some of the extreme situations where your fleet dies too quickly (for example, if an enemy fleet spawns with multiple Rogues or Lancers). We’ve got a host of new attachments still to be added to the game in future updates, but we’re generally pretty happy the combat is nearing where we intended it to be. There’s still some tweaking to be done though, so please let us know your thoughts on the changes in today’s patch.
Full patch notes can be found on our blog here.