This is the first update in Beta, so we added a lot of balancing changes this patch.
Buying Ships / Upgrades / Repairs / Supplies
Quite a few people have mentioned that the lack of these things are a problem and we agree. In this patch we have increased the likelihood that shops will spawn when a sector is generated.
Keep in mind that while we don't want shops to be ultra-rare, we don't want them to ultra-common too. It's a fine line, so let us know and we'd like to hear your feedback on how this is working out for you.
Combat
This patch brings a number of improvements to combat:
- Your ships will remember attack targets after move orders are given. This will make it much easier to focus fire on a particular target, but also move your fleet if you need to.
- Added a number of attachments - these will give you an idea of what we're aiming for but there's still more to come. So for example, ships will now have more functional abilities (increased damage, lower agro, improved stats) which will improve the flow of the game and offer you more customisation options.
- Removed Command Ships and Dreadnoughts from early game enemy fleets. This should ease up the difficulty curve early on, without impacting the end game.
- Drones have had their damage halved. In addition, drones, mines and turrets have been rebalanced.
- Several changes to how shields work. They will begin to regen sooner than they did before, but take longer to regen to full. In addition, if shields have been fully depleted, they will take longer to pop back to full. This will help improve your own survivability but also avoid situations where enemy shields were respawning before you had a chance to kill them.
- Missile buff. All missile types have had their damage increased.
- Photon Blast (Rogue) has been significantly reduced in damage. This is to cut down on situations where multiple Rogues insta-kill your ships. However, we have also reduced the cooldown of the ability to keep its DPS in line with other abilities. Also, we fixed the bug where it sometimes misses when the Rogue is moving.
The big thing that's still to come to the game is more attachments and weapon upgrades (all weapons will have level 1, 2 and 3 variants). These will really change the way combat works - they mean you can beef up your ships, give them burst DPS abilities or make them more resilient. Some players have reported that getting past mid-game is tough. The reason for this is that your ships will eventually have more upgrades by that point, therefore can take more hits and deal more damage.
Our plan is that these and upcoming combat changes will really help improve the combat experience - please let us know what you think about it. The other side of this coin is how enemy fleets work - our team is looking at just now and we'll have some more info about that soon.
Read the full patch notes on our blog here.