Enhancing Strategic Depth, Fleet Mobility, and Visual Intelligence
The universe becomes sharper and more intuitive with this update. This update has been deployed to both the main game and the demo, updating them to Version 0.13.
🔄 Fleet Mobility & Restriction Changes
Affinity Feature Removed: The affinity system has been entirely removed from the game. This mechanic unintentionally forced players to keep captains in the same vessels for too long. Deassigning and swapping captains between different ships is now much more viable and strategic.
Hard Stop Enforcement: Ships that exceed a captain's leadership value or have invalid configurations (such as too many elite weapons) will no longer suffer a combat handicap during battle. Instead, a strict "hard stop" now prevents these misconfigured ships from being deployed on missions entirely.
New "Best Armament" Trait: To replace the old affinity-related perks, the "Best Armament" trait has been added to the game and can now be chosen. This trait allows the ship a captain commands to carry a higher number of elite weapons.
📊 Massive Information & Tooltip Overhaul
Universal Hover Intelligence: The hover information cards have received a massive overhaul. This covers ships, weapons, weapon traits, stars, planetary properties, data cores, ship components, fighters, equipment slots, valuables, and logistical supplies.
Nested Tooltip System: Over 200 tooltips have been integrated. Players can now lock an active hover window in place and move the cursor directly into it to inspect nested sub-data definitions.
🎬 Cinematic & Exploration Additions
Mission Cutscenes: Sending any ship out on a dedicated data core decryption mission or a deep-space scouting mission will now trigger a cinematic cutscene, standardizing them with existing battle and trade transitions.
⚔️ Weapon Mechanics & Quality Tuning
Weapon Feature Refactor: Weapon features have been overhauled to modify base gun architectures more distinctly, creating noticeably diverse weapon behavior.
Star Quality Scaling: The weapon star-rating system used to indicate the tier and quality of armament drops has been completely restructured for better clarity.
🤖 Tactical AI & Combat Adjustments
Escort & Retreat Formations: Combat AI has been smartened up by splitting fleet elements into combatants and non-combatants (like freighters and haulers). Military vessels will now actively coordinate to form a protective rearguard screen, covering a fleeing freighter until it leaves the map safely.
Escort Bug Fix: Fixed a tactical glitch where escort ships failed to break contact after all non-combat vessels successfully retreated off the boundary.
🎭 Visuals, Dialogue, & Scripting Polish
Dynamic Lip Syncing: The face-talking animation script has been refined. Character lips now track and mirror the pacing of the spoken audio files much more naturally.
New Facial Expressions: The Emperor and Konrad have received facial expressions to mirror their dialogue states.
Dialogue Workflow Optimization: The Domain-Specific Language (DSL) driving the talk scripts was streamlined, making conversation files shorter, cleaner, and faster to implement for future content events.
📦 Economy & UI Refinements
Faction-Bound Data Cores: Salvaged data cores dropped from destroyed ships are now hard-coded to their originating faction. This forms the foundation for upcoming trading and faction-specific missions.
Interactive Tutorial Panels: Added dedicated instructional panels to the training / demo scenes to better introduce core game mechanics to new players.
UI Clean-up: Corrected various small layout issues, typos, and text errors across the logistical supply trackers, day counters, and info panels.
The Path Ahead
With all known bugs fixed, UI gaps filled, and information systems polished, the focus shifts entirely to core gameplay. The absolute priority moving forward is the battle itself—making the core gameplay loops significantly more fun.