With this experimental update, we’re doing things a bit differently. We’ve mostly been working on the usual, bug fixes, performance updates, etc. However we’ve also been updating the tutorial, and balancing the combat. And this is where we changed things up.
Instead of releasing the first experimental version with most of the features for the patch in place, we’re releasing it with only the combat changes. We feel like those will get the most user feedback, and are more interesting to players who actually use the experimental versions.
So the new tutorials will be disabled, as we are still working on them. They will be released during the experimental run. We’ve scrapped the old tutorial, and started fresh with a bunch of smaller more dedicated tutorials over a range of basic topics. The idea is that you can select one and learn about that particular piece of gameplay in a short span of time, not more than five minutes per tutorial.
Several combat related things have changed with this update, so let’s go through them one by one.
- Armor generators now have a 5 minute start up time when you active or deactivate them. This limits the stacking and swapping of armor generators during combat. They have also been buffed significantly, see the patch notes for details on that.
- Ships now enter a disabled state when their armor is depleted, entering a state where they can’t move and warp. It’ll stay in this state until the hull is fully repaired. Hull hit points are back, and only when the ship’s hull reaches 0 hit points, it will go into its death state mode. Blocks give significantly more hull hit points now. Once your ship has recovered all its hull, the armor generators will slowly turn on again, and the ship will become functional again. Weapons and such still work during this period.
- In this first experimental version, you will no longer be able to hack through shields, shields have been tweaked so they stay down longer when depleted, allowing a time frame for hacking. We have some thoughts on this mechanic and will tweak it more during the experimental version, we are currently thinking of making it harder to establish a connection when the shields are up vs when they are down, but in this first release they need to be depleted for hacking to work.
There have been various amounts of tweaks to damage values, weight values, and hit points for shields, weapons, armor generators and other combat related devices, check the patch notes for more information on that.
We’ve also been reworking how the nuclear reactor works behind the scenes, it should now have less issues with the states of turbines and such.
For full patch notes, and to leave feedback, see here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/363360/discussions/4/1778261844034638624/
Instructions on how to join the experimental branch can be found here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/363360/discussions/4/350542145693906320/
Thank you all for playing and see you star side!
-The Split Polygon Team