Commanders,
I'm happy to announce our first major update: The Space Imperia Campaign (Season 0)! Here are some of the highlights:
Solitaire Scenarios
Thanks for everyone's patience regarding the solitaire scenarios! These proved to be a lot more involved than I originally thought. The Doomsday Machine (small and large) as well as the Alien solitaire scenarios from the base box are now implemented! I've played through them a few times each, but there may still be some bugs, so if you see any, please ping me on the discord and/or submit a bug report in game.
For those that haven't played the board game before (or board games): it's common for many games to ship solitaire/single player only modes. These scenarios are just that. The decisions that the DMs or Aliens make are driven by a series of dice rolls, which each scenario has the full explainer from the original box's scenario book.
AI Improvements
I spent a few weeks running some experiments on AI improvements, and played a handful of matches to get more feedback and tweak the AI setup. Expect to see a bit more difficult of an AI to play against. If you continue to see inconsistencies, or observe some play that could just be a little bit better, please don't hesitate to put in a bug report and/or hop over to the discord! Everyone's feedback is EXTREMELY helpful with getting the AI in a better state, so please, continue firing away.
Campaign Progression & Awards
The Space Imperia Campaign (our Season 0) is a (hopefully) fun progression system I cooked up over the last few weeks. Inspired by my time in the service, I opted for an awards-based system where you can earn awards and medals for various things in game. The idea here is that, as the expansions release, there's a lot of opportunity with a Season-based system to introduce different match modes that unlock different awards. For now, we're sticking with the current Threat setup, but in future Campaigns I'd expect to tweak the levels (with community feedback) as well as change the Threat mode setup (specific map with specific set of settings).
For the Threat medal (and for the single player history) your current progress will count towards this season's medal. This was tested in our staging environment but let me know if you're NOT seeing the award apply for Threat (assuming you've already beaten at least Threat 3).
The Space Imperia Campaign will run through September 30th.
Asynchronous Ranked Matchmaking & ELO
Thanks to everyone's feedback on an initial Ranked season! I've introduced an asynchronous matchmaking system. This means that, if you join the ranked queue, you will be matchmade every fifteen minutes (pending player pool) into a long term async match (24h turn actions, 36h timebank, +3h gained per full round completed). Unless you leave the queue, you will remain in the queue (even when leaving the game) until you get paired for a game. This is a great setup for multiplayer as it bridges the gap between player pool and game accessibility. I anticipate doing this kind of setup for non-ranked at some point, too.
For the Space Imperia Campaign, we're using a Glicko-2 ELO setup with four placement matches (the Cadet ranks). Afterwards, you'll place into one of the six officer ranks (ELO bound). Throughout the season, your ELO can go up or down, but you'll never demote (after all, it takes A LOT to get an officer demotion in the military lol).
Blood Brothers Team Mode
I've also gotten the Blood Brothers mode into single player and multiplayer. This is a team mode where teams take their entire turns together and may stack forces as well as participate in combat together. I was able to test this a bit, but it's possible there's still some lingering bugs in there, so if you see any, let me know. I'll hopefully get some time to give it a deeper pass now that this big 'ol beefy update is out.
Mobile Versions Announced!
If you didn't see GMT Games' monthly newsletter today, we've announced the game will be coming to iOS and Android sometime in October! Our engine, Godot, publishes to all platforms, and we've been testing the Android build specifically for months now. Every bit of work we do to make the game better on smaller screens also applies to mobile. More to follow on details here, but you can expect a similar setup to how some other current board game adaptations operate their mobile versions.
Roadmap
This was a big one, and checked off many major things I wanted to have for launch but just ran out of time on. In no particular order, here's what else I'll be working on going forward:
small rulebook misses: carriers and screening, raiders not starting combat (I didn't want to continue piling onto this already massive update). As my board game friends can attest, sometimes I misread a rule, forget I read it, and do it that way for years and then continue to fail to read the rule correctly lol
email turn notifications: I setup a paid email service (currently used for password resets) and I just need to setup email confirmation flow, then players will be able to opt into getting email notifications for turns
continuous AI feedback and improvement
continued UI polish
mobile launches
Titans(!) (expect an announcement next month)
updated planet art (Mike built some fun stuff that I haven't merged yet, but will be soon!)
an advanced set of tutorials to teach board gamers and non-board gamers alike the full set of systems in Space Imperia
mod/workshop support
every small thing I've said "that's a good idea" to but haven't doubled back on yet lol
The Rest
FIXES
minerals are no longer double-counted against your budget, which had refused submits that were actually within it
a conceded game's ending now reaches every client, instead of leaving the other player stuck waiting on a game they cannot resume
carriers now retreat together with their fighters
unescorted Miners, Colony Ships, Pipelines and Decoys can no longer enter an enemy colony hex
a Danger hex now destroys every unit in it, civilians included
destroyed Miners destroy what they tow
a blockaded colonies can no longer build bases/shipyards
in-game messages moved to bottom middle projector (API errors, etc)
the controller cursor moves in Gaming Mode, and no longer hides under the hotseat turn curtain
the game no longer plays on past a win, and a team game credits the correct side
an unidentified enemy ship no longer keeps showing a tech symbol it revealed once
OTHER FEATURES
news screen carries game updates I post
end of match full reporting, with graphs and events from the game; these events are also stored for new multiplayer games (existing ones will not have as detailed rollups)
multi select can be rebound
NERD STUFF
full staging environment for server/backend testing
updated CI/CD pipelines to use less minutes/re-use build components
reduced server logs 20x
Enjoy!
Brett