Alrighty! Thank you everyone for an awesome launch! Your momentum helped HEAT DEATH reach 12,411 wishlists, and your bug reports have been crucial.
Don't forget to check out the deep dive down below regarding the improvements and changes made to the TRADE SYSTEM.
NEW
- Prometheus: Button to show Atlas Fleet ships
- Strategic: sfx when interacting with ship info card
- Strategic: "Save and Exit to main menu", "Exit to desktop" buttons
- Strategic, Skirmish: Icons for Armstrong, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Parker, Amundsen, Shanwei
- Strategic: Ellington class description
- Random Name Generator (511 names). Used for new ships (such as in bounty fleets), buying ships in the shipyard, and skirmish setup
- Tactical: Weapon Card Overhaul. Lasers: Recommended range and current damage. Kinetics and PD: Muzzle velocity. Show weapon target and weapon type icon
- Tactical: After action report shows "victory" or "defeat"
- Tactical: Weapon systems cards show target or "" if turrets are targeting multiple tracks
- Tactical: SFX when combat ends
- Tactical: Move line: Add white circle to show plane on move point, to help new players find the right destination
- Skirmish Setup: Ship info shows up when clicking "?" button in fleet list
CHANGES
- Tactical: Weapon system card > change ammo bars color from green to yellow to indicate ammo
- Tactical: Damage transfer from destroyed module to other modules in ship changed from 10% of original damage to 25%
- Tactical: When ship is dead (all modules destroyed), it stays dead. No more DC repairs
FIXES
- Tutorial 2: under NAVIGATION tips, "class" has one extra "s"
- Prometheus End: When end screen is shown after boss battle, still able to adjust time scale and if done, atlas fleet arrives again.
- Strategic: Make "No refuel" notif not spam
- Tactical: Captain command panel tooltips expand downwards instead of upwards
- Tactical: Pressing H doesn't update radiator toggle
- Tactical: After action report: Show accurate ship healths especially when destroyed or disintegrated
- Tactical: On ship selection, weapons stop shooting and reset target selection
- Tactical: Improved weapon ui card text wrapping
TRADE/ECONOMY IMPROVEMENTS
THE PROBLEM
- Autotrade selects profitable resources (higher average sell value than buy value). However, resources like Rare Organics were bought because they seemingly have a higher sell value, except the stations that buy them for profit are all full (Lagrange stations). This was the biggest negative factor affecting trade since traders can't sell to stations that are full.
- DT and DH Fuel are produced in small amounts in every station (Basic Refuel recipe), but this was still not enough. To ensure trade fleets get more fuel, they will now check for a station that has a lot of DT Fuel (for now, since all trade ships use DT drives) and buy resources from there
THE FIXES
- Reduced Luna Input, Luna Output, Depot (Lagrange station) Input, Depot Output recipes production from 100% to 10%, to help prevent these stations from getting full too quickly
Autotraders used to buy any random resource and get the best market for it as long as the resource's average buy price in that market was less than the average sell price. Now, traders have the following logic:
[A] If fuel ratio is at 25%, find the station most abundant with fuel resource (currently just DT Fuel since all trade ships are DT) that isn't hostile and buy any resource from it in order to sell for profit. If it is not selling any resource, do [C]
[B] If the fleet is currently in a station, buy its best resource for profit instead of going to another station. This has the bonus effect of fleets not using up so much fuel. If its best resource is not available, do [C]
[C] Get the best seller of any random resource that is profitable
Market Equilibrium
- During testing, after around four months, the economy reached some weird form of equilibrium where most resources became unprofitable to buy and sell since they're very abundant. Ships just stayed in stations waiting for profitable deals. To remedy this, I made sure that if no profitable deals (based on average prices) can be found, traders will revert to buying and selling any random resource based on market buy price vs average sell price, which will still give profitable trades.
Of course, there will be more improvements to the trade system going forward. But for now, I'm confident that the current implementation is pretty stable. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, you can comment here or send them via bug report. Thanks!
That's all from me for now. Happy hunting!