Well, it's finally here! The first major update for Heat Death brings a ton of new features that makes it feel like a completely different game. Get ready to flip and burn into a politically volatile Earth-Luna system! Factions now come with different forms of government, representatives, and demographics, including your own! You'll be able to cast a vote on important decisions, bribe other representatives to vote for you, and run a campaign to get reelected (or stage another coup if your faction is a dictatorship). These decisions will come with heavy consequences of course, because this update also includes faction warfare, battles for stations, and new ships and features to try out. Check out the full changelog below:
FACTION UPDATES
- Bounties now affect relations with other factions
- Factions have different demographics and ideologies, which factor into their government representatives, which vote for decisions during events
- Faction government types (dictatorship, oligarchy, republic)
- The player can be a representative in their faction and vote on events. You can also bribe others to force a decision.
- When a representative, the player can also propose an event (send diplomat, declare war, etc)
- After a few months (depending on government type), new representatives are voted for and the player can choose to run for a campaign to be elected
- At the end of every month, the reputation of a faction is added to its relations with other factions and reset back to zero
FACTION EVENTS
- Events: Random (like station workers striking), Cause (voted for by government, like tariffs or declaring war), Effect (can occur from a cause event, like discovering an enemy spy), and War (only occur between two warring factions. "Sue for Peace" is the only option for now)
- Naturally, outcomes of events affect a faction's relations, credits, stress, and reputation
- Decisions can succeed or fail, with different outcomes. Ex: 50% chance to quell rebellion
AI FACTION COUNCIL MEETINGS
- Daily: warfleet commands/assignments (defend station, attack enemy station or fleet, return to friendly station)
- Every ten days: fund allocation to buy trade fleets and warfleets, and improving stress
- Monthly: 10% interest on credits (includes player faction)
FACTION WARFARE
- Wars can be declared between AI factions and the player
- Losing battles and stations gives stress to your faction. Conversely, winning battles and capturing stations removes stress
- Stress makes your stations less productive
- Every time a station is captured, AI factions consider trying for peace
- War score is based on a faction's station count, total fleet value, stations captured, battles won, and enemy fleet value destroyed
- War score will determine how likely a faction is to sue for peace after a station is captured
- If an AI faction has no remaining stations at the end of a war, they surrender all their credits and fleets to the victor
WAR MANAGER AND UI
- UI buttons on left side of the screen show which wars are currently going on and who has the upper hand
- Clicking the war buttons opens a draggable panel for that war and shows specifics such as stations captured, battles won, fleet value destroyed, war score, etc
STATION COMBAT
- Strategic: Attacking a station owned by hostile faction triggers station combat
- Strategic: The victor gets full ownership of the station
- Strategic: When a station has ships spread across multiple fleets in port, they join together into one fleet (up to ten ships) that the attackers must defeat
- Strategic: When a station is captured, all remaining hostile ships are destroyed
- Strategic: Players can choose to AUTORESOLVE or SURRENDER station combat
- Strategic: Attacking a hostile station not defended by a fleet will result in the station's surrender
- Tactical: In station combat, defender fleets dont need to decelerate and start already facing the enemy, giving them a slight advantage
- Tactical: The station is present in the scene, behind the defending ships
SHIPYARD IMPROVEMENTS
- Non-neutral ships now only available in stations owned by their faction
- Neutral ships will still be available on every station as long as you have positive relations with the faction
- To buy ships from a faction, you need to reach a certain relationship level based on the ship's size class
- Your relationship with a faction now affects how much they sell it to you (0 rel = -50% discount, 50 rel = 0% discount (base price), 100 relations = 50% discount)
- Faction flag icon and UI fixes. Added "Base value" and "Size class" variables in UI
- Buying a ship from a faction increases your relations with them
- Changed available ship listing "cr" text to credits icon
- Ship info UI now cleaner
OTHER MAIN UPDATES
Strategic:
- Certain ships now available only in stations owned by their faction. Good relations required. Neutral ships still sold in all stations
- Better faction flags, which are also shown on ships during combat
- Players can now buy stations and profit from trade and tax
- Manual Trading: You can now set what resource your fleet trades
- Resource tooltip shows where it is typically sourced and bought from
- You can now reorder ships in fleet, to set which button you have to press for each ship during combat
- Track Filter Modes: Default - Shows track color based on relations towards player (red = hostile), Faction - Shows track color based on their faction. You can find this button in the top-left panel
Tactical:
- Three new coilguns + three new railguns
- Five new neutral ships
- Missile movement overhaul. They now follow targets properly. This is step one for the upcoming movement overhaul
- Kinetic projectiles damage rework. Projectiles now have mass and penetration area, which are also taken into account when calculating damage
- Overhauled turret aiming. Now using position error instead of angle error, scales linearly with range to target
Skirmish:
- New Abyssinia map (not available in campaign)
- Randomized positions for bodies on most maps, so they feel different every game
Settings:
- Bloom, gamma, colorblind settings
Other:
- Fixed issue where scrolling mouse wheel over UI affects camera zoom in strategic and tactical/combat scene
- Fixed Luna lagging behind lagrange points over time
NEW WEAPONS AND SHIPS
Coilguns:
> In comparison to railguns, coilguns have higher rates of fire, and use heavier and larger projectiles. Their drawbacks are lower muzzle velocity, higher heat per shot, slower turret rotation speed, and slightly higher positional error
- S1 Raijin
- S2 Pili "Thunderbolt"
- S3 Luchnik "Archer"
Railguns:
- S1 Zhanshi
- S2 Tunguska
- S2 Legkiy
Ships (All neutral):
- Zheng He: S1 Beam Lancer Corvette
> Nimble and agile, the Zheng He uses its nose-mounted BM10 laser to harass the enemy as it moves closer to use its four Raijin coilguns. A favorite of G-junkies and ex-racers.
- Battuta: S1 Kinetic Artillery Frigate
> Popular among Belters, miners, and mercenaries, the Battuta class is the standard for long-range protection at a budget. It sacrifices armor to keep its twin Zhanshi railguns and high maneuverability. Keep this one at a distance.
- Sacagawea: S1 Missile Frigate
> The Sacagawea class keeps enemies at bay using its missiles. Anything that happens to survive is then swiftly cut down by its four Raijin coilguns. This ship is the standard for new captains who prefer using missiles on the battlefield.
- Shackleton: S2 Cataphract Destroyer
> Five centimeters of armor and almost five meters per second of acceleration, the Shackleton class has a fearsome reputation. Capable of punching through heavy fire, it uses its multiple close-range PDCs and coilguns to devastating effect.
- Hillary: S2 Beam Artillery Cruiser
> Designed to support cargo fleets from afar, the Hillary class packs a considerable punch with its capable DM100 nose laser and four Legkiy coilguns. This ship chose delta-v instead of heavy armor, so don't expect it to hold up in a knifefight.
NEW
- Main Menu: Added main button hover SFX
- Main Menu: Reduced screenshake intensity
- Settings: Bloom and gamma sliders
- Settings: Custom colorblind setting
- Settings: Added mouse x and y inversion settings
- Settings: Added -5, -1, +1, and +5 buttons for UI scale
- Skirmish: Randomized body positions on every new skirmish match
- Skirmish: Added "New Abyssinia" space elevator skirmish map (NO COLLISIONS)
- Prometheus: Autoresolve and surrender options not available
- Strategic/Prometheus: Track display filter modes: DEFAULT and FACTION. DEFAULT mode colors tracks based on relations to player faction (green for owned, red for hostile, etc). FACTION mode colors a track based on its faction's primary and secondary colors
- Strategic: Warfleets are displayed with bold text, stations with italics, and tradefleets with normal text
- Strategic: Tracklist shows name with italics or bold based on type
- Strategic/Prometheus: Tracks texts use font styles based on track type. Normal = trade fleet/normal, Bold = war fleet, Italics = Station
- Strategic > New Game Start: Factions now start with warfleets attached to their stations, to defend them from attacks
- Strategic: Faction-based and default/neutral fleet compositions lists
- Strategic: Player and AI fleets can now target and intercept moving fleets. This allows for attacking other fleets that aren't just orbiting (like Bandit fleets), allowing factions to fully wage war.
- To reduce complexity, moving fleets that have a hostile fleet moving towards them are locked and cannot change course or burn away.
- Added new navigation warning: "Too slow for intercept". If your target fleet is close to reaching its destination and your current flight settings are too slow to catch up, you are not allowed to start the flight.
- Strategic: Selecting or targeting a fleet now shows its navigation lines. This is useful when intercepting a moving fleet, to know roughly where the intercept happens
- Strategic: Added Amundsen tanker ships in orbit for trading fuel
- Strategic: "Autoresolve" and "Surrender" options when engaging enemy now available
- Strategic > Autoresolve option: Base win odds on fleet values
- Strategic: Combat results notifications from tactical fight, autoresolve, surrender, and station capture
- Strategic: When beating bounty fleets via autoresolve, spawn new bounty fleet
- Strategic: Going to war with a faction (below -80 relations) updates track colors and IFF
- Strategic: Brand new, better looking flags for: Prometheus, Blue Dragon Orbital, Hermes, East African States, Tianmen, Hakugei, and Bandit factions
- Strategic: Players can now buy stations. Stations gain profit from trade and taxes
- Strategic + Skirmish Setup: Shipyard panel showing a ship's modules and mounts now shows kinetic and laser weapon data
- Strategic: Added manual resource trading (Set what resource your fleet will trade)
- Strategic: Bounty Hunting panel rework. Bounties now affect relations with other factions
- Strategic: Amundsen class can now be used to trade DT Fuel.
- Strategic: Added "state" variable in trader panel
- Strategic: Trade panel resources now show description on hover (resource market data), which gives a description of the resource, and where to buy/sell it
- Strategic: New games start at 0.01x time scale (+14.4 min)
- Strategic: Added ship name suggestions from community discord server (Now 2131 total)
- Strategic: Added x10 timescale option (use with caution), added pause and 10x timescale text colors
- Strategic: Using a camera to look at a fleet now shows simple exhaust plumes when you zoom in
- Strategic: Ship info cards now refresh data every second
- Strategic: Market panel resources now show a red bar if the resource is not available as the station needs to keep a stockpile
- Strategic: Markets now stop production if they already have desired amount of a resource, which now also has an indicator
- Strategic > Global market panel: Added profit ratio, global quantity, and default global quantity for each resource
- Strategic + Tactical: New track indicator icons to separate "selected" and "targeted" tracks
- Strategic > Track Panel: Added "value" text for stations and fleets
- Strategic: Added Station Panel under Target > Basic. Shows station type, tax, stabililty, and daily organics consumption
- Strategic: Added ship classification guide in shipyard Panel
- Strategic: New bounty fleet compositions
- Strategic: AI ship and fleet names randomized for every new game
- Strategic: Overhauled station factory recipes to ensure stations make a profit when producing goods
- Strategic: When player owns station, show sale and purchase notif from trade, tax income
- Strategic: "Reorder Fleet" button + panel. Now able to reorder fleets manually for combat. You can find the "Reorder Fleet" button in the bottom-right panel > FLEET tab
- Strategic: Unlawful Aggression - Intercepting a neutral (without a formal declaration of war) fleet will lead to combat, and an increase of your faction's stress and decrease in reputation, on top of starting a war with the target faction
- Strategic: When a new fleet is bought or renamed, refresh tracklist in top-left of UI
- Strategic: Improved fleet navigation > deceleration timing
- Strategic: Fleet listings now show ship count
- Strategic: Added four farm stations and a volatiles station
- Strategic: Notification when hostile fleet is moving towards player station or fleet
- Strategic: Deselect fleet button
- Strategic: When buying a ship from your own station, it costs the base price. Discounts only apply from factions with good relations
- Strategic: Attacking a hostile station not defended by a fleet will result in the station's surrender
- Strategic > Station services: update ship bars when refueled, resupplied, or repaired
- Strategic: The winning faction of a battle gains credits from scrap (10-20% of defeated fleet value). Does not apply to bounty fleets
- Strategic: Player is not allowed to buy the last station of a faction
- Strategic: Improve encounter zoom anim and centering accuracy
- Strategic: Added space elevator lines for New Abyssinia and Tianmen
- Strategic: Navigation panel acceleration G input plus and minus buttons tooltip
- Astrocaster: Added fish descriptions and improved UI
- Tactical: If selected ship is destroyed, target camera turns off and shows "CAMERA DISABLED"
- Tactical: Missile movement overhaul. Missiles now adjust their burn towards their target instead of just calculating a direction upon spawning. This is step one for the future navigation and movement rework. More improvements to come.
- Tactical: Ships now show their faction's flag during combat
- Tactical: Projectiles now have mass and penetration area, which are now taken into account when calculating damage and penetration aside from relative velocity
- Tactical: Updated coilgun and railgun vfx colors according to projectile speed (follows thermal radiation color spectrum with red being slowest and violet being fastest)
- Tactical: When the total crew module health of a ship reaches 10%, it is instantly disabled
- Tactical: Added billboard particles for missile exhaust, to make them visible even when far. Similar to laser and projectile glow
- Tactical: When screenshake is on, UI elements shake when missiles and ships explode
- Tactical: Improved intro "cinematic". Better timings and fade effects
- Tactical: Added actual ship deceleration on start. Minor variation in brake speed based on ship max acceleration as they switch from cruise to combat mode
- Tactical: Improved enemy AI behavior against player artillery ships: They now avoid staying around their spawn point while being attacked by Artillery ships
- Tactical: SFX when switching between normal and tactical view
CHANGES
- Main Menu: Updated Copperhead radiators to larger size
- Loading Screen: Reduced horizontal size
- Settings > Controls: Adjusted vertical separator lines color to be more subtle
- Settings: Added new "Show hostile ships paths" for tactical scene. This is on by default in order to make it easier to see where enemy ships are moving to.
- Strategic: The navigation lines now turn off when player fleets start their flight. This is to make the game look cleaner when you have multiple fleets. These still show when fleet is selected.
- Strategic: Markets now dont have a hard cap for resource stock. Traders can still buy half of current stock when it is below the market's target quantity
- Strategic: Opening panels doesn't pause the game anymore
- Strategic: Added notification mask to prevent overflow
- Strategic: Overhauled all factory recipes to improve income
- Strategic: Changed global market data for each resource from "average buy and sell" to "lowest buy and highest sell"
- Strategic: Changed trade profit check calculation from using average prices to lowest and highest prices
- Strategic: Changed basic refuel recipe to 25 dt fuel and 5 dh fuel
- Strategic: Changed luna output (L1 - Tianmen Station) and depot output (L3-L5) recipes volatiles production from 10t to 25t
- Strategic > Track Panel (Top-right): Moved select, nav target, and hail buttons outside of "Basic" panel
- Strategic: Stations can still produce 10% of output resources even without input resources
- Strategic: When selecting track, camera doesn't focus on and follow it
- Strategic: Faction reputation graph now goes from -100 to 100
- Strategic: Overhauled the way stations value resources. Now, stations do not value resources that they do not need as an input (except for organics), which should help against stations hoarding resources they dont need.
- Strategic: Adjusted stations resource cost calculation for fairer trades between them and traders
- Strategic: Changed tracks list refresh button to icon instead of text
- Strategic: When clicking player-owned fleet, it is now selected instead of targeted. This should make the UX a bit more streamlined
- Strategic: Clicking on player fleet button in attachments (top-right) and tracks (top-left) lists selects fleet instead of targeting it
- Tactical: Increased decals draw distance for all quality presets
- Tactical: Cargo modules updated to hold actual cargo containers (for Magellan and Von Neumann class ships)
- Tactical: To reduce clutter, the module repair button only appears when the module or its mounts are damaged
- Tactical: Adjusted Kalashnakava mounts (Molot, Shchit) color highlight to fit palette
- Tactical: When focusing [F] towards track, stop distance is now 2x farther away
- Tactical: Kinetic projectiles rework. Collider now stretches behind instead of in front of the projectile and spawns ahead to not hit the turret it spawned from
- Tactical: Since armor is now more effective, laser damage has been upped from 75% back to 100%
- Tactical: Changed heat system UI wording from "OVERFLOW" to "OVERHEAT" for clarity
- Tactical: Reworked turret rotation speeds
- Tactical: Increased S1 and S2 crew module repair materials to 400 and 1000 respectively, while repair costs are higher
- Tactical: Lowered hum ambience from 75% to 50% volume
FIXES
- Main Menu: Fixed clicking "New Game" panel header freezing the game
- Main Menu > Skirmish: Fixed null reference error stopping player from starting skirmish
- Main Menu: Fixed bug that occurs when doing skirmish > surrender > prometheus 1. Skirmish ships would spawn in Prometheus tutorial scene
- Settings: Improved colorblind modes
- Tutorials 1-3: Overall improvement and adaptation to new features
- Prometheus: Fixed Prometheus saves not showing up on loaded Prometheus game
- Skirmish: Fixed bug where you could have more than 10 ships in player or hostile fleet during setup
- Strategic: Disallow fleets from setting new navigation target when already in flight. This would make fleets teleport to new targets on arrival to previous target.
- Strategic: Fixed Earth rotation not saving properly, resulting in mismatched GEO station orbits
- Strategic: TrackList (top-left corner) and navigation panel now refresh data when loading a save
- Strategic: Fixed stations doing unprofitable trades
- Strategic: Fixed target track not deselecting when pressing close button in top-right target panel
- Strategic: Fixed bug where camera is disabled when the fleet it is following is destroyed
- Strategic: Fixed track panel selection showing "bodies" or "fleets" incorrectly
- Strategic: Fixed bug where after station combat, player station only shows Basic and Attachments in TR. No market or production
- Strategic: Fixed player trade fleets teleporting to different market upon arrival to original target market
- Strategic: Traders now stop buying a resource when its prices increases higher than the lowest global sell price
- Strategic: Fixed null tracks in trackdisplayer script after combat
- Strategic + Tactical: Finally fixed the issue where scrolling mouse wheel while your cursor is hovered over UI affects the camera zoom
- Strategic: Fixed factions not resetting after load
- Strategic: Fixed bandits faction not having icon when loading game
- Strategic: Money up/down sound now has 5 second max duration
- Strategic: Fixed fleet navigation not working (Shows NaN for Dv) after targeting a moving fleet. When fleet starts flight to a station, the fleet just stays in orbit
- Strategic: Trade panel > resource disappearing after right clicking on screen
- Strategic: Autotrade retries calculation if current flight takes longer than 5 days. Fixes trade fleets going on long flights
- Strategic > Astrocaster: Win/catch UI particle fx bug
- Strategic: Fixed bandit faction losing icon when loading save
- Strategic: Notifications > Improved readability of add/subtract player credits notif
- Strategic: Fixed Luna lagging behind lagrange points over time due to small difference in orbital period calculation
- Strategic: Optimized market price calculation code
- Strategic: Improved zoom sfx timing
- Strategic: Ship info card name can't be edited if not owned by player
- Strategic > Track Panel: Fixed panel closing when hovering over a track type different from previous track
- Strategic > Station Harbor Panel: Make scroll bars faster
- Strategic: Improved text formatting for target trader panel, global market panel, and production panel
- Strategic: Fixed recipe production and organics consumption not occurring on new games
- Strategic: Fixed ship in Shenzhen fleet having wrong faction ID, which caused the rare bug where you engage a neutral ship in the tactical scene
- Strategic: Fixed bug where trade fleets accidentally go to hostile stations
- Strategic: Improve encounter panel button hover and click fx
- Strategic: Fixed trade fleets losing more delta-v than they should during their flight after loading a save
- Save/load panel: Saving now clears the input text field
- Tactical: Shanwei fuel module no collider
- Tactical: Fixed advanced damageable textures (drive greebling, crew module, heatsink, etc)
- Tactical: Fixed laser base color not adjusting based on wavelength
- Tactical: Overhauled turret aiming. Now using position error instead of angle error. Scales linearly with range to target
- Tactical: Fixed bug where AI ships dont switch to a new target after killing player ship
- Tactical: Fixed neutral and shenzhen S2 crew modules only having 1 dc team and 10 materials
- Tactical: Fixed issue where combat acceleration is shown as cruise acceleration x 100 when in practice, it is cruise acceleration x 10.
- Tactical: Fixed RCS audio playing even when ship is not using RCS
- Tactical: Fixed RCS particles playing when ship is not using RCS
- Tactical: Fixed "Show move line" button leaving line stuck in space
- Tactical: Fixed invisible background of BL (module) and BR (weapons) panels making tracks behind them unclickable
- Tactical: Fixed Xin/QLS missiles not arming on launch
- Other: Fixed Shenzhen Zhen and Shizu ships using Aegis mounts in blueprint instead of Molot PDCs
- Other: Improved UI Button color change/visibility on cursor hover and click
Known Issue: Going from Prometheus part 2 to 3 makes the red move line start from a random point and makes movement difficult. For now, I recommend going to the escape menu and restarting, or going to the main menu and reopening Prometheus part 3. Expect a fix soon!
What's next?
- More quality of life improvements (such as manual squadron assignments from strategic scene) and fixes for bugs I missed in this update
- More events. Feel free to send in your suggestions via the bug report tool
- Movement overhaul and better combat
- New ships, as always
- New player faction starts, unlockable via achievements
As always, a huge thank you to everyone for supporting Spacefleet: Heat Death and for being patient with the many months I took to finally get this one out! Don't forget to drop any feedback and issues using the in-game bug report tool. I hope you guys enjoy the new update. Happy hunting!