Hi Everyone, released a large update to the demo today to fix a few issues, try some new things and other surprises. Check it out and let me know what you think, and of course I'd love to hear all your feedback.
Feature: Events are now a more meaningful decision
Events have been changed from singular "accept / decline" option, and replaced with a new system that allows the selection between multiple events for different effects. Right now I'm testing out two, but could change it to three if that would feel better. Two felt like a good balance between increased complexity / strategy and not too overwhelming for the more casual nature of the current design direction.
Additionally, the decline options for the faction events felt too punishing in some cases and didn't really feel like a meaningful choice / something to ever take. Players would often just spam the accept button because even though it had a cost, it was almost always just going to be the better option. Now you have a choice between two!
The events themselves will likely need some balancing soon to make it a bit more difficult to farm specific ones, because the pool is rather small at the moment in the demo. Might have an update on that in a day or two.
Feature: Better balance for hostile planet invasions
When playing with passive mode off, the hostile planets have timers that will attack (or flip) your captured planets back to hostile and leave them with a strength of two. Players have generally enjoyed the added risk to massive exploration that this provides, and gives meaningful decisions between exploring and focusing on infrastructure.
Though this has generally been positive, the timers are a bit too aggressive. They are tuned for the Prestige System but the demo doesn't have this enabled (yet, it's coming soon too!)... and because of this it tends to significantly slow progress if you make a small mistake in exploring too fast. To offset this, the timers have been reduced in rate by about 35% giving a much needed buffer between exploration and instant attacks.
Thanks for the help making this demo better
Included in this fix are a bunch of bug fixes related to camera pan, missing strings, action confirmations and more. Additionally the in game cursor has been updated, and the game now more correctly handles loss and gain of focus as well.