This was going to be released on the 6th but it was delayed a few days.
Fixed a bug that would cause the game to crash if the player tried to start a game on difficult or insanely hard levels.
Fixed a bug that would cause the game to crash if the player tried to use a percussion bomb III while in battle.
Did a lot of AI combat balancing. Combat will now be much easier early on during the game. The size of ships each race uses is now calculated differently. Prior to the update it was very much dependant on your maximum ship size which gave the player no real advantage to getting larger ships quicker.
Now each race’s maximum ships size is dependent on the star date. All races now start with just small ships. Then they can unlock medium ships. At that point their fleet will now be made up of small and medium ships. There is a gauge on the diplomacy screen the shows what the current ship sizes are and how close each race is to getting to the next ship size. This is on the race info popup window that appears when you mouse over a race or rebel group in the list.
Once a race unlocks medium ships the gauge will give you a good idea of how often they will use small versus medium ships. You can think of the gauge as a percentage chance to get the ship size. If the gauge is halfway between small and medium then the mix will roughly be 50/50.
The gauge also shows you the star date that the race will hit the new ship size. Once the new ship size is hit then the player will go up a ship size. The section below shows the progression.
Useable Ship Sizes What the gauge shows
Small ships only [Small ---> Unlock Medium]
Small and Medium [Small ---> Medium]
Medium and Large [Medium ---> Large]
Large and Huge [Large ---> Huge]
Huge Ships Only No Gauge
These changes will effect all saved games. So when you load a game the ship sizes for all the fleets of all the races will change! But you will like this change as it will make things easier. You will also get the new gauges as well.
We are still working on the new Bay Modules mentioned in the previous post. These should be in the next patch.