Wayfarers,
this is Update 2, and it's about fights. You can now see how close an enemy ship is to breaking, and you can get out of a fight you're losing.
Emergency jump
Some fights you just lose. For those there's an EMERGENCY JUMP button on the combat banner now. The drive spools at 40 percent of normal speed and your weapons go cold. Point defence keeps firing, but you give up the sector objective, and dreadnoughts won't let you leave. If the button is grey, the line next to it says why.
Airlocks
The store page says an airlock is a weapon, and the game didn't really keep that promise. A boarder in a vented room took fifteen seconds to die, while three crew with fists took one. Now it's about four seconds once the room has drained. The boarding alert has a VENT NEAREST button for the boarder's room. Get your own crew out first. The vacuum kills them too.
Reading the fight
Hostile ships have hull bars now, with a mark where the ship breaks apart, and on pirates a second one where they may give up. When their air is gone, their crew row counts down. Point defence gets an INTERCEPTED count on the combat banner. The building they just hit gets a red frame, and from sector 7 the banner tells you when a hit is deliberate.
Everything else
- A refused bribe costs half more the next time, with better odds, and stays there however often you ask. They keep the gold, and dreadnoughts never take one.
- Turrets only flash when they really fire, and the card says if they're waiting on charge or ammo
- Ordnance Bays make rounds three times as fast, and every round, missiles and torpedoes too, costs half the metal
- Crew fix wrecked guns and point defence mid-fight on their own (holes first, and never with the last 24 metal)
- Enemies aim for your systems from sector 7 instead of 5, guns first. On a small ship I'd build a second O2 recycler before then.
- Fight time doesn't fill ATTENTION any more, and the next random event waits until the shooting stops
- Dreadnought crews last up to two minutes without life support (other ships twenty seconds)
- Shooting the boss's air first still works, but takes about twice as long now, under its guns
- Third O2 recycler up front on new Colony Barge voyages
- UI scale 100 to 150 percent in Options
- Voyages mirror to Steam Cloud. The cloud only fills empty slots and never overwrites a save on this PC.
- Saves from the launch build and Clear Skies load unchanged
Found something? Post it in the Steam forum. The Clear Skies shield fix and this update's mass driver change both came out of one forum post.
Hey guys, I hope you really enjoy this update, thanks all for purchasing and wishlisting my game!
Safe jumps.
Robin