Greetings Captains! The past week was spent working on a brand new feature (that you won't see yet), while passively collecting data on away missions.
From that data, I can make a few generalizations about version 1.6M5 :
- The vast majority of away missions seem to make it back to the shuttle.
- Away team size plays a huge part in mission survivability. (Having 15+ crew members seems to guarantee survival!)
- A large percentage of missions don't involve using skills, grenades, or weapon swaps. (Is this due to lack of challenge, or players not understanding those options are available?)
- Squither larva kill the most crew by far, followed by cyclopeans, gnashers, and zombies.
- Certain common monsters are guaranteed to kill at least some of your crew: giant snails (surprise!), narcratu, gruff soldiers and the gorgonleaf.
- Rare monsters to look out for are the vordalene mutant, hungry rock, and banker security droid.
Note that away missions to locations without monsters are not counted, and neither are any games played on easy difficulty.
"The Great Rebalancing", phase 3
The major change in this version is to increase mid- to late-game monster difficulty, while trying to keep the early game mostly the same. One notable change that will affect everyone (positively) is ... more oxygen!
I'll continue working on the new secret feature while the numbers keep rolling in. I plan for phase 4 (next week) to be the final segment of the great rebalancing, then we can all move on to other things!
Small changes:
- Bandit machines spawn less often.
- The "Energize" skill now reduces cooldowns by 75% (instead of 50%).
- City walls can become infected with lichen spores.
- On the mini-map, the player icon and any area transitions are now animated.
Until next time...