Greetings Captains! After reviewing your after-action reports and official communiques, more changes are incoming.
Crew losses are up!
Across all away missions with away team size less than 8, crew losses (and entire landing-party losses) have increased up to 20%! This was not intended, but thanks to modern game design techniques, it can be corrected!
Accordingly, the following changes are effective immediately:
- Slightly increased hit points of suits, especially early ones.
- Reduced the damage of ALL planet monsters by about 10%.
- Smaller away teams will sometimes encounter slightly weaker enemies.
- Slightly increased the upper limit for monsters to scale *up* for larger away teams.
Meanwhile, deaths are actually down somewhat for large away teams (also not intended). Some difficulty increase has been felt, because there has been a significant decrease in "missions where no one dies". Less has been done this week regarding larger away teams, so that the focus can remain on getting early game missions to feel "right".
Tactical Actions
For the sake of analysis, I refer to using grenades, activating skills, and swapping weapons as "tactical actions". I recently discovered that a majority of away missions don't use any tactical actions at all.
What's wrong with that?
I want Approaching Infinity to present you with the right level of challenge, and I want you to feel like all the stuff you've collected and equipped is actually useful. I consider this a problem, and I intend to fix it.
I did get some very useful direct feedback here on Steam about this. It seems that in many cases, skills have excessive cooldowns, not enough power, or even not enough fuel (gel). And while grenades were always intended to be used sparingly, I don't think *never* using them is any fun...
To this end, the following changes have been made:
- Reduced cooldowns on majority of (ALL?!) activated skills.
- Increased potency of some skills.
- Increased the spawn rate of cyber-gel from lockers.
- All level-related limitations on cooldown skills have been removed! (That means a level one officer can equip 2 skills!)
- Fixed an error in the early game where you would find skills that you couldn't use
- Increased ammo for most (but not all) grenade types.
- Created a new device, the "Grenade Replenisher", that slowly restores the ammunition of your grenades while you are in space (but *not* while on away missions)!
At this point, there's not much I can do to actively encourage weapon swaps, but the secret feature I've been working on might ;) I'll be very excited to see the results of these changes at the end of the week. I hope to see far more skills and grenades being used.
The great rebalaning isn't over yet, but I think I'll be able to reveal my "secret new feature" soon.
Other Changes
- Added new cave level type : silver caves
- Added "cryogenic freezer" pickup, which can contain crew members, sentient aliens, or zombies!
- Added new weapon mod : "Needle", which can be applied to most physical-projectile weapons. Its damage type is still "piercing".
- Added "Gyrojet" weapon modification for pistols, rifles, shotguns, and snipers. Slow-firing, with increased range and explosive damage.
- Added more planet names in Resistance sectors.
- Added lockers and furniture to former human colonies.
- Music tracks will now fade out if you change areas and they're no longer appropriate.
- Crash sites ("technology") should no longer destroy walls on loot stockades (or anywhere else).
- Reduced the amount that "cave depth explored" adds to survey value.
- Computer terminals now have 8 different animated versions (thanks David!)
- Reduced the number of merc bases that will spawn on any given planet.
- Fixed a bug where the captain's "10% HP bonus" was not always being taken into account.
Artifact-Identification Related:
- Artifacts can no longer be destroyed during identification. (This may change!)
- When identifying artifacts, the game now remembers your previous choices for you, and anything that has failed in the past will now be colored red.
- Added a new "bad artifact ID" outcome that reduces the artifact's effectiveness by about 33%.
That's it for now, but there's so much more to come!