Release notes here.
This took a bit of extra time because I was moving house and moving my office, but also because we realized that there's a lot of new cool stuff that we really do need to work on, beyond what I had indicated last release, in order to get this where we want.
The list of things that are planned for the short term to address those bits is here, and the discussion that started it all is here.
So what's new in this actual build?
- "Supply" has been removed as a concept, because it was decidedly annoying. There are other things that will need to be added in to really make fleets manageable well, post-supply -- but those are in the link above, and planned for quite soon. Item one was to get rid of the annoying thing.
- Tractor beams now have a lot of the benefits from the first game, including behaviors like the AI mobile ships with tractor beams actively working to kidnap your ships again and drag them off to stir up more threat and other bad things.
- Tons of bugfixes, including one to that stutter that ships often had during battle, and another to make autobombs hesitate less before blowing themselves (and hopefully some enemies) to smithereens.
- A whole messload of balance tweaks in general have also been added. This ranges from certain strikecraft becoming way more useful (space planes and mirages for the win in particular), to forcefields becoming more viable to use, brawlers becoming slightly translocator-y and in general having a better feeling, and some of the golems not being SO overpowered compared to the others.
- Another big balance change is that now guard posts have a lot of their personal hull into shields, making it so that fusion bombers are now a lot more useful against them, which is good for you.
- The Instigators are now a lot more substantial in how they respond to you, giving you much larger forces to deal with rather than a small trickle. They still give you plenty of time to deal with them, but they're actually a threat you'll notice and fear now, particularly depending on the difficulty level.
- Turrets that are distributed to guard posts should also now be a lot less varied per guard post/planet, making it so that you're less likely to run into "well, that mashup of turrets just counters everything, so I can't really plan around it" issues like before.
- Tractors and tachyon systems and cloaking systems now get better at higher marks!
- When there are multiple AIs, they now pose more of a threat than before, with their budgets not being simply equal to a single AI like before.
- The first of some of the new features (other than the removal of supply and the turret mix changes) are also in, in the form of some offensive hacks you can use against AI planets to weaken either their turrets or their guard posts (respectively), thus giving you more to do with your hacking points against the AI itself. Even more is coming on that front, but the idea is that there should be more options to use your hacking points in ways that might prove critical to you actually being able to take out a tough enemy planet. This is far preferable to there being such a paucity of ways to harm the AI via hacking that you just hack for science all the time.
- Oh, and a bug where reprisal waves were double-sized is now fixed. That should make that a lot more balanced.
We're still in sort of a polish/refinement stage, but at this point we're also in one where there are a number of substantial feature adjustments in order to really make the fleets stuff shine as much as possible. This wasn't something that I had fully foreseen, but it's definitely welcome given how much this adds to the strategic options you'll be enjoying.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
Problem With The Latest Build?
If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.
The Usual Reminders
Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.
Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.
Enjoy!
Chris