Release notes here. This one is all about the balance and bugfixes, and in a few cases those go hand-in-hand.
What's new?
- There was a major bug in the game in the last month or so where not every "after a ship dies" bit of data was being logged. This came about when we started using a (much) more efficient way of removing ships from stacks, and it led to some really interesting (sigh) inconsistencies. With small weak ships on your side fighting large stacks of enemies, you'd get next to no counterattack strength and not a lot of experience. With really large ships that could blast entire midsize stacks in one shot, you'd get cataclysmic counterattacks and... the amount of exp gained actually was funky there.
- Anyway, so we fixed the bugs and everything should be logged correctly now... but things like counterattack strength had to be rebalanced in order to (hopefully) not murder you with overstrong responses now that it correctly registers all the deaths. Our internal testing is okay so far, but there's only a couple of us.
- If there's a larger problem with this, then it's literally just a couple of values in an xml file for us to get it balanced better based on your feedback. Please let us know sooner than later if that is the case. I'll be working tomorrow morning, but then not later on Christmas Ever or at all on Christmas Day. If there's a murderous set of stats there, we'd sure like to know prior to then. I'll be back the day after Christmas fully.
- Next up, the amount of time you have to react to waves has been reduced a ton, to be more like the first game and in general not give you such a ridiculously long time to withdraw your offensive forces and use them on defense. If you over-commit on offense now, that could be more trouble than before.
- The Outguard has seen a lot of balance work, mainly in the form of buffs, but in the form of nerfs for a couple of specific lines. You're much more able to hack to get these without getting smacked around unduly. Thanks to StarKelp for continuing to helm this.
- There was another major bug with "stuck ships" or "phantom lines" that were visual artifacts (often the stuck ships were invisible but you could hover over them). These were not something that impacted actual gameplay, but visually they looked very strange and could get in the way of interacting with real units. They also didn't go away until you restarted the program; exiting the campaign and loading another or the same one wouldn't do it. This should be fully fixed now, after a huge bug-hunt for it.
- If the game thinks you're using a cheat, it now tells you when you do so. This should mostly be apparent when you use things in the debug menu, but in other cases it might be that it's thinking you're cheating when you're not, and we'd like to find those cases if there are any. Right now it's just a suspicion, but the code we've looked at seems clean.
- Several other smaller bugfixes and balance tweaks also are in here.
More to come soon!
Please Do Report Any Issues!
If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.
We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time!
The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so we're back down to just Very Positive. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.
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 super detailed, 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