Hunt Contracts are a new reason to bring your combat ships out onto the archipelago. These contracts place AI airship encounters across the archipelago and for defeating all enemies you'll land a healthy chunk of resources. Hunt quarries spawn when you enter their last known location and their ships are some of the stronger AI and a new and improved selection to flesh out the top ranks. These AI are intended to be significant combat threats so their damage reduction has been peeled back slightly and the "insane" difficulty (previously "very hard") should be next to impossible if you don't find a way to cheese them or bring a well trained crew.
Server stability has been an issue as Expedition picks up steam and becomes more playable. Further fixes have been applied this update that prevent airships from lingering in the server and piling up as players cycle through. Thankfully, the fixes applied earlier this week (that did not make the problems go away) still addressed issues of server stability that would eventually crop up. I'm hoping to put the nail in the coffin here and stop setting alarms to manually reset the server every day.
1.9.3
Major Features
- Added Hunt contracts. Hunts reward resources for taking down AI airships at specific locations. Hunted airships have 25% turret damage reduction penalty instead of 50% like regular AI ships.
Minor Features
- Added 8 new AI airships as part of hunt contracts only. These ships are designed to be much stronger. Most are upgraded variants of existing ships.
- Added more jet streams.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed game time not displaying in non-expedition modes.
- Further improvements to server stability.
- Fixed ammo counts not hiding when firearms are returned to their cabinet.
- Fixed cosmetics not being shown on the preview airman.
- Fixed a bug where team names would not appear in expedition.
- Fixed a bug where abandoned ships did not show themselves as having changed to the AI team.
- Fixed a bug where abandoned ships switched to the AI team even though a new captain on the same team was found.