Hi everyone! We're excited to post our first of many expected patches of this year!
Below we have a wide list of features, improvements, bug fixes and game tweaks to share with you.
We are looking to keep a good pace going throughout this year with some major updates in store.
New features
- Released 1st draft of new scripted tutorial missions for new players
While the tutorials are certainly still not finalized and polished, this should be a good start towards getting these scripted and in a better place for new players.
We plan on adding more help, changing some of the maps a little and adding a lot more feedback around the entire UI that will continue to help new players get into the game.
Game changes
- Renamed "Resources" to "Wild" and updated icon
- Operations may now use Research to be played
- Repair effect easier to use (no longer blocked if contested)
Since we added resource subtypes we needed to go back and revisit how these interact with the names and [purpose of the general resource type. The hexagon is no more, long live the purple bolt! By not using the Wild resource anymore on various UI elements and cards it should be more clear that the Wild resource is precious and the most versatile of all.
We also decided to make Operations cost Research as a way of making it easier for players to afford operations. Before you could only pay for them with Wild, which made them sometimes very hard to play in various circumstances.
The repair change will indirectly buff cards like Hen and just make the module a lot easier to use. Avoiding being contested can be hard when you are at the front line trying to repair some ships!
Game improvements
- Revised card art to show sub-type icon on them for their respective types
- Deck builder UI improvements [ongoing]
- Game-wide UI crispness improvements and font enhancements [pixel fit]
The deck builder gets some improvements but we still need to finish off some additional polish on it in the next month or so. We also want to start incorporating more graphical detail in the tech pool and more first-time player help when building a deck. So a good start here, but still more coming.
For the font and site-wide crispness improvements we ended up removing the UI-zoom slider from the settings and instead forcing all screens to use pixel-match. This made an immediate improvement on all devices but it has made retina displays very small when playing the game. We will be looking into more options for retina display in the coming patch[es] to see how we can still offer retina and not have pixel match shrink the screens in the process. But for now, the game still feels good on our retina screens, so please let us know what you think?
Bug fixes
- Fix for discard-worlds in async games
- Fix for pin icon being places on ships it should not be on when just built
- Fir for coalition building that was working the opposite of intended
- Fix for obscure effects being revealed when not intended
- For for game drawing cards that should not be in your hand in async games
At this point we still have at least one more important bug to eliminate in async games, but this patch gets us that much closer again to a stable async build. Fixing this last bug is our top priority and what we will be focusing on intensely in January.
After this we will turn to some AI bugs that are important to have smooth battles in asteroids and around barracks.
Balance changes
- Commander hull broadly lowered to 25 from 30
- Brood nest went from 5 hull to 4 and has Infantry lowered from 4 to 3
- Stormbringer lowered from 2 retaliation to 1
- Ursa lowering hull from 9 to 8
- Great tree raising attack to 5, invasion to 5 and hull to 16
- Dominion now costs 3 fuel to move and lowered attack to 4
- Scythe increased attack to 5 from 4
This patch sees quite a few of the strongest cards from both sides getting toned down a little, this will help all the other cards in the game see more play and make the factions less reliant on the above cards for their win. In parallel a couple cards got a boost that were heavily underplayed to help boost their viability.
The commander lowering to 25 hull from 30 is part of a wider objective this year to really develop a strong win condition path around direct-commander attacks. We will be internally testing some ideas around various ways to facilitate this win-con in the coming months. More to be shared here when the time is right.
Sector updates
- Most worlds that generated 2 resources from special use have had their effect lowered to 1 instead.
- 5 new sectors added that are more Research and Wild based than the existing sectors, giving a tiny bit more chance that such sectors are present on maps.
The sector updates in this patch are mainly around normalization. We tweaked some sectors to be less game breaking if one players colonizes them early and added a touch more Research and Wild worlds to the pool to try and balance the resource distribution to be a little less heavy on the Fuel and Components.
See you again soon! And don't forget you can find us on Discord anytime you want to chat, report a but or suggest a feature. ;-)