This month’s patch brings us two new major mechanics plus a slew of UI and bug fixes.
New mechanics
Uprising
Uprising occurs when a planet is invaded. Now for 3 consecutive turns your newly invaded planet will produce zero resources (instead you see a fist) and half its star value. On the 4th turn you've held it, it will fully become your planet.
In addition, any developments that are on a planet you capture are no longer kept on the planet but instead stay with their original owner and are destroyed and discarded into the discard pile.
The net effect of this change is to make losing a planet to invasion less game ending. You still suffer a significant loss of course by losing a planet, but the invading player does not get the full value of the planet right away. This change makes it easier to come back from an early loss where one of your planets was captured unexpectedly.
Contest taxation
Before this patch, if an enemy ship was in orbit around your planet at the start of the next turn, you wouldn't be able to build anything anymore because the planet would be considered Contested.
While we didn't want to entirely remove this mechanic, we also felt it could lead to some early losses based purely on a surprise move or choice you made and didn't reflect well on the game dynamics we wanted to encourage.
As a result we ended up changing the way contesting works to instead make the cost of everything you build cost one extra Component. (which you can see with the new blinking cubes around and next to the sector) – So it still sucks if you are Contested, and it is still a meaningful strategy to do so, but it isn’t as back breaking when you suffer from it.
The overall effect of this change is that it is no longer possible to guarantee taking over a section of the map based purely on having some surviving ships. As a player you feel also less locked-out and more readily able to pull out an effective mid-game reversal.
As a secondary effect, players though should note that this 1-component penalty tax also applies to anything built on their commander! So having your commander contested is now more dangerous than it was before.
Improvements
- Spacebar in battle now toggles you through the sectors
- Random maps now always have at least 2 connections to your commander and 3 across the middle of the map
New 3D models
New 3D models for:
- Echo
- Chain Storm
- Continuum Hollow
- Tilithon Command
- Great Tree
- Ima Mir
Bug fixes
- Fix for window screen sizes on monitor settings that were close to full screen and would result in the bottom of the game window not being visible
- Fix to prevent cards from the discard and deck starting off screen before you scroll
- Additional validation code added to ensure tech pool buys remain consistent between reloads and turns
- Fix for battle numbers being blue when they should not have been
- Fixed AI sometimes not attacking
- Ship model preview works again
- Reloading a game no longer affects invasion numbers
- Invasion replay from saved games no longer happens too late
- Fixed an issue related to the tech-advance button in reloaded games
- Fixed rare AI crash situations if sector was not loading correctly
- Removed option to colonize in battle phase (was never intended to be possible!)
Next plans
We are testing universal shipyard options this month, plus working on:
- Potential larger changes to the Invasion game mechanic
- Better opponent replay information in the form of enemy movement trails
- Further work on single player puzzles and tutorials
With of course bug fixes and many other features on our timeline!
Thanks for following our patch news and we hope to see you on our Discord server where we have a stream every Wednesday. We are very quick to respond and always open to playing a game!
Be well,
Team Gala