With this patch we bring to you a brand new mechanic: Damage cards. Now whenever you damage an enemy commander, it generates a Burn Damage card into their discard pile. When those are then redrawn they either need to be paid to purge or their commander will take repeat damage by holding the card in their hand. But watch out, your commander can also get hit, so you’ll need to be careful to not let enemies get close to your commander and strike it.
Here is how the mechanic works: the larger the ship is, the more powerful the damage cards are that it creates. Damage cards always do two damage if you hold one in your hand at the end of the turn, but the cost to get rid of the card is proportional to the size of the ship attacking you.
Frigates create damage cards that cost 1 to clear.
Cruisers create damage cards that cost 2 to clear.
And Dreadnaughts create damage cards that cost 3 to clear.
In addition, larger ships also create more cards per attack. The amount of damage cards created per attack is also proportional to the ship’s size by the same amount as the cost. In other words:
Frigates create a single damage card whose cost is 1 to clear.
Cruisers create two damage cards whose costs are 2 to clear each.
Dreadnaughts create three damage cards whose costs to clear are 3 each.
So getting hit by a Dreadnaught is a serious problem! To clear all damage cards from a dreadnaught attack would cost you 9 resources!
The net effect of this new mechanic is to really encourage players to directly attack each other’s commanders. A single hit from any ship will result in the quality of the enemy deck being reduced and help offset the cost it took to build the ship, move it there and forgo firing at an enemy ship or development in exchange for chipping away at the other player’s life total.
This means games now are really fought and won much more often on who can break through into the enemy rear territory and land ships on the enemy commander.
We think this change makes the game even more enjoyable and doubles the level of tension. We hope you will too and look forward to your feedback!
BUG FIXES
- Reduced size and position of battle-edge to not cover your hand elements
- Tech list fix that would sometimes have cards from the pool appear twice or blank them out
- Fix for Z offset issue on some asteroid worlds that was hiding the graphics behind a gray disk
- Tutorial text tweaks
- Fixed issue related to single player mode where AI would ignore asteroid damage in its path finding
- Refinements and fixes to first tutorial
- Bombardment tutorial simplified and moved existing bombard tutorial over to scenarios
- Battle circle rainbow blinks appear again over all areas in conflict
NEW 3D MODELS
- Fabricator complex model added
NEXT UP?
We focused this month a lot of our energy on the damage card mechanic and all the connected systems. We know our rule book is now getting out of sync! So we need to loop back and update this.
The big thing for us next is the refactoring of the scenarios, and we are going to do some tests on some possible changes/improvements related to technology.
This patch also took longer than the previous one to test since this new mechanic touched on all areas of the game, so we are still deciding if we are doing another patch in 4 weeks or 6? Either way though, the star ship keeps on flying.