Release notes here.
Whew! It’s been a really long day, but I feel like I didn’t get really that many things in. Most of my day was spent on the forums, and I know I promised that a few things would be in this build that got pushed back — apologies to those folks. I think it was three features. I should be able to get them in tomorrow, but I’m going to be a bit more careful about my promises from now on when it comes to short-term schedule.
Basically I wound up spending a lot of my time listening to folks and finding out what gripes are bothering them the most. That was a super useful way to spend the time, even though it caused the feature list to be a little shorter than usual. Still, the list isn’t bad:
- A couple of minor clarity improvements.
- You can now see text and icons out further on the galaxy map, and you can customize when (or if) they disappear (it gets cluttered if you keep them all the way out).
- The planet tooltips show you some substantially more useful info, so less clicking around.
- You can build turrets and the like in groups of 5 by holding down Ctrl now, like in the first game.
- The various modes that ships can be in can now all be mixed and matched (so group-move+stop-and-shot+frd, if you want).
- There’s an awesome new attack-move mode, which is kind of a hybrid of several other modes and brings a much-needed way to automate small offensive actions. Pursuit mode is great for defense, and this is basically the offensive equivalent now. I spent a lot of time talking to Terrarius about the existing options, and eventually realized there was simply a gap that needed to be filled with something new.
- The game should no longer submit anonymous hardware statistics to unity. Sorry that we accidentally had that on; let us know if you still see it, please. Thanks to lonetrav and Demerzel for bringing this to our attention.
- A couple of other bugs were fixed, including the inability to save during the tutorial.
- Ships being in hold-fire mode messing with their ability to re-cloak is fixed.
And then a couple of major balance tweaks!
- Basically, people were too rich and the AI was too poor. So…
- You now only get 30 hacking points per planet, instead of 40. Hopefully this feels just right, instead of being over-abundant or pauperish.
- The AIP gained per destroyed command station is now 25 instead of 15. Basically the amount of ramp-up that the AI has from AIP is a bit more tame than the first game, and so this balance shift should bring them more in line with the first game. It also has the side-effect, Puffin noted, of letting the AI get substantially more mad at other factions, which is a cool side effect.
- And ambush turrets also got a variety of buffs to make them more effective.
Expect more tomorrow, and each day this week. We’ve been maintaining a schedule of roughly 3-5 releases a week for a while now, and we don’t expect for that to change anytime soon. I wish I had been able to get every last everything done in one day, but that’s of course not realistic. But we’ll make quick progress. Thank you everybody so much for the support, and the kind words, and the positive reviews. It’s making such a big difference to us.
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 be much more detailed than a thumbs up, 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
Hey would like to know if champion mode is going to be added for multiplayer, i would love to do what i did with my friend in the first one where he managed the base and i was a champion getting through the miniquests that were amazing and getting stronger to help with his campaign. I really love the ability to just be a helper in a campaign.
I am not sure if we’ll have that prior to 1.0, but it is something that interests me for sure. At a minimum, we will have a helper mode where the both of you can share control of one empire and thus he can control whatever units he wants (including the Ark), and you can control other pieces.
I remember I used to do that some with my dad back in Age of Empires 1, where I would play the economy like a fiend and keep sending him units to the front, and he’d be smashing the enemy with them. Good times.