Release notes here.
This one is pretty huge!
- The visuals for the 3D parts of the game have been hugely updated. Things had gotten very dark, and were hard to see as well as having bloom that was too harsh. There’s a long explanation for that here, if you’re into that sort of thing, but suffice it to say the game just looks vastly better now.
- There’s an new Technology Vault that you can hack to get a free tech!
- Firing from under forcefields now comes with a damage penalty, like in the first game. We’ll see how this one plays out; it’s kind of experimental.
- There are a huge number of revisions to the techs in the game, breaking them into weapon and hull categories and in general making the pricing and balance for them a lot more consistent and interesting. There are other categories beyond those two, but those are the main ones for turrets and offensive ships. Thanks to Puffin for orchestrating this.
- The way AIs act after death — those parts of an AI that are still remaining — is a lot more interesting now, with them “going rogue” in multi-AI games.
- The energy collectors have been removed, since they were kind of unclear to say the least, and now command stations generate energy directly. The differences between the command stations are now a lot more clear in the description text, too, so we should hopefully no longer see an over-reliance on military command stations from people who previously couldn’t see the massive benefits that having a few logistical or economic ones would have.
- The way that techs show the details of what they improve is also now completely overhauled, this one thanks to some cleverness by Asteroid, with it showing just a single section for each one and having the changes in parentheses. The readability is incredibly improved, without us having to re-code things in such a messy way since instead it’s using DiffLib for textual analysis.
- The fog of war in the game has been overhauled, in terms of planets you have explored but are not actively watching. Now it doesn’t tell you about threat there, and you can see easily by a tiny little question mark next to the strength numbers that your data for that planet is stale. This lets the AI sneak up on you much more easily, and in general feels more appropriate and consistent with the rest of the game in terms of what information is communicated when you actually look at a planet that is explored-but-not-watched.
- There is also an option for getting the old fog of war behavior, if you preferred it. Thanks to Badger for these two!
- We fixed a bunch more bugs, including the last of the “ships going through wormholes still go off to somewhere else nonsensical on the other side.”
- There are a bunch of new and improved ship graphics outside of the lighting changes we mentioned, too. The game is a lot more attractive in general, when you are zoomed in.
- And there are a lot of other balance tweaks and bugfixes, some of them very significant, that we just didn’t have time to mention here. This one is indeed huge!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
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
