I don’t know why these prerelease names keep coming to me, but I imagine they won’t keep up. If the last release was the sledge hammer, where we burst through a bunch of walls and floors and started remodeling, this release is continuing the remodeling work — and, even more importantly, healing some of those rips and holes from the last release, hence the name.
Notable stuff:
- There’s a bunch of key bugfixes and tweaks in there, including the ability to build command stations again (kind of hard to play for long without that, but that was the most severe of the bugs found in 3.707).
- Wow did the economy get an overhaul. The overall cap was raised from 600k to 999k, and command stations and harvesters all give you way more metal and crystal. You’ll need it.
- A bunch of stuff is now (sim and regular) framerate independent, so that more of the graphics continue to move in realtime even when you use a faster or a slower performance profile. Ships and shots and other things that are part of the simulation itself are just going to have to look jerky when you use a really slow performance profile — there’s no way around it — but there’s no reason that explosions, starfields, etc, can’t be nicely animated during that time.
- Speaking of, the ship movement now scales better (so your ships don’t zip around on insane, and don’t crawl along on extremely low).
- And a blanket 10 move speed has been added to all ships, too, which makes the really slow ships feel less sluggish. Always a plus.
- The Neinzul Hybrids were growing at something like 20x the intended rate in the last release, which led to murder within minutes. It’s safe to go back in the water now. 🙂
- Oh yeah, and the ship cap scale setting now actually applies to the AI as well as to you. We forgot to handle that in the last release.
- Also, the attack power of all ships has been scaled up, so that combat isn’t sluggish like it was in the last release (thanks to downed reload times, largely).
- And, last but not least, the first of the new “niche icons” to replace the old “niche text” have been added. So you can tell metal/crystal manufactories apart again from far zoom, and selecting all your engineers from the planetary summary no longer selects cleanup drones or rebuilders, for example.
Enjoy!
