More bugfixes and balance tweaks once again. And some performance improvement
things, and pretty huge memory usage improvements when more than one savegame is loaded per run of the application.
Amongst the balance changes, all of the waves are now 3x larger than whatever they
previously would have been. The waves have been incredibly puny lately,
while the players’ ability to deal with them (more knowledge-free
turrets, stronger economy in general, etc) has increased quite a lot. Aside from some problems lately with players being overrun with Zenith Electric Bombers and such (which was recently fixed), on the whole the risk from waves has seemed trivial compared to that from counterattacks, cross planet attacks, etc.
Having the difficulty and risk be a little more consistent can only be a good thing, as it will avoid those unpleasant surprises when something is suddenly 1000% more difficult after playing seven hours into a campaign. So that’s something we’re definitely wanting some last-minute feedback on, but I feel like the 3x buff is a pretty safe one, possibly slightly on the low side. All those turrets are pretty rockin’ now, after all.
The goal is to have waves be as significant as they were in 3.0 or 2.0, or perhaps slightly moreso (as they are less frequent than they were in 2.0). My guess is that this change will suffice to get into that ballpark, and is pretty safe, but that it really could be more like 6x larger to really hit it. Again: feedback on this one from playtesting (not speculation, as the
balance has changed in so many other ways recently) is welcome.
This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 3.701 or later. When you
launch the game, you’ll see the notice of the update having been found
if you’re connected to the Internet at the time. If you don’t have
3.701 or later, you can download the windows installer for 3.711, or the OSX installer for 3.712. Once you do an in-game update, they’ll both be on the latest version, despite starting at slightly different versions.
