This one continues progress towards fixing The Bug (10/10 being winnable) but also provides some significant quality-of-life improvements along with the quality-of-extermination ones. Specifically:
– Counterattack Guard Posts are no longer core-game. They’re still available as an AI plot if you want them (and there’s the AI type that gets a bunch of them either way), but their core-game role is now filled by Warp Relays, which can be very threatening but are much less likely to act as annoying speedbumps.
– The revenge exos launched by dying Core Guard Posts have been replaced by a different form of exo provoked by AI-Homeworld-assault that isn’t as strict about when the player needs to switch back to defense. It will hopefully still fulfill the goal of making most AI-HW assaults a “multi-stage boss fight”, but there won’t be as many stages and it won’t be as tied to your specific actions during the fight (so you’re basically never motivated to “hold back” to avoid tripping the next “stage”, etc).
And various other changes like some improvements to make out-of-memory errors less likely in intense gamestates, rebalancing Planetary Armor Inhibitors, giving Econ stations more energy production, and making interaction between Carriers and Mines far more… entertaining (previously Carriers had Mine Evasions, but on reflection it was realized they probably had all the evasion of a cow on rollerskates), etc.
Update: 7.030 is out to hotfix the Counterattack Guard Post’s last gasp of revenge: ANY AI wave could go to ANY planet. Curious.
Update: 7.031 is out to shift the warp relays to a separate AI Plot (instead of being core-game) as the feedback on the idea rather changed once the feature was actually implemented. Also some superterminal rebalancing.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 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 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
