Release notes here.
Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the “current_beta” option. Otherwise you’re going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused.
So what’s new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we’re aiming at in the next… weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what’s new:
- Right, so lately most of the balance changes have been in favor of the AI: the end battle wasn’t challenging enough, some various behavior was suboptimal, etc, etc. This time is different.
- The humans (that’s us players) have been given way more tools to defend ourselves in the fleets versions of the game, but that comes at extra energy cost, and at times there were still not enough battlestations to go around, on top of that.
- What this version does is attempt to address some of the inequity that middle-tier players were facing, particularly in the early game, economically-speaking.
- In the last build, I put in notes on each difficulty level and said that if things were off, the description of the difficulty was correct and the balance was wrong. Surprising no-one, the result is that we are already finding the balance was a bit wrong on things like difficulty 7. With the way things were shaking out, 5 was more like 7 (but with a less-smart AI), and 7 was more like 8 or 9.
- This version also makes it so that the Hunter and Warden Fleets are more different based on whatever difficulty levels you select for them. That’s pretty handy as an addition from Badger.
- kesseleth has added a new type of Instigator Base that feeds the Warden, which is really cool.
- Four more quickstarts have been added in by Puffin.
- Citadels are way more scary, which is a nice change also from Puffin.
- WeaponMaster fixed a bug where crippled mobile factories were still able to build ships.
- In general you also now have more lobby control over some things for the human faction, like if you want home human settlements and cryogenic pods, and if so how many.
- There’s also a stronger (positive) incentive to actually choose to have those!
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
