Update 0.1.7.0 is here! Several new features and many quality of life changes are included.

Expanded Tutorial and New Player Experience

The tutorial has been greatly expanded to include strategy tips, such as buying empty land to house your sprawling factory, basic vehicle automation, infolinks usage, some of the more common structure options, and much more. Not only that, the early game tech tree has been made easier and simpler to traverse (faster research, easier recipes, some techs like Warehouses start already researched now), to allow new players to more quickly jump into things.

Custom Difficulty Settings

Want to keep the economy, but ditch the enemies? Now you can, with your own custom difficulty settings! A number of controls can be altered at game start, including enemies on/off, weather, rent/maintenance multipliers, enemy start times, indestructibility, and more.

Orbital Market

There's a new AI Faction, the Low Orbit Mercantile Guild, which buys off any lucrative commodities you deliver to it. This adds an alternative way to make money instead of doing missions. However, prices fluctuate based on many factors, including when they last launched a rocket off world, demand off world, and how recently you've been flooding the market with commodities.

Rejection Cooldowns

If you reject a mission now, all AI Factions will no longer offer the same kind of mission for a long time. Does not apply to missions they've already called you about. If you're the sort of player who rejects most of the missions, this option can vastly reduce the number of popups you get.

Buying Already Occupied Land

Feds or Settlers bought the land you had planned to take? Now you can buy it off them. However, it comes at a steep price, and the price increases the longer you wait. After you buy their land, they'll relocate to another plot nearby.

Intermediate Caching Buffers

Similar to the Intermediate Storage Buffer, the new Intermediate Caching Buffer structure adds storage space to intermediate producers it's adjacent to. However, this version is larger, caches 5 times the recipes, but is more expensive and higher up the tech tree. With this, you can really exploit the power of pull logistics.

Faction AI Changes

Enemies are more aware of spawn camping now. AI Factions will sell off their units if they find they have too many. Enemies will now call you and demand tribute before their first attack, as a first warning system. All friendly Factions now allow you to relocate their Trading Post if they have one.

And Much More

Many more smaller UI changes, tweaks, bug fixes, performance improvements, and the like.

Full Patch Notes

New Player Experience - Tutorial expanded to cover buying empty land for your factory, growing your factory to increase throughput, infolinks usage, factories, prefabricators, returning rentals, limiting production amounts, bulk storage, flood filling, and some basic vehicle automation. - Much of the existing tutorial messages rewritten for clarity. - Start of the game technologies are vastly easier to research. This allows new players to rapidly jump into the game much quicker. Also speeds up the tutorial a lot. - Warehouses start the game already researched, and manufacturing them early for storage is added to the tutorial as well. - Early factions have a specific, easy trade request if the tutorial is active. - The first 2 missions in the tutorial are set and can no longer be declined. - Tutorial no longer is made from popups. Instead the messages appear on the righthand side of the screen next to missions. Gameplay - You can optionally customize difficulty settings when starting a new game. - Intermediate Caching Buffer - New structure, similar to the Intermediate Storage Buffer, but 5x as effective. Mid-game technology. - Exploding air units no longer inflict collateral damage on ground units/structures and vice versa. If an aircraft blows up over your factory, it won't affect your factory at all. - Orbital Warships fire KKVs (Kinetic Kill Vehicles) now rather than Missiles. Much faster and deadlier. - Cargo Rockets have much more space, and can pickup/dropoff faster. - Non-combat spacecrafts no longer auto-set pickup point. - Increased Vacuum Maglev's acceleration slightly. Makes them more competitive with Accelerator Maglevs. - Pollution Scrubber consumption rate is halved so productivity lasts twice as long. - Tweaked recipes - Producing concrete is faster. Billboard recipe tweaked. Warehouse is easier to build. AI - Low Orbit Mercantile Guild - New AI Faction which buys off many commodities from you. Alternative way to make money instead of the missions, although you won't get rewards this way. Prices fluctuate based on how much you sell to them, and based on demand factors off world. Every so often, they will launch rockets to deliver off world what you sell them, which affects prices. - If you reject a mission, no company will make a similar request for a long time. - You can now buy off land from the feds and the settlers, however, you must pay a price equal to the total value of all structures on that land. They will resettle elsewhere. Only allowed if they are not hostile to you. - Enemies now evacuate and relocate if you buy land close to their base, to prevent easy spawn camping. - Warfare factions now have spawning caps on how many units they will produce, and will never spawn enormous amounts (and existing save files with these issues will be automatically fixed in this version). - Factions will cull units if they have too many for any reason. - Enemies no longer suffer shock when you buy their land. - Enemies explicitly call you and demand tribute right before their first attack to give you a chance to pay them off immediately. - Enemies land on areas further out than previously. - Feds appears sooner in the tutorial to give you an alternative mission choice. - Conflux market doesn't appear until after tutorial is finished. They also come earlier in general. - Enemies will not activate until tutorial is finished. - Very late game pirates don't spawn nearly as large of a horde. - Conflux Market (and Mercantile Guild) allow you to relocate their Trading Post if you want to. - Air units use the third dimension better to avoid collisions, especially when delivering cargo. UI - The mission reward buttons have an small button for opening infolinks on what that reward does if you mouse over them. - Some Infolinks info expanded upon. Some have been clarified. - Calls can be dismissed with the escape key instead of enter. - Opening infolinks from the tech tree opens up infolinks on top of the tech tree (so it remains after you close infolinks). - 'Repair' costs renamed to 'Maintenance' costs. - 'Maglev Overpass' renamed to 'Vehicle Overpass.' - Light attached to the mouse cursor brighter and larger. Helps for seeing things better at night. - Settlers Faction Logo darkened to be visible on screens. - Conflux and Protectorate factions have visible borders now. - Overflow Destination icon changed, and is now visible on storage screens. Bugs/Crashes/Other - Save Games from this version on will now store the game version that they were saved with. Can now observe these versions in the Save/Load screen. - Bug fix - Building Breakers no longer do 'long-range' attacks on tubes. - Bug fix - Building Breakers no longer drop rubble everywhere when they break down maglevs. - Bug fix - Unable to relocate tubes in certain cases fixed. - Bug fix - Upgraders affected structure lists are corrected. - Bug fix - Orbital bombardment missile flight paths fixed. - Bug fix - Can right-click open infolinks on selected unit. - Bug fix - Unusable spacecraft buttons removed. - Bug fix - Spacecrafts setting invalid orders. - Bug fix - Zoom-to button on extermination missions zoom to the next target you need to eliminate. - Bug fix - If rent is zero, will print this correctly in money ui and ledger. - Bug fix - Fixed delay between maintenance costs and it showing up in money ui. - Bug fix - Main base cargo spacecraft no longer has maintenance costs. - Bug fix - Screens appearing behind holograms. - Bug fix - Enemies can still attack your walls/gates even if you make non-combat structures indestructible. - Crash fix - Crash when trying to escort with a spacecraft. - Crash fix - Exit crash fixed. - Performance - Rendering performance improved for very large monitor sizes. - Performance - No longer will enemy factions spawn unlimited amounts of units and kill the framerate. - New command line argument "MaxLoadThreads:#" for limiting how many threads are used to load a game. On Linux, defaults to 8 loading threads max to prevent Linux OOM-kill errors. - Memory - RAM used when loading a large save file vastly reduced.

[ 2022-04-13 23:12:38 CET ] [ Original post ]