Spoilers for 75+ One of the things I strive for in the design of USI is a feeling of consistent progression with plenty of player agency in terms of systems to focus or decisions to make. Unfortunately, the 75-90 section of the game largely fails at this in one way or another. So its getting some changes! You might recall a survey I posted here a while back about it. That, combined with talking to people about it a ton on forums and discord has helped shape these upcoming changes. Everything is not finished and tested but the general ideas are fairly locked in. So here is a high level overview of whats coming to improve things.

Compute and Fighters

Compute was meant to be the main source of powering up your fighters. This ended up not being remotely the case and Compute really, really sucks

• The Damage and Durability upgrades are changing to be multiplicative so that even after 20+ levels in them the next level is still noticeable
• A new specialization system based on total tiers gained (that run) to give a better feeling of control and "counter play" for specific enemy capital types

Resources and Synth

A huge bottleneck right out of the gate is the restrictively costly synth recipes, that also want the same resources as your core upgrades.

• There will be a pretty significant boost to resource gain right out of the gate with the compute/fighter changes
• The recipe levels that reduce the capital resource cost are getting moved way up, so you will achieve 0 cost much, much sooner.

Lack of Player Agency

There is a purposeful lack of capital focused upgrades right when you get to 75, but the dearth of options lasts too long. Prestige is also quite painful and restrictive making it harder to change things. This results in low interaction opportunity and railroading you into doing specific things too much.

• Again, the compute/fighter changes will help here with part of the new system
• A new, very minor addition to the core page at 77 that will allow for some tweaking
• Changes to prestige to make it less punishing and restrictive (this is not fully fleshed out yet)
• Scaling will be tweaked so that you don't hit 80, 85 and 90 for the reinforce targets quite so much by the skin of your teeth. This translates into having to play less "perfectly" at certain sections

This is not a final/complete list or anything, tons of minor tweaks are going in to fix the points above and just make things feel better. These changes are entering testing soon and should hopefully go live in May. Of course, feel free to post more feedback/thoughts here or in the discord as I am still looking for all the feedback I can get on this section of the game.

Future Content

Once the above is all wrapped up, its on to developing the new content. 100 is a big milestone and the new content will include the new, very large Fleet system. Its super early in actual development (really just rough prototyping and things bouncing around in my head) but its gonna be the biggest and most involved singular system so far. And of course, new stuff for everything else too! It is a very large update though so its quite far out :*(. I will do another post like this sometime down the road with more details and some actual teasers once it is further along.