Patch 637 is available in beta for PC, Mac and Linux now. Don’t know how to access beta? Read this.
For more details on patch 637 check out the Terran Roadmap on Trello where we have added additional detail outlining the tasks currently in progress, items pending release, the latest release items and much more.

Summary

Patch 637 introduces a host of new functionality to the Galaxy map. Many of these new features are in an ‘initial’ state … ‘dev-speak’ for rough around the edges … and we are looking for the community’s feedback as we work to stabilize the strategy (on map) and action (in space flight) gameplay.

UI Overview

We have consolidated the menus and brought a lot of functionality directly to the galaxy map which serves as the UI’s new ‘Home’ view. Its no longer necessary to drill into system level views in order to claim worlds this can now be done directly from map. The process of claiming a world has been both simplified and expanded. You can still colonize worlds as before assigning budgets to affect the outputs of the world or you can establish outposts which only fill a single specific output but cost less and yield their focused output faster.
Most functions of the fleet manager have been moved to the Home view as well. You can now place new ship build orders, manage existing flotillas and change your personal ships configuration from the Home view.

Empire Management

Corporate and Government progression and expansion have received notable updates with patch 637. With the introduction of outposts not every controlled world or even system has a permanent population. Trade ships have been introduced which shuttle people, supplies and goods between your outposts, colonies and the free trade ports. Your trade ships return to the capital system distributes the profits back into your empire. With patch 637 we have introduced the framework for pirates, raiders and other non-organized factions in the galaxy. At current, pirates will only wander the stars waiting for you to attack, in the upcoming patches however you will need to manage their threat or risk the loss of your trade ships and a sizable portion of your income. Influence has also been updated. As your empire grows so to does your influence and with greater influence comes the ability to expand further. Your influence is determined by your economic, industrial, scientific and military output and is further influenced by your standing fleet and amassed wealth. Colonies and outposts will cost influence in addition to credits and resources to maintain should your influence fall below required limits your accounts will drain followed by the population of your worlds until you stabilize or collapse.

Ships and Fleets

Nine new ship designs have been added and both ship and flotilla structures have been adjusted to leverage new capabilities of the game. The Ship Editor has been partially converted to work with the new ship structures and will be further updated in next few patches. New ship skins, decor, parts, weapons and abilities will be introduced as prepare to transition to Early Access Phase 3. With patch 637 you can now distribute your ships across multiple flotilla, each flotilla can have up to 50 warships assigned with no limit on the number of flotilla you can field. Flotilla are your primary method to interact with the galaxy at large. For patch 637 you can attack pirates or face off against a copy of your flotilla in the Broken Mirror. In later patches you will use flotilla to complete contact missions, explore the galaxy and more.
The Broken Mirror has been added for Early Access; located near the Alpha One station. Broken Mirror is simply a mirror battle where your opponent’s flotilla is a ship for ship copy of the flotilla you engaged it with. For patch 637 you will be required to personally lead every engagement however an ‘Auto Resolve’ function is planned for later patches.

Known Issues

For more details please see the Terran Roadmap on Trello

• Some dialogs and panels do not block mouse movements as desired e.g. dragging or scrolling the ship list in the Fleet Menu causes the camera to move or zoom in the map view. This will be corrected in an upcoming patch.
• Fleet maintenance costs are not deducted from income at current, this is deliberately disabled as we balance initial and maintenance costs of ships and fleets and how that will grow as fleets increase in power and size.
• Ship Editor decals do not display as expected, this is due to changes in rendering and in general ship structure and will be corrected in upcoming patches.
• Additional debug hooks are still active in fleet structures which can cause notable slowdowns during the initial shots fired during a battle and at key events such as merging flotilla together on the map. These will be removed as the system is proven stable.
• Vulcan rendering API is proving fragile and is very sensitive driver updates. Overlays such as Nvidia Experience screen capture and similar have been observed to cause renderer resets (flash to black on-screen aka a hiccup). We are considering possible solutions to stabilize these conditions and have a launch option configured in Steam for Windows platforms that will allow the player to force the game to run in Direct X.
• Contact missions have not yet been assigned map coordinates but can be accessed via the Logs view. As a result, you will be flying these missions solo (with out flotilla support). We will be updating the contact missions in the next few patches to include a presence in the galaxy requiring you to navigate a flotilla to target before engaging and thus allowing you to auto resolve or fly the mission with the support of the flotilla you engaged with.
• Scanner range / visible range indicators (bubble outline around your systems and fleet elements on the map) do not initialize correctly in all cases. We have identified several cases where the display of the scanner range simply doesn’t render though is applied and tested, these will typically self-correct as you transition from local space (combat, stations, etc.) back to the home view or load and reload a profile (Main Menu to Home view).
• Pirates do not grow in power or attack, this is deliberate as we test other systems. We will be enabling pirate AI in later patches where in pirates will become an aggressive threat and will grow/develop over time. For patch 637 they are simply a target you can engage infinitely from the map.
• Results of battles do not affect either party, e.g. ships lost are not removed from either you or the enemy. This will be corrected in up coming patches, ships damaged or lost in battle will be damaged or lost in the fleet element. Ships will automatically repair over time a process that can be speed up by being near colonies or military outposts.
• There are known balance issues with some weapon combinations that can result in grossly overpowered ships and ship combinations. These will continuously be balanced of the course of the Early Access as we add additional abilities, weapons and ships to tune the space combat experience.

To learn more about the latest changes and whats coming next be sure to watch the Terran Roadmap here.

[ 2017-12-19 10:59:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Patch 637 is available in beta for PC, Mac and Linux now. Dont know how to access beta? Read this.
For more details on patch 637 check out the Terran Roadmap on Trello where we have added additional detail outlining the tasks currently in progress, items pending release, the latest release items and much more.

Summary

Patch 637 introduces a host of new functionality to the Galaxy map. Many of these new features are in an initial state dev-speak for rough around the edges and we are looking for the communitys feedback as we work to stabilize the strategy (on map) and action (in space flight) gameplay.

UI Overview

We have consolidated the menus and brought a lot of functionality directly to the galaxy map which serves as the UIs new Home view. Its no longer necessary to drill into system level views in order to claim worlds this can now be done directly from map. The process of claiming a world has been both simplified and expanded. You can still colonize worlds as before assigning budgets to affect the outputs of the world or you can establish outposts which only fill a single specific output but cost less and yield their focused output faster.
Most functions of the fleet manager have been moved to the Home view as well. You can now place new ship build orders, manage existing flotillas and change your personal ships configuration from the Home view.

Empire Management

Corporate and Government progression and expansion have received notable updates with patch 637. With the introduction of outposts not every controlled world or even system has a permanent population. Trade ships have been introduced which shuttle people, supplies and goods between your outposts, colonies and the free trade ports. Your trade ships return to the capital system distributes the profits back into your empire. With patch 637 we have introduced the framework for pirates, raiders and other non-organized factions in the galaxy. At current, pirates will only wander the stars waiting for you to attack, in the upcoming patches however you will need to manage their threat or risk the loss of your trade ships and a sizable portion of your income. Influence has also been updated. As your empire grows so to does your influence and with greater influence comes the ability to expand further. Your influence is determined by your economic, industrial, scientific and military output and is further influenced by your standing fleet and amassed wealth. Colonies and outposts will cost influence in addition to credits and resources to maintain should your influence fall below required limits your accounts will drain followed by the population of your worlds until you stabilize or collapse.

Ships and Fleets

Nine new ship designs have been added and both ship and flotilla structures have been adjusted to leverage new capabilities of the game. The Ship Editor has been partially converted to work with the new ship structures and will be further updated in next few patches. New ship skins, decor, parts, weapons and abilities will be introduced as prepare to transition to Early Access Phase 3. With patch 637 you can now distribute your ships across multiple flotilla, each flotilla can have up to 50 warships assigned with no limit on the number of flotilla you can field. Flotilla are your primary method to interact with the galaxy at large. For patch 637 you can attack pirates or face off against a copy of your flotilla in the Broken Mirror. In later patches you will use flotilla to complete contact missions, explore the galaxy and more.
The Broken Mirror has been added for Early Access; located near the Alpha One station. Broken Mirror is simply a mirror battle where your opponents flotilla is a ship for ship copy of the flotilla you engaged it with. For patch 637 you will be required to personally lead every engagement however an Auto Resolve function is planned for later patches.

Known Issues

For more details please see the Terran Roadmap on Trello

• Some dialogs and panels do not block mouse movements as desired e.g. dragging or scrolling the ship list in the Fleet Menu causes the camera to move or zoom in the map view. This will be corrected in an upcoming patch.
• Fleet maintenance costs are not deducted from income at current, this is deliberately disabled as we balance initial and maintenance costs of ships and fleets and how that will grow as fleets increase in power and size.
• Ship Editor decals do not display as expected, this is due to changes in rendering and in general ship structure and will be corrected in upcoming patches.
• Additional debug hooks are still active in fleet structures which can cause notable slowdowns during the initial shots fired during a battle and at key events such as merging flotilla together on the map. These will be removed as the system is proven stable.
• Vulcan rendering API is proving fragile and is very sensitive driver updates. Overlays such as Nvidia Experience screen capture and similar have been observed to cause renderer resets (flash to black on-screen aka a hiccup). We are considering possible solutions to stabilize these conditions and have a launch option configured in Steam for Windows platforms that will allow the player to force the game to run in Direct X.
• Contact missions have not yet been assigned map coordinates but can be accessed via the Logs view. As a result, you will be flying these missions solo (with out flotilla support). We will be updating the contact missions in the next few patches to include a presence in the galaxy requiring you to navigate a flotilla to target before engaging and thus allowing you to auto resolve or fly the mission with the support of the flotilla you engaged with.
• Scanner range / visible range indicators (bubble outline around your systems and fleet elements on the map) do not initialize correctly in all cases. We have identified several cases where the display of the scanner range simply doesnt render though is applied and tested, these will typically self-correct as you transition from local space (combat, stations, etc.) back to the home view or load and reload a profile (Main Menu to Home view).
• Pirates do not grow in power or attack, this is deliberate as we test other systems. We will be enabling pirate AI in later patches where in pirates will become an aggressive threat and will grow/develop over time. For patch 637 they are simply a target you can engage infinitely from the map.
• Results of battles do not affect either party, e.g. ships lost are not removed from either you or the enemy. This will be corrected in up coming patches, ships damaged or lost in battle will be damaged or lost in the fleet element. Ships will automatically repair over time a process that can be speed up by being near colonies or military outposts.
• There are known balance issues with some weapon combinations that can result in grossly overpowered ships and ship combinations. These will continuously be balanced of the course of the Early Access as we add additional abilities, weapons and ships to tune the space combat experience.

To learn more about the latest changes and whats coming next be sure to watch the Terran Roadmap here.

[ 2017-12-19 10:59:56 CET ] [ Original post ]