We hope everyone is having a great time with family and friends for the holidays! We would like to add to the cheer with a Christmas gift of our own. Patch 0.4.0 is now live! This patch has a lot of great additions and changes. Including our research and tech tree systems which changes fundamentally how the game progresses and gives players another fun way to manage the development path of their companies. You must now construct research centers, which are orbiting facilities, and spend research points to gain access to new ships, efficiency upgrades to your ships, different buildings, and even a way for you to gain goods from newly subsidized industries.
We've added three new ships from a new manufacturer "Cochin". All three of these ships are late-game heavy haulers. Two being intrasystem and one being a giant 160 slot interstellar ship.
Bankruptcy now functions quite differently and is more forgiving and easy to tell when it will hit you. We have made a new in-game popup tutorial system to help new players. There are also a TON of optimizations this patch! Should make things quite a bit smoother graphically. We didn't stop there however, there's a bunch of other small fixes and additions. I hope everyone enjoys, and we look forward to hearing any feedback you have! We'll be working on a patch to fix some of the smaller issues with this release over the coming week or two, then we will be moving on to another big system which will add to the play-ability of the late game experience a ton! -New Research system. You must now construct a research station to build up reseach points which can be spent on various technologies to advance your company. -3 new large ships available from new manufacturer (Cochin) -Bankruptcy now works differently. It now takes 3 straight months with negative cash to go bankrupt. Getting positive money at any point resets the timer. On easy and normal difficulty players will now get a one time grant from the government when cash goes negative. -New in-game popup based tutorial system to help guide new players. -Auto save game improvements. No more giant list of save games -Big performance optimizations! -New trail render based orbit lines (experimental) -In game bug report system -Government colonizing toggle in custom games -More work on new spaceports menu to make it more functional (still a work in progress) -Once editing a ship name, icon changes from "edit" to "save" symbol -Leasing a gate now prompts for "Yes" or "No" -Various new tooltips to assist players in game setup and play. -Button in the routes screen to bring up ships screen with route filter applied. -Limited system, galaxy scroll boundaries. -New notification when a planet reaches it's max machinery level -Fixed dilithium crystal price readout -Some AI improvements to route expansion. -Fixed spaceport passenger list width and scroll speed. -Ship type drop down fixed in ledger -Upgrading a ship no longer reset's it's name and group -Tooltip on the ships screen to view exactly what a ship is carrying. -AI will take a small loan to buy a gate if it has too many ships orbiting. -Ability to rename and nickname planets. -Last company name and color saved from previous games. -Added button to reorder rockets on route in routes screen. -Stopped some more hotkey inputs from triggering while typing in an input box.