Hi Everyone, It has been a busy month since the big synergy update. Richard and I both took a staggered week off before the end of summer to get some much needed rest/family time. It was great to recharge, and we are right back at it full force now. It has already been 4 months since our initial Early Access release and there have been huge improvements thanks to your suggestions and support. The latest patch was all about tuning and fixing high priority quality of life issues. Thanks very much for your understanding on letting us prioritize this vs new features for this push. That being said, a couple of fairly major improvements happened so we decided to call them out.

Fighter Upgrade:

There was a great discussion thread about the problems with fighters and some good solutions to make them better, so we implemented them. Fighters are now a LOT more potent, but also are on a leash. This means that though their range is that of a long range weapon, and you need to be in range to use them. So more boring picking a ship apart for 30 minutes at massive long range with no threat. Get fighters in range, and they go to work, get out of range, and then return home to defend, rearm, rebuild. Bombers do quick heavy damage and then need to return to the ship to rearm, Fighters stay and fight a lot longer, but do less damage. More detail in the notes below.

Ramming Upgrade:

Another hot topic has been ramming. It was fun but overpowered. We didn't want to lose the fun, but we wanted to add a little more realistic risk to the ram. So since ramming is hull to hull impact, we wanted both hulls to take appropriate damage. This means that you as the rammer will now need to be a little more careful what you ram and with what part of your ship. Think of a part's armor as its hardness for the sake of a ram. If a hard nose, hits a soft wing, the wing takes a lot of damage and the nose not much at all. So the ramming is more part based now. Ram with your most armored parts into their least armored parts to do the most damage to them and the least to yourself.

Build Notes:

-Fighters now have limited range to prevent boring ultra long range kiting over long periods of time to take down almost any target. Instead, we want you to now fly near max weapon range and be in some danger while using the fighters, in return, fighters can now do much damage, much more in tune with other large size weapons. -Bombers and Ion Bombers shoot twice as fast and their bombs do 4x as much damage. They have to reload more often now. Bombers now complete fast/heavy strikes, and then return to the hangar to reload. -Bomber and Ion Bomber hangars now support 6 fighters instead of 4. -Shooter Fighters now have 8 per hangar instead of 6. -Shooter Fighters can now shoot 20 times before reloading (vs 10 before) -Zapper Fighters can now shoot 25 times before reloading (vs 16 before) -Shooters now do 3x more damage -Zappers now do 2.5x more damage -Decreased fighter build time from 10 seconds to 6 seconds -Fighters much more careful about damaging parent ship. -Fighter incidental friendly fire vs allied ships greatly reduced. -Fighters much better at docking on fast moving ships. -Bandit hives have 1 fewer strike craft defenders to offset the stronger fighters they now have. -Fighters don't launch in ship building level -Fighter bay controls don't clutter ship building level tac pan -Ramming damages Station cores and Bandit Hives armor AND health now. -Ramming damage lowered. -Ramming with high armor parts now does much more damage vs low armor parts -Ramming damage now reflected back on the rammer as well, but at a lower rate For most effective ramming, outfit a high armor nose and hit at high speed on low armor parts like engines or wings. -Fixed round off issue in surrender cargo menu -Fix for a goon rounding case where it seems you have enough goons but are an arm and a nose short and thus your ship takes slight damage over time. -If player's current faction destroyed, player now starts their own faction with their existing starbases. -Zombie respawn pods travel 50% faster -Fixed respawn pods moving at top speed when game loaded. -Turned off part size rarity as a rarity factor in trading prices. (was pointless + confusing) -Fixed fleet training mission if had broken strike craft. -Missiles prevented from firing in ship building level -Fixed bug where number of bounties on a captain was dictating the number of chasers. -Max bounty chasers at any given time is 1 for easy, 2 for normal, 3 for expert. -Added 15 second safety time after winning a battle where you wont get ganked. -When not defending their territory, Very large ships won't bother with much smaller ships anymore. -Removed tactics panel buttons for Fighters/Krule. Not needed anymore with fighter changes and need room for future strike craft updates. -Save game name length limited to 30 characters to prevent loading failures. -Captain's friends will not steal from their resource nodes -Captain's faction members will not steal from their resource nodes. -Resource nodes become attractive for ransack at variable richness now, not just at 50% full. -Battles will block any resource nodes underneath them so AI captains can't swipe the contents while you are battling to protect them. -When the player defeats a captain, they will be afraid of the player for a while so they won't just respawn and come running right back after the player anymore. They take time to build up a bit first. -Dropping junk parts into space does not create a junk field anymore since they have no value. -Zombie ships don't take infector ball damage anymore. They are already infected :) -AI captains, including wingmen, know how to evade area hazards now. Infection clouds, toxic clouds, ion clouds, mass bomb gravity wells. -Zombies can level up like other captains to keep them competitive. -AI Captains with positive relations with the player won't run from the player anymore. -Increased Minigun damage -Fixed current/reserve strike craft meter on the hud, was misreporting in some cases. -Fixed rogue menu sometimes appearing when a courier made a delivery. -7 Star part icon added for the lottery winners -New battle ring icon for battles involving starbases to better differentiate them. Also visible from high zoom to find trouble spots more quickly. -Fixed broken off parts being lost forever in all Bandit Hive attacks, including “The Signal.” -Fixed player strike craft being invincible in the final story mission -Scavenging bonus defaults to 10% of node total now from 0% so very large nodes don't take forever to scavenge if no one has the scavenging boosting perk. -Texture optimizations (less memory use) -Less button lock delay on Faction Members menu (allows faster switching between screens) -Faster, more subtle menu sweep effect. -Adjusted game complete text to be more generic, in case you are already playing a sandbox game. -Added toggle for automatic map target focus in gameplay options. -Super interesting spelling fixes. -Custom portrait system for your mothership. Here's how it works.

Custom Portraits:

-- File Path -- C:UsersYOURUSERNAMEAppDataLocalLowMinMax GamesSPAZ 2CustomPortrait MugShot.jpg -add a folder called CustomPortrait if it doesn't exist -texture must be called MugShot.jpg -texture must be jpg format -texture must be a power of 2 texture (512x512, 1024x1024) -best texture size 512x512

Moving Forward:

For our next update we will be conducting a major rework of the Strike Craft system. This will include implementing a blue print collection system similar to what we had in SPAZ 1. The mothership will now construct strike craft on its own using Scrap. We will also be adding an all new set of large strike craft as well as new unlockable configurations for the existing strike craft as their stars increase. This will be a pretty major change that will require rewriting some of the game flow and dialogue as well, so it will take some time, but we think the end result will be a really exciting addition to SPAZ 2.