Hi All, Well we have been back at it for the last couple of weeks and it is time to push a new build :) It was great to have a little time with our families over the holidays, and thanks very much to you all for being understanding about that too. We appreciate it! The goal of 0.8.6 was to tie up the smaller loose ends before we did our big 0.9 engine and multiplayer push. 0.8.6 is by no means the end of work on the single player, but for the next little while our focus will be on getting the engine upgraded to Unity 5.5+ (we are running v5.01 right now) and then to start on the multiplayer game modes. So single player will likely not change for a couple of months as we delve into these new major tasks. There may end up being an experimental build to opt into as we do the engine changes and very likely for the multiplayer changes so stay tuned for that too.

Fighter Changes

Fighters have been getting a lot of love in the last few builds, and now we think that we are zeroing in on something really workable for them. One of the big issues that has come up in the forums, and our meetings, was how fighters didn't work according to the rules of the other weapon systems. So fighters took no energy to use and were also able to attack during the reload cycle of the mothership, which is meant to be a battle lull for evasion and positioning. This meant that fighters were essentially a damage over time weapon that was free to use. A lot of cool ideas have swirled around the forums on how to deal with this, and what we settled on was to make fighter bays consume a small amount of power over time. This was really important because it works with the next piece of the puzzle. Fighters return to their hangars and reload when the mothership reloads. So when the mothership reloads, fighters will not be fighting and will instead repair and rearm. The power consumption over time here is important because a 100% carrier build would never need to reload therefore their fighters could still be fielded forever. Now carriers need to be concerned about power if they want to keep their fighters fighting for as long as possible. Another fairly major change was the conversion of Shooter fighters to Defender fighters. So there was a lot of discussion on wanting to manage fighter roles, but instead of adding even more interface, we decided to take the underutilized Shooter fighters and convert them into dedicated Defender fighters with a good stats boost. So if you want fighters that stick with your mothership and form a fighter screen, you choose Defenders. Otherwise, choose other fighter types, and they will kill whatever they find in range, while using your targeting and contextual actions to guide them as well. Defenders will attack enemy ships within their close range and since they are stronger than zappers, they are a good close range choice as well. Details: - Shooter fighters converted to defensive fighters that protect their parent ship. - Defenders 50% more health - Defenders 50% more weapon range - Defender damage up 20% - Fighters do not target exploding ships anymore - Fighter better at picking secondary targets as primary targets become invalid - Fighter bays consume a small amount of capacitor power continually - Fighters come home and dock to repair and rearm while the mothership is in reload mode. This prevents them from creating constant pressure (damage over time) to an enemy ship and gets them back being part of the attack vs. reload cycle like with other weapons. - Fighter ammo capacity doubled. Now that they are part of reload mechanic, they can stay out a lot longer. - Fighters launch 50% faster - Staggered the fighter spawn rates to make the spawn audio not stack

Disbanding Starbases

We have added the ability to disband a starbase now. There was a good post on the forums outlining the reasons why players would want this, and we agreed, so here it is. The main use is to change the focus of a Starbase, so making the Starbase root be a Militia core for example may be something you want to do to take advantage of the shield bonuses. In other cases, you may want to clear some space for another faction to grow. Details: - Added Disband Starbase button to the Assign Starbase menu. - Scrap refund (50%) for disbanded starbases - No disbanding starbases that are waiting for battles.

Capital Transports for All!

Another fairly common topic has been the Capital Transport and how inadequate it was for large empires. We were considering having one transport per 5 provinces, but in the end settled on actually giving each province its own Capital Transport. So this means you will see more of them on the map, and if you see one, it will be full of taxes. So now you don't need to manage sending them to the right bases at the right times. You don't need to worry about them making stupid decisions on which taxes to pick up either. They launch on a schedule now and you just wait to collect all the juicy taxes. When/If you start your game in progress, don't be alarmed if you see a large amount of Capital transports incoming on the capital. All the provinces will send theirs right away but will soon settle into a schedule and they will arrive over time instead of in bursts. Details: - Every starbase now has its own Capital Transport.

Protecting The Loot

We all hate is when some captain ninjas out loot from beneath us. Now there are a couple ways to prevent this. The first one is the "Get Lost!" button. You need to be in contact with another captain to use it though, because bullying from across the galaxy isn't that threatening. If your threat is high enough, the other captain will leave the current province for 3 minutes of starmap time (this is a long time) But to prevent abuse, you can only tell a captain to leave one province at a time. Telling a captain to "Get Lost!" has a much lower relations hit than attacking them. The other way to keep people out of your loot is now to fight them. Battle circles now block scavenge nodes and resource nodes. This means that if you are fighting someone, no other captain can come and sneak off with the loot anymore. So if you see a node you can't harvest and there is a battle nearby, that is why. Details: - Added Get Lost Button - Battle circles now block resource harvesting from nodes

War and Peace

We have upgraded the faction leader logic to do a better job of picking the initial wars when a new game starts. So before initial wars were random, which lead to factions across the galaxy from each other being at war. This was a pretty useless war since the faction members rarely came into contact. Instead, we now ensure that initial wars require border contact. This means that some factions may start with no wars if they are isolated, but as they grow, they will come into contact with other faction borders and wars will happen as they already naturally do. Peace has also become a little more logical as well. So as factions are separated, they will be more likely to declare peace if their borders are no longer in contact. Details: - AI much better at picking initial wars on new game start. Should lead to more logical border conflicts. - When faction borders do not touch for a while, peace treaties will be more likely.

And the Rest...

What is left was mostly fixes and quality of life stuff that we wanted to get to before we jumped into the engine upgrade/multiplayer. Since we will be away from single player likely for a couple of months we wanted to get these quick fixes in. There are still a couple pages of single player issues we want to deal with before v1.0 but the issues below were either really quick fixes or good bang for the buck type things. Details: - Fixed rare captain stuck at starbase case. - Fixed case where time would progress when not moving on load - Fixed prev / next ship both going to next ship. - Fixed rare Miniguns and Flak ignore incoming missiles after parent ship was destroyed. - Fixed pop in fighter engine sounds on spawn. - Fixed rare case where ships would move away from the center of the instance trying to track to their warp in start position instead of end position. - Fixed stores generating parts with multiple small hangars vs. one larger and better hangar. Still possible to add small hangars via the catalog part constructor if you are a weirdo. - Fixed particle hose continuing to fire after being broken off - Fixed automated part recovery after battles for: Border Raids, Bandit Swarms, Mining Ops, and “The Signal” mission. - Fixed upgrading starbases adding scrap to the stockpile. - Fixed tooltips for slider bars not showing up in mouse mode. - Fixed bug where the traits for the player character were being shown. We can't read your mind... yet. - Fixed hot swapping parts losing their icon. - Fixed case where Start a Raid side objective could not be completed. - Target lock indicator always available, even without missiles since strike craft and fighters look at it for targeting cues. - AI faction leaders better at recruiting captains so their factions become more full. - The loot screen won't be pushed after a battle when there is no loot. - Profiles can be deleted in the Change Profile menu now (if they are not currently active) - When exit the trade window with another captain, they will reconfigure their ship with the parts you traded them if they are better than their current parts (good for wingmen and helping out faction members) - More accurate analog slider when using controller - Hold SHIFT for slow sliders for keyboard users - The catalog weapon toggles are more clear overall - Added a toggle all weapons button for catalog - Some side objectives now have a “select” instead of a “move to” button when you do not need to be in physical contact to complete them - Command point perk counting fixed

On to v0.9.0!

Starting Monday (assuming v0.8.6 is all good) we will begin the large task of upgrading Unity from v5.01 to v5.5+. This will be a major task as we expect it to take up to a month due to the amount of game objects that will need to be changed. Literally thousands of them will have now defunct components on them and they will need to be rejigged to the new multiplayer back end. Probably a week before the official release of v0.9.0 we will open up an experimental branch for people to test out. This will just be the upgraded engine without multiplayer yet, but it will need some testing because there will be over a year of Unity changes in the new engine and some things are sure to go awry over a time span like that. Once we are happy that v0.9.0 is stable and working just like v0.8.6, but with the upgraded engine, we will release that build and start multiplayer work. There will be more details on the multiplayer plans as part of the release notes for the Unity v5.5 engine upgrade. Learning what Unity v5.5 can do may guide some of our multiplayer design, so it is best to wait on that until we see v5.5 alive and running the game. Thanks everyone for your continued support! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)