Release notes here. This is another huge one, which is why it took us a week to get it to you.

• The top item here is performance, as the name of the release implies. The new fire teams are awesome and make the AI so much smarter, but we were having late-game performance problems with very long-running threads that would actually stall the AI and all the other factions for minutes at a time if your galaxy was large and populous enough. Badger and I went through all of this with a scalpel and made performance improvements on the order of a 2000% increase for some of the savegames in question.
• There are still the occasional savegames with a very over-active set of marauders or nanocaust that don't perform as we'd prefer them to, but the vast majority of our test cases (with usually hundreds of thousands of ships) moved from being insanely sluggish to running at full speed.
• Exos have gotten much craftier about how they pursue their targets across planets. This is something... that will come in handy in existing savegames but also with features-to-come. (Cough)
• Cross Planet Attacks (CPAs) have been massively reworked to be more efficient on your CPU, as well as to be more clear in how they work and to not cheat the AI out of higher-mark ships. The CPA is now an event worthy of the name, without completely emptying the AI larder so to speak.
• Puffin has made enormous numbers of changes to fleet designs that you'll find throughout the galaxy, making them less mono-tech, and also has added 15 more fleet designs in general. We were noticing some unfortunate trends in how people use techs, and we're trying to encourage synergies rather than deep investment into a single thing over all else. This is the first step in that direction, but it's a strong one.
• Instigator bases stressing you out? That's now a setting you can turn off to not have them. They add mild time pressure that is good for the game as a whole, but which some people don't appreciate. We try to accommodate as many playstyles as possible.
• Astro Trains AND the Macrophage got some buffs. The AI and player strength levels had been growing and outpacing these.
• The Zenith Trader has been revamped a bit in terms of the wares it offers, no longer letting you exploit it to just get way too many goodies. It now works more like the first game, where you have to really consider what you want a bit more, rather than just putting everything everywhere.
• Bunches of other bugfixes and AI tweaks and improvements and balance tweaks have also been included, plus other interface clarity improvements. This is a pretty huge list of stuff.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-01-23 03:49:23 CET ] [ Original post ]