Another week, another six beta releases which now are officially out here. This is a big one! For the full story, you'll want to start reading at 1.310, if you haven't been on the beta branch.

• First up, the Warden fleet of the AI now uses fire teams. This is... a complete game-changer for them. You can't trick and trap them like you used to, although you can still mess with them in various ways. They're just way smarter and more fluid in how they respond to your messings.
• We went through a ton of code and fixed up any potential problems that we found during a code review. This cleaned up a few rare bugs that may or may not have actually been seen in the wild by players yet.
• Fixed a variety of achievements that were not properly triggering -- huge thanks to Quinn for putting in those fixes for us!
• Fixed a bug where in certain circumstances, NPC factions could cause AI ships to turn threat against you, leading to your unexpected doom.
• Improved some more of the fire team logic so that they don't get distracted by things like command-station-remains (which are already shot to death and do not require further shooting at this time). Prior to this, certain fire teams could get stuck waiting around to kill something that was already dead, thus letting you avoid the consequences of the hunter being after you.
• The debug menu has been updated heavily to show which items are considered cheats and which are not. One item that was previously a cheat -- revealing the entire map -- is now just considered a "lifestyle choice." In the first game you could choose to play with the entire map revealed from the start, after, all, so why not here?
• We also added an option that lets you scout the entire map but not have each planet permanently watched. Neither of these count as cheats.
• We also made several substantial improvements to how we read in xml from mods, enabling some new functionality for modders.
• Fixed a couple of cross-threading issues that could see drones get lost when they went back into their hub ship, or which could see stacks dying incorrectly in terms of the actual number of lost units. This was majorly weakening some units previously, particularly if you had your stack caps set unusually low.
• Some re-balance to the marauder empires, which could get overlarge and slow things down -- now that they are so much smarter, they don't need quite as many units to mop the floor with enemies, anyway.
• Exos (of a certain strength) are now able to launch against you on multiple planets simultaneously, splitting their forces and then coming for you from several angles. This makes them look better as they swarm in, being less stacked up, and also makes defending against them more challenging.
• A variety of other bugfixes, tweaks, UI refinements, and so on.
• If this doesn't sound quite as large of a release as I made it out to be at the start of the post... just wait until you see the difference in the warden and the hunter fleets and how that changes the game for you. It's a whole new ballgame these days.

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

[ 2020-01-31 02:50:21 CET ] [ Original post ]