Harvesters, those purple pursuers that you love to hate, now spread in a wave! This was our most requested feature, and were really happy with the way it plays right now. This took a week to get working, about a week to add effects, and another week of tweaks and adjustments. This is a major change and we expect some more adjustments will be necessary. Let us know what you think on our official Discord! We have now added ship and fleet items! Find these on all trade missions, and in rare cases on ordinary ships. Our first fleet item, especially for Battlestar Galactica fans: Networked Computers. These reduce your fleet plotting time by 25%! The only downside is that they require a slot on the battleship to be used. Our first ship item: Nanorepairbots - as you might expect, these repair damaged or disabled ships. They are multiple use with a variety of charges and repair levels available. Right now they require fuel and ore to work, but future repair items may appear that dont require either. Also, this item only works aboard the ship it is equipped on. They can be moved from ship to ship via a transfer order.
Rounding out our items in this update are Enhanced Sensors. These speed up scouting by at least 20% when equipped on a ship. Speaking of scouting, next update look for a new ship, the Pact Scout, which is purpose built for scouting! We have more ship and fleet items coming soon! When a ship joins your fleet we now display an animation. Now its a lot clearer to see what each ship brings you. (Especially how lesser supply ships benefit your fleet!) These animations queue to accommodate the missions where multiple ships join your fleet. This should work no matter how you manage to bring a ship into your fleet. The starmap no longer rotates to the direction of travel. And there was much happiness. The new jumpFollow action means ships can now follow the player (visibly or invisibly) through jump without joining the fleet. We can now spawn ships invisibly, too. I added this functionality to all escort missions and added a few other surprises. Im really looking forward to having more fun with this! Since you can now jump ahead of the Harvesters, we added the ability to scout locations youve already visited. Destroying a ship now does three things: any crew aboard jump into lifeboats, any cargo aboard is dropped, and a random amount of ore is dropped (also as a cargo container). There are no relationship penalties for destroying a ship.
Mine Ore and Melt Ice orders now shift ROE from Hold Fire to Defend. Attack orders also shift Hold Fire to Weapons Free. Hailing no longer switches the Hold Fire ROE to Defend. The tutorial was cleaned up, refactored and extended. There are now options to find a weapon and choose what kind of ship to add to your fleet first. New missions: The Weaponing, The Fooding, The Berzerked, The Berzerking (!), The Slaver, The Extortion, The Lost Empire, The Waystation, The Deep Regret, The Retriever, and some new confiscation-related random events. That puts us at over 600 missions/events! Adjustments were made to The Outbid, The Overfull, The Unceremonious, all minelaying events like The Fireteam, The Corp Standoff, and all the Harvester intro missions to account for the new wave propagation. We improved the layMines command to be able to drop mines directly on a target, and set up rules for how the various commands were interpreted. Mine damage has been fixed at 1, because at higher levels it was far too OP. Some usability improvements were made to the in-game feedback system, and additional tooltips were added to make the game a more pleasant experience. The game no longer auto-shifts back into tactical from starmap, and most dialog now displays in the starmap. We expect to have choice dialogs visible in the starmap, and trade/transfer as well, in the next update. Its important that, for the choice dialogs at least, we dont obscure the starmap so you can evaluate your jump options before deciding on accepting a mission. Oh and we adjusted timings so these dialogs didnt appear during the jump sequence. When editing a formation filters are temporarily disabled. The size of the universe was increased to 475 from 400. It is likely we will increase it more as we rebalance post-wave propagation, but we wanted to get more player feedback first. The speed of the Corp Tanker was slightly increased. It is now slightly faster than a heavily laden cow. Combat ranging and auto-protection algorithms were improved, resulting in many less ships unnecessarily lost in combat. Medals have been handed out. The shipOrderIs command was extended to include all orders including scan. Events can now be made invisible to hemisphere selection, correcting an issue where different mission ships were appearing next to each other instead of in different hemispheres. The Access order now has an accompanying animation. We improved our event logging system and combined some log files for clarity. Gas giant and starmap background colors were adjusted to make Harvested worlds much clearer. Color palettes are now properly applied on the galactic map. I made some tweaks to a certain event that trips a lot of people up.
Bugs: We truly hope to have squashed the joystick-related bug once and for all. Hotkeys are now disabled while the player is in a menu. Two bugs that would prevent jumping were solved. The Irenic Gatherer now has its mine ore command restored. Group mining commands should now work as expected. Mines should properly target enemies in all cases. Mines now use the time of firing to determine positioning as opposed to time of clicking. Result = better accuracy. A formation-related hail order issue was fixed. Unused waypoints now clear. Unity Prefabs, I hurl insults at thee. Emergency replacement events now honor faction-specific tags. We may have finally put an end to the dreaded SetDeltaTime bug. A few errors related to formation attacks and formation firing distance were cleaned up. An error that was thrown when using a shipDestroy command is no longer plaguing us. Gunboats and Half Gunboats now display their ship types when hovered in scout reports. Phantom operating crews were briefly visible on Corp mining colonies, but have been told to resume hiding.
Disabling Empire warships now works as expected in all cases. The timer now stops properly on The Peaceful Protest event A bug related to ship filters was trapped and ground into dust. Harvested worlds no longer show trade or repair mission animations in starmap. Theoretically they should also not display in the galactic map, too. Heru squnched a bug having to do with projectiles. Pact Destroyers no longer mistakenly show +0.5 fuel when added to the fleet. Starting a new game clears any in-progress new ship animations. 796 UnassignedReferenceException errors were assigned. A double-spawn event bug was undoubled. A few naughty rewired errors were disciplined. An edge case that would cause ships to get stuck was unstuck. We took care of a bug where attacking another ship would lock ships in place. A few ship not found bugs were found and fixed.