The Rovers now have their own unique weapon: the ion torpedo! Instead of causing damage, a torpedo hit temporarily disables a weapon. Hits also disable unarmored ships, but cannot be used to destroy a ship. What use is a destroyed ship to a Rover, right? All Fixers are now equipped with this weapon. Fixers have also been buffed to have 4 armor. Only lasers, mining lasers and shields destroy incoming ion torpedoes.
Ships now display weapon range rings! Hover any weapon-equipped ship while paused to see them. Each equipped weapon shows its range. Select a ship and hover another to see ranges for both ships. Select a formation and hover it to see all ranges for the formation. Oh and mines also show their range when hovered (paused). Note, range rings only show for shieldships when the shield is off. And lastly the formation editor also shows ranges for ships in a formation but only when a ship is hovered or dragged.
We added more in the you asked for it category: items and crew can now be dragged between ships! We added a little extra logic that prevents dragging things that you dont have enough ore to trade for, too. Hovering a disabled ship now shows the Ring of Doom: the point of no return where you cannot save a disabled ship and it will burn up in the atmosphere. As a reminder, ships in your fleet can abandon to lifeboats even when they are beyond the Ring of Doom.
You can now focus the camera on any ship: hover a ship and press the F hotkey key (or right click and select Focus). The camera will stay there until a WASD camera key is used or another ship is focused. Speaking of hotkeys, captains be advised, hotkeys for jump are now G (go) and hail is now T (talk). This makes it much easier to play keeping one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse. Also a reminder these can be reassigned from the main menu if this arrangement isnt happy-making. Camera movement keys (WASD) are now remappable, too. In the purely visual department, making the ion torpedo effect inspired me to improve the look of missiles, so I did that too! Check out the new bloomed missile exhaust! Thanks to our Discord community for helping test out colors, which you should join right now at https://discord.gg/D8DEcqj!
Items now have timed effects! Certain items now require a charging time and/or a cooldown time after use. Items can also now be restricted to being usable only on certain ships. We now also have a Fix action for items, which acts just like the Rover Fix command and only repairs a ship if it is disabled, and then only to 1 health. Look for the Fixabot in the game. We can also trigger sound effects for these effects. For good measure, a good bit of polish was put into the UI so the use of these items made more sense. Here are the new game items: ultra diveboats, hyperdistiller, molecular sieve, nanorepairbots, repair drone, fixabot, tritium condenser, quantum rift, superstring net. Those last two items can be used to slow or temporarily halt Harvester expansion! The other items increase resource collection or efficiency, or add various repair options. Weapons are now color coded! Your ships fire blue lasers, missiles and torpedoes. Harvester weapons are purple, and non-fleet ships are colored by their current relationship with you. Mines are now red if hostile to your fleet ships.
We did some more work with colors too: in comms dialogs, you (as captain of the battleship) are now colored white, and your crewmembers and ships in your fleet are blue. Weapon prices now make sense! For a long time weapon prices havent faithfully matched their abilities, but they do now. Welcome the new Pact Scout, our latest addition to the fleet! This lightly armored ship is as fast as the legendary Pact Frigate but has no weapon hardpoints. Instead it has a single upgrade/cargo slot, making the Scout perfect for Enhanced Sensors or fast crew rescues where weapons are not needed.
Formations now line up numerically left to right (or antispinward as we say), starting with formation 1. Ship information is now tied to choice dialogs, so you can more easily understand which ships youre dealing with in a given event. For events with multiple ships, hover the ship icon to see more detail. Ship portraits are dramatically more detailed! Check out the before/after:
The relationship hover was improved. Well make more improvements to this in 1.39, but a better explanation is given for what the different relation states do.

BEHIND THE SCENES:

We added the following new missions: the foundship, the cutters, the farmship intel, the scoutship, the lost scout, the iron hand, empty lifeboat events for all factions, the crofting, the smuggler, the trade dispute, the piracy report, and several Pact abandoned scout events. The following missions were balanced or expanded: The rover turnabout, the fooding, the weaponing, the press gang, the treetmaker, the salvage op, the pecking, an empiric escort, all Harvester intro events, and many other smaller and/or global adjustments were made. Some repair caches now drop repair items. Did a fair number of narrative fixes, too. Heres an example: I ran through all of the narrative and made sure that it was clear when you were offering protection to a ship and when you were letting them go. Also did things like remove all mention of supplies as flavor text, since we dont, um, actually track such things. Tutorial adjustments: harvesters no longer spawn during the tutorial. It is no longer a mission, allowing other missions/fleet events to occur during extended tutorial. A pointer was tied to mouse tips. Much more work is coming there.
Harvesters in general were toned down so as not to be quite so devastating. Looking at you, Devastator. destroyShip events were rebalanced in some cases to kill the crew (based on the new rule where crews abandon to lifeboats when destroyed) The new addWeapon event action allows us to, yes, add weapons to ships. We added local variables that are only seen by the event that created them, and increment/decrement for variables to allow for future mischief. Most event variables are now local to prevent them being accidentally clobbered. We can now mark certain ships as tradeable, which will allow me to make more shipyard-type events in 1.39. Seized ships are now displayed when hovering Extractors, Fixers and Auxiliaries. This should help to clarify when a repair/fix command has been aborted. We did a lot of UI cleanup, like eliminating some lower case. Many mockups were made for soon-to-be implemented UI improvements.
I created a lot of art. For example for the hyperdistiller, molecular sieve, nanorepairbots, tritium condenser, ultra diveboats. Also replaced a Pact beard, it was too similar to another one. Created the ion torpedo weapon model and its assorted icons and effects. The Fixer was made destructible. Better logic and messages were added for when scouts fail to return. On molten worlds the mine ore command is now greyed out instead of missing. Faction leader loss is now logged. Added information to cargoships to make it clearer that they add ore capacity to the fleet. The fleet rendezvous no longer displays on the galactic map until much later in the game. Quest beacons now also appear on the galactic map. Quests are no longer located directly in the oncoming Harvester wave, making them unreachable. When multiple ships are given a movement order with no specific direction, we calculate the short way for each ship individually to prevent ships from accidentally taking the long way. Mining lasers now work against any ship with only 1 hull point, including heavily damaged warships. A lot of work was done to make sure formation ships properly defended one another, and in particular that missiles were being properly defended against. Mining lasers now fire defensively even if your ship is in berzerk ROE (since they are only good for that). We also improved combat logic such that ships no longer unload their entire batteries if only one shot is required.
Ships under the defend ROE but not in a formation will now close to combat range and return fire instead of heroically soaking up damage. We made some further improvements to the logic that displays similar commands like transfer cargo and maroon to help clear up confusion. Ship armor and slots were rebalanced. Transmogrifying water now resets the water timer, same as using water cargo. Quite a few test events were added; these help us test the game before an update. Sending feedback feels instant now as it now sends in the background.

WHATS COMING UP

In this last cycle we experimented with ships trying to keep their combat range, but this led to a lot of frustrating chases, so we killed the feature. In the next build we will experiment with more tightly constrained movement during combat, and likely add much more shooty shooty bang bang type events. Well be making some major UI improvements, notably to the Water UI. And we will be working on the long-awaited boarding parties!

BUG FIXES:

Heres a summary of bug fixes, we did about 3x more than this: Much debugging was done on ion torpedoes. Much debugging. Much. M U C H. Did I mention a lot of debugging? When sending a ship scouting, lost ore is properly credited back when the ship returns. Heres a grab-bag of some issues that were fixed. We fixed a lot more than this: addWeapon issues were resolved. Zfighting issues were broken up. Fixed some issues when spawning events from events. Fixed a DOTWEEN game lockup Fixed an issue with frozen jump plotting ROEs show when hovered again. Ship portraits are no longer accidentally duplicated when hovering ships for trade. Z key no longer attacks self. Warships no longer forget their protect orders. Dual material ships now display all their pieces. Mines now properly attack shieldships. crewCount condition now throws the right message when marooning crew. Visited locations now properly display their resources. A couple of nasty bugs where conditions would not trigger were corrected. Perhaps we fixed the dreaded Set Delta Time projectile bug. Sandships with defend ROE now defend against incoming nukes. Rapidly hovering items no longer produces a bug. Gatherers can no longer destroy ships (oops). A formation error moving ships was corrected. Trade/repair animations were eliminated from the galaxy view when harvested. Fixed a game lockup that occurred when jumping just before a dialog appears Fixed an issue where fixers and auxiliaries no longer repaired but still ate ore Zero charge items with a charging state now destroy themselves after use Formation editing with filters on now shows all ships in the formation editor A bug related to mining ships joining was squashed. Several cargo-related bugs were fixed. A bug related to adding ships to a formation was eliminated. Riot-dismissed ships previously given jumpFollow orders now no longer keep following the fleet. When ships join the fleet, the resource cap no longer increases, then decreases, then increases again. jumpFollow no longer teleports ships. cargoCount now works properly again. The fixabot item now properly fixes. Dragging a repair action now works. Briefly you couldnt destroy enemy ships. Destruction has resumed. Another bug that triggered when you emerged from jump was nuked. Dual fixers now respond properly to a formation attack order. Fixers in formation also properly counterattack now. Plasma shields now display properly in slots. hailedBy triggers now work when leaveFleet is used in init/preTrigger actions. Mission text and timers are now saved and restored properly. A bug related to holdfire lasers and shields was fixed. A bug with choices dialogs was fixed. A bug where ships would open fire on you in defend ROE was taken care of. We think weve taken care of an issue where an event that shouldnt spawn was briefly spawned, then killed, counting against your events. Range rings show properly in the formation editor. Mining commands should work properly again. Killed a bug related to dragging passengers into crew slots. A lockup related to a timer expiring was fixed. Crew transfer issue with a particular event fixed. Croft cant jump event timers fixed. Some icon issues were fixed in speech dialogs. Several timer issues related to events and caches were fixed. A preTrigger issue related to timers was worked around. Ships that leave while the join fleet animation is playing should no longer leave the animation frozen on screen Attacking abandoned ships no longer causes relationship loss Crew can be loaded aboard hardpoint slots that were melted Self destruct drops correct faction lifeboat Tags to Types in eventTemplates Debug lack of events on certain systems. As I mentioned, we fixed a ton more bugs than this, but Im not sure people find this relevant so Ill leave it here.

KNOWN BUGS:

At present we are not aware of any known bugs. That means we only have known unknowns. Find one? Send us in-game feedback please!

[ 2020-07-22 19:38:12 CET ] [ Original post ]