Author Topic: Beta 0.822 now out (revised mouse controls, less death in general).  (Read 2144 times)

Offline x4000

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New version: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Stars_Beyond_Reach_Beta_Release_Notes#Version_0.822

The release notes mostly speak for themselves here, but a few highlights worth mentioning:

1. The sidebar is a bit clearer now when you're being attacked a lot, rather than being flooded with notifications.

2. There is now an absolutely crucial and amazing period of 5 turns (thanks nas1m!!) where saucers are holographic before they fully spawn in.  Right now that just gives time for you (or the AIs) to prepare for the coming assault, but later this will also give you time to negotiate with the aggressor prior to the saucers fully arriving.  ("Please take those guys away in exchange for these shiny beads!")

3. The performance of zooming and panning is worlds better now, although there are still a ton of performance things that we're working on.  Keith's schedule for pretty much all of tomorrow is currently focused on performance.

4. In general, saucers and international incidents are no longer so deadly.  These were meant to provide interaction, challenge, and skirmishes... not insta-death.

5. Brownouts are no longer able to accidentally cause a starvation death spiral.

6. Disabling buildings actually... disables all their functions, now.  Previously it turned out that a ton of their stuff was still enabled, and they were also still using resources, etc.  If you see anything else that disabled buildings seem to be doing, then please do let us know what you see!

7. Getting hit with a lot of diseases all at once is now less likely.  The more diseases there are already in a city, the less likely infection from further ones is until the prior ones are dealt with.

8. Lots of tech tree queuing refinements.

9. More buildings have a crowns upkeep cost now, and for a lot of those, they don't have less output when their staffing goes down, they instead have increased costs of operation.

10. The mouse controls have been revised for the main map, and are now more of a combination of Civ and TLF.  Hopefully people from either game will feel more at home right away now (previously the people coming just from Civ would wonder where the left click and drag map function was, when it was merely on middle mouse button).


As always, restart steam if you want to force a quicker update.
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Offline crazyroosterman

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okay regardless of everything else I just have to say THANK YOU FOR MAKING DISEASE NUKING LESS OF A THING! its not that their game ending(for me) its just their so freaking tedious its like hey I've got 3 or 4 different disease may as well have a nap for a billion turns.
c.r

Offline crazyroosterman

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trash dumps can still be disabled by the way doesn't actually do anything but it might annoy obsessive people, also the thoraxians have been eating my corpses for several turns and the krolins haven't lost any trust with me for some reason will report this as a bug when I get the chance.
c.r

Offline tombik

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Yay for performance fixes! Will try them today.

Offline TheVampire100

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Finally right-click for detail screen. This makes the game a lot more pleasant for me.

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
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okay regardless of everything else I just have to say THANK YOU FOR MAKING DISEASE NUKING LESS OF A THING! its not that their game ending(for me) its just their so freaking tedious its like hey I've got 3 or 4 different disease may as well have a nap for a billion turns.

My pleasure!  And I know what you mean, for sure.

trash dumps can still be disabled by the way doesn't actually do anything but it might annoy obsessive people, also the thoraxians have been eating my corpses for several turns and the krolins haven't lost any trust with me for some reason will report this as a bug when I get the chance.

I appreciate it -- thanks!  A savegame with the diplomacy thing in particular would be great.

Yay for performance fixes! Will try them today.

And even waaay more now. :)

Finally right-click for detail screen. This makes the game a lot more pleasant for me.

Ditto for me.  In this particular version the mouse controls were not as responsive as one would hope, though.  That's fixed now in a later release, and now it feels really good for me.  I miss right-click to get out of placement mode, but such is life.  On my laptop the escape key is easy to hit, and on my desktop I have a 5-button mouse anyway, and button 4 lets me do the cancel out of placement mode.  So just retraining my fingers some.
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