Various notes to recent posts:
- mavorspam, feel free to order from us now, or through Steam when it comes out. Plenty fine either way with us. To get rid of the trial notice, just disable the new expansion in your beta.
- Regarding the "100+ new ships" thing, bear in mind that those largely aren't bonus ship classes. Though, as Guiege (sp?) pointed out, it just wouldn't feel like an expansion without SOME new bonus ship classes, so I'll definitely put in some. I'd already had an idea for a new frigate-type spire ship, too.
- Generally the spire are just starship-sized things and up, and most of what is new in this expansion will fall along those lines. Most of the new ships will be guardians and guard posts and other big stuff for the AI, and larger-than-a-starship-but-smaller-than-a-golem "spirecraft" for the players and minor factions to use. With some misc other stuff thrown in, but that's the general shape of things.
- Generally speaking, making sure that everything is in perfect balance isn't too big a short-term concern. Especially with the AI ships, it's more about providing varied and interesting challenges rather than balance. Or, rather, balance takes the form of "make sure it's not unusually hard or easy to deal with unless that's specifically the intent." For things like bonus ship types, we have some automated tests that we run that give us oodles of data on that, which lets us hit pretty close to the mark pretty quickly, and then it's refined over time with the help of players.
- The balance of the game is pretty much ALWAYS in flux, because we're always adding new stuff or tweaking the balance of existing ships based on player reports, etc. It's like trying to balance the largest math or chemistry equation you ever saw, and our job is to keep the "remainder" of that as small as possible. There's no way we'd ever have zero remainder unless we stopped updating the game (even the venerated Starcraft, which largely didn't get any major free content updates, was still getting balance tweaks 8 years after release). At any rate, so our goal is to keep the balance as clean as possible, and to fix any major exploits or ships-that-become-uselessly-weak as soon as we find those.
- For comparison, the entire game with all of the pre-LotS expansions now has close to 700 ships, I think. So we're talking about adding about another 1/8th to that. So it's not likely completely overhauling the entire game, it's more about augmentation. But, as with something like Defender mode, some of these augmentations will definitely make for wildly new player activities and "games within the overall game," both of which are an important goal for any expansion we do.
- And, to be clear, it's totally about quality over quantity. The reason for the quantity is to provide variety, both between planets in a given game, and between campaigns in general. With a game that is partially about space exploration, I feel like having a lot to discover really helps sell me on the idea that I'm really a starfarer. It always makes the world seem to shrink when I know everything that's out there in a space game.
Anyway, a release will be coming in a couple of hours. I'd hoped to do one earlier today, but wound up making a doctor visit for my son instead. He's okay, it's nothing serious, but did need attention.
