We're 2 weeks from the desired official release date (June 10th, though the 13th has also been mentioned internally as a potentially better target) of 7.0 and the "Vengeance of the Machine" expansion.
What issues do you think are most critical to address before then? The only items you should assume are already on my list (though there are more) are:
1) Implement the rest of the expansion stuff
Specifically:
- The two other bonus ship types (Neinzul Combat Carrier and Protector Starship) (mostly implemented, but I still need to work out some of the details so I commented them out before releasing 6.033)
- The three Brutal Core Guard Post ideas that won their poll
- The three Non-Brutal Core Guard Post ideas that won their poll
- Dire Guardians (already implemented, really, I just need to get the actual art in and turn them on)
- Maybe a few other bits, but they're not really all that important so it depends on how much critical-for-7.0 stuff there is remaining.
2) As with every official, go through the existing tutorials and see where I've made a liar out of it through whatever changes, fix it up in those places, and make sure it any critically important rule changes are at least reflected in there somewhere (for instance, the fact that guard posts
hurt, where they used to be pushovers).
And a few specific things that we've discussed here but are not going to be in 7.0:
- The new hacking stuff. It's a personal priority for me but the timing of when we realized it made sense for me to switch from Exodus to doing this expansion was, and the timing of when we realized such an expansion would need to be released... it just didn't add up to include enough time for this.
- An armor overhaul, for two main reasons:
-- There's still not a consensus here on how that should be done. I don't mean we need unanimous opinion or whatever, but there's still a lot of people who want to keep the "good against high-rate-of-fire" aspects of armor and a lot of people who just want to ditch it for a %-based system or (like me) just ditch it in return for nothing at all.
-- As we've done recent balance passes on guardians and such, and for most of the newer units I've been adding, we've been gradually phasing in a different armor approach where there's simply a lot fewer unit types with armor and/or armor-piercing.
- A Champion overhaul, since the discussion on what to do there still needs time to resolve into a clear plan, and since there's not really time to iterate on a bunch of balance changes there on top of everything else.
Anyway, please let me know what you find most important to address before the official release (if your answer was going to be one of the things on that not-for-7.0 list, my response is: "is the rest of the game seriously that clean already?"). Including a mantis link for each item is
highly recommended I'm not sure yet whether I'll do a poll (either to prioritize due to huge volume, or to seek corroboration that something is not just a particular player's personal pet peeve), but it's a possibility. Obviously critical stuff will generally just be fixed as I become aware of it and have time
