Release notes here.
Lots of fixes! These alone are worth a full release. And same with the number of balance changes. But that's not remotely all what's here...
Victory and Ending Scenes!
Now when you complete a game, it gives you a bit of text, a nice song, and a cool visual scene with some mild animation.
You can see them on youtube from the linked release notes, so that you don't expect more than it actually is. But this is a major step up from just "you win" at the end, which was a kick in the pants for sure.
Later we can always build this out more and more, add in graphs and whatever else, more text, or whatever we feel like. But having this as a baseline, and a solid version for 1.0, I'm really pleased about. Visually I prefer the game over screen by far, but the victory screen has just such killer music...
Turret and Minefields Revamp
Among all the other balance things, you'll notice that you have only a fifth as many turrets and minefields as before, but what you have are now 5x as powerful and expensive, and also larger. This makes it easier for you to place them (fewer clicks), and also improves performance in savegames where turret counts were getting absurd.
Icon Placement Overhaul
A lot of people were irritated by where the icons were placed in the game. Basically they floated really high above the ships themselves, so that we could do things like have them hidden by ships in front of them. But this was really problematic for people connecting the icons to the ships themselves.
There's actually a milder version of this going on in Fire Emblem: Three Houses that keeps throwing me off, honestly, and in some ways that was the final straw for my own game. ;) The new style of placement works more like Stellaris mixed with AI War 1, and it's vastly easier to tell what's going on. But it's completely customizable, so that you can put it back to the way it was before if you prefer.
Energy Surplus... Removed
Basically there was too much energy, all the time, before. Hopefully now you actually have to consider economic command stations, or not just putting all your turrets on every planet, either way. Or go for the Zenith Power Generators as an actual exciting capturable.
And A Lot Of Other Stuff!
But I got very little sleep last night and I'm super tired, so I'm ready to just get this out to you and you can read the release notes for the other details. This thing has been a really huge one!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
Problem With The Latest Build?
If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.
The Usual Reminders
Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.
Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.
Enjoy!
Chris
