Release notes here.
This release is very notable! We've had a lot of those, lately.
C-Clicking things to learn more.
It used to be that if there was a bunch of information about a group of ships, then you just got the names of the ships and not really any details. That was... quite a pain in some cases.
Suppose you see a new fleet that you might want to capture, but it just is telling you it has ships X Y and Z in there, and you don't really have descriptions for a couple of those? You'd just have to gamble with them, or use prior knowledge you'd picked up in past plays.
Now you can hold C while you click the flagship of the fleet, and you then get a hugely-detailed screen with all the info on each ship in there. As usual, hold Ctrl for even MORE details in a tutorial-style fashion if you want them.
This works in a variety of places, including incoming enemy wave warnings, AI guard posts full of reinforcements, and even tech upgrades for your ships. It always tells you in the tooltip when you can C-click, and I'm already personally wondering a bit how we ever lived without it.
AI Aggressiveness
There were a number of cases where the "press home an attack against a weak key target despite being outnumbered" or "push through a strong planet to a weak one" logic was just not kicking in with enough frequency. To the point that some folks thought it wasn't even on.
These sorts of aggressive behaviors only kick in on difficulty 5 and up, but they become increasingly common starting at difficulty 7 now.
Combat Factory Drones!
These things now can actually defend themselves with some drones that are specific to each type of combat factory. Sweet!
Astro Trains Majorly More Interesting
In the original game Astro Trains were more annoying than anything else, so we made them optional and people mostly ignored them. In this sequel, Astro Trains were mostly bland and they are optional and so people have mostly ignored them; we're not short for interesting factions.
The thing is, astro trains are a really cool platform for a lot of potentially-very-interesting concepts (supply routes, etc) in how they are implemented in this game, so having them be boring was kind of a bummer to put it mildly.
Badger and Puffin have put in a ton of work into making these way more interesting, with a lot of feedback from mantis and discord, and trains should now be a much more dynamic and interesting experience. We look forward to seeing what you run into with them now!
Plus Lots of Key Bugfixes!
- Those bugs with the sidebar mouseovers not showing the right thing all the time are fixed.
- Same with the ones with the collision detection boxes for mouseovers of buttons being too large.
- Same with cloaked stacks of ships getting full cloak back when anything on the stack died. Total cheese for you and your enemies!
- Also fixed not being able to build energy-generating things that cost zero energy if you had negative energy. Talk about OUCH!
- Fixed a bug that was causing a number of commands to get discarded improperly when ships went through wormholes. Sorry about that! That made for some troubling stuff.
- Plus the whole thing with decollisions persisting after wormhole traversals should now FINALLY be fully fixed, and this was one of the most annoying bugs people were seeing. Fingers crossed.
- And fixed some bugs with certain planets in certain circumstances flipping back and forth between an explored and watched intel status every second or so. Definitely also irritating.
- And actually there was a bunch of other stuff, too.
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
