Release notes here.
Lots of stuff in this one! Also, there's a new interview with me and Rob chatting over at the eXplorminate's podcast, if you're interested.
- There's a new option under the debug settings that lets you forcefully change the difficulty of the AIs if you want to, after having already started the game. Later on this will make it so that achievements aren't valid during that savegame if you use this sort of thing, but it's a nice tool to have if you're enjoying yourself but want to up (or down) the challenge belatedly without starting all over.
- Fixed a bunch of bugs, including a number of cross-threading ones that were relatively rare but definitely annoying when they happened.
- The hacking difficulty has been rebalanced a bit, to make it easier early on and harder later.
- A whole heck of a lot of balance changes in all sorts of areas of the game based on feedback, but let's highlight a few specific areas:
- Arks and Golems and "Lone Wolf" fleets are much easier to actually find sooner in the game. They're also cheaper (in AIP) to capture, and more powerful.
- Outguard can now be hired at no hacking cost, and all of them now have flagships, and in general they are all much stronger. Some can also be hired twice now!
- And then lastly, unrelated to balance, we did a lot of work to get the game to load mods a bit more gracefully, and to be able to load expansions (the first of which is now in the earliest stages of work), and to be able to have mods of expansions, etc.
Please Do Report Any Issues!
If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those, particularly after such a large change as was required for the duplicate fleets stuff.
We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. I'm definitely not going to be getting to my originally-planned todo list of achievements this week, simply because there have been more important things that folks have brought up instead, and we've been focusing on those. The achievements will hopefully be something I have time to get in next week, but some of that depends on what reports come in between now and then.
The release has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, 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
