Release notes:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Stars_Beyond_Reach_Beta_Release_Notes#Version_0.803I honestly had not planned on working more tonight, but I got a surge of energy and a certain amount of inspiration, and here we are. I'm going to try to disconnect for the rest of the weekend (well, except Sunday afternoon), though.
This version brings a lot of balance shifts in your favor. In a few cases perhaps too much so, it's hard to say. But it also fixes two conflicting things:
1. If you played a certain way (ptarth), then after a while into the game you would be just this unstoppable juggernaut with practically unlimited resources.
2. If you played another way (Watashiwa), then you'd get absolutely bogged down in disease in the early-middle game, and... well, not death spiral anymore, but certainly the fun got sucked out.
3. If you played yet another way (topper) and got unlucky, then your hungry citizens in your midsize town would turn cannibalistic and just absolutely murder one another as soon as food became scarce.
Funnily enough, we've had the following progressions in crime:
1. Very frequent mall shootings, with vicious rampages despite police out in force (this is prior to the beta, it was something I kept fighting myself).
2. Larger-scale riots for a variety of reasons, mainly trash and dead bodies (hello earliest days for Redshirts).
3. And now post-apocalyptic scavenging and fighting for supplies when Burger King closes down for a day.
I have to say, personally the exploits of all this sort of thing endlessly amuse me. I'm somehow reminded of certain dwarves locking themselves in their rooms and feverishly creating some sort of insane object before murdering others. Anyhow, in this case it's down to bugs, but it's been a very fun evolution to see in terms of how the crime balance numbers could cause such disparate effects.
All right, I'm out!