Whew, this one is giant!
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Stars_Beyond_Reach_Beta_Release_Notes#Version_0.816I've put up another "beta" build for Steam that lets you revert to 0.815 if this eats your game overnight or something. There is a LOT of new math and so forth in this one, so it's quite possible that we messed something up. Mainly me, in the international incident calculations. If you get into game lockups or something, that will be why. Seems okay to me so far, but my testing has been limited as this is "hot off the presses," as they say.
First folks out the airlock, once again.
Notably new in this version, in no particular order:
1. Resource trading actually works now.
2. You will now see proper rogue waves rather than Grials, Grials all the live long day.
3. There is no longer a vicious cycle of death involving food production staffing.
4. There are a ton more staffing requirements for a lot of the "nice to have" buildings, like stuff that builds new products and writings, etc, so that you have somewhere to put your citizenry to work that at the same time doesn't cripple your infrastructure if they can't make it in to the office today.
5. You now can read the AI text fully at skill level 5, rather than skill level 7. As you might expect, you can also thus read the text better at lower skill levels, too.
6. Hey! You can queue up all sorts of cool stuff in the tech tree now, which is pretty darn slick. I wish I'd known I could do that in Civ, because that is freaking awesome as a feature. Now we have it here, too.
7. International Incidents are slowly making their way into the game. These take a LOT of framework, and about 90% of that framework is done now, I'd say. It's very light on content at the moment, but it already really creates a very different feel in terms of AIs not wanting to immediately nuke you when you come near them. This also lets you do proper approaches to AIs and then get into combined-arms fights with them, which should let the military portion of the game show a lot better.
8. That said, the AI is in a lot of ways more passive than ever, since the incidents are chiefly their ways of lashing out at one another and you. And at the moment they don't really have much in the way of data for that, meaning that they can't really do that much. They'll respond to your aggression, but they're going to be super oddly pacifist in this version in terms of proactively coming after you. Enjoy that while it lasts.
9. We've got internal mechanics working for MUCH more challenging and interesting raids from AIs against you and other AIs, again to have combined-arms fights in interesting ways. The military combat here is basically only interesting when it's combined arms, which was always the goal in terms of how you'd have to mix things up, anyway. That said, these mechanics aren't hooked up to anything yet, so you don't really get the benefit of these yet. It's coming, though!
Some folks were basically waiting for a "giant international incidents release," and I can understand why on that. However, that would be far too long of a stretch with no releases. There's a lot of goodies in this release, plus a huge amount of the international incidents stuff. But as a byproduct of you having a partially-complete version of the incidents, this actually makes the AIs more passive rather than more interesting. Rest assured that is incredibly temporary!! As it stands I think that this release is still a huge improvement over the prior one.
If you want to force a quicker update, just restart steam.
Goodnight!
