Beta 0.876 now out (Much Sanity Was Added)

[x4000]

Notes: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Stars_Beyond_Reach_Beta_Phase_2_Release_Notes#Version_0.876

Really this is just a big ol' bushel of bugfixes.  A lot of these bugs had staggeringly strange effects on the game.

Also this adds more specialization to the racial landers, which is pretty cool.

More tomorrow!

[topper]

Hey Chris,

I have been out a few weeks from general busyness, but finally got back in to the game today. It is feeling much better than a few weeks ago! Attaching the music and adding adjacency bonuses and free building placement made a huge difference in the strategic depth and game interest for me.

I have a bunch of little things to go Mantis now, but overall this is a game I can enjoy. Currently around turn 100 and getting wrecked by a Krolin land grab, but still having fun!

[ptarth]

...adding adjacency bonuses ... made a huge difference in the strategic depth and game interest for me.

Would you say you'd like even more adjacency bonuses?

[crazyroosterman]

...adding adjacency bonuses ... made a huge difference in the strategic depth and game interest for me.

Would you say you'd like even more adjacency bonuses?

perhaps we should have an adjacency bonus that makes more adjacency bonuses which also make more adjacency bonuses which also make more adjacency and then on and on and on and on!.

[topper]

...adding adjacency bonuses ... made a huge difference in the strategic depth and game interest for me.

Would you say you'd like even more adjacency bonuses?

I think the bonuses are doing a good job and are mainly logical relationships between buildings. I also think the visibility of the bonuses needs to be improved before adding many more to the game. Starting with 0017178 which is related to 16238.

If something like that was added, then yeah, a few more adjacency bonuses would be great!

[Pumpkin]

Yeah, adjacency bonuses are great. I was really pleased when they were added. And I think I would appreciate if you give them a bit more impact, for example by reducing the efficiency of a lone building while increasing the bonus (like a ship in AI War that have a low fire power but a big-big bonus against some hulls; this feature is great too and vital to the strategic depth).

But maybe the balance is fine and forcing the player to do more building packing wouldn't be good... I don't know.

[x4000]

Cheers guys, thanks for the kind words.  Lots of interesting thoughts here, and on mantis and the beta area recently.

A lot of the general things people are not liking at the moment, or wanting clarity on, come back a bit to some of my original intent for the game and how I had to give up a few things in order to make sense of things like combat and the world itself.  Now some of those are coming back to bite me in terms of combat and building ranges for this and that, and so that has me looking back to my original intent some now that I know all the things that I've learned about the game in the last half year.  I think I can bring back some of those elements in a straightforward way, and both simplify some of the range/combat woes as well as actually bringing more depth to expansion and so on.

We shall see.  It's something I'm spending a fair bit of time on today seeing if I can make work visually, because that's the number one thing for me right now.  I think that this works conceptually very well, so long as I can make it work visually in a way that doesn't make the entire game ugly or unclear or what have you.