Release notes:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=The_Last_Federation_Alpha_Release_Notes#Alpha_Version_.809Restart steam to force a quicker update if you like.
Good golly this one is huge. Took us a few days to put this together, obviously, and we really have not been paying attention to mantis during this time. It's been one of those "must keep our heads down and focus if we are to finish" types of things. There are two dispatch missions left for Keith on Monday, and then beyond that I believe most of his time will be on responding to bugfixes and polish notes from both mantis players and myself. So we will be getting into that again heavily at that point. If there's anything game-breaking in there prior to that, my apologies.
My focus is going to continue to be on solar map clarity stuff for the next bit, and solar map balance, and the new form of combat-without-SHMUP stuff. My goal is for all of that to be handled by the end of next week.
So... lots of release notes there. There are improvements major and minor all over the place, except in combat. This has been pretty much solely focused on the larger game. So what are the highlights?
1. The technologies work a lot better now in terms of your clarity of being able to understand them, the AIs making use of them, and you being able to make use of them. Boy it just gives me tingles with the new tech stuff, because I love tech trees. This has been where the vast majority of my time has been spent. And yes, I know the descriptions for the buildings are still useless. That's on my list. So is making it so that your outposts don't get capped immediately, thus making the Property Development dispatch mission not really possible at the moment.
2. There are a bunch of solar map AI improvements, and balance between the races, to make things more varied in how they play out. All of these things were pretty much intended from the start, but for either design or implementation (or both) reasons, they were not working as I had originally intended. In most cases it was my nuts and bolts side of the design not living up to the larger vision. A number of new mechanics and mechanics revisions were thus added to rectify that.
3. Dispatch missions are a huuuuuge new addition. Keith has been working pretty much exclusively on this while I was on the rest of the stuff. This was no small feat of an addition for such a short period of time. Basically, dispatch missions let you trade "time" for results. Aaaugh, right!? That sounds like grinding. But... smile... it's not. You're trading
relative time, not your actual human time. In other words, it works rather like a turn-based game in some respects, where the length of the dispatch mission essentially correlates to how long of a turn the other "players" get in exchange. On paper and in practice I find this really interesting. The actual scrolling page for the dispatch actions that are going by as you are in a mission needs work for aesthetic purposes, but so does the after-contract screen anyhow. I will work on that this weekend.
4. Some of the specific dispatch missions are absolutely essential now. The ability to directly research techs for yourself, for instance. Or to build outposts for the AI. Although stealing the techs from the AI is a lot cheaper in terms of opportunity cost. These new dispatch missions also provide you a
great way to earn BP that isn't combat. In theory, you could probably now play the game without doing much combat at all. In practice you would still have to do some, but still.
5. Opportunity costs to combat (and some other deals/missions/actions)! This is another huge thing. It now costs you some small number of months to do all the combat missions. Kind of like a dispatch mission, except much briefer, generally. This means that if there is a giant cloud of armadas around an allied planet, for instance, you can't just grind it out by attacking them serially with the game essentially on pause while you do so (since solar map time does not -- and should not -- pass while you are in combat). There is still no time pressure in the combats themselves, but choosing to do a combat at all now comes with that opportunity cost that means you can't essentially be a one-man time-traveling army.
6. Better randomization at the start of the game. This one is smaller, but races and yourself now start with some random techs at the start, and you also get some random resources. This lets you get moving faster in terms of gifting techs or resources to races from the get-go, or in terms of having more interesting targets to steal, faster.
Something I am not really happy with at the moment is the way that the balance on the solar map is playing out in terms of time that it takes the AI races to kill one another. That's something I'm still working on, but right now it's still too fast. I am extremely happy with the overall flow of the solar simulation and how the races interact, but the actual taking-over of planets should be something that requires more time investment on the part of the AI. Particularly with the new dispatch stuff and opportunity costs on the combat, this is a big deal, because things can just get to a near-endgame too fast without your intervention. I aim to solve that this weekend as well, but mainly it is a matter of tuning variables and looking at a few new rules, etc. It's no major thing in terms of actual time investment, overall, but it is something that just takes a lot of iterating and watching on my part.
Anyway, that's it for now. Cheers! I am going to be working all weekend, but pretty unresponsive on the forums and mantis, FYI. There's just some stuff I need to get through before I come back into focus here, for the sake of the overall workflow. I'm sure those of you with project-oriented jobs know how it is when you are able to focus on the project versus constantly being interrupted by meetings or whatever. It's kind of the same thing here at the moment, but that won't last forever.
