Release notes:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=The_Last_Federation_Alpha_Release_Notes#Alpha_Version_.853Restart steam to force a quicker update if you like.
Goodly amount of stuff in this one! As per usual lately, heh:
1. There are a few bugfixes, and some of them are substantial. Although we didn't really make that much progress on the bugfixing today, as we were otherwise engaged.
2. The underlying framework for setting up quest-related combat is now straightened out a lot better, thanks to Keith. That's what took up most of his bugfixing time today; that and some unexpected things that he found and fixed when he was working on adding some interface line items. Ideally with the work that was done here, I should be able to really get cranking on adding more quests over this weekend without bugging him. My pie-in-the-sky goal is 100+ quests, and right now we have 4, which is not too bad considering that was done with a bunch of framework and GUI stuff alongside it. So we shall see what I can accomplish there, but I intend for quests to be a really major driving force in the game.
3. Thanks almost exclusively to zharmad, who went really above and beyond on his analysis, there's a ton of combat balance tuning. It feels better to me; most of the differences are not the sort of thing a new player would notice, but I really feel like it gives the combat more proper legs.
4. I've made a couple of changes to keep the giant battles from becoming SO giant. Basically we were finding cases where there could be like 60+ flagships in a battle (with all their dozens of squadrons of multiple ships each), and the game could hardly run that on our beefy CPUs. The solutions that I've come up with there I'm pretty pleased with.
5. The techs that are related to combat (ground or space) now have a lot more teeth. nat_401 made some really good observations there that I had missed mainly because I get those techs out of habit, heh. I think that these techs will be a lot less ignorable now. And there are more techs that I have planned for tomorrow -- I started to get that in tonight, but then didn't have time. I've been wanting to do this other tech stuff for a while anyway, and it fit's well with nat_401's observations, so that works out well.
6. RCI values are now more volatile in the negative direction; it's no longer so easy to create late-game utopias. This is actually in some ways a good thing, because some really interesting quests will open up when races are getting desperate. Actually one already does.
7. Two new quests, to add to the two from yesterday.
8. Loooooads of interface improvements to the solar map tooltips, and then a number of related screens. Just some various stuff I've been meaning to get to for a long while, and that has been bugging me since... what, November? December? But I just never had time to get to it, always something more pressing. Anyway, the most-horrible screens are now cleaned up, and there are some cases where information that was frankly not available to you before is now revealed. Like what the budgets are, and what the racial compatibility with a planet means, and what the AI is building on a planet, or even what disease it has on a planet. There are still some screens I need to get to, but nothing remotely so dire anymore, which is a real relief for me. I still also do need to write descriptions for most of the actions and political deals, and rewrite the descriptions for most buildings and many events and actions. The descriptions for the techs were updated a week or so ago, so those are fine.
So there's still more clarity work for me to do, but I'm trying to balance that against functional considerations, like the quests for instance. There still aren't enough of those for you to really get a good sense of how the system will work, but the quests that are there should all work properly now, at least.
Enjoy!
