TLF Version 1.040-1.042 Released (The Need For Speed)

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.com/tlf-version-1-040-1-042-released-the-need-for-speed/

Version 1.042 is out, and it really does a lot of interesting things.

The biggest thing you will notice is that the speed of all the shots you fire is now doubled, making them far faster than enemy shots are.  This makes it easier to hit enemy ships that are running away or doing fast passes against you, and just feels more satisfying in general, too.  In general this is a lot more in keeping with other SHMUPs, I realized.  This may cause some balance problems in the short term (in your favor), but if that's the case those can be ironed out.  The speed of the enemy ships and shots is really well tuned, so it's just a matter of your ability to effectively deal damage to them, and their ability to take it, at this point.

A bunch of dispatches have been updated.  Various ones now pay you credits again rather than costing you credits, and a couple are more powerful and more clear.  There are a few other places where clarifying language has been added to help new players.

Also, this release removes a couple of exploits in edge cases with auto-resolve for battles, so that is more balanced.

Ongoing Updates

The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been a dry spell for the last couple of months in terms of the speed of updates on the game, but we're going to be continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.

As you've already seen, it won't always be on a consistent schedule, but if you're familiar with our post-release support for AI War: Fleet Command over the past 5 years, that's basically the arc that we are currently expecting here unless something unexpectedly changes. There are only two of us programmers, so when we have to divert our attention to something, there's not a lot of granularity available to us, heh.

At present we are also working on an expansion TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site on Monday, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in mid November, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

[Hearteater]

The biggest thing you will notice is that the speed of all the shots you fire is now doubled, making them far faster than enemy shots are.  This makes it easier to hit enemy ships that are running away or doing fast passes against you, and just feels more satisfying in general, too.  In general this is a lot more in keeping with other SHMUPs, I realized.

I haven't really played much, but I did notice the difficulty of my shots catching up to ships. But something else I noticed was the SHMUPs nature of the game. I wasn't around during development, but did you ever consider combat being real time instead of turn based? It seems like that would allow a lot more of the SHMUPs feel to come through. Right now I don't really find that I've got much chance of pulling off SHMUPs-like bullet dodging due to turns.

[x4000]

It originally was a realtime SHMUP, but it didn't fit well with the style of the rest of the game.  The move to turn-based was something that we did during the beta.

[Hearteater]

Very interesting. Seems odd since realtime would actually make it similar to Space Pirates and Zombies, and that has a nice overall feel. Out of curiosity, was the player shot speed as slow as before this last update while it was still a SHMUP?

[steelwing]

Thank you thank you THANK YOU for changing "improve relations" to a paid dispatch!  I was needing that as part of my strategy yesterday morning and couldn't use it due to unaffordability, and then the patch showed up last night, and my strategy was revivified!

[Misery]

Very interesting. Seems odd since realtime would actually make it similar to Space Pirates and Zombies, and that has a nice overall feel. Out of curiosity, was the player shot speed as slow as before this last update while it was still a SHMUP?

The realtime version just hadnt been working out too well.... it was too.... simple?  And it didn't really fit the tactical nature of the game.   Strategy players dont necessarily want pure twitch gameplay in there, really...

I had thought it was pretty darn good of course, but when they introduced the current system.... yeah, it really just does fit this game so much better. 


As for the patch, yay, it's not quite as stupidly hard to get money now!  That had seemed a little overdone in the previous version.

[Hearteater]

I'm not going to argue with success, I was just curious.

[x4000]

Thank you thank you THANK YOU for changing "improve relations" to a paid dispatch!  I was needing that as part of my strategy yesterday morning and couldn't use it due to unaffordability, and then the patch showed up last night, and my strategy was revivified!

My pleasure!

I'm not going to argue with success, I was just curious.

In the future we are planning a realtime shmup based on what we had going earlier.  But a lot more involved in... other ways that I'm not going to spill the beans about, yet.  We were going to call that Airship Eternal, but now I have a whole new concept for it.

[Hearteater]

Excellent to hear about doing a Shump, because I was really impressed by the potential I saw in TLF's combat to be a Shump. So I'm really looking forward to seeing a dedicated Shump. I'm sure I'll get used to TLF's combat. I need to play it with the faster bullets, because that was a big complaint I didn't even know I had.

[x4000]

Excellent to hear about doing a Shump, because I was really impressed by the potential I saw in TLF's combat to be a Shump. So I'm really looking forward to seeing a dedicated Shump.

Yeah, it's the same way that I felt, but it just didn't jive with the larger game.  And then I've been growing less and less enthused about the pure shmup game idea over the last few months, until finally this week I had the "second idea" that is always key to a game that I'm excited about.  I don't want to say what it is yet, but it has me all excited.

that was a big complaint I didn't even know I had.

That's how I feel a lot of the time when someone brings up something like this.

[ElOhTeeBee]

This might just be my opinion, but I think the buffed build-relations dispatches have gone too far the other way - rather than being lousy, they let you build up relations at an incredible rate.

(Also, do the various races form trade routes on their own, or am I just not colonizing enough moons to get resource surpluses going so the trade options start showing up?)

[x4000]

* The build/reduce relations dispatches are now half as effective as they were in the last couple of releases (and thus twice as effective as they were prior to that).  Just a process to figure out the exact balance on those!

Thanks!

And races do not build trade routes on their own -- we need to do a better job of explaining why various races aren't available, though, for sure.  I'll work on that.  Thanks!