TLF Version 1.015 Released (Nuanced Bloodshed)

[MaskityMask]

I gotta say that I like nightmare difficulty surprisingly enough. I mean, I'm not planning to play on it often, but it is surprisingly exciting.

Since every race starts with rather low opinion of you, only way to deal with that is quests and giving them spacefaring tech. But amount of spy drones rise up until eventually you can't complete smuggling mission without alerting some of them giving some races really low opinion of you... Meaning that best way to beat this difficulty is to choose which races you want to ally with and stick to them.

Though I do have to admit that it was kinda pain how in my first nightmare difficulty game it eventually ended up with burlast forming fear empire and everyone hating me because of wariness of fear empire to the point only acutians still somewhat liked me :p And I was unable to see if I would have been able to erase the fear empire without alliances(since acutians did have rather good military...) since I died in mission.

[jonasan]

nice looking change log today for the coming patch

I really like the weapon re-balancing you've done, nerfing spread shot should get players more engaged with different tactics, the buff to the mass driver should mean it gets more widely used and the changes to the minigun are great, should now be a viable and distinct alternative choice to spread shot.

Diversifying the weapons to different play styles like this should also mean players are much more inclined to take the hydral tech missions so as to unlock other weapons and get the load out they want... which can only be a good thing!

On the spyprobes front i think the changes are all for the better.... looking forward to seeing high numbers of probes set off to kill me at high speed wielding rather dangerous weapons!

the number of probes change will surely make the smuggling missions as interesting on normal as they are on harder levels - but i'm a little concerned about the possible effect it could have on the higher (misery) difficulties...

Previously on misery there was often no route to take without alerting someone, or more likely 2-3 of the races of your activities - which i liked. i really enjoyed the process of looking for and then piloting the perfect route in order to only alert the races i could afford to loose relations with (which is hopefully what this change will get into these missions at lower difficulties!)

i'm worried that at the higher settings we might end up with a situation where its almost impossible to deliver the tech without alerting every race to your smuggling... which is potentially going to be frustrating/defeat the point of seeking out a viable route through. Not sure yet of course! Will have to wait and see.

if it does though, i wonder if a slight change to the way the spy probes are spawned might help with this issue... perhaps each race's probes could spawn in small clumps/groups (3-5). Obviously these clumps would overlap due to the crazy number of probes, but this would potentially mean each race would be unable to cover every possible route to the target. Like that the missions get that much more dangerous (which is great) but there would still potentially be a route through where you didn't alert everyone. But hell, perhaps you've already got that in there and i'm worrying about nothing!

[MaskityMask]

Honestly, I'm little afraid of new patch <_<

Previously, only on nightmare difficulty with max amount of different races on combat map it was impossible to get to dispatch area without getting caught. If amount of drones are doubled, then that would mean that on higher than normal its impossible at all to do any of dispatch missions without getting caught.

Like, does on normal the "You can't avoid them even if you are careful" thing come only in play when there are five races on the map? I'd think that would be fair assuming same applies to higher difficulties.. If it comes after second race then I think its rather strict. Then again, what do I know about gamebalance?

Anyway, yeah, managed to beat nightmare difficulty. I think its quite fun actually