TLF Version 1.609 Released (Orbital Hunters)

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.com/tlf-version-1-609-released-orbital-hunters/

Version 1.609 is a collection of refinements to the recent changes to the game.

Orbital Bombardment by your flagship is something that is rebalanced the most.  The stronger the defensive fleet forces are at a planet you are bombing, the more expensive your bombing is, and the less effective it is.  This doesn't stop you from bombing in any circumstances -- a simple on/off switch for things like this gets extremely annoying -- but it does make it so that you can't just blaze past defenders at no additional cost.

Your ability to bomb the Obscura in this way is also extremely, extremely nerfed in general.  You could win the Invasion games shockingly quickly with this recent addition, and that definitely was not intended!  Overall this particular mechanism just wasn't much intended for Invasion mode, so it's been marginalized there quite a bit.  This fits thematically anyhow, given that the Obscura would easily have countermeasures to help defend against one freaking ship bombing them. ;)

Another fun thing is a change to how the Thoraxian Hunters work.  What are those, you ask?  Well, even experienced players almost never saw them before, because of the nature of the "Mega Buildings" intentionally being so rare in the game.  The Thoraxians no longer have a mega-building at all as of this version, and instead their Hunters will come out as their mega weapon against you-specifically if you've let the Thoraxians hate you -500 or more.  You'll actually see them more this way, and in more appropriate circumstances.

Outposts in the game also now have their naming done completely differently, making it so that you can properly identify them.  This also makes it so that you can tell what you're looking at in the Betrayal mode Armada Management screen a lot better.  That screen has seen some other facelifts and usability improvements in this version, too.  There are still a couple of things on my list to add for that one, but that will have to wait until early next week.

 

Let us know how things are looking, if you have suggestions or bug reports, etc!

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.

[nas1m]

Thanks for the many fixes - that was quick again .
Looking forward to trying them out!

BTW: How much credit would you expect to be gained by a won Assassins ambush? I remember from the patch notes that these are supposed to have been significantly buffed. But as far as I remember the most that I got in my last game was roughly 2.5k... Is this in the ballpark with what you intended? ANyway, I will keep my eyes peeled for that one in my next game.

BTW2: IIRC correctly I did not get a single Quest in my Betrayal game. Is this intended? If so, the "Hire Diplomats" friendly action could be removed in this mode, right?

[Misery]

Okay, here's a question: how is it that the various races are supposed to be powering up their various ships over the course of the game?  Previously I know it was done with those special techs they'd all just get every now and then, but right now, as best I can tell, nothing's even happening with that.  My current game has me trying out the "Harder" difficulty, and currently, I appear to be basically invincible.  I'm about 13 years in right now.  Even if a pile of flagships is sitting on top of me just pelting me with stuff, and me just ignoring them, they still barely scratch me.  With my shields typically at 2 or 3.  I also dont have a bunch of the available "space power" techs, either.   And I cant attribute this lack of difficulty to skill or something, since I barely need to do anything at all to easily win fights.  Theoretically, on Harder, getting really close and just sitting next to a pile of enemies just spraying a ton of shots right at me, with no allies around, SHOULD be really dangerous.  It pretty much seems impossible to lose here. I'm using the Boarine ship.

So.... dunno what's up with that, but that's the main thing I'm noticing currently, other than the bit with the queen being loopy.

[nas1m]

Okay, here's a question: how is it that the various races are supposed to be powering up their various ships over the course of the game?  Previously I know it was done with those special techs they'd all just get every now and then, but right now, as best I can tell, nothing's even happening with that.  My current game has me trying out the "Harder" difficulty, and currently, I appear to be basically invincible.  I'm about 13 years in right now.  Even if a pile of flagships is sitting on top of me just pelting me with stuff, and me just ignoring them, they still barely scratch me.  With my shields typically at 2 or 3.  I also dont have a bunch of the available "space power" techs, either.   And I cant attribute this lack of difficulty to skill or something, since I barely need to do anything at all to easily win fights.  Theoretically, on Harder, getting really close and just sitting next to a pile of enemies just spraying a ton of shots right at me, with no allies around, SHOULD be really dangerous.  It pretty much seems impossible to lose here. I'm using the Boarine ship.

So.... dunno what's up with that, but that's the main thing I'm noticing currently, other than the bit with the queen being loopy.

A question for you Misery: I just started a fresh Invasion game on Normal using 1.609 and noticed that the pink shots from Obscura Discs will insta-kill my flagship with 1-3 shots (I checked the tooltip and they do 200k+ damage while my flagship has roughly the same amount of health and shield (I guess). Is this intended to be this rough at the immediate start of the game?

[nas1m]

Also: Is it possible that the flagship count for Obscura fleets is significantly off?

In the invasion game I just started the first quest I started, "Joint Ground Invasion against Obscura" in like, year 3002, had 35(!) flagships in it. There is not way I can cope with this at this point in the game. Regular missions usually have 12+ flagships per armada! Thats's just too much. Sure, I can try analysing their patterns and dodge them in theory, but in practice there are just too many overlapping fields of fire. Throughly dodging the pattern of one ship will often cause you to be hit by multiple other ships.

Or am I not getting something here? 

[Misery]

Okay, here's a question: how is it that the various races are supposed to be powering up their various ships over the course of the game?  Previously I know it was done with those special techs they'd all just get every now and then, but right now, as best I can tell, nothing's even happening with that.  My current game has me trying out the "Harder" difficulty, and currently, I appear to be basically invincible.  I'm about 13 years in right now.  Even if a pile of flagships is sitting on top of me just pelting me with stuff, and me just ignoring them, they still barely scratch me.  With my shields typically at 2 or 3.  I also dont have a bunch of the available "space power" techs, either.   And I cant attribute this lack of difficulty to skill or something, since I barely need to do anything at all to easily win fights.  Theoretically, on Harder, getting really close and just sitting next to a pile of enemies just spraying a ton of shots right at me, with no allies around, SHOULD be really dangerous.  It pretty much seems impossible to lose here. I'm using the Boarine ship.

So.... dunno what's up with that, but that's the main thing I'm noticing currently, other than the bit with the queen being loopy.

A question for you Misery: I just started a fresh Invasion game on Normal using 1.609 and noticed that the pink shots from Obscura Discs will insta-kill my flagship with 1-3 shots (I checked the tooltip and they do 200k+ damage while my flagship has roughly the same amount of health and shield (I guess). Is this intended to be this rough at the immediate start of the game?

Er.... yeah, I went and had a look at that.... uh, no, they arent supposed to be THAT monstrous.   Granted, the purple shots are supposed to be the sort that you seriously cant withstand for long; like, stay in there for more than a few of turns, and you're in real trouble and probably nearing defeat, but not "die immediately" level of trouble. They're just supposed to get players attacking the thing from behind.  But...  Considering where their OTHER bullets are, it looks like their base damage is WAY too high, as only the purple shots should do really major damage, but they appear to pretty much ALL be doing really extreme damage.... 

And all of the other Obscura arent like that...   Ugh.  Did I set the blasted number wrong?  I think that's what has happened. And then I somehow never, ever noticed this.

Thanks for pointing it out, I'll take some time to mess with that and see if I cant get it to be sane and make sense.  Though it's not something that can be directly fixed until Monday when Chris is available to add it to the next patch.

And I'm also noticing a bit too much of a difference between Obscura in Invasion mode and in any other mode (where they're kinda weak, and not really supposed to be, particularly considering the strong rewards gotten from them in normal mode).  So while that's not related to the issue you're having, you've caused me to actually notice it, haha.... dunno how I didn't before.  That probably needs altering.   I knew the time for lots and lots of tweaking was coming soon, bah.  A variety of other things also arent really where they should be.  With the Burlust done, that's what I'll be trying to do now, is the tweaking.   ....and the Burlust need tweaking too, for that matter.  Cant have them just dying at you.


EDIT:  Yyyyyep.   The Disc's base damage multiplier looks like it was a tad totally absurd.  I'm sure it made perfect sense at the time (or not).  Easily fixed though.

[Misery]

Also: Is it possible that the flagship count for Obscura fleets is significantly off?

In the invasion game I just started the first quest I started, "Joint Ground Invasion against Obscura" in like, year 3002, had 35(!) flagships in it. There is not way I can cope with this at this point in the game. Regular missions usually have 12+ flagships per armada! Thats's just too much. Sure, I can try analysing their patterns and dodge them in theory, but in practice there are just too many overlapping fields of fire. Throughly dodging the pattern of one ship will often cause you to be hit by multiple other ships.

Or am I not getting something here?

And this bit is up to Chris, I think.  I'm betting you're really just not meant to be taking them on directly like that at all so early in the game; whichever race is coming up with that quest might be getting just a BIT too enthusiastic. For normal missions, 3-5 Obscura at once is a good number to deal with in one mission when that can be managed, the patterns end up working well enough together to be nasty but manageable and mostly dodgeable as long as you're being all tactical and stuff (like trying to lure a couple away from the others, stuff like that, to give you room to avoid bullets), though the more allies you have the more you can probably handle (splits them up more), but.... not like, 12 at once, especially that early.  Their patterns are very definitely not meant for extreme numbers for just your one ship to deal with at once.   

Argh I had to edit these 2 posts way too much.

[nas1m]

Also: Is it possible that the flagship count for Obscura fleets is significantly off?

In the invasion game I just started the first quest I started, "Joint Ground Invasion against Obscura" in like, year 3002, had 35(!) flagships in it. There is not way I can cope with this at this point in the game. Regular missions usually have 12+ flagships per armada! Thats's just too much. Sure, I can try analysing their patterns and dodge them in theory, but in practice there are just too many overlapping fields of fire. Throughly dodging the pattern of one ship will often cause you to be hit by multiple other ships.

Or am I not getting something here?

And this bit is up to Chris, I think.  I'm betting you're really just not meant to be taking them on directly like that at all so early in the game; whichever race is coming up with that quest might be getting just a BIT too enthusiastic. For normal missions, 3-5 Obscura at once is a good number to deal with in one mission when that can be managed, the patterns end up working well enough together to be nasty but manageable and mostly dodgeable as long as you're being all tactical and stuff (like trying to lure a couple away from the others, stuff like that, to give you room to avoid bullets), though the more allies you have the more you can probably handle (splits them up more), but.... not like, 12 at once, especially that early.  Their patterns are very definitely not meant for extreme numbers for just your one ship to deal with at once.   

Argh I had to edit these 2 posts way too much.

Mantised the two issues for your and Chris' convenience:
Invasion Mode: Individual Obscura projectiles way too strong especially early game?
Invasion Mode: Insane numbers of Obscura flagships even in early game missions?

[Misery]

Allright, that sounds good.

Instead of sending out a blob of stat changes today, I'm going to wait to see what he wants to do as far as the split-stats bit before I go TOO far with editing the Obscura numbers/stats/stuff.  So the Disc isnt going to stop being a nightmare just yet, haha.  And I think I mighta forgotten to include the full Burlust stat changes in the email I sent, so their initial version may have 10 zillion bullets that dont seem to actually do real damage.  But the patterns themselves are finished.

Either way, the tweaking/altering phase of this has started as far as I'm concerned.  Right now that means the "normal" new ships and the Burlust.  The major problems at the moment being that the VDecks and Parasites (may have gotten that name wrong... yay, memory) can go on berserk rampages that obliterate half of the battle within just a couple of turns (needless to say, they're not supposed to do that)... the Aegis isnt very effective in combat (argh), and pretty much just piles of numbers that I'm going to be messing with. 

For the most part, the actual bullet patterns on the Obscura and the other new things are complete, any changes to those are going to be subtle (and there will be some, indeed), but any feedback anyone has on them in their current state is welcomed and would help quite a bit.  That includes stats & damage levels and all that stuff too.

[Misery]

Okay, well, I've sent a blob of stat changes, so we'll see how that goes.

That should fix the Disc, make the Aegis not suck (because it kinda did), properly set Burlust Warlord damage, and a couple of other small things. 

I hope I didn't forget anything.