Release notes:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=The_Last_Federation_Alpha_Release_Notes#Alpha_Version_.807Restart steam to force a quicker update if you like.
So... about this new version:
1. There's a number of random balance and bugfix and player request things in here, but not really heaps of it. Some of that we're kind of queuing up at the moment, although we're also trying to at least do some every day.
2. There are a number of things that are explained better in the solar map now, and a number of the balance things are targeted at the solar map, I might add.
3. The player flagship stats were really differing between models and confusing people in all sorts of ways. And being decidedly un-fun in the variance, too. That's all been normalized to what should hopefully be the most balanced, interesting stats.
4. We did something of a performance witch-hunt (just a small one) relating to combat, and Keith gave it a good kick in the teeth. Still more to do, and we won't be spending a lot of time on that for another couple of weeks because there are more important things in the short term, but it is notable at least.
5. The logic for the AI flagships themselves should be a lot more interesting and aggressive now.
What this release does NOT address is the critical issue of finding it too hard to gain BP right now, and not having enough friendly actions in a number of scenarios. There has been a lot of progress on designing solutions for that today, and laying all sorts of groundwork. Actually parts of it are coded, but nothing that you can really touch yet. I hope to have that "resolved" in tomorrow's release. I put that in quotes because I really mean "enough to be playing with" and not "as much as we'll ever have."
There are a number of non-combat ways of earning BP that I have planned, which will instead cost you (game) time. You don't just sit there doing something boring, but rather when you choose these actions the sim speeds up and runs in the background real quick, and a second or so later you continue on with the game but time has passed while your flagship was off doing whatever it was that you agreed to do. You gain BP and so forth out of that, but since the situation on the solar map evolved while you were away, you can't just spam this sort of thing.
It actually MAY be that we can have enough non-combat missions that those who would prefer not to have the action-y combat can be more pacifist and instead work doing mining, construction, and other various jobs for races in order to earn the political capital needed to build the federation. We'll see how that works out. At any rate, it will be something to augment things. It would never completely replace the need for combat, but right now there is way more frequency of combat than I want to have be required. The other thing planned are some easier combat missions that are nonetheless based on the solar map sim state, and which feed both in and out in a very direct fashion. Well, all of them won't be easier per se... but faster, definitely.
So there are a number of things planned and in the works on all those fronts. My particular goal is to get all that worked out by the end of the week. We'll see how we do with that goal. Anyway, lots and lots of more actions and similar coming in the next days, so stay tuned.
