This is the first update in Beta, so we added a lot of balancing changes this patch.
Buying Ships / Upgrades / Repairs / Supplies
Quite a few people have mentioned that the lack of these things are a problem and we agree. In this patch we have increased the likelihood that shops will spawn when a sector is generated.
Keep in mind that while we don’t want shops to be ultra-rare, we don’t want them to ultra-common too. It’s a fine line, so let us know and we’d like to hear your feedback on how this is working out for you.
Combat
This patch brings a number of improvements to combat:
- Your ships will remember attack targets after move orders are given. This will make it much easier to focus fire on a particular target, but also move your fleet if you need to.
- Added a number of attachments – these will give you an idea of what we’re aiming for but there’s still more to come. So for example, ships will now have more functional abilities (increased damage, lower agro, improved stats) which will improve the flow of the game and offer you more customisation options.
- Removed Command Ships and Dreadnoughts from early game enemy fleets. This should ease up the difficulty curve early on, without impacting the end game.
- Drones have had their damage halved. In addition, drones, mines and turrets have been rebalanced.
- Several changes to how shields work. They will begin to regen sooner than they did before, but take longer to regen to full. In addition, if shields have been fully depleted, they will take longer to pop back to full. This will help improve your own survivability but also avoid situations where enemy shields were respawning before you had a chance to kill them.
- Missile buff. All missile types have had their damage increased.
- Photon Blast (Rogue) has been significantly reduced in damage. This is to cut down on situations where multiple Rogues insta-kill your ships. However, we have also reduced the cooldown of the ability to keep its DPS in line with other abilities. Also, we fixed the bug where it sometimes misses when the Rogue is moving.
The big thing that’s still to come to the game is more attachments and weapon upgrades (all weapons will have level 1, 2 and 3 variants). These will really change the way combat works – they mean you can beef up your ships, give them burst DPS abilities or make them more resilient. Some players have reported that getting past mid-game is tough. The reason for this is that your ships will eventually have more upgrades by that point, therefore can take more hits and deal more damage.
Our plan is that these and upcoming combat changes will really help improve the combat experience – please let us know what you think about it.
Update Notes v0.1.1.2
- Can now issue a move order after issuing an attack order and both will be preserved (maintaining target lock while moving).
- Selectable buttons can now respond on mouse down rather than mouse up, improving interaction. This feature is currently used on all selectable buttons that appear on the Battlefield UI.
- Phase Warp now resets to current node and doesn’t re-generate the sector. Still adds Phase Warp Criticals.
- Added new Support Attachment: Ion Bomb I
- Added new System Attachments: Auto Repair Bots I, Charge Reactor I, Charge Shielding I, Fortified Hull Plating I, Fortified Shielding I, Reaver Mode I, Vast Reactor I
- Updated skill names and descriptions.
- There are now tooltip-type rollovers on the ship buttons at the bottom of the Battlefield UI. These show the raw stats for the ships in the player’s fleet. In addition, there is now a replacement rollover on the stats bars in the fleet browser which swaps the bars out for the raw number stats.
- Implemented ship renaming.
- Updated pause button to new asset and moved it down above the minimap. Added play button to battlefield UI.
- Created a popup for the exit game warning with hazard chevrons.
- Added Warning dialogue when exiting the game.
- Created a Scrap Loot popup for the fleet browser.
- Background updates – fixed star positions and lighting colours for all backgrounds.
- Aos background now swaps out to dead Aos after Erebus Platform fires.
- Erebus charging VFX gets removed later due to time changes.
- Updated various in-game icons.
- Added Ann Scott-Jones to the credits panel.
- Activated hidden VFX.
- Various VFX tweaks.
- Reduced the thickness of beam weapons to help differentiate them from lances.
Balancing
- Significantly increased the chance of shops.
- Decreased the chance of flagged events (e.g. cargo beacon).
- Reaver mode brought in line with other ‘mode’ attachments.
- Reduced Orthani shield regeneration.
- Removed Command ship from earlier enemy fleets.
- Removed Dreadnought from earlier enemy fleets.
- Drones have had their damage halved.
- Ion beam no longer does energy damage.
- Changed Volatile Storm Micro/Generator AI to attack enemies when they have no shields.
- Halved the damage of Volatile Storm Micro/Generator.
- Increased the damage buff that Tactical Advantage gives to 25% up from 10%.
- Shields now start to regenerate after not taking damage for 1.5 seconds down from 5 seconds.
- Shield regeneration rate of all ships has been halved, and will now regenerate from 1% to 100% in 20 seconds.
- Shields that have been destroyed will now pop back to full after 30 seconds, up from 20 seconds.
- Drone, mine and turret rebalance.
- Reduced the damage of Orthani and Akari mines.
- Changed prices of support attachments
- Drones have had their projectile values normalised to make balancing easier.
- Brought skills in line with their system equivalents.
- Assault can no longer take Patched Repair I or Bolster Energy I.
- BF Torpedo has had its damage and cooldown increased.
- Breach and Ion beam have had their damage reduced.
- Fusion and Nova Lance have had their damage increased.
- Photon blast has had it’d damage and cooldown reduced.
- Strike, Spider and Siege missiles have all had their damage increased.
- All weapons have had their prices modified to reflect changes.
- All ‘modes’ now have a 1 second stop and charge time.
- Reaver Mode I now grants 50% damage and rate of fire increase for 10 seconds.
- Reworked pulses to do an instant effect and then some over time.
- Decreased the effect of all storms.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a few minor text things on the patch notes panel.
- Skills are now being saved after updating in the Fleet Browser
- Fixed issue with systems appearing as skills.
- Fixed issue where you could give orders to defended structures.
- Caught bug where fleet data would not save on exit of Fleet Browser.
- Bug fix – Full-screen Erebus explosion no longer has falloff.
- Skills now work as intended – they weren’t properly applying their benefits. Potential fix for skills not updating.
- Save game fix: CurrentGame – QuestPair serialisation corrected.
- Save game fix: LootItem – don’t construct if loading.
- Save game fix: StoryChoice, StoryMissionObject – now serialises Story Sector and returns on Awake/construction if deserialising.
- Save game fix: StorySector – stopped serializing some private variables.
- Save game fix: StoryText – constructor – don’t do anything if deserialising.
- Added ‘adjust aim for velocity’ toggle onto guns, Photon Blast is no longer wonky.
