Hello everyone! We just put out the latest stable branch Star Ruler 2 patch, incorporating the previous 2 weeks of changes and updates from our experimental branch.
Combat Effects and Weapon Skins
This build adds improved impact and explosion particle effects, with improvements to combat visibility up close.
You can now also choose one of 4 weapon skins for your empire, changing the appearance of your beams and projectiles.
In addition, the first bits of support ship behaviour made it in, and a fleet's support vessels will now move to better firing positions and to protect the flagship from incoming fire.
Governments and Early Game
As a precursor to our future Race Customization rework, we've updated your choice of Government to have a larger impact on your empire's early game progression.
Each player starts with extra goodies and a free fleet (or two!) based on their government.
We've also tweaked a lot of the early game resource curves, making Energy and Influence more useful to have earlier on and creating more varied starts.
Offers and Bribes
A new mechanic has been added to influence votes: Offers. Players can now freely offer up money, energy, fleets or even their own planets to try and garner support from other empires in a vote.
Note: The AI has not been taught how to work with this part of the diplomacy system yet. Stay tuned for future updates that will make the AI's diplomacy game better.
Full Changelog
Added:
- Some additional auto-tools for assigning auto-imports to planets.
- Right clicking a star lets you colonize all that system's planets at once.
- Planets Tab mode to display used and total amount of surface tiles.
- "Join via IP" button to multiplayer menu for direct connect.
- Empires now need to make first contact before doing diplomacy.
- Support ships move during combat, to block shots against their flagship, and to find an opening to attack their targets.
- Empires can now put up various offers on influence votes to entice other players to vote their way.
Changed:
- Tweak resource income curves early game to make other resources more useful earlier on.
- Energy generation is now reduced the more energy you are currently storing.
- Race "Government" choice now determines more about an empire's start, and gives a free fleet at the beginning of the game.
- Improved ship visbility. Support ships are visible as models from further away.
- Improved weapon and ship explosion particle effects.
- Empires now have differing visual effects for their weapons.
- Flagships can no longer stay inside stars indefinitely.
- Improved performance in large galaxies where you have vision in many systems at once.
- Swapped controls for issuing facing and 3D movement orders.
- Changed a number of vote support cards to go along the new Offers system.
Balance:
- Reduced income per money pressure from $100k to $75k.
- Tripled support ship armor HP to match flagship plate armor.
- Buff railgun damage output, especially on support ships.
- Fix reactors not costing maintenance relative to their supply storage.
- Increase overall supply regeneration rate.
- Reduced maintenance cost of level 0 worlds from -100k to -80k.
Fixed:
- Remants could end up wanting to fly to the center of the galaxy.
AI:
- The AI wasted large amounts of money on redundant colonization.
- The AI should manage multiple groups of fleets better.
- Medium and harder AIs will jump their fleets to relevant targets in systems, sometimes.