Today's update features some behind-the-scenes improvements to multiplayer networking, as well as general stability fixes. We also have two new major features for you to play with!
Designs Sandbox
We've added a new game mode that you can start from the main menu. In the designs sandbox, you can spawn and control allied and enemy ships in order to test out your designs in combat.
Civilian Trade Network
The resources your planets are importing and exporting are now automatically carried across your trade routes by various sizes of civilian trade ships.
Killing an enemy trade ship awards you its cargo in bounty, and disrupting an enemy planet's resource shipments will bestow it with the "Blockaded" status, reducing its various productions.
Gevron Dreadnaught Hull
The first of the larger hulls for our new shipsets has been added in!
Full Changelog
Added: Designs sandbox game mode. Allows you to spawn and control enemy and allied ships to test out your designs.
Added: Civilian trade ships will now automatically ship resources across your trade lines and can be intercepted for a bounty and to decrease enemy production.
Added: Added new, larger flagship to the 'Gevron' shipset (First in the list).
Added: Designs can now be marked as obsolete, hiding them from most lists. Obsolete support ships will not be built by defense.
Added: Added console cheat to change AI difficulty (ch_ai_command <id> diff <passive, easy, medium, hard, murderous, savage>)
Added: Added quickbar section to show fleets that are low on supplies.
Changed: Improved how the AI deals with damaged fleets, and fixed a bug causing them to protect systems that are no longer under attack.
Balance: Very small flagships with large amounts of supply are far more expensive now.
Balance: Significantly reduced benefits from Clear Water, and made it no longer work on Labor.
Fixed: The network library now scales to the available bandwidth, and a source of heavy packet loss was eliminated.
Fixed: Various crash fixes related to autosaves during combat.