1.017 marks the official release of the improvements from 8 separate beta releases, including:
* New optional "Conducts" such as the much-requested "Dead Is Dead" (losing an exo is permanent) to the relentless "On Your Toes" (you only get 5 seconds to pick your next action in missions).
* Massive rebalancing of the bot population logic so you don't run into 50 DoomBots in a single mission, and significant rebalancing of bot stats themselves (there's a lot less bullet-sponge-syndrome going on). The logic where the AI picks which bot types to upgrade between missions is now more consistent in the amount of agony it causes you. On the other hand, the Easy, Normal, and Hard difficulty levels are all harder (with Casual, Expert, and Misery mostly retaining their previous positions on the pain-scale).
* The Volatizer and the Shotgun have had their AOE patterns re-imagined to be more interesting and useful. And AOE in general has been heavily revised to make more sense (explosions no longer propogate to nearby rooms as if the walls weren't there at all, etc).
* It's now much easier to mod many of the game's graphical aspects.
Many thanks to the players for the feedback that prompted most of these changes. The specific changes (and the players primarily to blame for causing each new refinement of suffering) are listed here.