Greetings Commanders!
Another active week here at the Studio. This week we bring you an additional item slot along with several balance tweaks, quality of life improvements and bug fixes. With that said, on to the changes:
New Item Slot!
We have been looking at ways to give players more abilities to customize their ships. So far that has come in the form of adding new items to the game. This week we are increasing the number of equipment slots on all ships to three up from two. This should allow for even more build options for each ship.
Many of the original items were designed with a two equipment slot limit in mind. In order to allow the third slot we decided to restrict certain items to just two slots. Many item's description text will now say "" for items that were only ever intended to be able to equip two of. Still, there remain a good number of items which can be equipped in the third slot.
Quality of Life Enhancements
- We have decided that the cinematic zoom camera was slowing the game down too much, especially in the later game. To address this we have reduced the frequency of the cinematic zoom. In the first sectors for each campaign (Crosius and Arx) the frequency was reduced by only 3%. For the second, third and fourth sectors of each campaign the frequency was reduced 50%. For all of the end game sectors of each campaign the frequency was reduced 75%. Hopefully this helps with the pace of the later game.
- Update the icon for the Mining Outpost so that it matched the in-game model.
- Resized the super heavy capital ship explosions. When we had updated this we neglected to link the correctly sized explosions. These should no longer fill the map.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where sometimes Hero ships were allowed to deploy in the new "defend the outpost" bounty missions.
- May have fixed a bug where sometimes a player ship's turn could be skipped. This is a rare bug that is not consistently reproducible, but we think we found the problem.
Balance Tweaks
- Added Trade Goods to the Externus item drop tables.
- Lowered the overall difficulty of Beginner again. Veteran and Epic were unchanged in this patch.
- Slightly increased the damage on all Heavy Torpedoes.
- Increased item rewards for about a dozen missions.
- Increased the mission rewards for all late game bounty missions. We are continuing to test these missions to ensure there is a proper risk/reward. We may make additional changes to these missions in the future, but for now the increased rewards should help.
That's all for this week. We are hoping to be able to spend some time finally getting those Steam Achievements up and working next week. Once the achievements are done we will look at our roadmap going forward.
Thank you to everyone for playing our game!