Greetings Commanders!
Today's patch brings a buff to many of the Alliance forces, more memory management optimization and several minor tweaks and bug fixes. We continue to work behind the scenes to make the game as enjoyable as possible for as many people as possible and as many play styles as possible. With that said, on to the changes:
Alliance Campaign Balance
The behind the scenes numbers show that overall people are finding the Federation campaign far easier than the Alliance campaign. Very few players have made it out of the Alliance mid game (roughly story missions 10-20) on the medium or hard difficulties. Considerably more people have beaten the Federation mid-boss than have beaten the Alliance mid-boss.
In Patch 1.0.2 we partially addressed this by weakening the Alliance mid-boss. This barely made any difference however, as upon closer inspection very few people were even making it that far.
After reading feedback in the forums we decided to approach the difficulty of the Alliance campaign by directly buffing a variety of Alliance ships. This has the advantage of supporting a wider range of play styles with the Alliance forces, while still leaving all of the existing options intact.
Several ships got the tech tree ability to buy an additional action point at the cost of having their purchase price increased. This should make the starting Alliance ships viable for longer and also make the early and mid game portions of the Alliance campaign more accessible. Many other Alliance ships also received slight buffs.
Memory Management
Today's patch brings a second round of memory optimization. Working through people's error logs there are some that after the last patch had gotten right on the line of being able to play (able to load battles but crashing with a memory out during a fight).
We have made further under the hood optimizations to help those that can almost run the game. However these have come with a small cost for all users, several load screens that had been removed in August had to be re-instated and some of the loading screens will now take longer to load.
Still, we hope this lets more people actually be able to play the game.
New Gear
Plasma Ammunition
Plasma ammunition is the choice for commanders that want to deal the most combined damage. It adds to both primary damage and shield damage. Despite the high damage potential plasma ammo has not seen widespread adoption as the unstable plasma core leads to more missed shots that deal no damage. Still, for ace pilots that never miss, plasma ammo is a must have.
Fighter Shield Network
The Fighter Shield Network now has its intended artwork in the game.
Bug Fixes
- Some types of ammunition were applying to Flak Cannons and Mini-Guns damage and some were not. This has been fixed so that all types of ammunition alter the stats on both the primary weapon and Flak Cannons or Mini-Guns if applicable.
- Fixed a bug where Tier 1 Superior Fighter Thrusters were accidentally giving a -90% critical defense. The item now penalizes the intended -9% critical defense.
- Fixed a broken optional objective in a Crosius bounty mission for the Alliance campaign. There is no more mystery destination you never reach.
Balance Tweaks
- Re-balanced the stats or tech tree or both of many Alliance ships. The Alliance Ranger, Steelclad, Cruiser, Liberator, Catapult, Warship, Mauler and Dauntless were all buffed. In some cases this resulted in a purchase price or deployment cost increase, or both.
- Slightly buffed several late game enemies in the Federation Campaign.
- Added Plasma Ammunition to drop tables as item rewards at the end of missions.
Known Issues
Several people have reported that saves were corrupted during the patching process. We are still looking into this situation, but we want to warn you now that the saves might not be recoverable.
That's all for now. We are all caught up on emails from our support box, so we expect the rate of patching to slow down considerably. We want to let this current build be played for a while and analyze the numbers.
Thank you to everyone for playing our game!