Greetings Commanders, we have our first "big" patch after release today, I've been working hard on it all day because I want to make sure we have a good baseline and tackle all the bugs that are popping up from the huge amount of people playing. Thanks again to all of you in the discord and on the steam discussion boards pointing out bugs and quality of life improvements. I've tried my best to keep up with everything and there will likely be more patches soon as I continue getting the game to an extremely stable point.
Let's talk balance
Balance has been tough with the exponential scaling and how many different systems are interacting, and because of the vision I have for this game I want to have the balance perfect for the ideal experience, killing planets should be unforgiving and tough, sometimes you will run into a well defended planet that you simply can't beat, ideally you won't be able to force a win (40 depth run) every single run. "Breaking through" into an insane run will be harder now, but not impossible and I don't want to take away that magical dopamine fueled feeling when your build finally comes online and starts popping off, but I want the planets and encounters to eventually be insurmountable, rewarding players who really strategize and optimize and find new synergies and ways to get past nasty planets and push the leaderboards further and further, I want to avoid situations where you simply feel invincible even though you're on depth 150. This will likely still happen but eventually, with further balance tweaks and fixes I should be able to get the game to a point where the average run length, and insane unstoppable run length are where I want them to be. The changes I've made make it harder, but also give you more things to play with from the ship class system, and optimizations that make the encounters more fair like the warp in distance, and wingman control. Also I'm resetting the planets destroyed leaderboard for the first time since launch, since the difficulty is dramatically different now from launch.
v1.0.10 Planet Killer Patch notes
New Features and changes:
New Ship Class identity: Each ship class has a unique feature that other ships don't have access to.
Wingman waypoints: Added the ability to right click anywhere in space to direct your wingmen towards that point.
Slow ships: Larger slow ships have had their acceleration and maneuverability improved roughly 30% across the board to help them compete with smaller nimble ships.
Warp in distance: Added an option for warping in further away from the target planet.
Nuclear explosion flash size has been capped so it does not exceed the size of the planet and blind the player.
Added a cap check for upgrading damage reduction modules to not allow the player to surpass the 85% DR cap.
Ship Starter weapons have been rebalanced and higher tier ships have better starting weapons.
Adjusted how ramming damages the planet.
Cursed Modules can no longer generate with stats that cancel themselves out.
TAB targeting now remembers what it was left on last battle.
Added a small grace period before planet defenses arm and start firing at the fleet.
Added a Retry button for quickly retrying a run with the same ship after being destroyed.
Enemy ship damage begins to scale more after depth 30.
Game Balance:
Planet defense damage scaling per depth reduced slightly.
Prismatic Aegis Core shield regen scaling has been massively reduced, players were reaching 80% shield regen a second in late game scenarios which is not intended.
Maximum possible total shield regen per second set to 8%
Minimum possible player firing cooldown set to 0.20 instead of 0.01
Late game Needler weapon scaling has been adjusted and flattened as they were doing more terrain damage than intended.
Projectile replicators are causing too much exponential power and scaling too hard. They have been capped and had their scaling reduced, forcing players to stack multiples of the same module if they want to focus on multiplying projectiles.
Cooldown reduction modules were too powerful and have been capped and had late game scaling reduced.
Fleet fire rate modules have been capped as well as they were growing out of control.
Wingmen have a limit to how fast they can fire.
Tailwind Interceptor cooldown increased.
Star Sunder Beam damage reduced.
Neutron Beam damage reduced.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed an issue where enemy ships could become larger than intended in certain circumstances.
Fixed an issue where you could become stuck strafing and unable to turn the ship without restarting the game.
Fixed an issue where you could ESC pause during the warp transition.
Fixed an issue where resuming a run could have missing perk definitions.
Fixed an issue where resuming a run would sometimes multiply your ships speed.
Fixed an issue where late game tractor beams could destroy their own planet by rapidly smashing the player into the planet.
Fixed an issue where terrain penetrating weapons would sometimes fizzle out and not deal damage or not behave properly.
Fixed an issue where planet spires could block ships after being destroyed.
Fixed an issue where wingmen would inherit too much speed and crash into the planet repeatedly.
Fixed an issue where buying a hull upgrade would improperly grant too much hull.
Fixed an issue where you could sometimes have higher hull than your max hull.
Fixed an issue where upgrading certain cores would show flat numbers instead of the proper percentage.
Fixed an issue where treasure planets could sometimes fail to grant items.
Fixed an issue where enemy ship damage and health was not scaling properly late game.
Fixed an issue where unlocking all ships did not trigger the achievement.