Fleetbreakers has two main play modes: Story and Free Play. Story runs take place in a single sector and ease you into the game. Each chapter grows in difficulty as you get deeper into the fight against the Voltari. Story mode also unlocks several key features along the way: Discoveries (permanent buffs across all your runs), the second playable faction, and Free Play mode.
In many ways, though, we consider Free Play to be the core gameplay mode for Fleetbreakers. It’s what we play all the time. Free Play runs have three sectors strung together, each with bosses that have to be defeated before moving on to the next sector. Each sector is procedurally generated with the bosses, opposing faction, missions, and encounters being different each run.
Free Play also has another big component… Ascensions.
Ascensions are optional buffs and debuffs that increase the difficulty of the run. You must win a Free Play run against each ascension to unlock the next one, of course. The Early Access version of the game will have 10 different ascension levels.
We dig ascensions because they offer a terrific way for players to keep the challenge level high as they get better and better with the game. Beating that final ascension level is a huge achievement both in game skill and dedication to get there.
Of course, the Flux flows in Free Play. Flux is the resource used to unlock the permanent Discovery upgrades. And there are a LOT of discoveries to unlock.
We’ll cover more about the individual ascensions in an upcoming post!
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For reference, first 5 ascensions are:
Enemy Damage +10% each Sector (so 10% first sector, 21% second, and 33% third)
Colony Techs cost +2 Science
Prisma Clusters have -30% Prisma
Boss contributes +2 Boss Meter points per round
-2 Colony Sites per Sector