The Last Federation:Alpha Release Notes

Alpha Version .803

(This isn't done yet, we're still working on it.)

• Previously there were only 9 total images for space junk graphics, which got pretty repetitive pretty fast (3 each in 3 sizes). Now there are 27 in all (9 each in 3 total categories).

• All ships and turrets now use the "mode image" lights on top of themselves, and unless they belong to you they now use the colors there to denote which side they belong to. Allies are light yellow, neutral is light blue, enemies are light red. This helps a lot in multi-party battles when you need to quickly recognize friend from foe.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Destroying a pirate base now properly puts you into auto-withdraw mode to end the battle. Previously if you destroyed it and withdrew, you'd still win, but it was of course super unclear.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where it was not letting you have duplicate abilities assigned, and where it was then throwing a loca error when it prevented that.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• During Burlust duels, you're no longer allowed to spawn any reinforcements, as that defeats the purpose of the whole 1v1 scenario there.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• When an ability is disabled for contextual reasons like being in a burlust duel or not being in a gravity well or whatever, it now shows OFF instead of where the ammo would be, and shows the ability in a clearly-disabled state.

• The "Accelerate Warpship Mobilization" political deals were accidentally making races join the federation instead of accelerate warpship production!
  • Thanks to dersquatch for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the welcome to combat into instructions.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• The game now supports up to 1200 pixels tall, rather than just 1080. This may cause some black banding, not sure, as the art was all designed with the smaller size in mind. So we may have to take this back out, but trying to support 16:10 is worth a shot. We don't have monitors that are large enough to test this on, though, so let us know.
  • Thanks to Castruccio for suggesting.

• "Divert Power To The Shields" has had its ammo dropped from 5 to 1. Yeah, it was pretty OP, heh.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• The firing cones of enemy turrets versus friendly turrets are now different colors, so that you can quickly know where you can safely go versus not go.

• The firing cones of sniper turrets are now colored a bit differently as well, so that you can pick them out easily.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The speed of the directly-player-fired shots are all now faster, to allow for better targeting of ships moving laterally from you.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Sticky bombs and sine shots have been made brighter to stand out better. If there are other shots that are not high-contrast enough, please let us know.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The graphics for mass driver shots have been completely redone both to be more attractive and to be higher-contrast.

• The collision hitboxes on shots is now a bit larger, and on a number of ships it is now fixed up to be larger. If you find more ships that seem to have frustratingly small hitboxes, then please let us know. This isn't supposed to be an excercise in pixel-perfect targeting.
  • Thanks to Cinth and others for reporting.

• Special Ability Ammo is no longer shown on the HUD in the solar map, as it is always 100% now!

• The speed that flagships have to slow down to in order to dodge debris is now only 1/2 their normal speed, rather than 1/5. For non-flagships, the speed is now 1/4.

• Added new solar-map keybind: Buy Repairs.
  • When on the solar map, and docked at the Black Market, you can use this to trigger the buy-repairs action. It saves some time and clicks compared to accessing the same function through the Negotiate With Mercenaries menu.

• A second combat music theme has been added.

• An update to the way the WASD controls work has been added, and makes it so that those turns are a bit more graceful and gradual, feeling a bit more like a midway point between the old control style and the asteroids-style thrusters. It's still closer to the old style than the asteroids style, but without the jumpy feeling of the old style.

• All multi-stage combats (pirate base attack, searching for hydral tech... that's pretty much it, exactly) are now single-stage contracts. Further changes for balance will probably be necessary, but this tended to be more drawn out than was pleasant.
  • Also, with this change we were able to make sure that a contract ended when its combat did, regardless of the outcome or context, thus avoiding various "this combat keeps happening over and over!" bugs.

• Also added some safeguards to make sure that a solar-map-node created out of thin air solely for a contract (like a pirate base fleet or a pirate freighter fleet) is removed once that contract is done.
  • Notably this fixes a bug where a pirate freighter fleet would still be there after you completed (win or lose) a raid-pirate-freighter mission, because that mission doesn't require that you kill the whole fleet (just the freighters).
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290 for reporting a case where the pirate freighter fleet just wouldn't go away .

• In some combats the AI flagships would seed along a ring 16,000px in diameter. This is down to 8,000 to see if it helps feel like there's more going on and doesn't take too long.

• Shortwave Virus:
  • Now works ;)
  • Now shows a range circle when you mouseover the ability icon.
  • Range from 300 => 500.
  • Cooldown from 180 => 40.
  • Maybe this is OP, we'll see. But since it only works on small and medium sized ships (which don't often live long) this may well be fine.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for reporting that it wasn't working.

• Fixed the "Started Construction of a" message saying it built the planet on the building instead of the other way around (sounds uncomfortable).
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Fixed a typo in the next-election-in note on the Skylaxian political screen.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• The contrast has been improved on all the space junk, so that you can see it better during battles.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The "left apple" and "right apple" keys now say "left command" and "right command" instead. This has indeed been the name of those keys for a super long time, but unity calls them that and we didn't alias them. So now they're aliased.
  • Thanks to Admiral for reporting.

No More Combat Practice

• Combat Practice has been removed from the game except as a developer testing feature. This is something that really put a lot of emphasis on combat in terms of just getting in there and fiddling around in situations that really might not have ever happened in the main game. It was far too easy for a new player to get in there and just set up something really unrealistic and then go "this stinks." It also kind of takes away a lot of the sense of exploration of finding weapons and abilities and so forth as you actually play through the game. Our goal with new players is to get them into the "real" game as soon as possible, and having some portion of them diverting into an unsatisfying combat practice mode is definitely counter to that goal.

Auto-Resolve Combat Difficulty

• Added a new Auto-Resolve combat difficulty level, which keeps the decision-making portion of combat, but removes all aspects of any sort of skill check from it.

• In auto-resolve mode, the search for hydral technology missions are no longer available, and the ability to buy hydral tech at the black market is no longer available.

• In auto-resolve mode, the ability to customize your flagship at the black market has been removed, as it would be pointless.

Flagship Ability Category Differentiation By Race

• On the start of a new game, players are now granted 1 additional operations ability.

• Depending on which race you choose, you now get a different mix of number of TYPES of abilities you can use.
  • Acutian, Boarines: 2 weapons, 1 operational, 2 specialty (same as before)
  • Thoraxian, Burlusts: 3 weapons, 1 operational, 1 specialty
  • Peltians, Andors: 1 weapon, 1 operational, 3 specialty
  • Skylaxians, Evucks: 1 weapon, 3 operations, 1 specialty

Alpha Version .802

(Released March 11th, 2014)

• Added new contract type to the black market: Sell Bribe Item
  • You select a bribe item to sell 1 of, and get some BP in return.

• Added new contract type to the black market: Buy Bribe Item
  • You select a bribe item to buy 1 of, and get charged an arm and a leg (or perhaps just a couple of heads) in return.

• Added new contract type to the black market: Sell Trade Goods
  • You select a resource you've stolen from some poor unsupecting freighter (quite possibly just before blowing it into very small pieces), and get some BP in return.

• Shots now "fizzle" after 10 seconds. Aka, this mainly applies to homing missiles that are chasing you.
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for making us realize that logic had been taken out.

• Fixed a bug where it was possible to plant false evidence against a race where the target race was the source race!
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for reporting.

• Fixed several bugs where dead or non-spacefaring races could be selectable in some of the actions.
  • Thanks to waylon531 for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with a tooltip in the starting year in advanced start referencing combat practice.
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for reporting.

• Fixed an exploit where you could trivially capture things by cloaking and then just sitting by them. That was something we'd thought of, and then forgot to resolve. Now when you start the capture process, it decloaks you. This is as opposed to not allowing cloaking in that case, because you can't always willingly drop cloak, and having it just do nothing is more confusing than having it decloak suddenly.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed up the Hydral Sentinel and Golem collision radii to be more forgiving.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

• Fixed the second page of negotiate with mercs intro also saying page 1/2 instead of 2/2.
  • Thanks to waylon531 for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the predicted results for anything that involved a political deal that altered the RCI-style effects on a planet (environment, economy, medical, public order) would always say the wrong thing.
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290 for reporting.

• The burst shots from claymores now have 2x as much distance to live to them, to make sure they should be able to hit the player ship better.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Added a new Misery combat difficulty that is far more difficult than even Hard difficulty. Because, frankly, (ahem) some people just need the challenge.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change (as usual).

• Added a new primary weapon that you can find and unlock: Mass Driver
  • Hurls powerful pieces of rock that not only damage other ships, but also block incoming shots.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring.

Alpha Version .801

(Released March 11th, 2014)

• Burlust and Thoraxian ships now switch to attack mode (if not already there) when fired upon by anyone or if hit by mouse-directed player shots.

• On the solar map, events are now drawn full-scale next to the planets or outposts they are affecting, and can be hovered-over if you want to read what they are and see how much longer they will be lasting.

• The color used for the name of the boarines in text in game is now lighter, and thus easier to read.

• You can now hover over the race icons on the solar map, and it tells you their name and description, as well as your current influence with them.

• The "space dust" that blows by when you are moving is now twice as opaque as before, making it more noticeable so that you don't feel like your ship isn't moving.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for inspiring this change.

• The maximum amount you can zoom out now scales with the screen resolution, so that each screen resolution can (roughly) see the same amount of gameplay area as the others. Non-widescreen still does have some disadvantage, but not much.
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290 for suggesting.

• The Pirate Flagship Ravens were insanely too fast, way faster than your ship. They have been toned down substantially, although they are still speedy. Unfortunately, this won't affect existing savegames, as the stats for ships are randomly-rolled at game start and get baked in.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for reporting.

Cowardice

• The following things trigger a panic check (which, if failed, puts the ship into cowardly-flight-mode) :
  • When fired upon by a ship that was cloaked just before it fired.
  • When struck by a shot from an Ion Cannon or Golem (nearby allied ships also make the check).
  • When a Nuke detonates nearby.
  • When struck by a shot from a shadow-cloaked ship.
  • If a civilian ship (i.e. Freighter) and at <= 60% hull health, automatically panics without a random check.

• Each race has a cowardice multiplier that applies to (almost) all panic checks. Some races almost never panic (Burlusts, and Thoraxians... unless the latter have The Fuzz at the time) while some freak out quite readily (Peltians, Thoraxians with The Fuzz).

• Smaller ships have a higher chance of panic.

• The player ship (and other ships spawned on the player's side, as opposed to allied ships) is immune to panic, as are flagships (and all units fundamentally incapable of moving, of course).

• When a ship goes into cowardly flight mode, it tries to run directly away from the average location of all enemy ships.
  • In this mode, the ship finds some way to ramp up its engines to 4x movement speed (at the cost of reducing its attack power to 1/4).
  • Once it's been underway for at least 2 seconds (and is not currently within about 200px of being on your screen) it is completely removed from the game.
    • And counted as a loss against the strength of the armada which spawned it (unless it's a from-thin-air ship, of course).

Alpha Version .800

(Released March 11th, 2014)

NOTE: Uncharacteristically for us, this new version breaks all prior savegames. The changes in here are so severe that there was no real reason to keep savegames from prior versions anyhow.

• Fixed some bugs where, for some types of combat (defending yourself, going after a pirate base, etc), saving in the middle of combat and reloading would cause an endless stream of null exceptions (and thus a lockup) because the contract data had been lost.
  • Loading such a save in the new version won't recover that data, but it will dump you back to the solar map so you can play.
  • Future cases of the lost data will be prevented, though.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for the report and save.

• Fixed several bugs where non-spacefaring races could be considered valid choices for pirate base owners or opponents in contracts that pit you against pirates.

• Fixed a bug where the contracts window might display one BP cost on the contract's button, and another in the details pane. This was because the cost varied based on the related dropdown selections. Now it will update the button to show the cost of the current selections.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where event notifications were not formatting the name/description to include the related resource name (relevant for shortage events).
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the report.

• Taking a contract that involves flying somewhere else to attack something (like destroy-pirate-base) will now automatically unpause the solar map if it is paused, to avoid the appearance of some kind of hang or unresponsiveness.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Fixed a couple bugs that could result in negative populations.
  • Thanks to Endless Rain for the report.

• Smuggling Spacefaring now only works if you actually deliver the documents (in a previous version of the mission it was supposed to work even if you failed, just with influence penalties).
  • Also fixed a bug where the influence penalties (with previously-spacefaring races) for getting detected only happened if you retreated without delivering the documents; now they only happen if you succeed.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for the report.

• The political deals screen for the peltians now show voting proxies (which are local to that planet) instead of bargaining power.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Changed the "we just lost an armada" bleat type to only occur if the armada in question was naturally occurring. As opposed to the made-up-on-the-spot ships for smuggling spacefaring, etc.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Fixed several bugs with the bleat text formatting that was putting the wrong fields into the wrong places (leading to reports that you had just been constructed on their newest terraformer, etc).
  • Thanks to Billick for the report.

• Fixed a bug where races were constructing terraformers directly, when they're supposed to only come from certain specific Andor actions. Some planets had hundreds of the things, from different races.

• Fixed many bugs where "completed action" notifications were being added for actions that had actually been cancelled early in favor of other actions.

• The political deals window for burlusts now displays Leverage (which is per-warlord) instead of Bargaining Power.

• Now when the game has no music for a given situation it stops any currently-playing music rather than just let it continue to play.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for the report.

• Fixed a bug where Defend Planet From Pirates gave rather the wrong influence changes.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Now when an informant is killed (when the race goes to war), an item appears in the notificaiton sidebar to that effect.
  • Also, when looking at the contract for obtaining an informant, it now has proper error types for the things that can make that action invalid, rather than the internal marker for reasons that should not be shown.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Bargaining Power can now never be negative.
  • Thanks to JAlfredGoodwin for the report.

• Destroyed races can no longer start or continue any racial actions.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Removed a lot of old code used it building the "description of what this contract will do" text, since it was duplicating the newer logic and resulting in stuff like two lines telling you how much BP something would cost, etc.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for the report.

• The inventory window now uses the same logic as the ship-type-details window for knowing which hull techs should be shown.

• The inventory screen now has tooltips for each entry.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reminding us that they were absent.

• The planetary inventory screen now has tooltips for each row.

• The planet sidebar display now has tooltips for each row.

• The "which race to crashland into" selection in the start-new-world menus now has a tooltip.

• The dropdown graphics have been updated to match the rest of the GUI.

• The player inventory screen has been updated to visually look like it should.

• A variety of minor visual GUI improvements.

• Loads and loads of new and replaced graphics for the small planet images on the solar map itself. There are now 3 images for each of the 11 planet types, and the planets all now have proper radii for the graphic that they have (and the graphic is the appropriate size for the planet type itself, unlike what one of the Dense Turbulents previously was).

• The extremely freaky Thoraxians music theme is now in place, meaning that all of the racial music themes are now in the game.

• Pirates now spawn more often, no longer go after the player, and will consider planetary targets.

• The player now has a max of 5 special abilities, instead of 3.
  • And starts a new game with a random pool of 7, instead of 5.

• The graphics for the events/actions on the right-hand sidebar have been redone to be more crisp and visually clear.

• The three recently-added new Defend-A-Satellite type missions have been removed, as they were nonideal for a number of reasons. However, some of the underlying work that was done for their mission types is being retained for the new "Opportunistic Squadrons" that allies and enemies will use in some new scenarios.

• The ability to bomb planets from orbit via a contract, and to steal orbital bombers from military outposts, have been removed. You can get orbital bombers from special flagship abilities anyway, making this obsolete, and there are some other more-flexible ways of handling this same sort of thing that does not require a contract.

• All of the pre-existing ship classes now start as unlocked for each race from the start of the game, rather than requiring ship class unlocks, so that there is sufficient variety in the battles early in the game. Future ship classes added will tend to having research times on them, to keep that element in play with the game, but not make it so extremely limited right at the start.

• The game now has the capability to show "damage masks" for ships as they get worse and worse damaged. This basically serves as kind of an in-character health meter, aside from looking cool. Most of the large ships and structure will have this, but the small ships do not have enough health to bother with, and are too small to boot.

• When reloading a savegame that is in the middle of combat, hitting spacebar the first time now takes you properly into the game in active mode rather than pausing it and making you hit spacebar a second time.

• Lots of improvements have been made to the clarity of the various political deals and actions (all "contracts" under the hood) screens, including general formatting all over the place, and proper full descriptions for the "why you can't do this right now" reasons, rather than the temporary stand-in error codes it was using before.

• There is now an incredibly-expensive-in-BP (and aftermath influence fallout with other races) political deal that you can make with the Acutians where you directly convince them to launch a planetcracker at another race.
  • This feature is basically due to popular demand, since folks are going to be expecting this as an option. Previously the only way to have a planetcracker hit another planet was to very indirectly get the Acutians to do it, and that is still possible now as well.

• The purpose of informants has been changed around quite a bit. Now, rather than confusingly and frustratingly blocking access to certain kinds of information about the race of planet, they instead block access to certain hostile actions against local planets.
  • This actually is very fitting, as the actions in question basically require either spies or the help of underworld contacts, so that makes logical sense.
  • It is also now impossible to get informants on Andor and Thoraxian planets, due to their utopian and hivemind natures, respectively.
    • This in turn means that a number of hostile actions are unavailable to you against those races, ever, because you don't have spies or underworld support.
  • Similarly, while a non-federation race is at war and your informant has been killed off, there are certain things you cannot do.

• The first combat music for the game has been added (and holy heck, it's awesome).

• A vocal track for the end of the game has been added. This one features a duet between Hunter Vega and Corrine Tabor. This is one of our best vocal tracks yet, for sure.

• The gridlines that previously denoted distance and zoom are now gone. Zoom is now apparent based on the scale of ships, since the false scaling factor is gone. Distance is now handled mainly by the minimap.

• One thing that was previously lacking was a sense of movement when there were no referents on screen to judgement movement by. Now when you are moving, "space dust" starts appearing and flying by so that you get a sense of the direction and speed at which you are moving.

• When you are doing a quick start of the game, it now always makes you crash-land on the Acutian planet, rather than letting you have a choice of planets. Of course in advanced start you still get to choose, but this was one of those common "what exactly does this mean?" stumbling blocks for new players, and not something that thus needed to be there in quick start.

• Ships now give off more space junk when they explode, making them substantially more interesting from a tactical standpoint.

• Space junk that spawns on planet orbits from junk buildup is now done so in large clusters, making that actually meaningful.

Revamped Combat Practice Screen

• The tabs that were recently added so that you could configure all of the many different squadrons of each flagship are now gone. You can't be so specific in the scenario setup anymore (that was overwhelming, and at this point unnecessary).

• The section where you set up your pilots is gone, since you no longer have pilots of your own. On the other hand, you have 5 abilities you choose now, instead of 3.

• The combat practice setup menu no longer has elements for picking enemy flagship types, enemy squadrons, or various other things. What it now has are 5 rows of elements for configuring up to 5 AI sides for the battle:
  • Pilot/Race Type
  • Power (number of squadrons, basically)
  • Flagship count
  • Team
    • Can be None for "enemy to all", the Player Team, or on an Enemy-to-player team (two sides assigned to Enemy Team 1 will not shoot at each other, but will shoot at everyone else)
      • But if two sides are of the same race they will automatically not shoot at each other to avoid visual confusion.

• The combat practice setup menu's Scenario dropdown has been updated to match the new internal Scenario concept. Currently available options:
  • Exposed Conflict
    • Just the normal fight.
  • Freighter Convoy
    • The first AI side gets 3 to 6 freighters that it tries to protect, while its enemies try to destroy them. You cannot directly target the freighters, but if you're hostile to them and get close enough you board them to steal trade goods (which doesn't matter in combat practice, but does in the normal game).
  • Destroy Pirate Base
    • The first AI side has a pirate base with defensive turrets, plus whatever flagships assigned to it, and defends the base. Any of its enemies try to destroy the base.
  • Smuggle In Resistance Fighters
    • The first AI side is automatically neutral to you gets 10 troop transports (and only that) which follow you (a pair at a time) and break for the drop zone if they get close enough. The second AI side is automatically hostile to both the first AI side and you. Once all troop ships are delivered or destroyed, you automatically start withdraw mode

(Player-Involved) Combat Overhaul

• Your flagship no longer has squadrons that directly deploy -- instead, you control your flagship and your flagship alone. Any allies that you may or may not have will no longer be something you can directly control.
  • This is QUITE the change to combat, we realize, but bear with us here. This is actually something based on a lot of your feedback, although nobody remotely said to do specifically this. But this ties in thematically better for the game in general, and it also -- paired with a number of other changes -- is really going to integrate a lot more strongly with the solar map in some ways you will really like.

• The WASD movement controls in combat now work more similarly to the same controls on the solar map. Notably, if you start movement with WASD, that movement stops as soon as you are no longer pressing any of the WASD keys.

• Added a new keybind Q that cancels your flagship's current orders and just has it stop and sit still.

• The vast majority of combat hotkeys are now gone:
  • The specialized hotkeys for directly flying toward or away from the enemy ships are gone.
  • The 10 squadron-selection hotkeys are gone.
  • The various hotkeys for putting your own ships into "fire at will" or "escort" mode or whatever are all gone.

• You can no longer drag-select to rubber-band select ships. Instead, your flagship is always considered selected. Similarly, it no longer draws the ring circle under itself. Left-clicking doesn't really do anything now on the battlefield, again as a consequence, while right-clicks always give orders to your flagship. It is very consistent with the solar map.

• You can now retreat from any combat, but with influence hits with the Burlusts, Thoraxians, and Skylaxians for your cowardice.
  • Additional penalties apply for retreating from AFA or Assassin fights.

• Armadas no longer intentionally forget ship losses taken during combat. The flagships will be repaired between battles, but lost flagships will be remembered, as will significant squadron casualties.

• In combat, when retreating, there's now a special tooltip in the tooltip area for the purpose of reminding the player what retreat mode means.

• The "starting combat" window has been removed, and now the game just dumps you straight into the combat engine when you encounter something on hostile terms.
  • But now, next to the "Start Combat" button that appears at the beginning of combat, the "End Combat" button (which normally only shows after a win or loss condition has been fulfilled) will also show and will allow you to abandon the battle without consequence (as the start combat window often allowed you to do, previously).
  • And the combat description which previously showed pre-battle will now be shown as a tooltip during that pre-battle phase.
  • Thanks to jerith and others for various bug reports and feedback that led to our realizing we just wanted to get rid of that pre-battle window.

• Fighting AFA or Assassins, or pirate ambushes, now always grants some BP reward and has a 30% chance of granting a bribe item.
  • Thank to Cyborg for inspiring this change.

• The little arrow pointing to the enemy centerpiece has gone away. Later there will be a minimap.

• Retreating from an AFA or Assassin attack now converts the attacking fleet into a skirmisher, so that they don't immediately try to reengage you.
  • Also, retreating in that kind of forced combat moves your fleet to the black market.

• Whereas previously you would see the little glowing mode images for your own ships, now instead you see those for NPC ships. It gives you some clues as to what is going on (and also looks neat).

• The health and name displays for enemy centerpieces are now gone from the upper right corner of the screen, as those are no longer particularly relevant.

• The term "retreat" is no longer used in the game. Instead, the term now used is "withdraw." This is now more appropriate, because a lot of battles may involve you going in, executing some self-chosen objectives, and then withdrawing before the enemy fully knows what hit them. Obliterating all the enemy forces to "win" the main battle objectives is not remotely always going to be your object. You're freaking Batman in space, sometimes it's a good idea to get in, do some damage or provide some aid, and then get out. But that doesn't mean that you are "running away" in the Bravely Sir Robin sense. You've simply done your job, and now it's time to leave rather than sticking around to murder everyone or get murdered.

• Whenever there are "constellations" of turrets (that word constellation is no longer shown in the game, by the way), the centerpieces of those are no longer always good Hydral tech for you to capture. That was never intended to be the long-term design anyhow, there was meant to be more of a mix. Now we have that mix.
  • Capturable Hydral tech -- the stuff that was so common in the last version -- is actually pretty darn rare now, and probably isn't going to be in 85% of your battles at the very least. This is good, because making that stuff more rare makes it more meaningful and exciting.
  • The frequency of when there are "constellations" of turrets at all is also now shifted around and a lot more contextual, too.
  • A lot of the centerpieecs are now "civilian goodies," as noted in the section below. But only where this makes sense (in planet orbits, or at civilian-style outposts).
  • The rest of the centerpieces are now "defensive goodies," which you can probably most closely think of as being like Guard Posts in AI War. These are biggish beefy defensive structures that do not move, and which provide some specific sort of cover or defense or whatever. There are currently 5 types of these.
    • What is particularly interesting about defensive structures is that they are not always your enemy, any more than turrets are. You might be helping someone defend their home, in which case these would work FOR you. And you could do clever things like causing the enemy forces to come and get caught on the defensive stuff. Or you can suddenly turn on your ally once you are close to the defenses, take them out, and cause some sort of coup in a battle that otherwise your "enemy" (who you really wanted to win the battle, but entered the battle on the opposite side of for deceptive reasons) could not hope to win.

• During battles, the WASD keys now put you on permanent movement courses, rather than just moving you while you hold them down. This lets you do "drivebys" really easily, which is really important. You can also of course set up more complicated patterns by holding shift and right-clicking a bunch. Right-clicking somewhere near yourself will take you to that location and cut your engines off, too.
  • In general, the idea that you'd want to just move somewhere while holding down WASD temporarily is actually kind of low -- keeping moving is really important, so the controls needed to reflect that in order to feel natural.

• When you give normal right-click movement orders, it now sets you on a permanent movement course in that direction. Right-clicking an attack target, or using shift plus right-click to either lay down a single destination or a path of destinations, works as it did before.

• A shot that takes down shields now does any remaining power as damage to hull.

Direct-Fire Weapons

• Clicking or holding down the left mouse button during battle now lets you fire your "main gun," which is basically a kind of special ability with unlimited ammo which you can aim and attack with. Kind of like aiming spells in Valley 1, really.
  • This gives you far more direct tactile involvement in battles now that your squadrons are in general gone, and you can't control any ships other than your flagship. Without the direct-fire weapons, it was feeling like there was not enough for you to directly be doing at all times.
  • With this addition, the game does become a bit more twitch-based in some ways, but honestly you can slow down the speed so incredibly much that it's not exactly a speed fest in any way shape or form. You can also adjust the combat difficulty to be such that you just obliterate the enemy by grazing them, if all you want to focus on is pretty much the solar map part of the game and then the solar-map-affecting parts of combat.
  • Also we should stress just how much fun this is, at least to us. :)

• Currently there are three available primary weapons: minigun, spreadshot, and armor-piercing. You always start the game with minigun, which is the easiest to use, but then can unlock the others just as you would any other special flagship ability.

• On Easy combat difficulty, your direct weapons now do 1.5x as much damage to any auto-target-allowed ships (meaning you don't accidentally overkill things like civilian satellites by stray shots, since the damage buff does not apply to them). On "You Are So OP" combat difficulty, that multiplier is 3x.

Generalized Balance Shifts

• Flagship shields are now beefier, twice as powerful as before.

• The player flagship health modifiers are now higher, and now apply to the shields of the player flagship as well.

• Completely rebalanced the health of the turrets, and their attack power, to make them way less OP.

• Adjusted the pirate ships to shift them more towards smaller forces that are more powerful than the planetary forces, which are more numerous. Basically really playing up the pirate "feel" with these.
  • This is particularly possible since the player is no longer getting these ships. Previously it would have made sense to just stack your squadrons with all pirate stuff, but now that's not possible. Additionally, now in most cases you are facing pirates with the help of some other allies, so making sure to differentiate them further helps things feel more unique all around.

• The game no longer references "flagships" inside of armadas. Instead, it references "flotillas," which consist of 1 to 5 flagships, depending on the combat difficulty level. This has no effect on the solar map portion of the game other than a name change, but it has a big impact on the balance of the revised combat model. This lets us make your flagship substantially more powerful without letting the battles just get shortcutted by you decapitating the enemy flagships too fast.

• The Thoraxian Exterminator was way OP, and has been toned down.

• Spy Probes now seed different numbers of squadrons in the smuggling spacefaring tech missions now, depending on your difficulty level. These things can be incredibly fearsome now.

Secondary Objectives / Civilian Stuff

• There are 13 new "civilian goodies" (that's what we call them internally, the game never calls them that), which are a part of some battlefields. Typically ones around civilian-style outposts or planets, not out in the middle of nowhere. These civilian structures really don't do anything in terms of the main progress of combat itself, however they provide secondary objectives and consequences while you are in a battle. You can destroy these to do things like poison atmospheres, damage GPS networks, slow ship production at a planet, etc. However, it comes at the cost of the affected race getting kind of pissed.
  • However, these aren't JUST secondary objectives. If you are fighting in enemy space, and are guns-free against that enemy (as you would presumably be), then you have to be careful not to accidentally destroy these civilian things if you don't like the consequences of doing so. This helps to create yet more "terrain" to the battlefield, where this time you are avoiding parts of it because you are worried about what YOU might do, rather than what your enemy might do to you.
  • As an aside, if allies of yours wind up destroying these civilian things, then the same negative effects happen to the local area -- poisons, lack of GPS, whatever -- but the influence drops that normally would accompany that do not get applied to you unless you did damage equal to at least 25% of the structure's health to it. So you can also incite your allies to do things by baiting them to certain locations, or sometimes they will do things whether you like it or not. But you aren't just hit with personal arbitrary penalties because of it.

Your Flagship Repairs / Special-Ability Ammo Revisions

• Previously, whenever whenever you visited any sort of planet or outpost, it would automatically fully repair your flagship and give you all the ammo for all your special abilities. This is no longer the case.

• The ammo for your special abilities is now restored after every combat session. Having to micro that between combat sessions simply did not add anything to the fun factor, and in fact added tedium. Particularly now that special abilities are so central to gameplay.

• Any time you successfully complete a Friendly Action, the race you are doing it for now will repair your flagship for free as a thank-you.
  • Normally your flagship is now not repaired at all, so this is pretty important!

• If you prefer not to go around helping people, or simply don't think you can survive a Friendly Action to gain free repairs, you can now buy repairs for your flagship from the black market in exchange for BP.

Battle Viewport Changes

• Previously, you could zoom out really far in battles (ala AI War), and it was using a fake zoom scale factor to make things seem to get smaller slower than they actually would in reality. That kept things clearer when you were zoomed out, but it gave a somewhat strange sense of scale to things. With direct-fire weapons, it also would lead to things where a shot would seem to "hit" an artificially-larger ship, but would instead pass right "through it." Even though the collision detection was just fine, it was just a display issue.
  • You can no longer zoom out remotely so far, nor is there any false zooming factor. The lack of ability to zoom out and see the entire battlefield at a glance is actually an intentional change to help shift the feel of this to being more solo-ship.

• It is no longer possible to pan the viewport with your mouse or with the keyboard, in the solar map or in battles. Instead the view now always stays firmly centered on your own ship. In battles, this notably limits your perspective on how much of the battlefield you can directly see, but that's in keeping with your perspective as a single-ship mercenary versus an entire fleet.

Minimap In Combat

• There is now a minimap in combat, which you can resize and which has a few other options for display modes. This lets you see the general tactical situation at a glance on your screen, without being able to have "too much" intel like you used to be able to, in terms of scrolling around and seeing the entire battlefield. The minimap actually acts a bit like a radar, so it is possible that there are things that are off of your minimap that you can't see at the moment. But the "radar range," so to speak, is pretty wide. So having things be off the side isn't all that common.

NPC vs NPC (Off-Screen) Battle Updates

• NPC vs NPC armada combat no longer happens instantly on contact when one armada attacks a planet or outpost. Instead the two are locked together in combat for a little while, giving the player a chance to intervene if they so desire (that part is coming up).
  • Visually, fleets "scheduled" to attack the defenders of a planet or outpost now draw smaller and fly around the target much like its defenders do.

• Planets and Military Outposts now periodically spawn "skirmisher" fleets that behave somewhat like pirates but don't attack allies of their own race.

Multi-Sided (Player-Involved) Combat

• A major new addition to this game, and something people have wanted in AI War as well for a long time, is the addition of multi-sided combat. Aka, there can now be various factions fighting each other on the battlefield, with shifting alliances between all of them even on the battlefield itself. You might find yourself allied with one faction against another, or against two or three factions who all hate one another, or whatever else. More to come in this area, but this alone is a huge under-the-hood model shift and something that really is exciting in the flexible new things it will allow us to do.

• Attacking a planet/outpost/fleet that has scheduled auto-combat will now involve the other nodes that it's going to attack (or are going to attack it) and any planning to attack its target/attacker, etc. Basically it will pull the whole web in.

Player Flagship Special Ability Updates

• Since flagship special abilities are so central to the game now, they have now become more organized.
  • The first two abilities are always now weapon-style abilities.
  • The third ability is always now "operations"-style.
  • And the last two abilities are always now "specialty" abilities.
  • The dropdowns now restrict you to selection of the relevant ability types in each of the dropdowns, which reduces the size of each dropdown when you are considering your options.
    • There is also now no longer any restriction on having duplicates of abilities, since you could at most have two of the same ability in the weapon or specialty class, anyway.
  • At game start, the game now always rolls 3 weapons, 2 operations, and 3 specialty abilities for you. Before it was just a completely random mix, which could actually really set you off in a bad way if you had no weapons, for instance.

• All of the pre-existing flagship special abilities have been touched in some fashion, many of them outright replaced to make sense in the new combat scenarios.

Alpha Version .702

(Released February 13th, 2014)

• Many of the race actions now have more informative descriptions (including the name of target planets, related races, etc).

• Fixed a bug where the intro tips would show on quick-start, not just advanced-start.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Fixed a bug where attacking the skylaxian senate could cause an exception.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the contracts screen's refresh logic wouldn't clear the label showing the name of the selected contract, when there wasn't a selected contract.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the display's "whiteout" state (caused by planets getting cracked, etc) would not clear when the game ended, such that starting a new game could leave you with a very white screen.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Added a new toggle to the Graphics tab of the Settings window: Darken Chatter Scroll
  • Darkens the chatter scroll at the bottom of the screen to provide better contrast for the text.
  • Thanks to Misery and jerith for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the game would try to simulate the rest of the sim-step during which an "End the game" type action was processed (like from the escape menu). This lead to it always playing one of the "you lose" narratives when you tried to leave. Cute, but wrong.
  • Thanks to Billick for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the ship type details window would still list a player version of the Model X flagship even if that wasn't (and therefore never could be) the player's flagship.

• Fixed a bug where, on the solar map, the ship type details window would list the player's currently-in-use squadron types twice.

• Split the difficulty level of the game into two parts: combat and strategic.
  • We basically knew we'd have to do that at some point, it was only a matter of time.
  • Thanks to Mick for directly inspiring the timing of the change, though.

• The various difficulty levels now include tooltips for what they actually do when you are starting the game.

• Non-hydral flagships have had their speeds dropped back down to their prior levels, so that they are never faster than the ships escorting them.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Previously, if retreating was not possible, then it would not show the retreat button at all. Now it shows the button but in red in those circumstances.
  • Thanks to waylon531 for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue where the victory music was throwing an error instead of playing.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Previously, assassins and AFA attacks were able to be launched from non-spacefaring planets. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• Fixed a couple typos in the game in reference to politics.
  • Thanks to hyfrydle for reporting.

• In the description of the "Smuggle Spacefaring tech" we had inadvertently dropped off a 'd' in the word drop.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Updated the chatter scroll font some so that commas look more like commas instead of periods.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the planet sidebar button was displaying the enabled state of the planet overlay.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Added keybinds for toggling on and off the planet overlays and planet sidebar. These are the first keybinds that are exclusive to the solar map.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.

• On Hard strategic difficulty, races now become spacefaring 3x faster than they otherwise would.

• On Easy strategic mode, there are now a number of negative influence factors that get skipped entirely, making the solar map portion of the game easier.

• Fixed a missing localization issue on the right-hand planet sidebar window.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the planet sidebar window could be larger than it was supposed to be when you were not at a planet in particular. This then caused mouse oddities. Now it doesn't draw at all when you aren't somewhere where it is relevant, and it also shows a darkened underlay to make it clear where the non-clickable area is.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• A number of visual and clarity improvements on the contracts/politics/actions/etc screens, including have the "Execute deal" button now have different text depending on the relevant context of the time.

• Added another contract new contracts to provide more early game options: Attack Strongest Local Armada
  • This is similar to Attack Outpost or Attack Planet Defenders.
  • But you always face the strongest defending armada.
  • And you have to select a race that you're doing the contract on behalf of (rather than simply acting on your own).
    • You can only select from races that have a negative attitude towards this one, and are not allied with them.
  • You will gain some influence with the race you're working for, and the race you're attacking will decrease their attitude towards your client race.

• Retreating has been greatly simplified:
  • Now it just starts a 10 second timer, and once that counts down to zero the combat ends.
  • But if you or any of your squadron ships are hit, the timer goes up by 1 second (max of 10).
  • So your squadrons no longer need to redock to escape with you, nor do they try to do so.
  • Thanks to Cyborg and others for inspiring this change.

• The contracts/political/actions screen has had a lot of updates so that it:
  • No longer jumps around as you click through items.
  • Shows the BP gains/losses on a second line of each contract, rather than the first.
  • Shows nice header colors over on the right-hand side of the screen's text info.
  • Uses space more effectively, so that there are not strange wrapping and overflow issues.

• Invincible ships now say so, instead of trying to list their health (or nothing, in one tooltip).

• Truly invincible ships will now no longer interact with shots which would normally collide with them.
  • Thanks to waylon531 for inspiring this change.

• Now when you select the same ability for more than one slot it will display the word "DUPLICATE" in red text next to the offending dropdown.
  • Thanks to jerith for inspiring this change.

• Added an intimidation influence factor when you do acts of extreme violence (usually murdering dignitaries) on the Peltians. They become more compliant the more of that sort of thing you do to other races.
  • Thanks to jerith for inspiring this addition.

• About half of the "why this contract/action/deal can't be done right now" pieces of text have been properly written out now.

• The Peltians music theme has now been added to the game.

Defense-Mode Battles

• Added three new contracts to provide more early game options:
  • Defend Communications Network From Insurgents
    • Pits you against some insurgents trying to destroy a communication satellite (or satellites) around this planet/outpost.
    • To win you must destroy all the enemies that spawn. This will increase public order on the planet and moderately reduce any AFA insurgency there.
    • If all the satellites are destroyed, or if you retreat, you lose. This will decrease public order on the planet and cause a surge in AFA insurgency.
    • The later in the game, the more satellites and the more enemies you will face.
    • Win or lose, also causes a small influence hit with other races that dislike the client race (and are not allied with them).
  • Defend Weather Network From Insurgents
    • Very similar to the communications network one, but impacts environment instead of public order.
  • Defend GPS System From Meteor Shower
    • Like the others, but instead of enemy ships you face large rocks that are all mysteriously flying at one of the satellites. These will slam into anything they touch, mutually dealing damage equal to their health (or the other object's health, if that's lower).
    • This grants more bargaining power than the others, but causes an influence hit if you lose.

Alpha Version .701

(Released February 12th, 2014)

• The delay on the tooltips disappearing on the solar map is now gone; it was indeed annoying.
  • However, part of the purpose there was to keep the tooltips from being so "blinky" late in the game when there are tons of armadas and you are mousing over them.
  • The thing is, you almost never need to mouse over an armada; it doesn't tell you much about it, and you can tell the color from looking at it. Anyway, the need for a mouseover there is very rare.
  • So! Now the game only lets you get a tooltip for non-planets/outposts while you have the solar map paused (and it tells you this). This actually solves some annoyances I had with trying to mouse over the planet that I was located on, anyway.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• The chatter bar now has a bit of a shadow to the text, and shows the icon of the race doing the speaking, to make it easier to see. You can also click the bar to see everything fully.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring these changes.

• Any time any dropdown item is open, it now directs all mouse wheel scrolls to that dropdown and suppresses any other dropdown handling.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.

• Added a very long-requested feature to our engine: generalized mouse scrollwheel support in scrollable windows. And there was much rejoicing. :)
  • Thanks to Admiral and jerith and many many others for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug in generating the prediction/result strings for the Andor speech actions.

• The "when must one race refrain from attacking another race?" logic now includes a rule to exclude non-spacefaring races from being attacked and invaded.

• Fixed a bug where a few direct-use abilities that were supposed to only affect player stuff (like the Afterburner) were affecting both sides.
  • Thanks to ProfessorPaul1290 for the report.

• The ship type details window now:
  • Doesn't list internal types (the drop zone, etc)
  • Doesn't list a huge negative number for a ship with an attack range of zero.
  • Doesn't list racial flagships for races that can never get them (or for you, unless they're of your chosen race).
  • In non-combat mode doesn't list anything that isn't a main flagship type or a deployable squadron type.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting various issues here.

• Fixed several bugs with contracts not populating the opponents correctly, leading to instantly-completed "destroy pirate base" or "raid pirate freighter" missions, etc.
  • Thanks to Misery for the report.

• Fixed a bug where raiding a pirate freighter would destroy a pirate base.
  • Thanks to Misery for the report.

• Fixed a bug where smuggle-spacefaring missions would be instantly won because (despite proper enemy population) the game thought there was no enemy centerpiece.
  • Thanks to windgen for the report.

• The special-ability selection on the black market screen and the combat practice screen now simply checks to prevent duplicates when you try to confirm, rather than removing what-would-be-duplicate-choices from each dropdown in real time.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting issues with the way it was doing things.

• Fixed an issue with spy probes having an animator dictionary problem.

• Fixed a bug where the planetary details sidebar would draw a single oddly placed green line if you had no informant on the planet.

• Fixed a bug where various assassination contracts would show up on the menus for the wrong races (Assassinate-Boarine-Regent showing up on the Acutian menu, for example).
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Now it won't show contracts that cannot be taken because they require a federation member, a non-federation-member, an outpost, or a non-spacefaring race, since the transitions to make those possible would either be impossible or sufficiently game-changing that it's ok that the list of contracts change in such a case.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report.

• Hive Queen mood swings, andor and skylaxian elections, and boarine regent deaths now no longer show up in your sidebar when those races are not yet spacefaring.

• Fixed a silly bug that was causing scrollbars on certain screens to be completely unresponsive to clicking and dragging.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Adjusted how close you have to be to do a number of things, like redock ships during a retreat, or drop off troops or tech that you are smuggling, etc.

• The box that pops up when you click start game now no longer refers to exos. :)
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed a small typo in the explanation of ghost mode.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting

• The new "constellations" types of battles are now a lot more limited in scope most of the time, and not as prevalent throughout the game. There are still some that are just as hard as before, though, for sure. Yay variety
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting the difficulty of too many constellations.

• The descriptions for all the various forms of "you're now starting combat, here's the special rules if there are any" are now in.

• During battle or on the solar map, the ability to move your flagship ONLY south was nonfunctional. You could do it if you also held left or right, but not just holding down.
  • Thanks to Misery and jerith for reporting.

• Fixed music playback not working properly except on the title menu.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in trade goods missions where freighter graphics were messed up.
  • Thanks to waylon531 for reporting.

Alpha Version .700

(Released February 11th, 2014)

• Loads and loads of more stuff on the solar map; again not noted here since there is no previous version of it to compare to, so why bother.

* The actual game (as opposed to combat practice) has been opened up outside of developer-mode. :)

• To capture a powerup, your ship no longer has to be quite so close to it.
  • Thanks to Cyborg and Misery for reporting.

• The default battle speed of the game has been returned to 1 instead of 0.5. We really need to balance things around that, because otherwise things like time intervals make no sense with everything taking twice as long as it should, etc.
  • Also, frankly, I just feel like it is just as slow as molasses at that lower speed, which is really a grating feeling. I wind up playing almost all the time on super fast forward. As it stands, the option to lower the speed of things is right there prominently on the Quick Start screen (which of course people haven't seen yet), so if someone feels they are getting worked over they can turn down the speed. When someone gets a game over within the first short amount of time, it also reminds them about this (all these things were already in place, just not yet visible to folks).
  • Thanks to jerith for pointing out the time inconsistencies, and thus pushing me over the edge on something I was already feeling.

• The overall speed of ships and shots has been cut by half, so that even at speed 1, it now is the same speed that it previously was at speed 0.5
  • Additionally, the hull strength and shield strengths have been doubled. But the attack powers have NOT, so that actually will string things out a bit more, even.

• Time slowdown continues to work as it did before, but when you increase time past the default speed, it now works differently -- rather than using larger internal multipliers for all the various movement, trig, time-passage, and other such math, it now does an internal loop for approximately the number of extra times you wanted this to run.
  • This is incredibly more CPU-intensive while you are running at a high speed, but it's really nothing that a semi-modern computer can't handle without incident.
  • The benefit, however, is immense: before, certain aspects of "correctness" would get lost due to the coarser time intervals. Things would happen in an odd way in the solar map sometimes (mainly on the hyper-fast-forward that is possible to use in Ghost/Observer mode), and in battles (where things are more precise) you'd run into problems even with the regular Super Fast Forward.
  • Thanks to waylon531 and jerith for pointing out the issue in battles.

• Two more of the planet types now have their proper orbital background images completed.

• Fixed a bug where the gigacannon (and other keeps-going-after-hit weapons) could only damage the first target touched.
  • Thanks to Misery for the report.

• Increased the range of the Gravity Missile and Nuke up to Gigacannon levels, so that you don't have to be so close to successfully fire them.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for inspiring this change.

• The ship tooltips now show overall DPS and damage types.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a null exception that would occur on the input-bindings window when trying to switch to the solar-map tab (since it has no keybinds currently).
  • Thanks to Admiral and Cyborg for reporting.

• Mouseovering an ability icon now displays its range circle around your flagship (unless it has sniper ragne, which doesn't have a range circle).
  • Thanks to Misery for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug where if you were holding down a speed-change key (FF, etc) and clicked the mouse, it would go back to normal speed.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting, although this was bugging the heck out of Chris, too. ;)

Alpha Version .601

(Released February 8th, 2014)

• Put in a fix to an index out of bounds error that could happen with explosive ammo in the prior version of the game when it hit debris.
  • Thanks to waylon531 and Cyborg for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where any combat zones that were not in planet orbits were not showing a space background at all.

Alpha Version .600

(Released February 8th, 2014)

Special Note: This version breaks any savegames you might have from the prior version.

• Loads and loads of stuff is being done on the non-combat portions of the game, but since that wasn't open to alpha testers yet we aren't bothering to clutter up the log with that for the most part.

• Added a new basic kind of flagship to go alongside the Model X. This one is called the Velociter, and it is basically a much faster version of the Model X, but with lower health and shields. It's certainly great for kiting the enemy, although in close quarters it is a very dangerous thing.

• Players are no longer ever able to get the pirate flagships, which are now called Pirate Ravens and have altered stats.
  • They also now have actual final graphics and animations.

• Fixed a bug where the backgrounds were not found in the last version or two when you used a planet gravity well strength greater than 0.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• When you are fighting in orbit around a planet, the battle backgrounds are now showing a new very-high-orbit view that includes that planet at the bottom area of the battlefield. This not only helps keep things contiguous in terms of theme/sense-of-place, it also makes it clear what direction the gravity is coming from.

• The ability for players to turn on auto-resolve for battles has been removed. That was something that we would have liked to have had ala the Total War series, but as the battles are growing in complexity here, there is just no meaningful way to do that in this game. Plus, cutting them out simply gets rid of too much of the meat of the game at this point.

• The Fleet Levels for races and the player and pirates have all been removed, and everything is now just level 1. The progression of the fleet levels was just one more piece of management hassle in the outer solar system game (like credits), and something to mess with balance in a negative way. It's also the sort of thing that is frustratingly invisible to the player on the battlefield in some respects, and which doesn't thematically stand up as interestingly as things like the pilot types do.
  • There will still be a progression of quality of ships and abilities and all that good stuff, but it will actually be using other existing mechanisms that we have in place that are more interesting. Fleet Levels was actually kind of duplicative in some ways.

• Added a new flagship: The Colossus Bounty Hunter.
  • This ship puts a LOT of ordinance in the battlefield, and does so very quickly.
  • This is used exclusively by assassins that races send after you late in the game if you've pissed them off enough.

• Started a new Tip of the Day document, which will be used in a ticker scroll on the main menu that you can also open up and see the full list of if you prefer.

• The Black Market, Burlust, Evuck, and Skylaxian music themes are now in place.

• Whichever race you choose to crash on the planet of at the start of the game now holds a grudge against you for the rest of the game, affecting how much influence you gain and lose with them.

• The Y and V keys now target the nearest enemy flagship/centerpiece (could be an outpost of the enemy), rather than the "sole" enemy flagship, since there isn't one anymore.

• Shots that are fired now have a short "grace period" before they will hit debris like asteroids, junk, etc. That way if ships are at close range, or in the edge of an asteroid field or junk cluster, they can fire out.

• Now if a shot hits a piece of debris, it damages any ships that are also touching that same piece of debris. That way ships can't hide on top of a single asteroid or similar, gaining protection that way. They have to literally be behind it.

• The final version of the main menu is now complete. It's a lot more attractive, and mirrors the design of the solar map GUI. First impressions are obviously important, and by working on this first it was actually quicker to get the solar GUI going, too.

• The player now starts significantly further away from the enemy.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for inspiring this change.

• The number on the buttons for your squadrons now reflects the actual keybind that they are bound to -- so #10 says "0" instead of "10." Additionally, if you rebind any of them to something other than numbers, it will now you show whatever your other binding was, too.
  • Thanks to Admiral for suggesting.

• The first squadron to be deployed by any ship is always deployed 5x faster than the rest, now.
  • Thanks to Admiral for suggesting.

• AI squadrons now wait to attack until it's satisfied that it has enough attack squadrons to do some good (this amount varies by race, and somewhat by individual battle).

Improving Tools For Balancing Combat

• Added a new Ship Detailed Info grid that you can call up with the "i" key. This lets you see detailed stats if you are so inclined to do so, with all the ships neatly organized. For those who want all the hoary details on everything, this lets you get it without us having to clutter up the main tooltips with that sort of thing.

• The combat balance testing export (Ctrl+F11) now visually shows the battles playing out at hyperspeed. This is slower, but it gives an actual idea of what is happening so that changes can be made when there are issues. Some very interesting things were discovered via this already.

• The combat balance testing export now runs at a vastly more granular set of time per internal combat frame, to better reflect the actual situation in real battles. Previously with it not being granular enough, you would have things like shots missing because of physics getting wonky at that sort of speed, etc.

• The combat balance testing export was previously logging stalemates as victories for some parties, and this is now fixed.

• Space junk no longer pops out of large ships during balance exports, because that was often skewing the numbers by chance or prolonging battles.

• As the balance export is running, a lot of stats now display right on the tooltip area, to make understanding the results easier in realtime.

• The balance export now writes a BalanceExportWinsPerShip.txt file that tallies up how many wins each ship has, and notes the total number of ship types, to aid in finding balance holes where something is too strong or too pathetically weak. We have something similar in our balance exports in AI War.

• Given the addition of the new Ship Details screen (i key), the Ship Rankings screen (r key) has been removed as irrelevant. The latter screen was based on showing some information in a format that is now outdated anyhow.

Ship Balance

• Ammo has been removed from all of the ship weapons except for interceptor missiles. It didn't serve a whole lot of purpose in the main, it was fiddly and small to find, and during combat balance exports in particular it would give skewed results since both sides could run out of ammo and just sit there.

• The sine shots have been updated for both the predator and the peltian solar fortress to be more effective as well as more interesting.
  • Previously they had two fairly wavy shots. This was good and bad -- they could wind up missing something that they were shooting directly at, unfortunately. But at the same time, they were great in crowds and could hit around corners, etc.
  • Now those two shots are even MORE wavy, making them even better at getting around corners, but they also have a third center-shot that goes straight, thus always hitting straight-line targets.

• Hypersonic Pods now have a second weapon on them, called Energy Balls. These are a longer-ranged energy weapon that is more or less like a single-shot version of the burst shot that the claymores have.
  • This makes the hypersonic pods have a much different role from the interceptors at this point, as they are able to deliver two kinds of munitions now -- but their second form of munitions, these energy balls, are not very useful against enemy flagships, which is also part of the idea. However, these things suddenly are really useful as claymore-killers.

• Hypersonic Pods were WAY overpowered. To fix this they have been slowed, have had their DPS lowered and had their hull strength brought way down.
  • Basically these things can't generally take more than one hit from anything now, but they still have use in battle.

• Claymores now have a bit more health.
  • They were lowered a bit too much in previous patches due to a bug in some of the testing portions of the game making them look stronger than they were. This has been fixed and now the Claymores are closer to where they should be.

• PirateSnipers now only have 2 ships per squad.
  • As a result, they now hit much much harder.

Racial Special Flagships

• The balance of the Thoraxian Exterminator has been completely reworked, making it faster and with a stronger hull, but poorer shields.

• Completely revised the Acutian Executor:
  • Highly shielded, extremely fast-moving weapons, and the ability to deploy squadrons twice as quickly as normal.

• Continuing with the effort to make the flag ships more unique. Peltian Solar Fortress now has a TON of shields, but not a lot of hull strength.

• Skylaxian Battle Carrier now has what amounts to a machine gun.

• The Burlust Longship now has two Burst guns, as well as some increased health.

• The other racial special flag ships have all been partially updated. These final three all have new weapons planned.
  • The Boarine Tusker now moves faster.
  • The Evuck Herald moves faster too, but it also has a significantly faster shot speed now.
  • The Andor Supressor has more health now, but a smaller shield, as well as having a slower shot speed.

Shifts Toward A More Asymmetric Fleet/Armada Model

• In combat practice, players can only ever select the racial special flagships for themselves, now.

• When starting a new game, players are now given the racial special flagship for the race whose planet they crash-landed on. They then can never swap out their flagship for the rest of the game.

• All races have access to their racial special flagships right from the start of the game, now.

• All of the racial special flagships have been made substantially more unique.

• AI ships are organized into armadas now, which are basically a collection of 1-5 fleets in one group. You fight an entire armada at a time, which is obviously very outnumbering for you.

Enemy Turrets

• There are now turrets that only the enemy gets. All of your ships are still mobile, and you never get things like turrets.

• Depending on the context of the fight you are in, you may have a simpler-style battle where it is just fleet vs fleet as in the older versions of the alpha. In those instances you are out in empty space typically, and a foe has snuck up on you.

• In most other instances, you're attacking a foe that is entrenched at least somewhat, and they have turrets and other fortifications up that you have to figure out how to break.

Player Flagship Special Abilities

• There are twenty-five new special abilities that players are now able to customize their flagships with. The AI never gets these abilities, and these are a big part of your Act-In-The-Hole Batman-esque way of taking on foes that otherwise have superior numbers.
  • You start a new game with access to 5 random ones of these, and you can only ever select 3 at a time. You can run certain kinds of contracts to unlock random other ones.
  • In combat practice, you can select any of them at any time, but again only 3.
  • These have both ammo and cooldowns, and if you are doing multiple fights between visiting a planet or a black market, you have to think about how and when you want to expend said ammo.
  • Some of these, like using nukes in the orbit of a planet, have larger-game consequences despite being very powerful. But then again, using nukes out in empty space or in the asteroid belt or ice belt doesn't bother anybody, so...
  • The JKL hotkeys allow you to trigger these abilities quickly.

• Any flagship controlled by the player now moves 250% faster than it used to. The flagships felt like they were moving in molasses before -- which was appropriate when the battlefields were smaller, and when there was less maneuvering to be done. And it is still appropriate for the enemy flagships. But this is now one of your "Batman" advantages. ;)

Player Powerups / Abandoned Hydral Technology

• Since you are the last Hydral, only you know how to make use of some very cool technology that happened to be left in various places throughout the solar system. After all, the Hydrals were occupying the solar system for centuries, and had built up a ton of stuff. They also left in a hurry to run back to their planet right before they died, so all that stuff is still floating around out there.
  • Usually the enemy forces have set up guards and turrets and so forth around these sorts of technology, though, so if you want to activate them you will have to really think about how you approach them, and which ones you approach.

Helping The Player Out On Lower Difficulties

• The difficulty levels below Hard now provide bonuses to the player that make their forces stronger than equivalent AI forces:
  • Easy: Flagship Health is 4x, Squadron Sizes are 3x
  • Normal: Flagship Health is 2x, Squadron Sizes are 2x

• It is now possible to select your difficulty level for combat practices, so that you can try scenarios at the various difficulty levels.

"Constellations" In Combat

• Combat -- well, most of the time -- is now organized into what we call constellations internally (although the game itself never references these). These are various fortified enemy locations, typically with some sort of hydral technology at the center, or some sort of other large centerpieces. The variety of these will go up in the coming week, so that it's not all hydral technology (which for the moment, it is).

• The constellations have different arrangements of turrets in a variety of styles, and some are easier to bypass than others. The constellations get distributed around at random, near one another, at random orientations, so you wind up with a very interesting fortress-like battlefield to approach in these sorts of situations.

• The AI for the enemies when constellations are present is very different from before. They now tend to hide in the constellations, and overwhelm you with force, or guard hydral technology, as is appropriate.

• None-constellation combat is still present, and uses different AI. This mainly happens in the main game when you are attacked by the AFA or by Assassins, and in those circumstances it actually starts to feel very naked and lonely and brutal-simple. By contrast, the constellation battlefields are a lot more intricate and about finding the right paths through them, and the right ships to use at the right time to punch through them.

Alpha Version .102

(Released January 31st, 2014)

• Several new battle background visuals are now in place, completely replacing the older kind at this point. They all use a specific level of brightness (or lack thereof), to make sure that things on the battlefield are clearly visible, as well as to make sure that the interface "pops" properly.

• Fixed a bug where the multi-bullets were incredibly out of balance.

• The peltian and evuck pilots now actually have bonuses for the cutters (pirate and regular)

• Adjusted the max range to live on the shots, because the way it was working before was clamped in .101 just too short to remain functional/balanced in a lot of cases.

• The multigun weapon has been revised to fire shots sequentially, and to fire fixed-size salvos rather than "one shot at any in range, up to 10".

• Initial positions in combat are now fixed to the left and right at X distance from the center, rather than at random angles from the center. This way your first action in every combat isn't panning the view around wondering where the enemy is.

• In the combat practice setup, as well as in the game itself, it is now no longer possible to select fewer than 5 squadrons for either side.

• In the combat practice setup and in the game itself, blank squadron slots now show "None" in darkened letters rather than just being blank. This is a lot easier to see.

• Fixed an indexing exception when you use peltian pilots in interceptors.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• The basic flagship is now called Flagship Model X, so that we can differentiate it from other later kinds of flagships better.

Heavily Revised Combat GUI

• The visual styling in general is now much improved; it's based on the solar map GUI, which is newer work.

• There are new buttons on-screen for slow-motion as well as super-fast-forward.

• The entire arrangement of the bottom area of the screen has been redone.

• The "charging tanks" display on the player health/shield bar area has been removed (although the enemy one still has it).

• The queue of your ship production is now on the left side of the screen going down, rather than at the bottom going to the right.

• The end combat button is now much more in the regular style of the game without being so gaudy, and it now pulses slightly to hint at you to click it.

• When you first get into a new battle or load a savegame that is in the middle of a battle, it now automatically starts out paused so that you can look around. Pressing the spacebar or clicking the slightly-pulsing "start combat" button actually begins the combat.
  • Thanks to Admiral and Misery for suggesting.

• Tooltips in combat now linger for 2 seconds after you have moused over something, if you do not mouse over something else first. This makes it easier to mouse over moving ships, etc.
  • Thanks to windgen for suggesting.

• The tooltips in combat now actually say what side each ship you are hovering over belongs to.

• A more detailed role description text with some extra key information is now included in the tooltip information on hovering over ships in combat. The raw statistics of lesser importance have been removed from the tooltip, as it is not actionable information during battles in terms of how you use things tactically.
  • Thanks to windgen for suggesting the added text here.

• The tooltips for hovering over the squadron buttons have been much improved.

Balance Changes

• Damage from the Claymore shots was brought WAY down.
  • These things were hitting like a Mack truck loaded with school buses.

• Monitors (both pirate and non) now have a lower shot rate.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version where the effective shot travel distance on sine shots (from predators, mainly) was so short as to make them ineffective.

• Nearly doubled the ranges on most ships, in order to make it so that the escort behavior works better in terms of keeping the ability to fire shots more of the time when an enemy approaches.

• Fixed an issue where the AI was making way too many solitary attack fleets and sending those pitifully at the player in the prior version. It's now a lot more varied, but less prone to attack fleets in general. Still more AI work is needed, but a lot of that will have to wait until we have our hydral technology capture points in place, because the AI really needs to take that into consideration and not just the point-to-point fighting.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting the error.

Alpha Version .101

(Released January 30th, 2014)

• The recent page notes actually points to the release notes, now.

• Lots of various stuff in the larger strategic game outside of the combat section, but since that isn't available to testers yet, we'll spare you the list.

• The game now keeps tracks of campaigns played and won/lost separately from combat practices played and won/lost, and now properly logs all of them.
  • Thanks to Admiral for reporting.

• Squadron deployment buttons in combat now have tooltips.

• The tooltips in combat now show a line about the pilots and pilot bonuses.

• Combat performance optimizations.

• The selection rings for ships were not properly scaling up with ships as you zoomed out in the prior version of the game, making it almost impossible to see what you had selected when you were zoomed out at all.
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290, Admiral, and mrhanman for reporting.

• "Giant" ships like your flagship now show larger selection rings in general, even when zoomed in.
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290, Admiral, and mrhanman for reporting.

• The clickable area for ships now scales up with the zoom going out, so that you can still click them when you are zoomed out. And for flagships, this area is now larger in general.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• The racial/other-purpose ship name prefixes now properly show during battles. So something from the Thoraxians is now no longer the "Bolt," it's the "TCC Bolt."

• Strafing time was not properly adjusting to different simulation speeds, so on lower sim speeds it was causing hugely less strafing, and on higher sim speeds or fast-forward, it was causing hugely more.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue with the background grid of lines basically being insane when you zoomed in and out. Given that was supposed to be a major indication not only of spatial distance but also of your zoom level, that was kind of an important oversight.
  • Thanks to Misery and Admiral for reporting.

• New slider on Settings -> Graphics: Combat Background Brightness
  • Adjusts the brightness of the backgrounds in combat. 1 is normal, 0 is completely black.

• Now when a squadron deploys its ships start at a small scale and grow to full size over about a second. They cannot be selected, fire, or be targeted during this time.

• Shots now disappear after they have traveled twice their maximum range, to avoid an interceptor furball from spraying the cosmos like some kind of shmup.
  • Missiles travel up to 5 times their maximum range.
  • Thanks to Admiral for inspiring this change.

• New ship: Hypersonic Pod
  • Built for doing incredibly fast strafing runs that enemies find it difficult to do defend against, even though the strafing runs themselves are not that strong. Not the strongest, and not the hardiest, but definitely the fastest.

• Added two new battle backgrounds, and removed three of them that were simply too bright.

Enemy Combat AI Improvements/Additions

• Now, once the enemy flagship has directly fired upon your flagship, all flanking AI squadrons immediately attack, and any further AI squadrons are either attacker or defender (no wanderers or flankers, etc).

• Now, when a flagship's shields are down or its hull is below half, all new AI squadrons are attacker (if it's the player's flagship in distress) or defender (if it's the AI's flagship).
  • Further, if a flagship's hull drops below 20%, all AI squadrons immediately switch to the corresponding AI type.

• After deploying a squadron, the AI will check if it needs to pick a different next-squadron-to-deploy. Specifically, it will try to make sure it has Claymores to counter Interceptors, Interceptors to counter Snipers, and Monitors to counter Lancers.
  • There's a significant random factor involved, and often it will just keep the existing order.

• Added a new "Buddy" AI squadron behavior that makes the squadron pick a random non-buddy squadron to stick around (whatever it might be doing).

• Added new AI squadron behavior that tries to hide some of the types of pirate ships (which don't slow down near asteroids) in clusters of asteroids a bit away (about 2x firing range) from the player's flagship.

Flagship/Racial Fleet AI

• AI flagships now randomly select from a variety of AI routines (weights based on the flagship's creating race).

• The enemy flagship now always turns aggressive (as in "bum rush the player flagship") if it is completely out of squadron ships or if 2 minutes of game-time have passed since the last squadron deployment.

• Added a "Enemy Flagship Behavior" dropdown to the combat practice menu. It defaults to random (which just uses the race's normal chances of picking various flagship AIs) but you can use it to pick any flagship AI for the enemy.

Added Battle Controls/Tools

• Added a new "wild hunter" mode for your ships, that also applies to some enemy flocks. This can be turned on via the B hotkey, and makes them automatically seek out and destroy the ships that they are best suited to kill.

• Double-clicking one of your ships in combat now selects all your ships of that type.

• Added new Key Bind: Center On Selection
  • In combat, centers your viewport on the averaged center of all the ships you have selected. Does not adjust your zoom, so if you have a widely-spread selection of ships and are zoomed in this may center your view on a whole lot of nothing.
  • Defaults to C.

• The player's flagship now responds to WASD for movement in combat.
  • Holding control while pressing WASD sets the destination considerably further out, so the ship will stay on that heading for some time (unless another order is given).
  • Thanks to Admiral for the suggestion.

• Added new Key Bind: Pure Coward
  • In combat, puts your flagship in Pure Coward mode, which causes it to try to run directly away from the enemy flagship until you give it another order.
  • Defaults to U.
  • Thanks to Admiral for the suggestion.

• Added new Key Bind: Insanely Aggressive.
  • In combat, puts your flagship in Insanely Aggressive mode, which causes it to try to run straight at the enemy flagship until you give it another order.
  • Defaults to Y.
  • Thanks to Admiral for the suggestion.

• Added new Key Bind: Center On Enemy Flagship
  • In combat, centers your viewport on the enemy flagship.
  • Defaults to J.

Battle Speed Stuff

• The default battle speed is now 0.5 instead of 1, and battle speeds can be adjusted all the way down to 0.05 instead of just to 0.25.
  • Thanks to Admiral and Misery for suggesting.

• The deployment speed of ships has been halved, so that there is a much bigger difference between what size ship you bring out at any given time timing-wise, as well as making it so that you can't flood the battlefield with low-cost ships too fast.

• Added new Key Bind: Slow Motion
  • Like the inverse of Fast Forward, it reduces speed to half normal in combat (does not apply on solar map).
  • Defaults to T

• Added new Key Bind: Super Fast Forward
  • Like Fast Forward, but double that in combat, and eight times that on the solar map.
  • Defaults to G

Balance changes

• Pirate Lancers no longer have "strafing time," unlike interceptors and cutters of both the regular and pirate varieties.

• Interceptors now hit for less and have a longer time between shots. This is to hopefully prevent the "zerg rush" strategy from being effective.
  • Thanks to Misery for pointing this out.

• The Flanking squadron AI now switches to Attacker when fired upon from beyond their own weapon range.

• Claymores nerfed hard as they were literally beating all ships 1v1.
  • Health, damage, and shot frequency all dropped.

• PirateSniper health dropped.
  • With the nerf to Interceptors, they actually didn't kill snipers anymore... OOPS.

The Last Federation