Pre-Alpha 7b Hotfix Released!

Hello everyone,

we’ve just released Pre-Alpha 7b, which is a hotfix to Pre-Alpha 7a.

This hotfix includes several bug fixes to space combat, several balance tweaks and adds a lot of variety to the ruins searching text. Also, ships start with no shields at the beginning (Class I Shields needs to be researched now) among other gameplay changes and bug fixes.

Note: The save games from Pre-Alpha 7a should work on this new version but we suggest that you start new games to test this new build properly, and to benefit from the new features and fixes fully.

To update to this latest version, just use your existing download link from humble bundle. If anybody has trouble finding the email with the link you can use the order resender and Humble Bundle will send you a list of your download pages.

Here’s the full change log:

NEW

• Ruins searching flavor text added, with many new variations (thanks to Konstantine!). This was implemented in a way that it should be very rare to see the same texts repeated in the same game

BALANCE

• Space culture perk “Frontier Spirit” bonus changed to +3% morale per parsec (was +5 previously)
• Survey ships now cost 2 SSP (instead of previous 3)

GAMEPLAY

• Shields not researched at the beginning now. All players start with unshielded frigates and no shields tech
• Stellar Drive tech removed from the game, which caused all the following drives to get their speed reduced by 1. It was found that ships were probably moving too fast on the starmap. By eliminating the Stellar Drive (which was a bit redundant with the Magdrive anyway) we get a bit less speed but keep the choices interesting, if not more now. Let’s see.
• Chance of AI ships fleeing from combat decreased slightly

UI

• Changed the Ship Design hangar image (the previous one was left there by mistake)

AUDIO

• N/A

BUGS

• Fixed a bug where it was not possible to defeat a Space Dragon with only armor piercing weapons (or any other vessel for that matter)
• Fixed a bug where the weapon modifications were changing from one combat to the next and causing all ships to eventually acquire all modifications
• Fixed a bug where leaders initiative in combat (that determines which side goes first) was taking into account all the empire’s leader and not only the leaders present in that particular battle, as it should
• Fixed a bug where loading a game that was saved with the outliner set to “planets view” with a “colonizable” planet was causing the game state to get corrupted
• Fixed a space combat bug where sometimes the combat would freeze and cause the UI to disappear
• Fixed an issue where the only space monsters available in the game were Space Dragons. Now the Crystal Entity and Space Amoeba also appear
• Fixed an issue where the asteroids name was a bit too small on the outliner which caused big names to wrap

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Instructions on how to download the latest build can be found here.