Patch 3 is now live on Steam

[RIV]

Changes are:
- Removed Capacitor from the Arbalest's starting cards and replaced it with Ordnance Surge.
- Fixed bugs on "Unload" and "Pineapple shell" flak cards
- Removed Light barrage from the Marauder's starting cards, and replaced it with Predictive Aim
- Removed a shield pulse card from the Marauder's starting shield, so you can draft more cards on it's basic shield
- Clarified text on the Shield surge card to better represent what it does
- Clarified text on the Forced Optimization, Forced Conservation and Forced Equivalence
- Replaced Flash Shields with Hasty Defense (again) to balance the energy usage of Predictive aim now being in your starting deck.
- Hasty Defense now also adds 1 duration in addition to the 12 Shield points

["The Canadian"]

@RIV
Typo, "not live" > "now live"

[RIV]

Fixed :D

[dt]

demo's great

[CrabNicholson]

give us the locked ship!

[Grasshopper]

Originally posted by RIV:

Changes are:
- Removed Capacitor from the Arbalest's starting cards and replaced it with Ordnance Surge.
- Removed Light barrage from the Marauder's starting cards, and replaced it with Predictive Aim
- Removed a shield pulse card from the Marauder's starting shield, so you can draft more cards on it's basic shield
- Replaced Flash Shields with Hasty Defense (again) to balance the energy usage of Predictive aim now being in your starting deck.
- Hasty Defense now also adds 1 duration in addition to the 12 Shield points

You guys made the Marauder a lot harder. It's a challenge now. Removing Light Barrage and replacing it with predictive aim. Yikes! That was good because having that extra Light Barrage made things too easy. Predictive Aim is a bit of a hindrance, but I figured out how to sync it with my energy usage. I'm not sure if I like Predictive Aim.

Removing a shield pulse card made me pick up a better shield card. I like that.

I like the new Hasty Defense.

The Marauder feels like a different ship now. I have to think more about energy, whereas before all I had to do was concentrate on Ordnance and Mass.

The Final Boss fight was tough. I recruited Xan and his 50% bonus works great with Hasty Defense. I finished with 17 HP. It would have been much worse without him.

Removing Capacitor from the Arbalest is terrific because I always played it and it made the Arbalest easy to use.

Thanks Devs, you made this game more challenging.

[RIV]

Well, now that Next Fest is over, you guys get to be our testers while we figure things out :P

[RIV]

In all seriousness though, we'll probably revert some changes and take it easy on the balance patches while we focus on the EA content.

[Nhaima]

Predictive Aim definitely feels like an early game liability. Not only does Marauder rely on multi-resource attacks, where the majority of Arbalest is Ordnance-only, it costs 3 energy from your weakest resource producer. Opening Shot deals an average damage of 3 while inflicting RNG-fixing Shred for three resources. Twin Barrel deals an average of 4 damage and gives you an extra attack for 5 resources. The Light Barrage from Twin Barrel deals an average of 3.5 damage for 3 resources. This means that Predictive Aim is worth an average of 1 damage, 2 damage, and 1.5 damage respectively - and while it ensures you hit your shredding thresholds against unshielded targets it has the lowest damage-to-cost ratio of any of the starting cards while also requiring you to have enough resources to play both it and an attack in the same turn. It also doesn't count as a flak attack so it doesn't give you any progress towards Unload, the "have played 3 flak attacks this turn" card.

I'm not sure what would improve it, maybe additional duration? But I'm not sure I'd draft it unless I already had really random attacks like the 0-8 flak attack and it feels like it an absolute hindrance in the starter deck.


Separately, it would be helpful if you could right click on equipment to look at the cards before selecting. You can do this I think when you're looking at new modules in a space station's shop, but you can't when you're getting the free extra gun from the information broker.

[RIV]

Reverted some of the changes in the last patch after looking at some player feedback.
Looking at some of the player preferences, and what people like and dislike, I think at some point during Early Access we are going to go with alternate starting loadouts for each ship, similar to FTL.

Changes in the last build include:
- Replaced Predictive aim with Light barrage
- Added light barrage to the Light Flak's drafting table
- The Marauder's basic shield now starts with 2 shield pulse cards
- Blinding pulse Ordnance cost reduced by 1, its energy cost is increased by 1
- Heavy pulse energy cost increased by 1
- Fixed a bunch of typos and unclear text on the Heavy Laser
- Hyperlaser card now gains +3 damage increase for every Blast card played instead of +2

[Adam Beckett]

Hi Riv,

is there any 'automated process' for bug reporting - without user's writing long stories, and you going mad, having to read/understand what the issue is?

Can the game run on debug mode on the user side, creating dump files for you to read?

Otherwise, I would 'report' a minor bug.

14022024-b (latest patch). The player (me) was stuck after 5 nodes (= the points you traverse as a player on the map) and unable to click on the next node.

Mouse input not responding with the map - I could not progress to the next event. So, it is a 'game stopping bug'.

Solution was to exit game and 'Continue'. Then, the player (me) was able to click on the next available nodes (so the game state was written properly - just an input or scripting issue?).

Not sure, if this is really helpful as feedback. This could be absolutely anything - from a script not triggering, to a mouse-input or screen rendering (I run no Steam overlay) or cache/memory address issue - graphic driver issue, etc, etc, etc?

Again, you will go crazy reading forums for user 'reports'.

Implementing some sort of bug report system is probably too much work on top of too much work, already?



Btw, really fun, amazing game.

["The Canadian"]

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

Otherwise, I would 'report' a minor bug.

14022024-b (latest patch). The player (me) was stuck after 5 nodes (= the points you traverse as a player on the map) and unable to click on the next node.

Mouse input not responding with the map - I could not progress to the next event. So, it is a 'game stopping bug'.

Solution was to exit game and 'Continue'. Then, the player (me) was able to click on the next available nodes.

Hey Adam,

Pretty sure this is a known bug, and its happening because you're playing with Graphics on "High" or "Ultra". Doesn't matter what your GPU is, its affecting everybody.

Try playing a run on "Medium" and if you have no problems with non-clickability, relations with factions disappearing, post-battle loot you can't collect, et cetera, then you've confirmed you're running into the known bug I'm referencing. Report back if switching to Medium helped you so RIV is aware.

In the DevOPS world, this bug would be classified as a moderate since it doesn't stop someone from playing from A->Z, it just stops that progress while enjoying perks.

GLHF

[Adam Beckett]

Originally posted by "The Canadian":

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

Otherwise, I would 'report' a minor bug...

Hey Adam ...

Thanks, for the heads up.

Sorry for the redundant reporting (cannot read all the threads). Will have to play more, tomorrow.

["The Canadian"]

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

Thanks, for the heads up.

Sorry for the redundant reporting (cannot read all the threads). Will have to play more, tomorrow.

No worries. And never be sorry for redundant reporting.

Devs/Professionals who know what a sprint is would always rather have more information than too little information. In a way, its their job to parse it.

Thanks for reporting at all. A significant minority of players actually do.

[john]

This was my favorite Next Fest game. I played the demo through a bunch of times, and I can't wait to buy/play the finished product.