This release candidate has a lot of quality-of-life improvements, balance tweaks, new ships, and a handful of bug fixes.
We're still working hard at a bunch of upcoming improvements as part of Career 2.0, plus a big new weapon and related ship-design mechanic, but we wanted to get these improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.
Thanks for testing!
RC1:
- Ships: [list]
- Added 3 new Monolith combat ships: Attractor, Bluescreen, and Reginleif.
- Added 3 Monolith crew transports: Minor Connector, Bulk Connector, and Mass Connector.
- Added 1 new Monolith trade station: Large Monolith Trade Station II.
- Added 6 Cabal crew transports: Tourist, Pioneer, Wayfarer, Cicerone, Originator, and Pathfinder.
- Added 2 new Imperium combat ships: Bulkhead and Tenderizer.
- Added 6 Imperium crew transports: Ardeola, Bacchus, Agami, Botaurus, Ardea, and Butorides.
- Added 1 new Imperium defense platform: Medium Nuke Platform.
- Added 3 Fringe crew transports: Target Practice, Packed Like Sardines, and Khrushchevka.
- Added 1 new Fringe trade station: Small Fringe Trade Station II
- Miscellaneous updates to existing ships and stations.
[*]Balance:
- The calculation that determines how many resources are needed to repair a damaged part now rounds up (again) to the nearest whole number of resources instead of down, because rounding down was causing repair costs to be far lower than intended.
- Huge thrusters no longer have a ramp-down time.
- Increased the Electron Cloud's energy weapon buff from 75% to 90%.
- Decreased the Electron Cloud's reactor debuff from 80% to 40%.
- 2-way and 3-way Small Thrusters no longer have 5% lateral thrust. (This was supposed to have been removed back when lateral thrust was removed from other thrusters, but we forgot.)
[*]User Interface:
- You can now save up to three different custom sets of "favorite" parts or decals. To do this, open the ship or paint editor, right click on the button for the part or decal, and then select which favorites set you want to add it to or remove it from. You can also middle-click on the part or decal to quickly favorite or unfavorite it. When a favorites set has any parts or decals in it, it will appear as a tab to the left of all the standard part/decal tabs.
- Split the "shapes" decals group into "straights", "curves", and "fades".
- When using the 'select' tool in paint mode, holding Shift will now suppress the 'grab hand' just like it does when using the 'select' tool in build mode.
- Added a note to the Tractor Beam Emitter's tooltip to clarify that force and power usage varies based on the target's distance.
- Removed the "Dmg vs Shots" stat from the Flak Array because it was identical to the "Max Damage" stat and misleading.
[*]Career:
- Added a new "High Electron Cloud Density" type of star system that is covered predominantly by Electron Clouds. (These star systems will not appear in existing saved games.)
- All four factions now have "crew transport" ships that are similar to trade ships but focus on crew capacity over resource capacity. Players can still trade and hire crew from these ships, and they will refill station crews faster than regular trade ships.
- A.I. trade ships will no longer stop in ion storms or sun heat zones to repair themselves.
[*]Bug Fixes:
- Crash if an under-construction part is selected in the supply-chain assignment mode as it finishes construction.
- Crash in some rare circumstances when transferring crew while the game is paused.
- Diagonal ships could sometimes have difficulty getting into and staying in formation.
- Electron Clouds or Ion Storms that overlapped with sun damage zones could cause ship pathfinding issues.
- Selecting a starter ship with a missile launcher would require all four missile/mine blueprints to be unlocked/purchased instead of only the one(s) required for the selected missile/mine type(s).
- A.I. ships would sometimes demand that the player surrender if the player had any unarmed ships, even if those ships were being protected by other armed ships nearby.
- In supply chain assignment mode, it was unintentionally possible to assign a reactor to a storage room (or vice-versa) by selecting both the reactor and a storage room and then right-clicking on a different storage (or reactor).
- Randomly-generated crew names could sometimes have non-alphabetical characters.
[*]Modding:
- Saved games containing ships that no longer exist due to disabled or updated mods should now be loadable. The missing ships will in most cases simply not exist after loading.
- Mods can add (or remove) part and decal favorites sets.
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