v0.16.0
v0.16.0: One mission select, and a kinder prestige
Send probes to find worlds worth invading, automate your defenses to bank scrap while away, and launch as many satellites as you can afford.
Deciding what kind of run you are about to fly now happens first, in the open, on one screen. And prestige stops charging you twice.
Added
- The Deep Survey Program. A survey probe is a third thing you can launch. It rides the same timed run, keeps going once it clears orbit, and reports back about four hours later, real time, with a world worth taking. Charted worlds keep: nothing expires.
- Deep Survey, the star chart. Every world your probes have found, what it would take to hold it, what it would pay, and the odds against the fleet you have in orbit right now.
- Survey Analysis. A probe can tell you a world is defended and roughly how much. Four ranks of analysis narrow "roughly" from a wide guess to a number you would stake a fleet on. It does not make your fleet stronger, it makes the estimate stop hedging.
- Automated Defenses, the largest program the Research Center has ever offered. Every rank arms another battery that holds your site in real time while you are away, and the recovery crews bank the scrap. It appears once your first satellite is up.
Changed
- Mission select opens with a run type picker: Defend, Satellite, or Platform. Options you have not unlocked stay out of the way, and the picker only appears once you have more than one choice.
- The funding slider now reads the way it looks: a full bar is the biggest investment, which buys the shortest countdown on the pad.
- Prestige no longer wipes your flux. Buying a rank clears your perks and nothing else. The price of the rank is the cost.
- Orbital Command is reachable once you actually have a platform in orbit, not merely the program to launch one.
- The Research Center's two tabs are now Battlefield and Programs. Everything in the building is research and every purchase is a perk, so the old labels named nothing. Battlefield is what a run fights on, Programs is what you put in orbit.
- The constellation no longer stops at five satellites. Launch as many as you like; from the sixth on the price climbs far more steeply, so the sky above five is bought rather than granted.
- The Orbital Factory Program is offered at two satellites instead of a full constellation, and command sends word when it becomes available.
- Announcements now arrive in a modal that waits to be read, instead of a stack of toasts that could pile three deep and time out before you looked. The report on what your satellites, defenses, and shipyards banked while you were away is one card with the figures on it.
- The globe pulls back as your sky fills, so satellites and platforms orbit in view instead of swinging past the edge of the frame.
Fixed
- Vapor screens stationed themselves inside the middle of the battlefield no matter how wide it was, so extra cannons got no cover and the banks piled up on top of each other. They now spread across the whole field you are defending.
- Site names and beacons were missing from the globe on mission select
All patch notes