Hi all,

Here's what we have been working on for the last couple of weeks. We have been trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible before we make the engine upgrade to support multiplayer in v0.9.0. We hope you like it!



You can now intercept escape pods on the starmap and then do terrible things to them. Messing with escape pods is considered taboo in the galaxy, so expect any witnesses to be unhappy about your pod fishing.

Re-education (lobotomy)
- Costs more scrap the higher level the enemy captain
- Gives the captain the “passive” trait (lobotomy)
- Captain loses all hostile traits.
- Resets the relations to 0
- Only seen in neighboring provinces, so do somewhere secluded
- Good way to install a leader who is neutral toward you (will also be a passive leader)
- Medium relations hit.

Execution
- Is free!
- A new low level captain with a blank slate will spawn elsewhere in the galaxy, same face different captain. (prevents depopulation)
- If the captain was a faction leader that hated you, this can improve faction relations if the new leader doesn't hate you as much.
- Capital will move to the new leader's starbase if you kill the leader.
- Only seen in neighboring provinces, so do somewhere secluded
- Good way to get revenge and be rid of some troublesome captain forever.
- High relations hit

Cure
- Converts a zombie back to being human for a lot of rez
- Everyone in the galaxy likes this. (everyone hears about it)
- Cured captain is very happy with you
- Vaccinated against re-infection for a while (3 starmap minutes)



When faction members are defeated in battle, if there are no remaining starbases from their faction, they will become neutral. This means that you can now wipe out a faction. Kill the starbases, then kill the captains so they can't respawn into the faction.



Starbase bounties were far too low, allowing players to wipe out empires far too easily late game simply by using scrap. You can still do it, but it will now be a lot more expensive so you will need to strategize more in how you spend.

The minimum starbase bounty is calculated based on the owner's tech level and the starbase's size.



We have added what we call the chipper on the inventory screen. You access the screen from the starmap in the bottom button array.

If you want to be rid of parts and don't want to drag them to a starbase to sell, you can chip them on the spot. You will get 50% of the scrap price that you would have gotten at a starbase, so hauling is better. But if you don't want to haul, and don't want the parts to weigh you down, then chip em and make your own scrap.

Select the parts that you want to chip and transfer them to the other side of the inventory screen. There you can either chip them, or drop them into space as before as a scavenge field (good way to get pursuers off your back sometimes, especially zombies)

Infected parts are special, since they have zombie goo all over them, they give you Rez instead of scrap when chipped. So now you need to decide if you want to clean that infected part, or convert it to some much needed Rez.



When we added the chipper, we also added a much simpler way to clean your stored parts. The Disinfector works just like the chipper, but in this case, you can transfer your stored infected parts and then disinfect them by spending goons. This means you no longer need to attach a part to your ship to clean it of infection.



We have changed Battle Wagon's target acquisition logic based on used feedback. So how it works now is that Battle Wagon's guns will prioritize shooting at your contextual target (E), then your locked target, and then anything it can possibly hit.

So Battle Wagons tries first to kill what you told your fleet to kill, then it will try to kill whatever you may be looking or shooting at yourself, then it will scan for anything it can hit.

The reason this works so well is that if you are actively shooting, you override Battle Wagon mode so you will always be hitting what you want if you are pressing the fire button.

A neat side effect of this new system is also that Battle Wagon can now shoot asteroids and junk if you target them with (E).



Fighters now work like a swarm of angry bees and instead of needing to be directed, fighters will now seek and destroy enemies within their attack radius. Their target acquisition also takes hints similar to Battle Wagon. So fighters will prioritize your E target, then whatever you are pointing at, and then anything in range.

Some effects are that you no longer "need" to use E to send fighters after enemy ships, which will then allow you to keep your Carrier strike craft our of weapons' range more easily.

If there is no (E) target, fighters will automagically sweep to whatever you are shooting at. So if you start shooting at a ship or an enemy strike craft, you will notice your swarm of angry little bees swarming to that target naturally as well.



So the Mining Op was underwhelming resource wise vs. time required to mine. We are hoping these new changes will make mining op's more of a treat to try when you see one pop up.

- There are double the resource rocks in the Mining Op now.
- Each resource rock contains double the amount of Rez.
- We added a second tractor beam to the mothership to make pickup faster.
- Rez drops from rocks come in larger denominations, now in 1,2,5,10 (was 2,5)
- Resource rocks won't drop explosive wisps anymore (so you don't risk breaking the rogue miner crates, causing an unwanted battle.



Strike craft will now play their proper role in threat level calculations. Large ones in particular will make a big difference, and now the threat levels should be much more reasonable, at least when it comes to a fleet's strike craft factoring in.



We noticed a reoccurring problem with players not realizing when the final battle was ready to start, or not knowing what they had to do to start the final battle. We have made this a lot more explicit. Now when the final battle is ready the helper tip tells the player to kill the capital base, there is a callout indicating readiness (also in sandbox which had nothing)

But most importantly we have changed the war meter once the final battle is ready. Once you achieve the threshold for the final battle, the war meter will stop counting and will instead tell you to go fight.



A great player suggestion came up to add command points to the prestige system, so we did. Command points are now infinitely leveling. This means that given a high enough level, you could now field four large strike craft. Prestige command point levels will give you 2 points instead of the usual 8 for main levelups.



- Fixed stash showing values with markup

- Fixed long profile names warping in trade window

- Torpedoes and Bombs (and all missiles) got a health boost. Bombs and torps got a bigger health boost.

- Flak cannon damage down 20%

- AI more willing to accept peace if losing badly in a war

- Fix for autosaves being blocked for 15 seconds after a battle.

- Autosaving is forced to happen on game exit regardless of timing of last autosave.

- Accept/Decline on quit to main menu and quit to desktop.

- Large Bounty Hunter engine received a dispenser slot (hangars/krule)

- Fix for possible control lockout when restarting a single player game from in game.

- Increased medium bandit hive threat from 35->40

- Increased large bandit hive threat from 45->55

- Special twiddling of phase 2 final fight ships if > 11 cores. Was causing unwinnable scenarios.

- Fix for non progression if complete final mission without starting a faction

- Small strike craft health + armor up 50%

- Hammerhead has a higher banking angle when turning.

- Clear to spine, and clear ship in the inventory menu don't make a noise anymore

- The following mothership parts now support small turreted weapons.
- Science --Large Nose: Flat Deck
- Civilian -- Large Engine: Camel Back
- Militia-- Large Engine: Horizon Back
- Miners -- Large Nose: Foundry
- Hunter -- Large Nose: Sting Nose

- Added Ion barrels to the final mission in cease players need some extra shield popping potential.

- The whole reticle turns red when a target is in range now, to make it more obvious.

- Player core in scan view will show both total ship stats and core stats.

- Lots of improvement with the controller in menus

- Zombie Capital threat now shows as ??? since it is outside the usual threat assessment system and also MYSTERY wooooh...



Next, we will be working on v0.8.5 which contains mostly tuning and bug fixing tasks to get us solid for our extended work on v0.9.0.

Version 0.9.0 will be the big engine upgrade and multiplayer rewrite required for Unity 5.5 (We are currently on v0.5.0.2)

Once we upgrade the engine, we will need to rewrite our multiplayer back end to comply with the major multiplayer changes in Unity since v5.1. That upgrade will take us offline for a while, but we will have more details upon the release of 0.8.5.

We don't expect that it v0.8.5 will be ready before January due to us taking a little time off to be with our families over the holidays. We will be pushing fixes to v0.8.4 though as needed.

We look forward to seeing you all again in 2017!

Andrew (Blorf) and Ricard (Narlak)

Hi all,

Here's what we have been working on for the last couple of weeks. We have been trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible before we make the engine upgrade to support multiplayer in v0.9.0. We hope you like it!



You can now intercept escape pods on the starmap and then do terrible things to them. Messing with escape pods is considered taboo in the galaxy, so expect any witnesses to be unhappy about your pod fishing.

Re-education (lobotomy)
- Costs more scrap the higher level the enemy captain
- Gives the captain the “passive” trait (lobotomy)
- Captain loses all hostile traits.
- Resets the relations to 0
- Only seen in neighboring provinces, so do somewhere secluded
- Good way to install a leader who is neutral toward you (will also be a passive leader)
- Medium relations hit.

Execution
- Is free!
- A new low level captain with a blank slate will spawn elsewhere in the galaxy, same face different captain. (prevents depopulation)
- If the captain was a faction leader that hated you, this can improve faction relations if the new leader doesn't hate you as much.
- Capital will move to the new leader's starbase if you kill the leader.
- Only seen in neighboring provinces, so do somewhere secluded
- Good way to get revenge and be rid of some troublesome captain forever.
- High relations hit

Cure
- Converts a zombie back to being human for a lot of rez
- Everyone in the galaxy likes this. (everyone hears about it)
- Cured captain is very happy with you
- Vaccinated against re-infection for a while (3 starmap minutes)



When faction members are defeated in battle, if there are no remaining starbases from their faction, they will become neutral. This means that you can now wipe out a faction. Kill the starbases, then kill the captains so they can't respawn into the faction.



Starbase bounties were far too low, allowing players to wipe out empires far too easily late game simply by using scrap. You can still do it, but it will now be a lot more expensive so you will need to strategize more in how you spend.

The minimum starbase bounty is calculated based on the owner's tech level and the starbase's size.



We have added what we call the chipper on the inventory screen. You access the screen from the starmap in the bottom button array.

If you want to be rid of parts and don't want to drag them to a starbase to sell, you can chip them on the spot. You will get 50% of the scrap price that you would have gotten at a starbase, so hauling is better. But if you don't want to haul, and don't want the parts to weigh you down, then chip em and make your own scrap.

Select the parts that you want to chip and transfer them to the other side of the inventory screen. There you can either chip them, or drop them into space as before as a scavenge field (good way to get pursuers off your back sometimes, especially zombies)

Infected parts are special, since they have zombie goo all over them, they give you Rez instead of scrap when chipped. So now you need to decide if you want to clean that infected part, or convert it to some much needed Rez.



When we added the chipper, we also added a much simpler way to clean your stored parts. The Disinfector works just like the chipper, but in this case, you can transfer your stored infected parts and then disinfect them by spending goons. This means you no longer need to attach a part to your ship to clean it of infection.



We have changed Battle Wagon's target acquisition logic based on used feedback. So how it works now is that Battle Wagon's guns will prioritize shooting at your contextual target (E), then your locked target, and then anything it can possibly hit.

So Battle Wagons tries first to kill what you told your fleet to kill, then it will try to kill whatever you may be looking or shooting at yourself, then it will scan for anything it can hit.

The reason this works so well is that if you are actively shooting, you override Battle Wagon mode so you will always be hitting what you want if you are pressing the fire button.

A neat side effect of this new system is also that Battle Wagon can now shoot asteroids and junk if you target them with (E).



Fighters now work like a swarm of angry bees and instead of needing to be directed, fighters will now seek and destroy enemies within their attack radius. Their target acquisition also takes hints similar to Battle Wagon. So fighters will prioritize your E target, then whatever you are pointing at, and then anything in range.

Some effects are that you no longer "need" to use E to send fighters after enemy ships, which will then allow you to keep your Carrier strike craft our of weapons' range more easily.

If there is no (E) target, fighters will automagically sweep to whatever you are shooting at. So if you start shooting at a ship or an enemy strike craft, you will notice your swarm of angry little bees swarming to that target naturally as well.



So the Mining Op was underwhelming resource wise vs. time required to mine. We are hoping these new changes will make mining op's more of a treat to try when you see one pop up.

- There are double the resource rocks in the Mining Op now.
- Each resource rock contains double the amount of Rez.
- We added a second tractor beam to the mothership to make pickup faster.
- Rez drops from rocks come in larger denominations, now in 1,2,5,10 (was 2,5)
- Resource rocks won't drop explosive wisps anymore (so you don't risk breaking the rogue miner crates, causing an unwanted battle.



Strike craft will now play their proper role in threat level calculations. Large ones in particular will make a big difference, and now the threat levels should be much more reasonable, at least when it comes to a fleet's strike craft factoring in.



We noticed a reoccurring problem with players not realizing when the final battle was ready to start, or not knowing what they had to do to start the final battle. We have made this a lot more explicit. Now when the final battle is ready the helper tip tells the player to kill the capital base, there is a callout indicating readiness (also in sandbox which had nothing)

But most importantly we have changed the war meter once the final battle is ready. Once you achieve the threshold for the final battle, the war meter will stop counting and will instead tell you to go fight.



A great player suggestion came up to add command points to the prestige system, so we did. Command points are now infinitely leveling. This means that given a high enough level, you could now field four large strike craft. Prestige command point levels will give you 2 points instead of the usual 8 for main levelups.



- Fixed stash showing values with markup

- Fixed long profile names warping in trade window

- Torpedoes and Bombs (and all missiles) got a health boost. Bombs and torps got a bigger health boost.

- Flak cannon damage down 20%

- AI more willing to accept peace if losing badly in a war

- Fix for autosaves being blocked for 15 seconds after a battle.

- Autosaving is forced to happen on game exit regardless of timing of last autosave.

- Accept/Decline on quit to main menu and quit to desktop.

- Large Bounty Hunter engine received a dispenser slot (hangars/krule)

- Fix for possible control lockout when restarting a single player game from in game.

- Increased medium bandit hive threat from 35->40

- Increased large bandit hive threat from 45->55

- Special twiddling of phase 2 final fight ships if > 11 cores. Was causing unwinnable scenarios.

- Fix for non progression if complete final mission without starting a faction

- Small strike craft health + armor up 50%

- Hammerhead has a higher banking angle when turning.

- Clear to spine, and clear ship in the inventory menu don't make a noise anymore

- The following mothership parts now support small turreted weapons.
- Science --Large Nose: Flat Deck
- Civilian -- Large Engine: Camel Back
- Militia-- Large Engine: Horizon Back
- Miners -- Large Nose: Foundry
- Hunter -- Large Nose: Sting Nose

- Added Ion barrels to the final mission in cease players need some extra shield popping potential.

- The whole reticle turns red when a target is in range now, to make it more obvious.

- Player core in scan view will show both total ship stats and core stats.

- Lots of improvement with the controller in menus

- Zombie Capital threat now shows as ??? since it is outside the usual threat assessment system and also MYSTERY wooooh...



Next, we will be working on v0.8.5 which contains mostly tuning and bug fixing tasks to get us solid for our extended work on v0.9.0.

Version 0.9.0 will be the big engine upgrade and multiplayer rewrite required for Unity 5.5 (We are currently on v0.5.0.2)

Once we upgrade the engine, we will need to rewrite our multiplayer back end to comply with the major multiplayer changes in Unity since v5.1. That upgrade will take us offline for a while, but we will have more details upon the release of 0.8.5.

We don't expect that it v0.8.5 will be ready before January due to us taking a little time off to be with our families over the holidays. We will be pushing fixes to v0.8.4 though as needed.

We look forward to seeing you all again in 2017!

Andrew (Blorf) and Ricard (Narlak)

Hi Everyone,

We have just released v0.8.0 and it is our biggest one yet. There are quite a few major changes in this update. Lets dig into the details.



This update was huge. It deserved a video, and here it is. Please give it a watch to provide context to what you will read below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUz1HE2IdYs



This one was a major player request. People wanted strike craft to matter more and be configurable. We heard you and here is what we did.



The Hangar System

The mothership now contains up to 4 hangars (start with 2, unlock 2 more.) These hangars can be used to build multiples of any strike craft that you can afford, up to the command point maximum. The hangar menu has replaced the strike craft menu.


Command Points

Command points dictate how many total strike craft you can build. Different sized strike craft consume different numbers of command points. So command points dictate your strike craft reserve while hangars dictate how many you have active at a time.

Command points are increased through the perk system.


Hull Selection

Once you select a hangar, you can then select the hull to place in that hangar. Hulls are unlocked through combat using a blueprint system similar to SPAZ 1.


Weapon Selection

Once you select a hull, you select the weapons for that hull. All the strike craft have had their weapon mounts totally redone. Each strike craft has its own unique set of mounts and it is up to you to pick the mount config that best suits the weapons that you want on the strike craft.



Its back! So now when you kill a strike craft there is a chance that a blueprint will drop. These blueprints first unlock the strike craft as a hull that you can build, but over time, they are used to improve the hull as well.

So as you pick up blueprints, your strike craft hulls will gain stars which boost their stats significantly. As strike craft get more stars, blueprints for those hulls drop less frequently since they are getting harder and harder to improve upon.

If you had a game in progress, we estimate what your blueprint progress should have been, so you don't need to restart unless you want to.



Strike craft now come in three sizes.



Small

These are the strike craft that you are used to. They drive their weapons off of their reactor (so no reloading) and don't have shields. They are very fast and pack quite a bit more punch than they used to. They are also pretty inexpensive so are great if you are on a budget or want to flood wave after wave at an enemy.


Medium

These strike craft are quite a bit larger than the smalls, and some of our old craft have been scaled up to fit this new role. They can field medium sized weapons but are still able to drive them off their reactors (this means no reloading.) The medium strike craft also have weak shields. Mediums can do quite a bit of damage but can't soak nearly as much as their bigger more expensive siblings.


Large

These strike craft are behemoths and can take on smaller motherships by themselves. They use large sized weapons and as such also need to use a reactor and capacitor combo like a mothership. This means that they need to reload and sometimes cannot fire or boost their shields, just like a mothership. By the time you face these strike craft, your mothership better be of a decent size or they will take you apart. Large strike craft have strong shields and can soak a lot of damage.


Junk Class

There are three scrap class strike craft. One for each size class. These are always unlocked and are cheaper than their non Junk counterparts. They also take fewer command points to field, so are sometimes a good option if you need strike craft to distract an enemy. They also get blueprint upgrades and can become quite powerful.



The new strike craft size system meant we needed some new strike craft. There are 6 new larges, 1 new medium, and 1 new small.

The Short Bus (Small/Junk)
Our beloved bus is back from SPAZ 1. This is the cheapest strike craft in the game and a great bullet sponge.

The Mule (Medium/Junk)
Also making a return from SPAZ 1 is the Mule, the old mining ship. It fields two small launchers and 2 medium turrets.

The Freighter (Large/Junk)
Another SPAZ 1 alumni. This ship is bristling with small turrets and small launchers.

The Star Spot (Large)
You may recognize this as well from SPAZ. It is a heavily modified Sun Spot, turned on its side. 4 omni turrets for defense as well as a large turret and large dispenser mount.

The Gold Digger (Large)
This is a new beast. It is a heavy carrier capable of carrying two large fighter hangars (or Krules if you roll that way) Up front it has 2 omni cannons and there are 2 small turrets in the back.

The Shatter (Large)
The Shatter is the Bounty Hunter's newest strike craft. It supports 4 medium launchers and 2 medium turrets. It is a dedicated launcher platform with a couple of defensive turrets for anyone getting to close.

The Hammerhead (Large)
Most peoples' favorite ship from SPAZ 1. We had to bring it back. It is a turreted monster as it always was. Two large turrets in the front, and 2 medium turrets in the back. It is just a big pile of nasty.

The Star Cruiser (Large)
You can't have a Hammerhead without a Star Cruiser. So it is back too :) The Star cruiser is the only strike craft capable of fielding warheads, and two of them at that. It also supports two small launchers (put fighters in there) and there are two turrets mainly for point defense.

And the Rest
All the strike craft have had their weapon mounts/stats overhauled as well, so none of them got away without an upgrade. Some also got a size upgrade. The Triglave for example is now a lot bigger and beefier.



In Combat you can now use the Tactics Panel (TAB) to call in your strike craft.

Hangars have two modes now, auto deploy and manual deploy. If you set your hangars to manual deploy, then in combat you have total control of when your strike craft arrive on the scene. This can allow you to sweep enemy strike craft from the level and then call in your fleet when you are ready to concentrate on the enemy mothership.





While we were working on the strike craft upgrade, we realized that some mount types did not have enough weapon variety to make the certain strike craft viable/interesting to configure. This plus a few beers lead to a burst of new weapons, because instead of just solving the problem we decided to go to town a little bit. Weapons are fun to build.


The Particle Hose

We didn't have an Uzi, now we do :) That was pretty much the conversation there. It is a really fun bullet hose style weapon. The bullets do not do much damage individually, but there are a whole lot of bullets. The particle hose is a medium sized weapon so it will only appear on medium and large parts.


Micro Hangars

We really wanted to support people having fighters earlier on in the game. Some people love fighters, so holding them back until large parts appeared wasn't fair. So...

There are three new micro hangars. Small launcher mounts can now fit a tiny hangar that holds two zappers. Medium launcher mounts can hold a hanger that holds 4 zappers or shooter fighters as well.


The Flak Cannon!

It has finally arrived, four years too late for SPAZ 1, but it is here. We now have a turreted version of point defense to complement the minigun. Flak cannons are long range defense systems that will try to pop slow moving targets at a distance. They create a large cloud of flak and can sometimes pop multiple missiles at once.

Flak cannons are not great at short range defense and the flak puffs will not explode too close to the ship as to prevent damaging themselves.


The Cloud Torpedo

The Cloud Torpedo drops ion bomblets as it flies. This serves two purposes. The bomblets fly ahead of and around the torpedo to soak up point defense fire instead of the torpedo, and those bomblets that do hit do ion damage to lower enemy shields before the torpedo impacts to wreck the hull. The Cloud Torpedo is best used at long range to give it the maximum time to deploy all of its bomblets.


The Ion Shotgun
The Ion Shotgun fires long range and somewhat tightly grouped ion projectiles. Its purpose is to take down shields at range. It is a small turreted weapon so it is a great early shield popping solution. Note: The Ion shotgun fires blue (Ion) projectiles whereas regular shotguns shoot red.


The Mac Hammer
It is a medium sized assault shotgun that says go away... loudly. Very high damage and high spread but with a short range.


The Plasma Dispenser
Take a pulse cannon and turn it up to 11. It shoots a multitude of very slow moving and very long range explosive plasma charges. Each plasma charge also explodes on impact causing splash damage. It is a devastating weapon. It only appears on large parts and is quite rare... Thankfully.





We had to capitalize that one. It is the number one requested feature that we have seen. We resisted at first because we felt that it went against the scrounging/empire building nature that we wanted to build for SPAZ 2, but SPAZ 2 is a game about building, and tying your hands is really not fair.

So... Here's how we tie your hands... Custom Order parts are expensive. The most effective way to build your ship will still be to use what is available in the stores and adapt to that. Later, once you have an empire of your own, take territory that best will produce the parts you want. That will always be best.

However, now there is a new custom order panel in the catalog. How it works is whatever you search for in the catalog, if it can be built, someone will be willing to build it for you, but at 5x the cost. late game, when you are swimming in money, this allows you to upgrade more freely, but early game you really need to think about that extra expense.

Sometimes the custom order criteria will come up blank. For example if you ask for a small wing with a chainsaw beam on it, that can't exist so it won't be built. If a custom part can be built though, it will. There are actually over 3000 part/weapon combos it has to search to determine viability of a request.

When custom ordering a part, it will always be built at the space station that has the lowest markup. This means that you will get the best price possible, and it is always delivered (there is no extra delivery charge in this case)

You can set the number of stars you want on a part as well, but it will become very expensive, very quickly.



Thanks to everyone with your patience waiting for this update as well as your great suggestions. As you can see, we hear you and we are all making SPAZ 2 better together!

For those of you with games in progress. You should not need to restart. We refunded the price of all your current strike craft as scrap so you didn't lose anything and we also tried to figure out a reasonable blueprint progress for your saves.

For everyone else. This update was major open heart surgery on the flow of the game so there may be issues, especially balance issues. We look forward to hearing from you about them and will tune/fix as quickly as possible.

Now get in there and try this new stuff out! :)

Andrew(Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)

Details:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/252470/discussions/0/215439774876341308/

Hi Everyone,

We have just released v0.8.0 and it is our biggest one yet. There are quite a few major changes in this update. Lets dig into the details.



This update was huge. It deserved a video, and here it is. Please give it a watch to provide context to what you will read below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUz1HE2IdYs



This one was a major player request. People wanted strike craft to matter more and be configurable. We heard you and here is what we did.



The Hangar System

The mothership now contains up to 4 hangars (start with 2, unlock 2 more.) These hangars can be used to build multiples of any strike craft that you can afford, up to the command point maximum. The hangar menu has replaced the strike craft menu.


Command Points

Command points dictate how many total strike craft you can build. Different sized strike craft consume different numbers of command points. So command points dictate your strike craft reserve while hangars dictate how many you have active at a time.

Command points are increased through the perk system.


Hull Selection

Once you select a hangar, you can then select the hull to place in that hangar. Hulls are unlocked through combat using a blueprint system similar to SPAZ 1.


Weapon Selection

Once you select a hull, you select the weapons for that hull. All the strike craft have had their weapon mounts totally redone. Each strike craft has its own unique set of mounts and it is up to you to pick the mount config that best suits the weapons that you want on the strike craft.



Its back! So now when you kill a strike craft there is a chance that a blueprint will drop. These blueprints first unlock the strike craft as a hull that you can build, but over time, they are used to improve the hull as well.

So as you pick up blueprints, your strike craft hulls will gain stars which boost their stats significantly. As strike craft get more stars, blueprints for those hulls drop less frequently since they are getting harder and harder to improve upon.

If you had a game in progress, we estimate what your blueprint progress should have been, so you don't need to restart unless you want to.



Strike craft now come in three sizes.



Small

These are the strike craft that you are used to. They drive their weapons off of their reactor (so no reloading) and don't have shields. They are very fast and pack quite a bit more punch than they used to. They are also pretty inexpensive so are great if you are on a budget or want to flood wave after wave at an enemy.


Medium

These strike craft are quite a bit larger than the smalls, and some of our old craft have been scaled up to fit this new role. They can field medium sized weapons but are still able to drive them off their reactors (this means no reloading.) The medium strike craft also have weak shields. Mediums can do quite a bit of damage but can't soak nearly as much as their bigger more expensive siblings.


Large

These strike craft are behemoths and can take on smaller motherships by themselves. They use large sized weapons and as such also need to use a reactor and capacitor combo like a mothership. This means that they need to reload and sometimes cannot fire or boost their shields, just like a mothership. By the time you face these strike craft, your mothership better be of a decent size or they will take you apart. Large strike craft have strong shields and can soak a lot of damage.


Junk Class

There are three scrap class strike craft. One for each size class. These are always unlocked and are cheaper than their non Junk counterparts. They also take fewer command points to field, so are sometimes a good option if you need strike craft to distract an enemy. They also get blueprint upgrades and can become quite powerful.



The new strike craft size system meant we needed some new strike craft. There are 6 new larges, 1 new medium, and 1 new small.

The Short Bus (Small/Junk)
Our beloved bus is back from SPAZ 1. This is the cheapest strike craft in the game and a great bullet sponge.

The Mule (Medium/Junk)
Also making a return from SPAZ 1 is the Mule, the old mining ship. It fields two small launchers and 2 medium turrets.

The Freighter (Large/Junk)
Another SPAZ 1 alumni. This ship is bristling with small turrets and small launchers.

The Star Spot (Large)
You may recognize this as well from SPAZ. It is a heavily modified Sun Spot, turned on its side. 4 omni turrets for defense as well as a large turret and large dispenser mount.

The Gold Digger (Large)
This is a new beast. It is a heavy carrier capable of carrying two large fighter hangars (or Krules if you roll that way) Up front it has 2 omni cannons and there are 2 small turrets in the back.

The Shatter (Large)
The Shatter is the Bounty Hunter's newest strike craft. It supports 4 medium launchers and 2 medium turrets. It is a dedicated launcher platform with a couple of defensive turrets for anyone getting to close.

The Hammerhead (Large)
Most peoples' favorite ship from SPAZ 1. We had to bring it back. It is a turreted monster as it always was. Two large turrets in the front, and 2 medium turrets in the back. It is just a big pile of nasty.

The Star Cruiser (Large)
You can't have a Hammerhead without a Star Cruiser. So it is back too :) The Star cruiser is the only strike craft capable of fielding warheads, and two of them at that. It also supports two small launchers (put fighters in there) and there are two turrets mainly for point defense.

And the Rest
All the strike craft have had their weapon mounts/stats overhauled as well, so none of them got away without an upgrade. Some also got a size upgrade. The Triglave for example is now a lot bigger and beefier.



In Combat you can now use the Tactics Panel (TAB) to call in your strike craft.

Hangars have two modes now, auto deploy and manual deploy. If you set your hangars to manual deploy, then in combat you have total control of when your strike craft arrive on the scene. This can allow you to sweep enemy strike craft from the level and then call in your fleet when you are ready to concentrate on the enemy mothership.





While we were working on the strike craft upgrade, we realized that some mount types did not have enough weapon variety to make the certain strike craft viable/interesting to configure. This plus a few beers lead to a burst of new weapons, because instead of just solving the problem we decided to go to town a little bit. Weapons are fun to build.


The Particle Hose

We didn't have an Uzi, now we do :) That was pretty much the conversation there. It is a really fun bullet hose style weapon. The bullets do not do much damage individually, but there are a whole lot of bullets. The particle hose is a medium sized weapon so it will only appear on medium and large parts.


Micro Hangars

We really wanted to support people having fighters earlier on in the game. Some people love fighters, so holding them back until large parts appeared wasn't fair. So...

There are three new micro hangars. Small launcher mounts can now fit a tiny hangar that holds two zappers. Medium launcher mounts can hold a hanger that holds 4 zappers or shooter fighters as well.


The Flak Cannon!

It has finally arrived, four years too late for SPAZ 1, but it is here. We now have a turreted version of point defense to complement the minigun. Flak cannons are long range defense systems that will try to pop slow moving targets at a distance. They create a large cloud of flak and can sometimes pop multiple missiles at once.

Flak cannons are not great at short range defense and the flak puffs will not explode too close to the ship as to prevent damaging themselves.


The Cloud Torpedo

The Cloud Torpedo drops ion bomblets as it flies. This serves two purposes. The bomblets fly ahead of and around the torpedo to soak up point defense fire instead of the torpedo, and those bomblets that do hit do ion damage to lower enemy shields before the torpedo impacts to wreck the hull. The Cloud Torpedo is best used at long range to give it the maximum time to deploy all of its bomblets.


The Ion Shotgun
The Ion Shotgun fires long range and somewhat tightly grouped ion projectiles. Its purpose is to take down shields at range. It is a small turreted weapon so it is a great early shield popping solution. Note: The Ion shotgun fires blue (Ion) projectiles whereas regular shotguns shoot red.


The Mac Hammer
It is a medium sized assault shotgun that says go away... loudly. Very high damage and high spread but with a short range.


The Plasma Dispenser
Take a pulse cannon and turn it up to 11. It shoots a multitude of very slow moving and very long range explosive plasma charges. Each plasma charge also explodes on impact causing splash damage. It is a devastating weapon. It only appears on large parts and is quite rare... Thankfully.





We had to capitalize that one. It is the number one requested feature that we have seen. We resisted at first because we felt that it went against the scrounging/empire building nature that we wanted to build for SPAZ 2, but SPAZ 2 is a game about building, and tying your hands is really not fair.

So... Here's how we tie your hands... Custom Order parts are expensive. The most effective way to build your ship will still be to use what is available in the stores and adapt to that. Later, once you have an empire of your own, take territory that best will produce the parts you want. That will always be best.

However, now there is a new custom order panel in the catalog. How it works is whatever you search for in the catalog, if it can be built, someone will be willing to build it for you, but at 5x the cost. late game, when you are swimming in money, this allows you to upgrade more freely, but early game you really need to think about that extra expense.

Sometimes the custom order criteria will come up blank. For example if you ask for a small wing with a chainsaw beam on it, that can't exist so it won't be built. If a custom part can be built though, it will. There are actually over 3000 part/weapon combos it has to search to determine viability of a request.

When custom ordering a part, it will always be built at the space station that has the lowest markup. This means that you will get the best price possible, and it is always delivered (there is no extra delivery charge in this case)

You can set the number of stars you want on a part as well, but it will become very expensive, very quickly.



Thanks to everyone with your patience waiting for this update as well as your great suggestions. As you can see, we hear you and we are all making SPAZ 2 better together!

For those of you with games in progress. You should not need to restart. We refunded the price of all your current strike craft as scrap so you didn't lose anything and we also tried to figure out a reasonable blueprint progress for your saves.

For everyone else. This update was major open heart surgery on the flow of the game so there may be issues, especially balance issues. We look forward to hearing from you about them and will tune/fix as quickly as possible.

Now get in there and try this new stuff out! :)

Andrew(Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)

Details:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/252470/discussions/0/215439774876341308/

Hi Everyone,

It has been a busy month since the big synergy update. Richard and I both took a staggered week off before the end of summer to get some much needed rest/family time. It was great to recharge, and we are right back at it full force now. It has already been 4 months since our initial Early Access release and there have been huge improvements thanks to your suggestions and support.

The latest patch was all about tuning and fixing high priority quality of life issues. Thanks very much for your understanding on letting us prioritize this vs new features for this push. That being said, a couple of fairly major improvements happened so we decided to call them out.


There was a great discussion thread about the problems with fighters and some good solutions to make them better, so we implemented them. Fighters are now a LOT more potent, but also are on a leash. This means that though their range is that of a long range weapon, and you need to be in range to use them. So more boring picking a ship apart for 30 minutes at massive long range with no threat. Get fighters in range, and they go to work, get out of range, and then return home to defend, rearm, rebuild. Bombers do quick heavy damage and then need to return to the ship to rearm, Fighters stay and fight a lot longer, but do less damage. More detail in the notes below.


Another hot topic has been ramming. It was fun but overpowered. We didn't want to lose the fun, but we wanted to add a little more realistic risk to the ram. So since ramming is hull to hull impact, we wanted both hulls to take appropriate damage. This means that you as the rammer will now need to be a little more careful what you ram and with what part of your ship. Think of a part's armor as its hardness for the sake of a ram. If a hard nose, hits a soft wing, the wing takes a lot of damage and the nose not much at all. So the ramming is more part based now. Ram with your most armored parts into their least armored parts to do the most damage to them and the least to yourself.


-Fighters now have limited range to prevent boring ultra long range kiting over long periods of time to take down almost any target. Instead, we want you to now fly near max weapon range and be in some danger while using the fighters, in return, fighters can now do much damage, much more in tune with other large size weapons.

-Bombers and Ion Bombers shoot twice as fast and their bombs do 4x as much damage. They have to reload more often now. Bombers now complete fast/heavy strikes, and then return to the hangar to reload.

-Bomber and Ion Bomber hangars now support 6 fighters instead of 4.

-Shooter Fighters now have 8 per hangar instead of 6.

-Shooter Fighters can now shoot 20 times before reloading (vs 10 before)

-Zapper Fighters can now shoot 25 times before reloading (vs 16 before)

-Shooters now do 3x more damage

-Zappers now do 2.5x more damage

-Decreased fighter build time from 10 seconds to 6 seconds

-Fighters much more careful about damaging parent ship.

-Fighter incidental friendly fire vs allied ships greatly reduced.

-Fighters much better at docking on fast moving ships.

-Bandit hives have 1 fewer strike craft defenders to offset the stronger fighters they now have.

-Fighters don't launch in ship building level

-Fighter bay controls don't clutter ship building level tac pan

-Ramming damages Station cores and Bandit Hives armor AND health now.

-Ramming damage lowered.

-Ramming with high armor parts now does much more damage vs low armor parts

-Ramming damage now reflected back on the rammer as well, but at a lower rate
For most effective ramming, outfit a high armor nose and hit at high speed on low armor parts like engines or wings.

-Fixed round off issue in surrender cargo menu

-Fix for a goon rounding case where it seems you have enough goons but are an arm and a nose short and thus your ship takes slight damage over time.

-If player's current faction destroyed, player now starts their own faction with their existing starbases.

-Zombie respawn pods travel 50% faster

-Fixed respawn pods moving at top speed when game loaded.

-Turned off part size rarity as a rarity factor in trading prices. (was pointless + confusing)

-Fixed fleet training mission if had broken strike craft.

-Missiles prevented from firing in ship building level

-Fixed bug where number of bounties on a captain was dictating the number of chasers.

-Max bounty chasers at any given time is 1 for easy, 2 for normal, 3 for expert.

-Added 15 second safety time after winning a battle where you wont get ganked.

-When not defending their territory, Very large ships won't bother with much smaller ships anymore.

-Removed tactics panel buttons for Fighters/Krule. Not needed anymore with fighter changes and need room for future strike craft updates.

-Save game name length limited to 30 characters to prevent loading failures.

-Captain's friends will not steal from their resource nodes

-Captain's faction members will not steal from their resource nodes.

-Resource nodes become attractive for ransack at variable richness now, not just at 50% full.

-Battles will block any resource nodes underneath them so AI captains can't swipe the contents while you are battling to protect them.

-When the player defeats a captain, they will be afraid of the player for a while so they won't just respawn and come running right back after the player anymore. They take time to build up a bit first.

-Dropping junk parts into space does not create a junk field anymore since they have no value.

-Zombie ships don't take infector ball damage anymore. They are already infected :)

-AI captains, including wingmen, know how to evade area hazards now. Infection clouds, toxic clouds, ion clouds, mass bomb gravity wells.

-Zombies can level up like other captains to keep them competitive.

-AI Captains with positive relations with the player won't run from the player anymore.

-Increased Minigun damage

-Fixed current/reserve strike craft meter on the hud, was misreporting in some cases.

-Fixed rogue menu sometimes appearing when a courier made a delivery.

-7 Star part icon added for the lottery winners

-New battle ring icon for battles involving starbases to better differentiate them. Also visible from high zoom to find trouble spots more quickly.

-Fixed broken off parts being lost forever in all Bandit Hive attacks, including “The Signal.”

-Fixed player strike craft being invincible in the final story mission

-Scavenging bonus defaults to 10% of node total now from 0% so very large nodes don't take forever to scavenge if no one has the scavenging boosting perk.

-Texture optimizations (less memory use)

-Less button lock delay on Faction Members menu (allows faster switching between screens)

-Faster, more subtle menu sweep effect.

-Adjusted game complete text to be more generic, in case you are already playing a sandbox game.

-Added toggle for automatic map target focus in gameplay options.

-Super interesting spelling fixes.

-Custom portrait system for your mothership. Here's how it works.


-- File Path --
C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\MinMax Games\SPAZ 2\CustomPortrait\ MugShot.jpg

-add a folder called CustomPortrait if it doesn't exist
-texture must be called MugShot.jpg
-texture must be jpg format
-texture must be a power of 2 texture (512x512, 1024x1024)
-best texture size 512x512


For our next update we will be conducting a major rework of the Strike Craft system. This will include implementing a blue print collection system similar to what we had in SPAZ 1. The mothership will now construct strike craft on its own using Scrap. We will also be adding an all new set of large strike craft as well as new unlockable configurations for the existing strike craft as their stars increase. This will be a pretty major change that will require rewriting some of the game flow and dialogue as well, so it will take some time, but we think the end result will be a really exciting addition to SPAZ 2.

Hi Everyone,

It has been a busy month since the big synergy update. Richard and I both took a staggered week off before the end of summer to get some much needed rest/family time. It was great to recharge, and we are right back at it full force now. It has already been 4 months since our initial Early Access release and there have been huge improvements thanks to your suggestions and support.

The latest patch was all about tuning and fixing high priority quality of life issues. Thanks very much for your understanding on letting us prioritize this vs new features for this push. That being said, a couple of fairly major improvements happened so we decided to call them out.


There was a great discussion thread about the problems with fighters and some good solutions to make them better, so we implemented them. Fighters are now a LOT more potent, but also are on a leash. This means that though their range is that of a long range weapon, and you need to be in range to use them. So more boring picking a ship apart for 30 minutes at massive long range with no threat. Get fighters in range, and they go to work, get out of range, and then return home to defend, rearm, rebuild. Bombers do quick heavy damage and then need to return to the ship to rearm, Fighters stay and fight a lot longer, but do less damage. More detail in the notes below.


Another hot topic has been ramming. It was fun but overpowered. We didn't want to lose the fun, but we wanted to add a little more realistic risk to the ram. So since ramming is hull to hull impact, we wanted both hulls to take appropriate damage. This means that you as the rammer will now need to be a little more careful what you ram and with what part of your ship. Think of a part's armor as its hardness for the sake of a ram. If a hard nose, hits a soft wing, the wing takes a lot of damage and the nose not much at all. So the ramming is more part based now. Ram with your most armored parts into their least armored parts to do the most damage to them and the least to yourself.


-Fighters now have limited range to prevent boring ultra long range kiting over long periods of time to take down almost any target. Instead, we want you to now fly near max weapon range and be in some danger while using the fighters, in return, fighters can now do much damage, much more in tune with other large size weapons.

-Bombers and Ion Bombers shoot twice as fast and their bombs do 4x as much damage. They have to reload more often now. Bombers now complete fast/heavy strikes, and then return to the hangar to reload.

-Bomber and Ion Bomber hangars now support 6 fighters instead of 4.

-Shooter Fighters now have 8 per hangar instead of 6.

-Shooter Fighters can now shoot 20 times before reloading (vs 10 before)

-Zapper Fighters can now shoot 25 times before reloading (vs 16 before)

-Shooters now do 3x more damage

-Zappers now do 2.5x more damage

-Decreased fighter build time from 10 seconds to 6 seconds

-Fighters much more careful about damaging parent ship.

-Fighter incidental friendly fire vs allied ships greatly reduced.

-Fighters much better at docking on fast moving ships.

-Bandit hives have 1 fewer strike craft defenders to offset the stronger fighters they now have.

-Fighters don't launch in ship building level

-Fighter bay controls don't clutter ship building level tac pan

-Ramming damages Station cores and Bandit Hives armor AND health now.

-Ramming damage lowered.

-Ramming with high armor parts now does much more damage vs low armor parts

-Ramming damage now reflected back on the rammer as well, but at a lower rate
For most effective ramming, outfit a high armor nose and hit at high speed on low armor parts like engines or wings.

-Fixed round off issue in surrender cargo menu

-Fix for a goon rounding case where it seems you have enough goons but are an arm and a nose short and thus your ship takes slight damage over time.

-If player's current faction destroyed, player now starts their own faction with their existing starbases.

-Zombie respawn pods travel 50% faster

-Fixed respawn pods moving at top speed when game loaded.

-Turned off part size rarity as a rarity factor in trading prices. (was pointless + confusing)

-Fixed fleet training mission if had broken strike craft.

-Missiles prevented from firing in ship building level

-Fixed bug where number of bounties on a captain was dictating the number of chasers.

-Max bounty chasers at any given time is 1 for easy, 2 for normal, 3 for expert.

-Added 15 second safety time after winning a battle where you wont get ganked.

-When not defending their territory, Very large ships won't bother with much smaller ships anymore.

-Removed tactics panel buttons for Fighters/Krule. Not needed anymore with fighter changes and need room for future strike craft updates.

-Save game name length limited to 30 characters to prevent loading failures.

-Captain's friends will not steal from their resource nodes

-Captain's faction members will not steal from their resource nodes.

-Resource nodes become attractive for ransack at variable richness now, not just at 50% full.

-Battles will block any resource nodes underneath them so AI captains can't swipe the contents while you are battling to protect them.

-When the player defeats a captain, they will be afraid of the player for a while so they won't just respawn and come running right back after the player anymore. They take time to build up a bit first.

-Dropping junk parts into space does not create a junk field anymore since they have no value.

-Zombie ships don't take infector ball damage anymore. They are already infected :)

-AI captains, including wingmen, know how to evade area hazards now. Infection clouds, toxic clouds, ion clouds, mass bomb gravity wells.

-Zombies can level up like other captains to keep them competitive.

-AI Captains with positive relations with the player won't run from the player anymore.

-Increased Minigun damage

-Fixed current/reserve strike craft meter on the hud, was misreporting in some cases.

-Fixed rogue menu sometimes appearing when a courier made a delivery.

-7 Star part icon added for the lottery winners

-New battle ring icon for battles involving starbases to better differentiate them. Also visible from high zoom to find trouble spots more quickly.

-Fixed broken off parts being lost forever in all Bandit Hive attacks, including “The Signal.”

-Fixed player strike craft being invincible in the final story mission

-Scavenging bonus defaults to 10% of node total now from 0% so very large nodes don't take forever to scavenge if no one has the scavenging boosting perk.

-Texture optimizations (less memory use)

-Less button lock delay on Faction Members menu (allows faster switching between screens)

-Faster, more subtle menu sweep effect.

-Adjusted game complete text to be more generic, in case you are already playing a sandbox game.

-Added toggle for automatic map target focus in gameplay options.

-Super interesting spelling fixes.

-Custom portrait system for your mothership. Here's how it works.


-- File Path --
C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\MinMax Games\SPAZ 2\CustomPortrait\ MugShot.jpg

-add a folder called CustomPortrait if it doesn't exist
-texture must be called MugShot.jpg
-texture must be jpg format
-texture must be a power of 2 texture (512x512, 1024x1024)
-best texture size 512x512


For our next update we will be conducting a major rework of the Strike Craft system. This will include implementing a blue print collection system similar to what we had in SPAZ 1. The mothership will now construct strike craft on its own using Scrap. We will also be adding an all new set of large strike craft as well as new unlockable configurations for the existing strike craft as their stars increase. This will be a pretty major change that will require rewriting some of the game flow and dialogue as well, so it will take some time, but we think the end result will be a really exciting addition to SPAZ 2.

Hi All,

We have been tinkering with Synergies due to your feedback since their initial launch last week. The main issue really came down to, why bother using them they don't do much. Well I think we fixed that. Here we go...

First off, we put together a video explaining the system and its new bits and pieces. Please give it a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHNuypZnEBY

The biggest change is that synergies now spread to attached wings, noses and engines. The peripheral parts do not add to the synergy, but they do feed off the synergies of the cores that they are attached to.

An additional bonus is now weapon damage is effected by synergies. So if you have a well synergized mass driver for example, it can do up to 80% more damage on top of any subsystem bonuses in the part itself. Synergies can add a lot of punch to a part.

Now this is a really big change and some things will be out of tune. Engines will be faster, turning will be faster etc because everything has been sort of turned up to 11 right now due to the bonuses. That will all be tuned, but we wanted to get this change into your hands for feedback and fun.

Now you have a real decision to make. Create an L with 4 wings that are synergized to 10% or create a well synergized ship with 2 wings, but those two wings are 80% more powerful. When the synergy bonuses of the cores are taken into consideration, there should be a lot of thought involved with making your perfect ship.

- Rewrote the ship engine sound effects system to finally kill the sound freeze forever and ever and always. If you get a freeze after v0.6.1, please report it to us. We really want to know. We will cry, but we want to know.

- Added a strike craft readout to the hud. Active/Reserve
- Fixed set bounty side objective happening before you can boutny
- Level 1 bandits get fewer strike craft so less overwhelming early on
- Mining Ops are richer in Rez rocks. More/Bigger rocks with more in em.
- Added the Hive Level to the mouse over info on the starmap
- Boosted 3 way synergy 30->40%
- Boosted 4 way synergy 60->100%
- +/- in trade screen no longer reversed
- speleen -> spleen
- Strike craft counts now show up yellow on the map if not in your faction since they are bad things
- Tutorial text and image updates
- Assign starbase menu shows distance in light years from captain to base.
- Fixed brake/reverse hint in into when in screen relative control mode
- Province name shown on scan viewer for starbase comms screen and mouse over.
- The usual spelling fix-o-rama
- Pushing "Back" in controller mode won't change the camera in addition to displaying the icon legend while in the tactical menu.

We hope you all enjoy the Expanded Synergies!

Andrew(Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)

Hi All,

We have been tinkering with Synergies due to your feedback since their initial launch last week. The main issue really came down to, why bother using them they don't do much. Well I think we fixed that. Here we go...

First off, we put together a video explaining the system and its new bits and pieces. Please give it a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHNuypZnEBY

The biggest change is that synergies now spread to attached wings, noses and engines. The peripheral parts do not add to the synergy, but they do feed off the synergies of the cores that they are attached to.

An additional bonus is now weapon damage is effected by synergies. So if you have a well synergized mass driver for example, it can do up to 80% more damage on top of any subsystem bonuses in the part itself. Synergies can add a lot of punch to a part.

Now this is a really big change and some things will be out of tune. Engines will be faster, turning will be faster etc because everything has been sort of turned up to 11 right now due to the bonuses. That will all be tuned, but we wanted to get this change into your hands for feedback and fun.

Now you have a real decision to make. Create an L with 4 wings that are synergized to 10% or create a well synergized ship with 2 wings, but those two wings are 80% more powerful. When the synergy bonuses of the cores are taken into consideration, there should be a lot of thought involved with making your perfect ship.

- Rewrote the ship engine sound effects system to finally kill the sound freeze forever and ever and always. If you get a freeze after v0.6.1, please report it to us. We really want to know. We will cry, but we want to know.

- Added a strike craft readout to the hud. Active/Reserve
- Fixed set bounty side objective happening before you can boutny
- Level 1 bandits get fewer strike craft so less overwhelming early on
- Mining Ops are richer in Rez rocks. More/Bigger rocks with more in em.
- Added the Hive Level to the mouse over info on the starmap
- Boosted 3 way synergy 30->40%
- Boosted 4 way synergy 60->100%
- +/- in trade screen no longer reversed
- speleen -> spleen
- Strike craft counts now show up yellow on the map if not in your faction since they are bad things
- Tutorial text and image updates
- Assign starbase menu shows distance in light years from captain to base.
- Fixed brake/reverse hint in into when in screen relative control mode
- Province name shown on scan viewer for starbase comms screen and mouse over.
- The usual spelling fix-o-rama
- Pushing "Back" in controller mode won't change the camera in addition to displaying the icon legend while in the tactical menu.

We hope you all enjoy the Expanded Synergies!

Andrew(Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)

We have been hard at work over the last couple weeks and we are hoping this patch will be a real crowd pleaser for all you veteran players out there. We have heard your suggestions and here is what we have come up with to address them.



One huge request has been to keep the bandits viable into mid and late game, so hunting them is not just an early game thing anymore. We have given the whole bandit system a major overhaul to support this. Here's what's new.

New Bandit Parts:
First off, the bandits got bigger, so they needed a part size upgrade to match. We have added medium and large noses, wings, and engines for the bandits (8 new parts) which are also available in the junkyard. They are also pretty darned cool looking.

New Bandit Brains:
Bandits can now level up just like the other captains on the map. This means they now get perks just like other captains as well. Bandit's will become much stronger as they level up and utilize their perks. This means damage, shield, power bonuses etc... Just like you.

New Bandit Ship Building:
Bandits can now upgrade their ships on the fly, just like other captains. They also build them BIG. While bandit parts tend to have less punch, they will now make up for that by fitting more cores. The highest level Bandit Chief can field 21 core monstrosities.

Bandits also now USE their salvage. This means a bandit who wins a battle doesn't just break down the parts for scrap, but instead fits the new part on their junk ship nightmare to make it even stronger. You can spot the toughest bandits toting around parts from their victims.

New Bandit Types:
We now have the Bandit Enforcer and the Bandit Chief. Bandit Enforcers will only spawn out of hives of level two or three. They have a bonus of 3 cores on their ships as well as a level bonus on spawn. Level 3 hives will spawn Bandit Chiefs. They get the 6 core bonus as well as a larger level bonus, making them incredibly dangerous.

If you see a bandit hive in your space, the smart move is to kill it before it hits level 3.

Nastier Hive Combat:
With the increase in the strength of the bandits, we needed to make the hives a little more difficult to uproot (more on that in a sec) So hives now have a defending mothership to augment the defending strike craft.

The Swarm:
We have been calling bandit hives, “hives,” for a while, but now have taken it to heart. They work like beehives now. So you kill a hive, and it now swarms and leaves the territory that it was in (avoiding the faction of whoever killed it) This initial swarm state is “dispersed” meaning the bandits have been thrown to the wind for the most part and are looking for a new home, but over time, the swarm reforms into something you can attack.

Once the swarm comes together, you can attack it. This is a very difficult strike craft battle, but like bees, the swarm is carrying honey. If you attack the swarm, the crates of resources that they are taking to their new destination are up for grabs.

When you mouse over a swarm, you see where it is headed as well. Perhaps you want to let a swarm land at its intended destination if it is in enemy territory, but you can also attack it and divert the swarm to a new territory, if you win.

We hope you all enjoy these new bandit mechanics. Keep in mind that we finished this new tech yesterday so there may be tuning issues, but we will get on top of those as well.



Another big issue has been the ideal ship shape problem. It turns out making a ship and L or a T shape would give you the most bang for your buck (pun intended.) To add depth to the decision making, not only for spine shape but even for core placement, we have added the Synergy system.

How synergies work is that they provide bonuses for two way connections between cores. A core with one core connected (end of the line) gets no bonus. Two cores connected, 10%. Three cores connected 30%. Four cores connected 60%. Since cores are mainly responsible for power generation, health, and a portion of shields on your ship, you need to decide if that extra wing the L or T shape will get you is worth more than the power to shoot your guns more, have more health and have your shields last a bit longer.

Right now, the numbers for the bonuses of synergies are a best guess as is the tuning of the weapon power consumption which is still using the old non synergy power consumption model. Tuning will come over time as we find a new balance of firepower vs reactor power, but for now we just wanted Synergies in your hands, so have fun.

Synergies are visualized through core to core connections that pulse with increasing speed as the synergy bonuses progress. If you look at your ship in the assembly screen, you should notice more meat in the connections between parts. These are the synergy “pipes” that are there to show synergy progress. You can also see the synergy progress by mousing over a connected part. It is the new green icon at the bottom.

In combination with the new part swapping ship building system, you should now place your best cores in the positions with the highest synergy bonuses on your ship. So we don't want to see any 6 star cores at the end of an L anymore, get that thing synergized. :)



We introduced starmap cloaking in the last patch, but it was a bit over powered. We have adjusted it so that cloaking now has a longer recharge time (90 vs 60 seconds) takes a bit more rez to maintain (3x vs 2x consume) and also now has an activation time (15 seconds)



For our next update, we will likely be working on tuning and doing a large bugfixing round. It isn't glamorous, but we have been so busy adding features to SPAZ 2 for almost 3 months now that we have had little to no time to play the game and tune all these new features. We also have very large bug lists that need to be dealt with. Most of it is quality of life stuff thankfully, but it is important.

Other things we are looking at, though probably in the update after the big tuning pass will be a whole new Strike Craft System, Killing of Captains, and Faction Death.

Thanks very much for your continued suggestions and support. They really do help to make SPAZ 2 the best game it can be. We really appreciate you all sticking with us!