Hi All,

We have finished upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to Unity 5.4.4. The last time we upgraded the engine was before we entered early access. This is a huge change and is the first major SPAZ 2 engine update that you will have been exposed to.

The main reason to upgrade the engine was to stay compliant with the ever changing operating systems and technology. The last engine version was already two years old, and we feel it is critical to stay up to date to ensure SPAZ 2 continues to work for years to come.

We tested the build as best as two people can, but there may be issues here and there. Please keep your eyes out for bugs and weird issues, and if you see them, please report them on the bug forums here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/252470/discussions/2/

So this update isn't about new stuff, in fact ideally the game looks and plays identically to v 0.8.8. The goal was to get everything working as it was in v0.8.8 and then build on that foundation for the rest of the project. Since gameplay didn't change between v 0.8.8 and v0.9.0 we can roll back to v0.8.8 without breaking saves. We want to ensure that we don't disrupt peoples' progress.



So between Unity 5.0.4 and Unity 5.4.4 somewhere monitor 0 and 1 became swapped in the engine. What this means is that your monitors may be swapped next time you play. We tried to make this as painless to fix as possible and have added an in game display switcher to the Display Menu.

Beyond that, we also detect if you have dual monitors and place a one time helper button on the main menu to fix the problem. The big yellow button will go away as soon as you start a game, and it will never return. We wanted to make sure people wouldn't be frustrated by the unintended swap.



As discussed in the v0.8.8 announcement, multiplayer wasn't going to work. See: https://steamcommunity.com/games/252470/announcements/detail/240217815948540606

Although experimenting and trying multiple methods to bring multiplayer online ate most of the time between v0.8.7 and v0.9.0, we were able to make some improvements. Also, again, thank you all for your amazing understanding and kindness about this.

After v0.8.8 we began to remove the Unity 4 legacy networking hooks from the game (took 3 days, there were tons). This means that all of our spawning routines and level loading now flow directly from function calls instead of traveling through a virtual network layer and object lookup system before reaching their eventual destinations.

What this means to you... Speed. You should notice that there is much less hitching when ships spawn and level spawning should be really fast. Everything is essentially on a direct pipe now.



SPAZ 2 is now DX11 capable. If your card only runs DX9, don't worry, the game will default to DX9 if DX11 is not present.

People with DirectX11 capable video cards can expect frame rate improvements. Visuals wise, the game should hopefully look identical, just faster.

There were rendering improvements for everyone across the board, especially on the map due to some shader changes.

Please report any rendering issues you see. We tried to catch em all, but there is a lot of stuff out there.



We found a really odd bug that has been around forever and fixed it. It turns out when vysnc was off and frame rate was really high in some cases, like the ship assembly level because there is almost nothing in there, the mouse input would slow way down. What was happening was the mouse input was being divided by the frame speed. This meant higher frame rates, slower mouse.

What this also meant was lower frame rates, faster mouse. The mouse input changing based on frame rate is just bad so we fixed it.

Since we played with vsync on we never noticed the issue until now.

Now at low and high frame rates the mouse input should be consistent.

What this means to you: You may need to readjust your mouse sensitivity, but once you adjust it, it will be consistent.



This was an artistic change that would not effect save games, so we let this one in. The Starmap now has a cool 3D background. It adds a lot of depth to the Starmap... Badum tish... I will see myself out.



The next version will focus on the sandbox and improving tuning and replaybility.

We hope to release a large set of game mutators for the sandbox.
We want to make missile builds more viable.
A new map for the Starmap!
A first crack at a really hard insane difficulty mode for experts.

Beyond that there will be a focus on physics and script performance improvements. Rendering wise we probably have done all that can be done, but we think we can squeak out some more frame rate by taking a bit more load off the CPU. Never hurts to try anyhow.


Thanks everyone!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All,

We have finished upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to Unity 5.4.4. The last time we upgraded the engine was before we entered early access. This is a huge change and is the first major SPAZ 2 engine update that you will have been exposed to.

The main reason to upgrade the engine was to stay compliant with the ever changing operating systems and technology. The last engine version was already two years old, and we feel it is critical to stay up to date to ensure SPAZ 2 continues to work for years to come.

We tested the build as best as two people can, but there may be issues here and there. Please keep your eyes out for bugs and weird issues, and if you see them, please report them on the bug forums here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/252470/discussions/2/

So this update isn't about new stuff, in fact ideally the game looks and plays identically to v 0.8.8. The goal was to get everything working as it was in v0.8.8 and then build on that foundation for the rest of the project. Since gameplay didn't change between v 0.8.8 and v0.9.0 we can roll back to v0.8.8 without breaking saves. We want to ensure that we don't disrupt peoples' progress.



So between Unity 5.0.4 and Unity 5.4.4 somewhere monitor 0 and 1 became swapped in the engine. What this means is that your monitors may be swapped next time you play. We tried to make this as painless to fix as possible and have added an in game display switcher to the Display Menu.

Beyond that, we also detect if you have dual monitors and place a one time helper button on the main menu to fix the problem. The big yellow button will go away as soon as you start a game, and it will never return. We wanted to make sure people wouldn't be frustrated by the unintended swap.



As discussed in the v0.8.8 announcement, multiplayer wasn't going to work. See: https://steamcommunity.com/games/252470/announcements/detail/240217815948540606

Although experimenting and trying multiple methods to bring multiplayer online ate most of the time between v0.8.7 and v0.9.0, we were able to make some improvements. Also, again, thank you all for your amazing understanding and kindness about this.

After v0.8.8 we began to remove the Unity 4 legacy networking hooks from the game (took 3 days, there were tons). This means that all of our spawning routines and level loading now flow directly from function calls instead of traveling through a virtual network layer and object lookup system before reaching their eventual destinations.

What this means to you... Speed. You should notice that there is much less hitching when ships spawn and level spawning should be really fast. Everything is essentially on a direct pipe now.



SPAZ 2 is now DX11 capable. If your card only runs DX9, don't worry, the game will default to DX9 if DX11 is not present.

People with DirectX11 capable video cards can expect frame rate improvements. Visuals wise, the game should hopefully look identical, just faster.

There were rendering improvements for everyone across the board, especially on the map due to some shader changes.

Please report any rendering issues you see. We tried to catch em all, but there is a lot of stuff out there.



We found a really odd bug that has been around forever and fixed it. It turns out when vysnc was off and frame rate was really high in some cases, like the ship assembly level because there is almost nothing in there, the mouse input would slow way down. What was happening was the mouse input was being divided by the frame speed. This meant higher frame rates, slower mouse.

What this also meant was lower frame rates, faster mouse. The mouse input changing based on frame rate is just bad so we fixed it.

Since we played with vsync on we never noticed the issue until now.

Now at low and high frame rates the mouse input should be consistent.

What this means to you: You may need to readjust your mouse sensitivity, but once you adjust it, it will be consistent.



This was an artistic change that would not effect save games, so we let this one in. The Starmap now has a cool 3D background. It adds a lot of depth to the Starmap... Badum tish... I will see myself out.



The next version will focus on the sandbox and improving tuning and replaybility.

We hope to release a large set of game mutators for the sandbox.
We want to make missile builds more viable.
A new map for the Starmap!
A first crack at a really hard insane difficulty mode for experts.

Beyond that there will be a focus on physics and script performance improvements. Rendering wise we probably have done all that can be done, but we think we can squeak out some more frame rate by taking a bit more load off the CPU. Never hurts to try anyhow.


Thanks everyone!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

It has been a hard month upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to 5.4.4 and there have been some really unexpected road bumps. We still aren't fully 5.4.4 ready, but one thing has become clear, the Arena multiplayer isn't going to work.

Between Unity 4 and 5.1 Unity's multiplayer backend fundamentally changed, but we always thought we could transpose our multiplayer code into the new system without too much difficulty. But we can tell you after 4 weeks hard at it, we have made no progress... at all.

We have tried four new multiplayer solutions as well as made a good try to resuscitate the legacy networking from Unity 4 but at this point we feel that the mounting wasted time and dead ends are really hurting development progress.

There has been considerable interest in a coop multiplayer mode. In the past we have posted why that would not be possible, as it would be like running a 300 player server on a local machine. So coop multiplayer wasn't part of the plan, but Arena was...

The Arena multiplayer which we had hoped to deliver was at least something, but so far it has received very limited interest on the forums. So now we have hit this multiplayer upgrade road block and we need to make a hard decision.

Do we keep pressing ahead on Arena multiplayer which likely will only have a small following and will take many more months than expected, or do we spend that time making the single player better. We think it is more important to make the game better.

We have tried to make it very clear on the store page that in its current form SPAZ 2 is a single player game and we requested that people not purchase the game for multiplayer features not yet implemented, but we know many of you are still going to be quite disappointed.

First of all, we are very sorry and embarrassed at this failure to deliver on our part. We let our enthusiasm get ahead of us.

Secondly, we have contacted Steam and have asked them remove the two week since purchase time requirement for refunds. We are still waiting to hear back from Steam about this, but it should be possible. So if you picked up SPAZ 2 early and sat on it waiting for multiplayer, and didn't elapse the two hour playtime limit, you should be able to refund it soon.

EDIT: Update from Steam: Their system is unable to remove the automated 2 week ownership time limit, but our Steam contact has kindly offered to handle the refund requests by hand. If you meet the refund requirements above and want a refund, please contact us at contact@spazgame.com with a link to your Steam profile, and we will forward your link to our contact for a manual refund.

Above Refund Offer Available Until July 16 2017, need an end date else we will be pinging our Steam contact forever.

Thirdly, we plan to use the time we recover to double down on content and replayability. We can get to these features sooner now and make them bigger. We are going to build new maps for the sandbox mode, release an greatly expanded set of sandbox gameplay mutators, add a much more difficult insane difficulty level, and we will focus on making the end game more challenging once you have that massive battleship.

We hope that this will in some way make up for our failure with the multiplayer Arena mode.

Currently we are still working on the upgrade to Unity 5.4.4 and it will feature DirectX 11 support as well as quite a bit of rendering optimization. Removal of the legacy networking hooks should also lead to CPU performance recovery. Once that is ready, we will dive back into work on the single player campaign at full speed to make SPAZ 2 the best it can be.

Thank you for your support and understanding
Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

It has been a hard month upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to 5.4.4 and there have been some really unexpected road bumps. We still aren't fully 5.4.4 ready, but one thing has become clear, the Arena multiplayer isn't going to work.

Between Unity 4 and 5.1 Unity's multiplayer backend fundamentally changed, but we always thought we could transpose our multiplayer code into the new system without too much difficulty. But we can tell you after 4 weeks hard at it, we have made no progress... at all.

We have tried four new multiplayer solutions as well as made a good try to resuscitate the legacy networking from Unity 4 but at this point we feel that the mounting wasted time and dead ends are really hurting development progress.

There has been considerable interest in a coop multiplayer mode. In the past we have posted why that would not be possible, as it would be like running a 300 player server on a local machine. So coop multiplayer wasn't part of the plan, but Arena was...

The Arena multiplayer which we had hoped to deliver was at least something, but so far it has received very limited interest on the forums. So now we have hit this multiplayer upgrade road block and we need to make a hard decision.

Do we keep pressing ahead on Arena multiplayer which likely will only have a small following and will take many more months than expected, or do we spend that time making the single player better. We think it is more important to make the game better.

We have tried to make it very clear on the store page that in its current form SPAZ 2 is a single player game and we requested that people not purchase the game for multiplayer features not yet implemented, but we know many of you are still going to be quite disappointed.

First of all, we are very sorry and embarrassed at this failure to deliver on our part. We let our enthusiasm get ahead of us.

Secondly, we have contacted Steam and have asked them remove the two week since purchase time requirement for refunds. We are still waiting to hear back from Steam about this, but it should be possible. So if you picked up SPAZ 2 early and sat on it waiting for multiplayer, and didn't elapse the two hour playtime limit, you should be able to refund it soon.

EDIT: Update from Steam: Their system is unable to remove the automated 2 week ownership time limit, but our Steam contact has kindly offered to handle the refund requests by hand. If you meet the refund requirements above and want a refund, please contact us at contact@spazgame.com with a link to your Steam profile, and we will forward your link to our contact for a manual refund.

Above Refund Offer Available Until July 16 2017, need an end date else we will be pinging our Steam contact forever.

Thirdly, we plan to use the time we recover to double down on content and replayability. We can get to these features sooner now and make them bigger. We are going to build new maps for the sandbox mode, release an greatly expanded set of sandbox gameplay mutators, add a much more difficult insane difficulty level, and we will focus on making the end game more challenging once you have that massive battleship.

We hope that this will in some way make up for our failure with the multiplayer Arena mode.

Currently we are still working on the upgrade to Unity 5.4.4 and it will feature DirectX 11 support as well as quite a bit of rendering optimization. Removal of the legacy networking hooks should also lead to CPU performance recovery. Once that is ready, we will dive back into work on the single player campaign at full speed to make SPAZ 2 the best it can be.

Thank you for your support and understanding
Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All,

Well we have been back at it for the last couple of weeks and it is time to push a new build :) It was great to have a little time with our families over the holidays, and thanks very much to you all for being understanding about that too. We appreciate it!

The goal of 0.8.6 was to tie up the smaller loose ends before we did our big 0.9 engine and multiplayer push. 0.8.6 is by no means the end of work on the single player, but for the next little while our focus will be on getting the engine upgraded to Unity 5.5+ (we are running v5.01 right now) and then to start on the multiplayer game modes. So single player will likely not change for a couple of months as we delve into these new major tasks.

There may end up being an experimental build to opt into as we do the engine changes and very likely for the multiplayer changes so stay tuned for that too.



Fighters have been getting a lot of love in the last few builds, and now we think that we are zeroing in on something really workable for them. One of the big issues that has come up in the forums, and our meetings, was how fighters didn't work according to the rules of the other weapon systems.

So fighters took no energy to use and were also able to attack during the reload cycle of the mothership, which is meant to be a battle lull for evasion and positioning. This meant that fighters were essentially a damage over time weapon that was free to use.

A lot of cool ideas have swirled around the forums on how to deal with this, and what we settled on was to make fighter bays consume a small amount of power over time.

This was really important because it works with the next piece of the puzzle.

Fighters return to their hangars and reload when the mothership reloads. So when the mothership reloads, fighters will not be fighting and will instead repair and rearm.

The power consumption over time here is important because a 100% carrier build would never need to reload therefore their fighters could still be fielded forever. Now carriers need to be concerned about power if they want to keep their fighters fighting for as long as possible.

Another fairly major change was the conversion of Shooter fighters to Defender fighters. So there was a lot of discussion on wanting to manage fighter roles, but instead of adding even more interface, we decided to take the underutilized Shooter fighters and convert them into dedicated Defender fighters with a good stats boost.

So if you want fighters that stick with your mothership and form a fighter screen, you choose Defenders. Otherwise, choose other fighter types, and they will kill whatever they find in range, while using your targeting and contextual actions to guide them as well. Defenders will attack enemy ships within their close range and since they are stronger than zappers, they are a good close range choice as well.

Details:

- Shooter fighters converted to defensive fighters that protect their parent ship.

- Defenders 50% more health

- Defenders 50% more weapon range

- Defender damage up 20%

- Fighters do not target exploding ships anymore

- Fighter better at picking secondary targets as primary targets become invalid

- Fighter bays consume a small amount of capacitor power continually

- Fighters come home and dock to repair and rearm while the mothership is in reload mode. This prevents them from creating constant pressure (damage over time) to an enemy ship and gets them back being part of the attack vs. reload cycle like with other weapons.

- Fighter ammo capacity doubled. Now that they are part of reload mechanic, they can stay out a lot longer.

- Fighters launch 50% faster

- Staggered the fighter spawn rates to make the spawn audio not stack



We have added the ability to disband a starbase now. There was a good post on the forums outlining the reasons why players would want this, and we agreed, so here it is.

The main use is to change the focus of a Starbase, so making the Starbase root be a Militia core for example may be something you want to do to take advantage of the shield bonuses.

In other cases, you may want to clear some space for another faction to grow.

Details:

- Added Disband Starbase button to the Assign Starbase menu.

- Scrap refund (50%) for disbanded starbases

- No disbanding starbases that are waiting for battles.



Another fairly common topic has been the Capital Transport and how inadequate it was for large empires. We were considering having one transport per 5 provinces, but in the end settled on actually giving each province its own Capital Transport. So this means you will see more of them on the map, and if you see one, it will be full of taxes.

So now you don't need to manage sending them to the right bases at the right times. You don't need to worry about them making stupid decisions on which taxes to pick up either. They launch on a schedule now and you just wait to collect all the juicy taxes.

When/If you start your game in progress, don't be alarmed if you see a large amount of Capital transports incoming on the capital. All the provinces will send theirs right away but will soon settle into a schedule and they will arrive over time instead of in bursts.

Details:

- Every starbase now has its own Capital Transport.



We all hate is when some captain ninjas out loot from beneath us. Now there are a couple ways to prevent this.

The first one is the "Get Lost!" button. You need to be in contact with another captain to use it though, because bullying from across the galaxy isn't that threatening.

If your threat is high enough, the other captain will leave the current province for 3 minutes of starmap time (this is a long time) But to prevent abuse, you can only tell a captain to leave one province at a time. Telling a captain to "Get Lost!" has a much lower relations hit than attacking them.

The other way to keep people out of your loot is now to fight them. Battle circles now block scavenge nodes and resource nodes. This means that if you are fighting someone, no other captain can come and sneak off with the loot anymore. So if you see a node you can't harvest and there is a battle nearby, that is why.

Details:

- Added Get Lost Button

- Battle circles now block resource harvesting from nodes



We have upgraded the faction leader logic to do a better job of picking the initial wars when a new game starts. So before initial wars were random, which lead to factions across the galaxy from each other being at war. This was a pretty useless war since the faction members rarely came into contact. Instead, we now ensure that initial wars require border contact. This means that some factions may start with no wars if they are isolated, but as they grow, they will come into contact with other faction borders and wars will happen as they already naturally do.

Peace has also become a little more logical as well. So as factions are separated, they will be more likely to declare peace if their borders are no longer in contact.

Details:

- AI much better at picking initial wars on new game start. Should lead to more logical border conflicts.

- When faction borders do not touch for a while, peace treaties will be more likely.



What is left was mostly fixes and quality of life stuff that we wanted to get to before we jumped into the engine upgrade/multiplayer. Since we will be away from single player likely for a couple of months we wanted to get these quick fixes in. There are still a couple pages of single player issues we want to deal with before v1.0 but the issues below were either really quick fixes or good bang for the buck type things.

Details:

- Fixed rare captain stuck at starbase case.

- Fixed case where time would progress when not moving on load

- Fixed prev / next ship both going to next ship.

- Fixed rare Miniguns and Flak ignore incoming missiles after parent ship was destroyed.

- Fixed pop in fighter engine sounds on spawn.

- Fixed rare case where ships would move away from the center of the instance trying to track to their warp in start position instead of end position.

- Fixed stores generating parts with multiple small hangars vs. one larger and better hangar. Still possible to add small hangars via the catalog part constructor if you are a weirdo.

- Fixed particle hose continuing to fire after being broken off

- Fixed automated part recovery after battles for: Border Raids, Bandit Swarms, Mining Ops, and “The Signal” mission.

- Fixed upgrading starbases adding scrap to the stockpile.

- Fixed tooltips for slider bars not showing up in mouse mode.

- Fixed bug where the traits for the player character were being shown. We can't read your mind... yet.

- Fixed hot swapping parts losing their icon.

- Fixed case where Start a Raid side objective could not be completed.

- Target lock indicator always available, even without missiles since strike craft and fighters look at it for targeting cues.

- AI faction leaders better at recruiting captains so their factions become more full.

- The loot screen won't be pushed after a battle when there is no loot.

- Profiles can be deleted in the Change Profile menu now (if they are not currently active)

- When exit the trade window with another captain, they will reconfigure their ship with the parts you traded them if they are better than their current parts (good for wingmen and helping out faction members)

- More accurate analog slider when using controller

- Hold SHIFT for slow sliders for keyboard users

- The catalog weapon toggles are more clear overall

- Added a toggle all weapons button for catalog

- Some side objectives now have a “select” instead of a “move to” button when you do not need to be in physical contact to complete them

- Command point perk counting fixed



Starting Monday (assuming v0.8.6 is all good) we will begin the large task of upgrading Unity from v5.01 to v5.5+. This will be a major task as we expect it to take up to a month due to the amount of game objects that will need to be changed. Literally thousands of them will have now defunct components on them and they will need to be rejigged to the new multiplayer back end.

Probably a week before the official release of v0.9.0 we will open up an experimental branch for people to test out. This will just be the upgraded engine without multiplayer yet, but it will need some testing because there will be over a year of Unity changes in the new engine and some things are sure to go awry over a time span like that.

Once we are happy that v0.9.0 is stable and working just like v0.8.6, but with the upgraded engine, we will release that build and start multiplayer work.

There will be more details on the multiplayer plans as part of the release notes for the Unity v5.5 engine upgrade. Learning what Unity v5.5 can do may guide some of our multiplayer design, so it is best to wait on that until we see v5.5 alive and running the game.

Thanks everyone for your continued support!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)

Hi All,

Well we have been back at it for the last couple of weeks and it is time to push a new build :) It was great to have a little time with our families over the holidays, and thanks very much to you all for being understanding about that too. We appreciate it!

The goal of 0.8.6 was to tie up the smaller loose ends before we did our big 0.9 engine and multiplayer push. 0.8.6 is by no means the end of work on the single player, but for the next little while our focus will be on getting the engine upgraded to Unity 5.5+ (we are running v5.01 right now) and then to start on the multiplayer game modes. So single player will likely not change for a couple of months as we delve into these new major tasks.

There may end up being an experimental build to opt into as we do the engine changes and very likely for the multiplayer changes so stay tuned for that too.



Fighters have been getting a lot of love in the last few builds, and now we think that we are zeroing in on something really workable for them. One of the big issues that has come up in the forums, and our meetings, was how fighters didn't work according to the rules of the other weapon systems.

So fighters took no energy to use and were also able to attack during the reload cycle of the mothership, which is meant to be a battle lull for evasion and positioning. This meant that fighters were essentially a damage over time weapon that was free to use.

A lot of cool ideas have swirled around the forums on how to deal with this, and what we settled on was to make fighter bays consume a small amount of power over time.

This was really important because it works with the next piece of the puzzle.

Fighters return to their hangars and reload when the mothership reloads. So when the mothership reloads, fighters will not be fighting and will instead repair and rearm.

The power consumption over time here is important because a 100% carrier build would never need to reload therefore their fighters could still be fielded forever. Now carriers need to be concerned about power if they want to keep their fighters fighting for as long as possible.

Another fairly major change was the conversion of Shooter fighters to Defender fighters. So there was a lot of discussion on wanting to manage fighter roles, but instead of adding even more interface, we decided to take the underutilized Shooter fighters and convert them into dedicated Defender fighters with a good stats boost.

So if you want fighters that stick with your mothership and form a fighter screen, you choose Defenders. Otherwise, choose other fighter types, and they will kill whatever they find in range, while using your targeting and contextual actions to guide them as well. Defenders will attack enemy ships within their close range and since they are stronger than zappers, they are a good close range choice as well.

Details:

- Shooter fighters converted to defensive fighters that protect their parent ship.

- Defenders 50% more health

- Defenders 50% more weapon range

- Defender damage up 20%

- Fighters do not target exploding ships anymore

- Fighter better at picking secondary targets as primary targets become invalid

- Fighter bays consume a small amount of capacitor power continually

- Fighters come home and dock to repair and rearm while the mothership is in reload mode. This prevents them from creating constant pressure (damage over time) to an enemy ship and gets them back being part of the attack vs. reload cycle like with other weapons.

- Fighter ammo capacity doubled. Now that they are part of reload mechanic, they can stay out a lot longer.

- Fighters launch 50% faster

- Staggered the fighter spawn rates to make the spawn audio not stack



We have added the ability to disband a starbase now. There was a good post on the forums outlining the reasons why players would want this, and we agreed, so here it is.

The main use is to change the focus of a Starbase, so making the Starbase root be a Militia core for example may be something you want to do to take advantage of the shield bonuses.

In other cases, you may want to clear some space for another faction to grow.

Details:

- Added Disband Starbase button to the Assign Starbase menu.

- Scrap refund (50%) for disbanded starbases

- No disbanding starbases that are waiting for battles.



Another fairly common topic has been the Capital Transport and how inadequate it was for large empires. We were considering having one transport per 5 provinces, but in the end settled on actually giving each province its own Capital Transport. So this means you will see more of them on the map, and if you see one, it will be full of taxes.

So now you don't need to manage sending them to the right bases at the right times. You don't need to worry about them making stupid decisions on which taxes to pick up either. They launch on a schedule now and you just wait to collect all the juicy taxes.

When/If you start your game in progress, don't be alarmed if you see a large amount of Capital transports incoming on the capital. All the provinces will send theirs right away but will soon settle into a schedule and they will arrive over time instead of in bursts.

Details:

- Every starbase now has its own Capital Transport.



We all hate is when some captain ninjas out loot from beneath us. Now there are a couple ways to prevent this.

The first one is the "Get Lost!" button. You need to be in contact with another captain to use it though, because bullying from across the galaxy isn't that threatening.

If your threat is high enough, the other captain will leave the current province for 3 minutes of starmap time (this is a long time) But to prevent abuse, you can only tell a captain to leave one province at a time. Telling a captain to "Get Lost!" has a much lower relations hit than attacking them.

The other way to keep people out of your loot is now to fight them. Battle circles now block scavenge nodes and resource nodes. This means that if you are fighting someone, no other captain can come and sneak off with the loot anymore. So if you see a node you can't harvest and there is a battle nearby, that is why.

Details:

- Added Get Lost Button

- Battle circles now block resource harvesting from nodes



We have upgraded the faction leader logic to do a better job of picking the initial wars when a new game starts. So before initial wars were random, which lead to factions across the galaxy from each other being at war. This was a pretty useless war since the faction members rarely came into contact. Instead, we now ensure that initial wars require border contact. This means that some factions may start with no wars if they are isolated, but as they grow, they will come into contact with other faction borders and wars will happen as they already naturally do.

Peace has also become a little more logical as well. So as factions are separated, they will be more likely to declare peace if their borders are no longer in contact.

Details:

- AI much better at picking initial wars on new game start. Should lead to more logical border conflicts.

- When faction borders do not touch for a while, peace treaties will be more likely.



What is left was mostly fixes and quality of life stuff that we wanted to get to before we jumped into the engine upgrade/multiplayer. Since we will be away from single player likely for a couple of months we wanted to get these quick fixes in. There are still a couple pages of single player issues we want to deal with before v1.0 but the issues below were either really quick fixes or good bang for the buck type things.

Details:

- Fixed rare captain stuck at starbase case.

- Fixed case where time would progress when not moving on load

- Fixed prev / next ship both going to next ship.

- Fixed rare Miniguns and Flak ignore incoming missiles after parent ship was destroyed.

- Fixed pop in fighter engine sounds on spawn.

- Fixed rare case where ships would move away from the center of the instance trying to track to their warp in start position instead of end position.

- Fixed stores generating parts with multiple small hangars vs. one larger and better hangar. Still possible to add small hangars via the catalog part constructor if you are a weirdo.

- Fixed particle hose continuing to fire after being broken off

- Fixed automated part recovery after battles for: Border Raids, Bandit Swarms, Mining Ops, and “The Signal” mission.

- Fixed upgrading starbases adding scrap to the stockpile.

- Fixed tooltips for slider bars not showing up in mouse mode.

- Fixed bug where the traits for the player character were being shown. We can't read your mind... yet.

- Fixed hot swapping parts losing their icon.

- Fixed case where Start a Raid side objective could not be completed.

- Target lock indicator always available, even without missiles since strike craft and fighters look at it for targeting cues.

- AI faction leaders better at recruiting captains so their factions become more full.

- The loot screen won't be pushed after a battle when there is no loot.

- Profiles can be deleted in the Change Profile menu now (if they are not currently active)

- When exit the trade window with another captain, they will reconfigure their ship with the parts you traded them if they are better than their current parts (good for wingmen and helping out faction members)

- More accurate analog slider when using controller

- Hold SHIFT for slow sliders for keyboard users

- The catalog weapon toggles are more clear overall

- Added a toggle all weapons button for catalog

- Some side objectives now have a “select” instead of a “move to” button when you do not need to be in physical contact to complete them

- Command point perk counting fixed



Starting Monday (assuming v0.8.6 is all good) we will begin the large task of upgrading Unity from v5.01 to v5.5+. This will be a major task as we expect it to take up to a month due to the amount of game objects that will need to be changed. Literally thousands of them will have now defunct components on them and they will need to be rejigged to the new multiplayer back end.

Probably a week before the official release of v0.9.0 we will open up an experimental branch for people to test out. This will just be the upgraded engine without multiplayer yet, but it will need some testing because there will be over a year of Unity changes in the new engine and some things are sure to go awry over a time span like that.

Once we are happy that v0.9.0 is stable and working just like v0.8.6, but with the upgraded engine, we will release that build and start multiplayer work.

There will be more details on the multiplayer plans as part of the release notes for the Unity v5.5 engine upgrade. Learning what Unity v5.5 can do may guide some of our multiplayer design, so it is best to wait on that until we see v5.5 alive and running the game.

Thanks everyone for your continued support!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard(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 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/