A major new feature, defense fleets, was added this week that could change the way you and the AI play the game. Also, over the next few weeks we will be adding new victory conditions to the game. As part of this work, we will be removing the ability to carry credits from game to game through your profile. You will still keep your ship upgrades on your profile, but bringing millions of credits into a new game trivializes the difficulty of the game.
New Features
- You can now garrison ships at any Military Station and this fleet will automatically defend any sector in the station’s range. As you upgrade the Military Station, the maximum garrison increases.
- You now see fleets on the map rather than individual ships. The fleet icon shows you its fleet strength.
Improvements & Bug Fixes
- You can now access the Fleet Management screen when landed at your Military Stations to transfer ships to/from the reserve and purchase new ships.
- Increased hull and shields of Radar Stations and Mining Stations by 100%.
- Reduced war score value of Radar Stations and Mining Stations by 50%.
- Increased war score value of all ships by 100%.
- Military Stations have lights on the landing pad.
- Reworked AI city fleet logic to make them harder to exploit. They will now be more decisive in a war and change their minds less often about what to attack. They will also be less predictable about which targets they attack.
- Cities and outposts are faster at detecting when they are under attack.
- Homing Missile, NLS Drive, Salvage, and Dock abilities have new icons.
- Added scroll bars to the fleet management screen.
- Lone ships that are not part of a fleet should get cleaned up faster (no more huge numbers of pirates coming out of asteroid sectors).
- Fixed a bug that caused some AI cities to stop building ships and buildings.
- Fixed a bug that caused sector ownership to not get cleared properly on clients when a station was destroyed.
