0.5b2: Hivefleet Now In Orbit news

Hey all!

So guess what just got uploaded to ModDB and DoWFiles? A little mycetic spore called...

0.5b2:

Yep, soon you will have the latest Tyranids update gestating inside your computer, preparing to summon swarms of their planet-devouring friends from deep space to kill us all!

So what's in this update?

Well we fixed the Influence mechanic. It doesn't run on WAAAGH anymore (we managed to crack open that tasty, tasty Faith can), so any ork problems you might have been having should no longer occur. And that means GDM now works as intended too, so when you're sick of being fair to your AI opponents (or when you want to see what happens when your PC has no limits), you can now watch a true no-holds-barred Tyranid invasion in action!

But that's not all. Remember how we kept talking all that good stuff about a builderless construction system? Well the global construction system is now in-game. That's right - you can now build anywhere you have line of sight to, with all the benefits and downsides that entails.

Oh, but wasn't the Influence resource meant to indicate how much control you had over the environment? Wouldn't that mean that you'd have global abilities to let you use that to do cool stuff too? Oh hey, the construction bar also flips into a global abilities bar to let you use your environmental influence against your foes!

...And I seem to recall you all asking for a Hive Tyrant? That bad boy is now in-game too!

We also had a generous donation by a very talented guy called Skinnie of some higher quality FX. So a lot of things will look much, much prettier.

So I think I speak for all of us when I say that this has been our most ambitious and biggest update yet. Sorry it's a few months late, but I think you'll all enjoy it.

What happens now?

Bit of a monster release, eh? Confused how the Tyranid Mod can make this any more awesome? Well we need you to break this bad boy. Find out what's wrong with it. 0.5b3 is going to be us polishing this off before the REALLY big stuff for 0.6 (which may actually be 1.0 at this rate).

So we already know there's a lot of sound work to do - we're gonna try and tackle that as hard as we can. We're also pretty sure the balance could use some tweaking, but we've got a lot of arguments going on as to what. Balance is going to be a big thing we need to sort out before we can tackle 0.6, so tell us what's letting you down and what's going above and beyond. Are genestealers too expensive in Tier 1? Are carnifex too OP? Don't try and tell us how to fix it (that's our job to surprise you with!), we just really want to know the problems.

And if you're really keen and have the time to spare, join our forum and ask to be a beta tester.