Hey all and happy new year!
In this year of the impending apocalypse and inevitable demise of all mankind as foretold by the Mayans (excluding of course, every currently existing remnant of the Mayan culture) and that guy in the US who said the world would end twice last year and possibly once back in the 90s, the Tyranid Mod team along with our beta team are currently going over necessary minutiae for 0.5b2.
So currently we're going over the specifics of the Influence mechanic (things like whether it should take 4 or 5 Spore Chimneys to hit maximum cap, and whether you should start with one bar or no bars of Influence cap) and a re-hash of genestealers (the damn blighters are a nuisance - being both scouts and heavy infantry, and trying to balance both aspects of the unit).
The important thing to take from our discussions is this:
We have the broad strokes already done. Influence works. Genestealers are in the game (assuming you haven't been paying attention to anything we've done in the past five years or so). The big difficult stuff is taken care of. At the moment we're in the very nice situation of being able to comfortably spend all our time paying attention to the little details and balance necessities of making stuff work well, rather than just making stuff work.
That said, we seem to have a remarkable shortage of beta testers who pay attention to the forum. If you think you can understand the importance of how an individual unit works in the context of how everything else works as well, and you have the time to regularly contribute to discussions, and you happen to be remarkably obsessed with Tyranids, feel free to say so here.
As always, active and intelligent participants in our development discussions are a luxury we pay highly for. And by pay, we of course mean, give free pre-release beta access to and talk with about important things like what isn't working currently. So less with paying, and more with "oh god, please say something useful, DEAR GOD PLEASE JOIN OUR FORUM WE NEED PEOPLE WITH BRAINS WHO CAN THINK AND DEAL WITH COMPLEX PROBLEMS LIKE WHAT WOULD HELP MAKE THINGS WORK RIGHT".
Not that we're desperate or anything. We just like smart people with too much time on their hands.
So yes. To summarise: Important stuff taken care of. Fine details currently under discussion. Probably will spend a bit of time looking at the details before the next release. Dear God, we would like smart people to help out. The end.
