Heat Death
some nice little changes
-Satellites will now always perform actions in left-to-right order, instead of the order in which the satellites were created.
-There should no longer be a chance of being forced into a high threat level at the beginning of a cluster
-Reduced the variance in what a high-threat combat can look like in the 1st cluster.
UI
-Added a preview of a satellite's spawn location when you are about to create a satellite using a card.
-On the starmap, you can now see which stars are 'connected' by hovering the mouse over them. (1 known issue: It doesn't always show all connections, this will likely be fixed in the next patch)
-Travelling to a cluster/star now takes 1 less click. The info box shows up on hover.
-Some changes have been made to the color of card borders
Infinite Mode, and a fun new cheat
Infinite mode is now available. You can start an infinite run by clicking the "Infinite" button after you win a game. Here's how it works:
-Every time you win, you will start over, keeping all your resources.
-Enemies will get tougher.
-You get less max health for winning fights.
-Anything that happens in Infinite mode will not be recorded in your run history, for the time being.
'CHEATS'
-A new cheat has been added, which allows you to find cards from ALL planets at the same time. Turning this 'on' will also give you the required tech to make magnitude and radioactivity work. For now, these tech will stay even if you turn the cheats off.
-The number of runs required to unlock Cheats is reduced from 10 to 5.
BALANCE
-Moving to a consumed node will now reduce your max health by 15 (low difficulty) or 13 (high difficulty). This is a net loss of 5 max health for winning ordinary combats.
-"Refreshable" card rewards are less common at higher luck / later stages of the game.
-The card "Emulator" is now affected by mystery. It should no longer be able to create systems you already own.
-The damage reduction of "Extinguish" is now mitigated by Mystery.
UX
-Damage/healing/shield numbers will no longer pop in random directions, but instead follow the golden ratio.
-Upgrading a Dwarf Planet with attack/defense modifiers will no longer produce a warning.
BUGFIX
-Fixed combinations/upgrades sometimes being applied to the wrong card.
-Fixed distributed attacks (deal damage to 2 random opponents) sometimes only attacking one opponent.
-Fixed x% changes to healing being applied twice. For example in the card 'Smoothing', and the enemy 'Lie'.
-(Cheat mode) Fixed an issue where a card with multiple upgrades would sometimes not load correctly. (Symptoms: Card disappearing from the deck, or card stuck in the middle of the screen)
-(Cheat mode) Fixed the combination preview sometimes being different from the real result.
Lots of balance adjustments, 3 new tech
-Added 3 new tech for Ablaze: "Hestia", "Tinder", and "Remnants".
"Remnants" will be the new starter tech for Ablaze, replacing "Contrashock".
ABOUT THIS PATCH
My intention with this patch is to nudge many details in a better direction. Hopefully this will improve strategic diversity, and possibly even make new strategies possible.
I've also decided to remove some cards that I thought were not interesting enough. Removed cards will still be in your deck if you picked them up on an older patch, but you can no longer find them in card rewards.
NEUTRAL
-Some of the less interesting/powerful Upgrades and Insertions have been buffed.
-"Escalation" has been nerfed from 4 to 3 ticks. This upgrade has probably been too powerful, given that it does not exhaust.
-'Trinity' energy cost reduced from 1 to 0. Additionally, the 'trinity' tech can now be activated multiple times if you somehow copy enough 'Trinity' cards.
ABLAZE
-No longer starts with the tech 'Contrashock'. This tech could sometimes be very detrimental when fighting certain enemies, so it was not right to have this as a starter. Instead, start with "Remnants", which gives the player 2 shields whenever they destroy a card. This should synergise nicely with the somewhat overlooked "Damageable card" concept.
-The self-burn of 'Macerate' is reduced from 20 to 12
-Removed 'Levin+'
-'Turret's and 'Large Turret's have slightly more health
-'Underhand' changed from 18 burning / 5 shield to 15 burning / 9 shield
RADIOACTIVE
-Removed 'Systematic Chaos'
-'Fat Decemator' reduced from 4 to 3 energy cost
-Changed 'Fast Reactor' from Uncommon to Rare.
-'Roots' now applies the effect at turn end, rather than turn start.
-'EMP' will now reduce Radioactivity by 2, instead of shieldpower by 1. Damage is changed from affecting all enemies, to affecting 2 random enemies.
STORM
-Various cards have been slightly buffed, in order to improve strategies that don't emphasise growing the Magnitude only.
-Propellar has been moved from common to uncommon.
-Removed 'Maintenance' because the effect seems redundant.
-Reworked 'Other Nature'
HUMAN
-Tether buffed from +2 to +4 per use
-Trash moon buffed from 20 to 22 damage
-Disregard changed from 3 to 2 energy
-Tekka changed from 2 energy 16 damage, to 1 energy 9 damage.
-Removed 'Hope' (the card, not the concept)
-Adaptive AI changed from +6 to +8 firepower. This card had previously been nerfed because it had extreme synergy with Mystery, but Mystery has itself been nerfed since then.
-Clear the way changed from +4 to +5 firepower
-Attacker mk2 nerfed from 9x2 to 8x2 damage.
-Various other minor buffs
BUGFIXES
-"Polish" should no longer require a target
-The encyclopaedia scrolling should no longer get stuck after going from the Tech page to the Cards page.
UI/UX
On a previous patch, I tried out the idea of hiding additional information until the player presses ctrl. This was meant to reduce the amount of clutter, but- I don't think it worked very well. This change has been reverted.
Lots of more little details
-Added a new 'cheat' which changes all medium-threat fights into high-threat fights.
Bugfixes
-Fixed an issue where a card would not be saved/recreated correctly if it had been upgraded multiple times. (This was only an issue with cheats on)
-Fixed Scout Tower not getting aoe-shields when upgraded with AoE.
-Fixed the card "Copycat" having the wrong description for multiple attacks.
-You can no longer play cards after the last enemy dies
-Fixed 'crumble' having 2 different descriptions
-Fixed 'Seeping Tub' not having a 'retain' tag.
-Other minor bugfixes
Player Balance
-Reduced the energy cost of Pow to 2.
-Removed the cards Transparency and All-Consuming from the reward pool.
-Carbonfire: Increased bonus from +2 to +3
-Inverter: Increased damage from 10 to 13
-Klonk: Affects the first 2 attacks, instead of 1
-Loyalty: Bonus increased from 2 to 3
-Shrapnel is now exclusive to the Radioactive planet
-The card Classic Nuclear has been slightly buffed, and Ramp has been slightly nerfed.
-The card 'Spyware' can no longer be found as a combat reward. (You can still obtain it from a specific low threat event.) This change is done because of how easy it can be to create infinites with its effect.
-The damageable cards (Transmission Line, Turret, Large Turret) are now affected by the planet's firepower and shieldpower.
Enemy Balance
-Some enemies have a buff which limits how much damage they can take from a projectile. I don't like this mechanic, and I'm looking for something to replace it with. For now, this buff has been nerfed on high difficulties, and removed on low difficulties.
-Some other adjustments have been made to enemies that were a bit too strong
UI/UX
-The black background for enemies' intentions has been made darker, to improve readability
-The wording on some cards has been changed, hopefully to make them more consistent and easier to understand.
This patch lets you break the rules!
This patch brings in a new menu of "Cheat" settings. This feature unlocks after you have won or lost a total of 10 games.
Currently, the available cheats are:
- Allow cards to be upgraded and combined an infinite amount of times, instead of just once.
- Have all the tech in the game at the same time
- Add +1 mystery to all cards
- Reduce the size of your starter deck
- Unlock all difficulty levels
- Start the game with only 1 max health
More cheats might be added in the future. For example, I'd like to add one which makes it possible to find cards from all planets at the same time, and one which makes all stars into high threat levels.
A lot of little things
Enemy Encounters
- Enemy selection is less random. The type of enemy that spawns will now depend on how many clusters you've visited. This should allow for more strategising when building your deck. I'll try to add more detailed information about this to the Encyclopaedia in the future.
- Two new enemy types have been added.
UI
- The starmap, for low difficulties, no longer features 'consumed' nodes which limit movement. for these difficulties, the number of stars in a cluster has been slightly reduced. This is done in order to simplify the UI.
- When hovering the mouse over a specific satellite, its health bar will be moved to the front.
- Some new tooltips
- Fixed a text overflow issue on the "Massive Storm" and "Radioactivity" techs, for when numbers were more than 3 digits.
- A lot of the redundant stuff in tooltips is now hidden by default. Press ctrl or command to expand the tooltips. This is to reduce the "wall of text" problem that I'm feeling.
Encyclopaedia
- A section with the list of all 'Tech' in the game has been added.
Other
- 'Ablaze' will now appear as frozen if you play the card 'Skathi'.
- The character selection menu has been updated, and a preview of the 5th planet has been added
- Fixed the card 'Defensive Crystal' not being permanent
- Fixed a bug related to how characters were randomly selected when distributing shields randomly.
- I've also started working on a 5th planet. No promises about when this will be ready.
Edit: A couple of bugfixes/changes have been added in a quick follow-up patch:
- The behavior of the enemy "Steel" has been simplified.
- Fixed an issue with the new enemy "Luminoase", which would cause the enemy turn to never end.
- Fixed an issue related to Mystery + self-burning effects. The effect should now properly do what the card's text states.
minor bugfixes,
There's also some bugfixes, for example "history" displaying in the wrong order.
I've been a bit under the weather this week, so I've not been able to make any new content.
My main focus moving forward is to finally improve the UI in the starmap. This might also involve changing some of the game's rules.
A few new cards, balance changes, minor UI improvements
Open the encyclopaedia, go to "Search", and then check the "Only New" checkbox.
This will narrow your search to show only cards that were added in this patch.
There are also some minor improvements to text readability, and you can also adjust the font size in tooltips in the Options menu.
There are many balance/mechanic changes, here are the key takeaways:
- There are some minor changes to a variety of Human and Ablaze cards, mostly buffs.
- Combustion caused by cold damage should now also be affected by card modifiers, in the same way as ordinary combusts.
- The last boss will no longer apply a debuff which deals damage to all allies. Instead, it will reduce your Firepower slightly.
- The energy cost of Polish has been increased from 1 to 3.
- The human card 'Ignite' has been renamed to 'Bug', to avoid confusion with Ablaze's Burning mechanic.
balance changes, difficulty 6 changes, and bugfixes
- Fixed Artillery Factory not consuming any energy.
- Fixed Regrowth being able to make negative card costs.
- Turrets and Large Turrets have slightly more health.
Balance Changes, Run History, Search
1. You can now search for cards by name in the Encyclopaedia
2. There is now a run history. Only new runs on the new patch will be recorded.
3. There are many balance changes.
4. The "+?" effect has been renamed to "Mystery".
Here are the most significant balance/gameplay changes. There are also a number of small tweaks to numbers which are not listed here. The overall goal is to allow for a large variety of strategies, encourage fun combos, and to have the most powerful combos be rare or difficult to pull off.
Nerfs:
- "Booster" will no longer give energy.
- "Polish" has been capped to giving at most 50 damage. The damage cap increases by +5 with Mystery.
- Mystery will no longer give additional repetitions to satellites' attacks, unless the attack already repeats multiple times. (This is now the same behaviour as for regular attack cards)
- Superb Mystery will now give +3 Mystery instead of +4.
Buffs:
- Some card effects which interact with energy (such as the 'set energy' of drone swarm) will now interact with Mystery.
- Ablaze has a couple of new cards, including a pretty good healing card.
- Frozen no longer reduces by 1 per turn, and the amount of shields given by Melting has increased by +1 per tick.
- Mystery can now reduce the amount of burning you apply to yourself.
- The probability of finding a "Combine" from high threat levels has been halved. This means you will be finding more upgrade/insert rewards. The probability of finding Tech has also been slightly reduced.
- Enemies which had a limit on how much damage they can take per attack, have had that limit increased.
- Difficulty 6, which increases enemy attack strength, will now only increase projectile damage and not projectile count. This should make the gap between 5 and 6 a little bit smaller.
Prioritised future plans:
- I want to improve the UI more. For that purpose, I'm thinking that I might need to overhaul the starmap.
- More enemy types are in the works. Ideally I want to have many enough of them so that there are specific challenges at specific points in the run, instead of enemy encounters being mostly random.
- I'd like to create some way of collecting statistics from users (opt-in), so that the game's balance can be better understood.