Idle Armada

• Update to golang v1.19.4.
  
• Update to ebiten v2.4.15 which fixes some rare crash bugs, a mouse scroll wheel bug, and a MacOS framerate bug.
  
• Fix minimum version on MacOS to only require 10.13, as originally intended.
  
• Squad ease factor was not very fairly calculated for ship combinations of 3 or more ship types -- it now uses a different algorithm to calculate ease factor that should prevent players from hitting sudden walls at certain levels in their run. Thanks HowardTheGrum and JulezMaddin for reporting.
  

• Original: Fix regression since a few releases ago where ship bonuses that were specific to one ship were accidentally applying to all other ships. Oops. Thanks to Potatomaster on discord.
  
• Original: Show DPS when a ship is selected.
  
• Original: Tone down Cargo Guns and Cargo Damage bonus which both combined had been a little crazy OP for a long time.
  
• Original: Scale up the one super-weak mining bonus for miner job.
  

Preface

Item System Goals (These Aren't Changing):

1. Players should have a way to get more powerful without purchasing upgrades (auto collecting mechanic helps a bit with that today)
   
2. Players who prefer an active (instead of idle) playstyle have something they can do actively to accelerate their run
   
3. Item visual effects / triggers make battles more fun to watch
   

Problems Today:

1. Although picking up the very first item of a type often has a decent effect on battle, picking 5-10 more items of that same type barely makes a dent. Even auto-collecting items for hours doesn't make a big difference in combat effectiveness. This alone means item system is not really accomplishing goals 1) or 2).
   
2. Item mark system, while it allows items to scale into infinity, also makes the items at different battle levels feel samey-samey. Items you get at level 60 are more powerful versions of the same items you get at level 10.
   
3. Items diminishing in effectiveness as battle level increases is hard for players to understand, and makes the effect of getting the next item mark feel vague
   
4. Existence of fast forward button (and fear of extremely fast, repetitive prestiges) severely limits the design choices available for items in general, and this bleeds into other aspects of the game balance such as raising the minimum level required to prestige.
   
5. Badges just plain dominate the economy way too much in general.
   
6. Late levels can have so many drops at once that it annoyingly clogs the screen
   
7. Item system is confusing for new players (why did items reset on prestige? What the heck is an item mark level? Why are item drops so weird after I maxed out the common drops?)
   

Proposed Changes:

• Items remain permanently through all prestiges (try game "Tower of Hero" on Android/IOS for a vague example of what I'm picturing)
  
• Items are ONLY dropped when defeating each boss level for the first time in a run (to collect more items from those same levels again, you must prestige and beat those bosses again)
  
• Items dropped in this way can never be missed even if you are idle at the time they drop. They will simply show in the Item Tab as a treasure to be opened.
  
• Each item pickup, while way less frequent, should feel more meaningful to pickup than today
  
• Items have no caps, and every item is designed to scale infinitely
  
• Eliminate the item mark system. Instead of seeing every variety of item before level 10, and then that same variety of items repeating at a higher mark the next 10 levels -- instead the low levels only drop the basic items, and you must beat higher level bosses to get a chance at the better items.
  
• Rethink of all item effects in general, to reflect their new low level "easy to get" status, or high level "gotta grind high to get" status. Fun visual effects like Dual / Triple / Big Shot will be preserved. Most other effects to be rethought from the ground up.
  
• Badges will be made extremely rare, and also toned down in effectiveness so they no longer dominate the economic game.
  
• Instead of a "battle level resistance" mechanic that some special effects use to scale today (such as big shot and dual shot), such mechanics will entirely be based on how many of that item you have, and a formula involving the ratio between the attacking and defending ship's mark levels. So just like today, you'll see these things fire more often at lower battle levels, and less often at higher battle levels you get. But unlike today, your highest-mark ships will have a far better chance than your weak ships of triggering these effects, and any enemy scaling reduction abilities you have will help these mechanics to trigger more often.
  
• Regen items will be REMOVED to make way for in-battle healing mechanics, such as a repair ship.
  
• Needless to say, all items anyone has in a run today will be LOST because the new item system is so different
  
• New EXP system, so that ships get meaningfully more powerful over time from destroying enemy ships over and over again. Ships will gain EXP based on how much damage they did in battle. So ships you spend the most land/metal/crystal on will gain the most EXP. EXP will, for now, lead to a straight multiplier to a ship's mark level. This basically increases all stats, and increases the chance of special effects triggering.
  

Downstream changes that I feel will be required with such a change:

• What would auto-collect do in such a world? After these changes, there will be new temporary bonuses that will visibly drop during a battle, such as "+10% damage for the rest of the battle", or "+25% exp for this battle".
  
• Perhaps in a future update there might be new, rare, consumable items it can collect as well (collect now, choose which battle to use it in).
  
• What would "farm mode" do in such a world? Remember today, farm mode picks the level which gives optimal item drops for you right now. After these changes, farm mode should optimize EXP gained instead.
  
• Fast forward button, which will be heavily exploitable in such a new item system, will be removed entirely.
  
• All prestige abilities that offer "start with more of item..." today, will need to be replaced with something new. Some will be +% to exp, others may be something new. I think the "start with more of item..." prestige abilities are sort of boring, anyway.
  
• OP players can probably reach level 11 very quickly, even without fast forward. Because of this I'm not planning to remove any of the mechanics that discourage fast prestiges, such as the "minimum level to prestige" changes with mark-up with this item system remake, nor am I planning to allow leftover job points to carry over on prestige.
  

As always, please let me know your thoughts!

• Original: Fix recent regression with the way Damage Reduced bonuses are displayed in upgrade UI.
  
• Original: Clear battle particles on prestige.
  
• Original: Render battle particles behind main sprites to make battle UI less confusing.
  
• Original & Remake: Fix longtime subtle rounding bug that caused a +15%-per-level bonus, at level 6, to show as a +104% instead of +105%, and other similar rounding errors.
  

• Require more prestige abilities to rank up jobs, so that players can't get stuck with a high level required to prestige.
  
• If a player hasn't bought enough prestige abilities to rank up the job, then don't let the minimum-level-prestige increase take effect, to help players already in a soft wall due to this situation.
  
• Upgrade to latest ebiten 2.4.12-pre-release with MacOS 13 fullscreen fix.
  
• Display benefits of ranking up a job in that UI (you know the cost -- what new prestige abilites will you gain by doing this?).
  
• Enable fullscreen mode in MacOS and linux versions.
  
• Try a little harder to hide the system bar and get immersive fullscreen on android release.
  
• Fix prior internal changelog date that said ???, and improvements to build scripts to prevent it from happening again.
  
• Display mark before weighting logic, so users can more clearly see how level scaling modifiers affect their run.
  

• Upgrade to golang v1.19.3.
  
• Fix bug where one of the new job's top-tier prestige abilities was not having the intended effect.
  
• Fix display regression in last major update that falsely started saying multiple jobs had -99% benefits to something that wasn't accurate.
  

• Make hint at new job unlock a little less vague
  
• Fix bug with loading remake in last release
  

• Randomization update -- now all enemy waves are better randomized. Fight against a better variety of enemy ship types!
  
• Now ranking up a job slightly increases the battle level required to prestige.
  
• Original: Add particle effects on ship movement and destruction! I hope to add these to remake as well later on. Disable these if you find performance has become slow.
  
• Make in-game changelog UI scrollable for large updates (like this one)! And number the update's bullet points, so it's easier to differentiate when scrolling.
  
• Now OCD mode middle button buys a single increment, rather than half of what you can afford.
  
• Fix bug with gradient-colored buttons not changing colors when they are intended to.
  
• Put page/scroll buttons on military tab so the UI properly supports more than 9 ship types.
  
• Fix issue where black bar on military tab appeared above the Dmg % text for flagship and mercenaries.
  
• Various other improvements to the miliitary tab to make it less clicky. Shift+click a + or - button to add or remove max, and add new 'Clear' and 'Dole Out' buttons to make it easy to spend land or switch ship preferences.
  
• Now refunding factories for a ship type no longer returns ALL resources spent, instead it returns 60%. You may need a better variety of ships to tackle the enemy than before, and will need to think carefully whether respecing your fleet composition is worth the metal and crystal sacrificed.
  
• Balance changes to avoid shield getting so incredibly OP and hull being so underwhelming late game. Also make Shield Damage Multiplier weaker against hull just as it is strong against shields.
  
• General rebalancing of certain units and prestige abilities.
  
• Parapets can now move, slowly.
  
• Fix bug where original game sometimes didn't let you scroll, especially during intense battles. Also better tolerate a broader range of finger / mouse movement speeds in scrolling (both faster and slower).
  
• Fix bug where mothership and mercenary damage bars on military tab could go above the resource view, and fix merc damage bar bug.
  
• Fix typo that said 'Shield Hull' instead of 'Shield Health'.
  
• Fix bugs showing extremely long time displays (falsely said storage was full when it was not).
  
• Modest performance improvements.
  
• Job select screen now offers users a hint of how to unlock more jobs.
  
• Alleviate max level of prestige abilities of sniper job to be consistent with other jobs.
  
• Start using embedded resources instead of separate files in preparation for iOS release.
  
• Remake: Fix bug where planets and other core things on main map screen wouldn't get drawn in some cases.
  
• Upgrade to golang v1.19.2
  
• Upgrade ebiten v2.4.10-prerelease, more bugfixes.
  

• Upgrade ebiten v2.4.6 pre-release, which fixes android image rendering issue on app switch, and more crash bugs.
  
• Totally redo the way android packaging is done, for multiple reasons including to support .aab (smaller download size!), and allow for real java code (might be better at hiding navigation bar, for example).
  
• Fix issue in remake where scrolling around the map lagged by one frame.
  
• Fix recent regression where android demo wouldn't save.
  
• Fix bug in build script that caused game to mistakenly get stuck displaying 0.13.1.0 instead of the actual version in various places.
  
• Fix bug with opening tutorial screen not darkening the upper left corner of the screen.
  
• Fix bug where remake would get slower, cumulatively, each time you started a new map (until you closed and reopened the game).
  
• Fix a long-standing bug in web demo that made web demo saving/loading work incorrectly, and prevented it from working from a cell phone browser.