Update to the work in progress build. You can access the latest beta build by right clicking on Lost Fleet in your steam library -> clicking Properties -> Betas -> and selecting 'testing - beta branch' in the Beta Participation dropdown.
Improvements
Added level up message to HUD and added perk descriptions to buy menu.
Fleet XP UI now respects the player's current team, XP bar no longer overflows.
Spectate cam now defaults to auto rotate when a gamepad is plugged in.
Fixed floaty spectate & orbital camera rotation.
Fix for auto turrets attacking target locked friendly ships.
Balance
Added a guaranteed nearby resource deposit to Infinite Mode.
Reduced XP requirement for 1st fleet level up 1500 to 1200 so your first resource deposit will always grant a Refinery.
Decreased Mule cargo capacity from 125 to 50 (I'll be testing various tweaks to the income curve with this version).
Increased spawn interval of Camels from fleet perks (120 to 140s).
Increased Pegasus and Artemis carrier hangar respawn rates from 40 to 90s.
Paragon hanger respawn rates increased from 30 to 80s.
Known Issues
Selling certain ships while in flight doesn't free up the spectate camera right away.
New perk list in the buy menu doesn’t resolution scale properly.
Hud doesn’t return when exiting command mode, buying a new ship resets the Hud.
New Beta Build 'Version 10.05'
Hey everyone, for those of you that are new we run a beta branch that updates roughly once a week and we take feedback in the Gameplay Megathread. You can access the latest beta build by right clicking on Lost Fleet in your steam library -> clicking Properties -> Betas -> and selecting 'testing - beta branch' in the Beta Participation dropdown.
Moving forward I'll be doing short news posts for each beta build in addition to the forum posts I've been doing up to this point (future beta posts will only show up under the game's tab, not the library homepage).
Update 11 will be focused on Infinite Mode improvements such as improved wave balance and pacing, long promised side events such as mini bosses, refugees joining your fleet and enemy depots you can raid, as well as dialogue & UI improvements to better explain the mode's mechanics.
The current beta build is now 10.05, notes below:
Improvements
Added missile threat warning to HUD.
Added 'Command Mode Time Scale' under gameplay options, when playing solo and entering command mode the game will enter slow motion. Default value is half speed, setting the timescale slider to 1 disables this feature.
Entering Command Mode now longer forces you out of free ships such as Mules and Freebees.
Fixes
Fixed ships getting stuck in the sell animation when you use the sell hotkey in command mode (thanks rithicae.monroe).
Fixed NPC strikecraft not using boost when trying to gain distance from a target. Improved Sabre AI dogfighting.
Auto turret systems will now prioritize the ship’s target if it matches the turret system’s target type.
Update 10: Combat Overhaul
Hey everyone! Update 10 is up on the main branch, notes are below but tldr: We've added weak point damage, floating damage numbers and reworked many of the weapons, abilities and ship stats to make for more dynamic combat.
Version 10.0 Notes:
Improvements
All ships now have weak point damage! Target natural vulnerabilities such as cockpits, bridges and exposed ship sections to do extra damage. Weak points appear as yellow portions in command view, you can inspect each ship in the Firing Range mode.
Added floating damage numbers and critical hit effects for striking weak points (can be disabled in gameplay options). Floating numbers will also appear for events that generate income for your team.
Torpedo overhaul: Torpedoes can now be intercepted by autocannon turrets and fighters! AI point defense turrets will engage them automatically, so you'll want to steer around enemy defenses before moving in for the kill. Primary Fire is a quick and nimble low damage variant, while the secondary fire is a slow but high damage nuclear warhead.
HUD Improvements: Boost bar and speed indicator have been moved to the bottom left, the primary fire indicator is now the center left bar and secondary fire is center right, the icons for your primary and secondary abilities are displayed just bellow the corresponding ammo bars.
Micro Jump has been reworked to function as a hold and release ability. A hologram of your ship will mark your estimated exit point and holding past your maximum jump range will cancel the jump.
New weapon and ability icons.
Improved collision sounds, increased the volume of most sound effects.
New loading screen tips system.
Balance Changes:
Tweaks to campaign difficulty, map layouts.
Major overhaul of ship weapons and abilities. virtually every ship has had its secondary ability improved or replaced with a new attack.
Freebee: Armor boost functions more like an iframe dodge now, with high damage reduction a short duration and quick recharge time.
Hornet: Secondary fire is now seeker missile.
Swordfish: Swapped ability for rocket pods. Improved speed and handling, reduced beam duration and increased charge speed for overall higher up time when you need it.
Dragon: Improved handling.
Talon has been reworked as a heavy bomber with dumbfire rockets and a secondary countermeasures system. Countermeasures disrupt the targeting of seeker missiles and detonate nearby enemy torpedoes, allowing you to support larger ships.
Boxer: Swapped secondary ability for a longer ranged power attack. Health increased, shotgun spread reduced.
Raven: Health increased. Reworked pulse laser HUD elements so that a full ammo bar good and an empty bar is bad like other weapons. Changed tooltips accordingly.
Tweaks to frigate speed and boost stats to reduce excessive kiting.
Paladin: Paladin: Increased primary rate of fire and reduced damage, secondary is now heavy quad cannon.
Cyclops: Changed flight model to 6 DOF strikecraft style.
Revenant: Enabled manual control of turrets and moved broadside attack to secondary fire. Increased turret DPS and decreased its accuracy.
Hammerhead: Side turrets now auto anti-strikecraft, secondary is now heavy attack.
Paragon: Reduced turret DPS.
Titan: Secondary is now Micro Jump.
Fixes:
Fixed missing anti-aliasing for a number of sprites.
Fixed Pegasus and Artemis heal turret rotations not syncing to clients.
Fix for non-functional Ranger turrets & Hammerhead side turrets when flown by a client in multiplayer.
Fix for carriers getting stuck in warp out animation when selling at the same time one of its fighters is destroyed.
Fixed for several muzzle effects shooting off into vertical space.
Fix for Pulse Laser appearing to shoot off into infinite space when firing outside its range.
Flare ability now properly disables missile tracking, destroys nearby torpedoes.
Adjusted death sequences.
Update 9 Released
Improvements:
Added ‘Call for healing’ button (default: ‘left ctrl’) assigns the closest Camel repair drone without orders to assist you, press multiple times for multiple healers. Counts as a command so Camel will stick with you until you die or someone gives it another order in command mode (default clear order hotkey in command mode is now ‘backspace’).
Added sell ship ('g') and target lock closest ship (‘mouse 3’) hotkeys. You may need to reset your key bindings if you've played on an older build or set new binds if you use custom hotkeys.
Improved turret and autocannon consistency & responsiveness for clients.
Carriers will now automatically form up around the Mothership unless given an order.
Carrier secondary ability now commands your fighters to attack your current target, press a second time to let your fighters pick their own targets.
Pulse lasers: Audio pitch rises with heat buildup, added smoke when overheating, added missing muzzle effect to Raven.
Infinite Mode: Reworked spawning system with better enemy placement and improved performance.
Fixes:
Fleet level perks no longer spam the firing range with extra ships.
Fix for AI controlled autocannon turrets not appearing to fire for clients.
Fixed bad video memory setting that would cap texture resolution at a lower value than intended.
Fix for fighter escorts skipping range estimation and nuzzling escort targets.
Fix for end of match stats text persisting past server restart.
Fixed fleet perks not resetting at end of match.
Holding the middle mouse button no longer disables steering.
Removed old drift mode setting from control bindings.
Removed overlapping text in tab menu player score card.
Fixed esc menu activating HUD in lobby.
In-game esc menu now hides the HUD.
Updated Hammerhead reticle.
Balance Changes:
Increased Mothership armor from .5 to 1, fixed strafing thrust was 10x intended value.
Mothership hangar no longer scales to player count, always spawns 5 Mules.
Removed extra refinery from Versus mode.
Adjusted map 2b (bleu belt) spawn waves to prevent early Titan wave.
Added stronger late spawn waves to map M3b “Abyss”.
Adjusted stage 4 enemy spawns to be more gradual.
Reworked Hammerhead reload stats for more uptime, added reload sounds.
Adjusted Zeus boost stats and effects to bring it in line with other ships.
Increased Talon health from 150 to 180, Boxer from 150 to 210.
Increased Paladin health from 1800 to 2000, armor from 2 to 4.
Increased Paragon flak turret damage to 10 damage, 1.5 area damage.
Update 8 Released to main branch!
Improvements:
Menu overhaul, changed layout to be more controller friendly, added sound feedback and improved UI consistency. Still a work in progress, main menu background video is placeholder. Renamed skirmish to versus mode.
New and improved HUD reduces screen clutter and improves contact reticle layout.
Ship trackers in the top left of the screen now animate when under attack, clicking them focuses your camera on that ship.
Increased health of all ships by ~50%, for more detailed balance changes check out the Megathread .
New fleet leveling system to replace the old 'Donate to Refinery' fund button. Your fleet gains xp from income: mining, collecting scrap from kills, side objectives, etc. The end goal is fleet level awards a passive perk such as free support ships, stat modifiers, passive abilities. Some of these will be random, others like refinery support will be the same each playthrough.
The UI for this is still being worked on, right now perks fill in your fleet with support ships that were a pain to keep track off in multiplayer. Refinery's are earned at levels 1 and 4. Mothership repair drone hanger at Level 2, Artemis at level 3. Pegasus at level 5. Fleet level resets after each match.
This should help fix the problem of single player teams being able to snowball their refinery count early on compared to teams with multiple players or bots that had to split their income.
Infinite mode improvements: Reworked resource spawning (one asteroid is guaranteed to spawn relatively close to the mothership), reduced map size, removed enemy gates directly above and below the mothership, improved spawn positioning, new spawn lists (balance pass and NPC variety). Reworked a number of systems to increase balance consistency.
Campaign mode balance pass: adjusted spawns, positioning, map sizes, new NPC enemies in stage 5c ‘Metallic Clouds’. Set fixed positions for resource spawns on 1st campaign map.
Added resource asteroid types with different mining speeds and resource yields.
Ships launched from carriers now spawn from inside them and no longer play warp effects.
Changed default command mode hotkey to spacebar, renamed tooltip to clarify 'map mode' is for giving ship commands.
Background work to support future Steam rich presence support.
Fixes:
Fixed discrepancy between acceleration of AI fighters and player ones, AI ships now less aggressive with boosts when pursuing a target.
Several new sounds, volume changes, fixed certain bullet impact sounds not respecting the master volume setting.
Fixed inconsistent tracker icons for teams 3 and 4.
Fixed team 4 material for boxer wreckage.
Improved paragon turret own hull avoidance.
Reduced heal beam glow to be less messy in fog.
Fixed Armor Boost ability stuck assigned to right click.
Improved end boss beam turret own hull avoidance.
Smoothed out Mule dropoff marker motion for clients.
Fix for radar enable disable getting inverted from UI toggle key.
Fixed mission and music reset on server restart after match end.
Fixed Camel engine audio source offset making engines inaudible, other audio fixes.
Tweaked missile impact effects to prevent strobing targets.
Removed excessive knockback from unguided rockets.
Fixed several mismatched ship tooltips.
Fixed NPC capital ships getting stuck firing when players leave a ship with a friendly target.
Fixed incorrect radar sizing for large sharks.
Added missing reload sounds to Sabre, Paladin.
Update 7.1
Hey everyone quick bugfix update this week, the next major update in early March will be focused on more improvements to the Campaign and Infinite modes, notes below:
Increased capital ship turn thrust to compensate for the angular drag fix in Update 7.
Fixed capital ship afterburner not recharging until boost button released.
Fixed warp effect playing for clients when mothership was still charging in Infinite mode.
Enemy waves will now increment while undiscovered during scout missions to help prevent snowballing in the campaign.
Removed stray aiming reticle for Artemis, planning on making the frigate heal beams controllable later.
Fixed some missing/old ship tooltips.
Update 7 Released
Hey everyone! Update 7 is up on the main branch, here are the notes:
Improvements:
Complete overhaul of Strikecraft camera system, collisions should feel less jarring and flying fighters should feel much more dynamic. Holding the camera swap button (default 'z') now lets you look around.
Removed Drift Mode and overhauled flight values for most ships. Consolidating flight models helps us focus on creating a single well balanced feel for each ship and frees up a button to give ships a second ability.
New HUD Radar and Target tracker.
Added Firing Range game mode for testing out ships.
Added First Pass end-of-match stats screen.
Audio and visual effect improvements.
Many ship changes effecting weapons, abilities and movement. Highlights include:
Torpedoes now decrease thrust in proportion to remaining fuel and factor target distance when the aim point returns a position in empty space, also improved torpedo hitbox.
Freebee is now armed with a Pulse Laser and Armor Boost ability.
Reworked Hornet as an Autocannon fighter to better match its ability.
Primary weapon for Ranger is now a Plasma Bomb launcher.
Boxer now has the self-repair ability
New Guided Missiles.
Fixes:
Fixed Music and Post Processing Volume/Skybox not syncing with clients in Infinite Mode.
Fixed client aiming reticles getting stuck on death.
Fixed AI ships getting stuck after rallying on the Mothership.
Fixed nearest minable asteroid UI for clients.
Removed excessive collision sounds(no more bonging or ricochet noise).
Fixed Capital Ships getting incorrect angular drag values that were too low.
Fixed Armor Boost.
Filled in missing Capital Ship thruster particle effects, boost effects.
Fixed a number of ability cooldowns not updating the HUD.
A number of client fixes for guided missiles.
Client fixes for a number of HUD elements.
Fixed map obstacles marked as resource asteroids on HUD radar.
Lowered Carrier AI optimal guard range (Paragon sometimes try to leave the map).
Slingshot now alternates between upper and lower launchers.
Fixed Small Shark using the wrong weapon.
Added version text to lobby menu.
Test Builds on the Beta Branch
A big thanks to everyone that supported us through the holiday sale! We'll be focusing on Infinite Mode and quality of life improvements for the next major update. General list of improvements to Infinite Mode we're working on include:
Stat tracking such as elapsed time, kills, resources mined, spent, etc.
Implementing side objectives.
Better markers for enemies, the tags marking incoming waves were a bit confusing and spawned enemies currently have no marker until you lock onto them.
Refine the map size, improve object spawning and spacing.
Improve AI large obstacle navigation.
Improve enemy variety, in late game npc enemy types will make an appearance.
Still working out the feasibility of deeper roguelike elements such as unlockable ships, player or team wide buffs and debuffs, named boss enemies/unique friendly ships, etc.
If you'd like to keep up with our progress a new test build is up on the Beta Branch and we're taking week to week feedback in the Gameplay Megathread. We'll be uploading new builds at roughly weekly intervals with the goal of a main branch update at the end of the month.
To access the test version of the game:right click on Lost Fleet in your Steam library and go to Properties-> Betas -> Beta Participation dropdown -> "testing - beta branch"
Beta Build Update 7 Test 1 Notes:
Decreased size of Infinite Mode maps by ~10%
Added Firing Range game mode. Test out any of the ships without mining and blow away target enemies.
Update 6.5 Released
We wanted to do a quick update before we break for the holidays. Here are the notes:
Infinite mode is now available in the game mode dropdown; Still very much a work in progress but I'm hoping that as the mode expands this will be the primary way to play the game. Added new skyboxes and map objects for over 100 environmental combinations.
Fixed warp effects playing outside of the jump countdown.
Re-enabled velocity limits for ships.
Paragon turrets are now more powerful and controllable.
Reset Paragon and Pegasus camera controls to capital ship default.
Added glow effect to Pegasus hangar.
Improved command selection icon sprite and sizing.
Fixed command selection icons displaying when selected units were behind the camera.
Fixed orders remaining visible on the command when deselecting units using group binds.
Fixed carriers getting stuck selling if missing ships
Repair units will now reject commands to heal enemies
Increased target finding distance when holding the target button to find nearest enemy
After New Years we'll be working on expanding Infinite mode, special thanks to everyone who provided feedback in the megathread and to Splattercatgaming for the recent coverage. Take care everyone!
Update 6: New Targeting system, Turret system, and more!
Thanks for your patience everyone, detailed update notes are below and as always hit us up the forums with your feedback:
New Targeting System: Targets in the center of the screen are now automatically selected (box reticle), the target button will lock your current target (circle reticle) and a long press will target lock the nearest preferred enemy for your current ship.
New Turret Aiming System: We replaced the old world space reticles with a single center screen aim point. Your turrets will set their range to the distance of your current target so you can focus on blasting.
New carrier dedicated to supplying repair drones, the Artemis.
A number of balance changes: Doubled damage and a new ability for the Freebee, area damage for the Paladin, tougher Rangers, tons of smaller changes.
Added Anti-Aliasing mode options to video settings.
New options and menu fixes: Fixed a number of gameplay sliders resetting when quitting the gameplay menu, added sensitivity options and relative mouse settings.
Updated visual effects for a number of ships and weapons.
Improved accuracy of AI turrets and target leading HUD when using autocannon weapons.
Added world space markers to make it easier to keep track of your important ships.
Reformatted lobby UI to be easier to read and prevent clipping in ultrawide.
Added 'fire until empty' value to beam weapon modding.
Most of the work in progress environments have been added to the skirmish selection
A bunch of smaller gameplay fixes.
The next update will be focused on introducing infinite mode, which will essentially be a more freeform version of the campaign mode. The idea is to create a more roguelike experience where any enemy, environment, or side mission can appear on any stage. You'll be able to keep racking up the score and completing stages as long as your fleet can hold out. Infinite mode will be fleshed out over a number of updates but we plan the initial release with Update 7 to hit before new years.
