The Last Federation
TLF Version 1.606 Released (Credit Bombardment)
There's a bunch of other great stuff, too, in the bugfix and clarity categories. Your options for dealing with rescued pilots are now a lot more obvious, for one. When planets are captured while defense fleets are still in orbit, those fleets no longer switch sides inappropriately. Fighting pirates no longer angers the race that the pirates happen to be. Several quests that had some bugs now do not.
Orbital Bombing, v2
Orbital Bombing is one of my favorite new additions. Let us know how you feel about the balance on it; it may be a bit strong, but it does cost money, so we'll see. Basically you used to be able to use a special ability to spawn Orbital Bombers inside battle, and then as long as they were alive they'd bomb the planet from orbit. This was fiddly and never felt right for a host of reasons (it was tedious, for one).
Now the Orbital Bombers themselves are attack craft like any other, and kind of send mini-nukes inside the battlefield, but don't affect the planet surface at all. Instead, you have a new dispatch that lets you do their old job for them -- but faster, and more effectively, thanks to the magic of dispatches and fast-forwarding in them. ;)
Earning Credit, v2
When it comes to Credit, hoo boy. There had been complaints for a long time that attacking the AFA to grind for credit was really the only viable way to get enough credit late game -- and that you could get a TON there. And that there were not enough ways to peaceably earn credit.
All right, so the first order of business was to heavily nerf the amount of credit you earn in combat -- you now gain 1/10th the amount you did before. That's a counterintuitive place to start, but basically if it was already so attractive to grind, and this was the primary source of income, then yeah we had a problem. When I looked at this, you could gain around 8000 credit in a solar month when fighting a sizeable battle, while the most generous dispatches were maybe 200 credit max. And many were more like 10 credit per month. Wow what a difference.
To add to the problem with the balance on the combat side, that was all income from fighting ships -- so you'd only get that full 8000 if you auto-resolved, or if you really fought an extended battle just for the sake of earning credit. We've had this sort of unintentional balance problem in AI War before, too: basically if you have a way to do grinding at all, for some players that means that they will do it (and hate it) in order to play "optimally." Depending on the game, I fall into that category of players.
All right, so killing everybody in combat is no longer so profitable that it encourages grinding much. So what is there to compensate? Glad you asked. :)
First of all, almost all of the existing credit-earning dispatches earn you far more credit than they previously did. Depending on the dispatch, they earn you 3, 6x, or 12x more. Expanding usable land area for a race was something that was never attractive to me to do personally before, but now I find that it's a key part of an early-game strategy. You can rack up 40,000 credits in just half a year or so. Doing this expansion actually has a lot of benefits for the AI, too: you make it so that they don't hit population density problems so fast, and you also make it so that they can divert that portion of their budget to other things -- like shipbuilding. This is an aspect of strategy that was never really viable before, because expanding the usable land area yourself was such a bad deal for you personally that helping the AI via it was not really on the table tactically.
Next up, a lot of the regular friendly actions that give you flat credit (like 5,000 credit for granting spacefaring tech) now give you a LOT more credit. The one for delivering spacefaring now gives you a quick 20,000, for instance. These particular missions that have been buffed in credit reward are things that you can't just do endlessly, and in some cases they come with drawbacks (like having another spacefaring race that you might not really trust). But they provide a way to get off to a much more profitable start to the game, which really opens up your options much faster -- with no grinding, but with appropriate tradeoff costs.
Then there are the assassins and thoraxian hunter that can sometimes sneak up and attack you. I don't know about you, but that has always kind of annoyed me, even if it does make great thematic sense. I've been tempted to remove the mechanic, but it makes just so much sense and is fitting when you are in the wrong part of the solar system and you've really made someone angry. So I had a thought, today: what if these were really big credit rewards? So when you get attacked, sure, it's annoying to have an interruption to whatever you were previously doing. But it's also a windfall, which makes it exciting. It will be interesting to hear how you feel about it, but it makes me go "ooh, assassins!" now. "Hey Greedo, whatcha got on ya, there? It's your fault for coming after me in the first place, you know..."
Lastly, we come to quests. A lot of the quests gave either no credit reward at all, or a very tiny one (in the 500 range, max). These quests typically represent some major powerful things that you can do for the races, so they were already attractive to do. And you can't farm them, because of their limited nature. So I thought: why not make it so that they are directly profitable to you, personally, as a mercenary as well? It makes thematic sense, and from a gameplay standpoint also works well. So the most stingy of these now give you 2,000 credit, and the most lucrative (and infrequent) offer 40,000.
All in all you will probably have more credit now than you did in past games. And I'm cool with that, because that gives you more options. Some options may now be overpowered since you can afford them more frequently, and so there may need to be another round of balancing in terms of either the costs of certain political deals or the scale of credit granted from various sources. In fact, I'll be shocked if some sort of further tuning isn't needed. But I figured I would err on the side of the player's favor in this case. Even having more credit, I don't think that trivializes the strategic game (particularly on higher strategic difficulties, whereas I think most people have been previously treating Normal as Hard, which is not great). But what having more credit does do is prevent the game from dragging on simply because you are waiting to have options. Not that that was previously epidemic, but it happened more than I liked.
Let us know how things are looking, if you have suggestions or bug reports, etc!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.
Click here for the official forum discussion about this release.
TLF Version 1.605 Released (Disease And Order)
The most impactful bit is how diseases affect death rates -- expect some much more substantial shakeups from diseases from now on.
There are also changes here that help to balance out the late game in Invasion and Betrayal mode, specifically making sure that neither players nor other races can go for a technological wipe-out victory by getting Time Travel or God Mote.
The "harm RCI" dispatches no longer pay you credits, and instead cost you a slight bit. Not much, but enough to make it so that you can't just do that with impunity for free indefinitely. Helping the RCI at a planet still gains you credits just like before, which makes sense.
There are a variety of other things that are fixes and clarifications and balance tweaks and so forth. It's really a completely eclectic list of small stuff, so it's hard to summarize without just repeating the entire release notes list, which is linked above.
Let us know how things are looking, if you have suggestions or bug reports, etc!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.
Click here for the official forum discussion about this release.
TLF Version 1.604 Released (A Dangerous Surplus)
The big thing here is how races handling mining of resources, and new racial actions that they can take when they build up an excess of resources. The details of it are here, and it definitely adds a new element to the game.
There are also a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks, including a major performance improvement for very-lategame savegames in particular. In one particular save we had from Acenoid, super-fast-forward and regular speed were pretty much identical -- wow, that's terrible. Now the super fast forward speed acts like you'd expect. There may be some bugs relating from the fix to this, as it was a fairly major colonoscopy... but definitely worth it.
There are also a variety of really good fixes in here, but those are the highlights.
Let us know how things are looking, if you have suggestions or bug reports, etc!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.
Click here for the official forum discussion about this release.
TLF Version 1.603 Released (Life, Death, And Irreconcilable Hatred)
One cool new feature is to be able to make notes for yourself to come back to between sessions.
Another big balance piece is that if races wind up hating each other or you past the point of -1000, they'll never recover their esteem of the other race or you. This prevents situations where you absolutely screw someone over and then spend a lot of time grinding to get them to like you again. If someone hates you -1000, you guys are blood enemies and you'll have to figure out some other way to deal with them.
The big big big thing this time around is lots of refinement and adjustments to births and deaths. A number of things have been corrected, improved, and in particular clarified. There are a lot of notes in there, but basically it acts more like you would think it should. And you can see exactly why it is working the way it works, via tooltips, like the other various numbers of late.
Lastly, some of the RCI values were giving seemingly-wrong stats because they were combining planetary compatibility and the RCI value, which was confusing as heck. The way that the economic RCI affects manufacturing is now much better, and science gets improved by medical scores, too, now.
Overall, the changes to the births/deaths and the RCI stuff make it so that you have more tools in your arsenal to mess with the races on a planetary level rather than via space combat. Sometimes that's really the sticking point, after all -- you dominate in space, but just can't break through the lines on the surface no matter what.
Let us know how things are looking, if you have suggestions or bug reports, etc!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.
Click here for the official forum discussion about this release.
TLF Version 1.601 Released (Double-Wide)
There are a bunch of fixes to the armada management window in this version for betrayal mode, so you can really play that mode a lot more like it was intended to be played, now. Sorry about those!
The last two Obscura ship bullet pattern designs are now in place thanks to Misery, and boy are they doozies. These introduce the concept of "bosses," which I think is pretty cool, and something we will likely explore even further as part of a theoretical future expansion. For now it's a really nice sub-component of the Obscura, in any case.
There are also a number of fixes relating to defending various kinds of planets against invader armadas using your own flagship. These affect all modes of the game. Oh, and the Pirate Raven flagships now should be harassing pretty much only you, not flying about after other ships like crazy. So this is something where their extreme speed should no longer cause "I can't chase them" issues. The idea is that they come for you and you pretty much have to fight them broadsides for a bit until they speed off and then return.
Let us know how things are looking, if you have suggestions or bug reports, etc!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.
Click here for the official forum discussion about this release.
TLF Version 1.600 Released (Tsar Bomba)
Science Revisions
60 very-boring-somewhat-confusing techs were removed from the tech tree, a ton of techs were changed quite substantially, and 19 all-new techs have been added. The way that research happens is more balanced now, and proceeds at a more interesting pace. Science Outposts have more of a clear and present purpose, and holding on to them can be key for both you and the AI to a degree that was never the case before.
Shipbuilding/Manufacturing
Previously, the concepts of shipbuilding (for ships) and manufacturing (for buildings and outposts) were separate, and it was really confusing. These have been merged together in a sensible way, and also completely rebalanced from the ground up, just like the science stuff was. Manufacturing Outposts are also now more valuable, for you and for the AI, which again is great.
Ground Combat
Ground combat is something that could get absolutely bonkers out of balance in the late game, mainly because it was using multiplicative math instead of additive math. This was the problem with the other areas that are being rebalanced here, too. The ground combat is now balanced a new way, and much more sensibly. In the early and middle game, the results are pretty close to what they used to be, although there is more variance now in terms of decisions made during gameplay having larger effects (mainly in terms of which techs are or are not researched). And in the late game, the ground combat stays sane.
Space Combat Power
This was a huge thing to rebalance, and really important. Previously there were a lot of things that were really unclear, and those 60 "mark level for specific ship" improvements were a big part of that. In general there was just a lot of decentralization and special-casing here, so that it was incredibly difficult to tell what was going on at a glance.
But even more than that, the general feel of the progression of this has changed. There are now distinct jumps in power, rather than a slow small increase in power that is hardly noticeable. I spent a lot of time working on making the jumps in power something that were noticeable, but not so severe that they were frustrating or game-ending. I think I hit a good balance, but let me know what you think.
Why does it matter that the jumps are noticeable? Well, it helps with tension, honestly, and makes it so that it MATTERS if you are behind on techs. The new system also rewards you a lot more than before for unlocking more flagship abilities, too. The way that races handle the space combat power upgrades is now entirely different in terms of their tech research, and it can make science play a much larger role in space battles than it previously did.
Overall what this does is create desperate swings in power at various times, so that you have a chance to suddenly seize a temporary opportunity or you have to compensate for a poor oversight. You have a number of years before this really becomes a factor, and the computer adviser already tells you about this in no uncertain terms, so new players should be fine. But there were some players who previously just kind of ignored these techs and yet were still successful... I don't think that will be possible anymore, which is certainly by design. But at the same time, I believe the "this is so complex and also so incremental that I don't care to look into it" feeling that was causing the players to ignore these techs has been resolved.
Better Insight Into Ground Power And Space Power
And on the racial power grid and at each planet's details screen, you can now hover over the ground power number and see a breakdown of WHY the number is what it is. That's understandably been a longstanding request, and it was something we had already done in the past for manufacturing and science.
On the racial power grid, you can also see this same breakdown for the ship power multiplier. This is something that is completely centralized, so there's nothing needed anywhere else. For ground power there is a local component for defenders, hence being able to see it in both places.
Military Outposts
Military Outposts have a completely different function, now. They buff the space multiplier and the ground troop multiplier, end of story. They don't produce armadas or anything like that. This plays a lot nicer with Betrayal mode, which is good. But it also just makes more sense and is more clear with the AIs, too. Even in the standard federation-formation mode (or Invasion mode, for that matter), you can use military outposts gifted to the right races to really help shore up their weaknesses. Or ones for yourself to help increase your own flagship's power.
The AI for how the races deal with outposts in general, and what they prioritize building, has been completely reworked. The races are much better now at trying to shore up their weaknesses with the use of outposts, or to in general stack onto their primary goal (aka Thoraxians with space power). Previously it was a bit more generalized, not as good.
Invasion Mode Updates
In the prior version, Invasion mode was basically "you die now" mode. I had fixed the AI for the Obscura, and they were then just running amok. In looking at how to fix that, I was realizing that I really needed to go ahead and switch to the additive model for the space power and science and all that jazz. So hence the long foray into all the great base game updates that make this release so huge. Anyway, with all of those things in hand, I also did a bunch of balance work on Invasion mode.
This mode is still quite hard, but how hard depends on the strategic difficulty you choose. On normal, the Obscura tend to win within 60 years, typically. They don't lose. ;) On Easy, they'll still tend to win within 60 years, but sometimes they'll lose even in observer mode. Rare, but it happens. On strategic difficulty modes higher than normal, the situation gets increasingly dire increasingly fast. So basically you need to wipe out the obscura pretty quickly, or else you're frankly going to lose.
In general when it comes to invasion mode, if you get into a long stalemate, you'll eventually lose. On the higher difficulties for this mode, the only way to win is to basically play a "rush" style of game, in the Starcraft sense, where you deny them resources and expansion power, and just cut them off before they get started. Any way you play it, though, the strategies required for invasion mode really are incredibly alien to that of the main game mode.
(This post is so long that it has to be continued in the comments! Sorry...)
TLF Version 1.502 Released (Obscura Relicui)
Actually, there are some very good things for the base game, too. Chief among those is that now the trade routes are vastly clearer in terms of why they can't happen at a given time, and the logic for when and why they can happen is actually simpler now, too. Since trade routes are so central to good relations between races, this is a big increase in clarity overall.
In the expansion, your fights with the Obscura are now not just a madness of shots flying everywhere. It keeps the fights to four-at-a-time even if there are more ships stacked up to appear as existing ships disappear. This means the fights are still very hard, but they don't get insta-death impossible like they could previously.
Speaking of the Obscura, the Invasion Mode for the expansion has seen a tremendous number of updates and refinements based on early feedback. The Obscura no longer use technologies like the other races do, and in general the balance and AI of the invasive race has been heavily altered. Before it was possible for them to just tootle around being all mighty but not really going anywhere for 20 years. Running the same simulation now (just observer mode without me interacting with anything), they wipe out 5 other races in 9 years. Bit of a difference.
It may be that the invasion mode is impossibly hard now, I'm not really sure. If so, the Obscura can certainly be tuned in terms of their stats. But behaviorally I think they are now where they need to be, at any rate, so it's a numbers game beyond that point. Probably. ;)
Betrayal Mode for the expansion has also seen some fixes and tweaks. Your new armadas were coming out incorrectly weak, and your general stats were mirroring that of the race you first took over too much. The focus was more on Invasion Mode in this release, but that was also the one that needed more at the moment.
Let us know how things are looking, if you have suggestions or bug reports, etc!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.
Click here for the official forum discussion about this post.
Betrayed Hope (Expansion 1) Beta Begins - Plus Daily Deal!
Beta Launching Today!
The beta of the expansions is now released on Steam, and in celebration of that there is a brief one-day-only 50%-off discount promotion being run on the base game. There's never been a better time to get into the game! The expansion will remain in beta until mid-November, when the game will hit version 2.0 and the expansion will be considered fully released.
What Is The State Of The Beta?
The expansion is pretty much feature complete, although we are still working on 3 of the new ships. Everything else is fully in place, although bear in mind that the tutorials for the new game modes will leave a lot to be desired on day 1. We’ll use the early feedback on that to quickly get them up to snuff.
The other big thing is balance: the new game modes and new ships have been tested, but only internally, and this game is huge. So you’re going to find stuff that we missed, particularly at first, and that’s why we’re doing a beta.
Beyond that, we’ll just be going through a nice relaxed balance and bugfixing period until the full launch of the expansion in mid-November. Thank you for your support!
About The Expansion
Betrayal Mode: “I am not the Hydral you thought you knew. You thought I was content to stay on the sidelines as a minor mercenary? You thought I would work for unification from the shadows? The other races killed my people, and I will have vengeance, not unification. I will drive every last one of them out of the system, and replace them with billions of mindless servitor robots to work at my command. One day, perhaps, my servitors and I will discover a way to raise the dead.”
Invasion Mode: “Nothing unites enemies like an even stronger common foe. The Obscura come from outside the solar system, and have already wiped out one of the 8 races. The remainder are scrambling to protect themselves from this grave new threat, and I myself am incredibly outclassed when I try full frontal assaults. I must rally the other races into unified action while striking from the shadows in my own ship. If we can drive the Obscura menace from the solar system, a Federation will be easily established… with whoever survives.”
Features Added In The Expansion
<*>Betrayal Mode: Ignore your ideals and conquer the solar system with armadas of your own!
<*>Invasion Mode: Obscura invaders have already wiped out one race, and now threaten all the others. Can you rally a counterattack?
<*>8 Boss-like Obscura ships with crazy SHMUP-style bullet patterns.
<*>9 new fleet ships used by the AI with yet more interesting bullet patterns.
<*>2 new solar system backgrounds to choose from.
<*>12 new Offensive abilities, 12 new Specialty abilities, and 8 new Operational abilities.
<*>New Quests for boosting RCI values or temporarily staving off diseases without a vaccine.
<*>19 new achievements.
<*>13 new music tracks!
TLF Version 1.040-1.042 Released (The Need For Speed)
The biggest thing you will notice is that the speed of all the shots you fire is now doubled, making them far faster than enemy shots are. This makes it easier to hit enemy ships that are running away or doing fast passes against you, and just feels more satisfying in general, too. In general this is a lot more in keeping with other SHMUPs, I realized. This may cause some balance problems in the short term (in your favor), but if that's the case those can be ironed out. The speed of the enemy ships and shots is really well tuned, so it's just a matter of your ability to effectively deal damage to them, and their ability to take it, at this point.
A bunch of dispatches have been updated. Various ones now pay you credits again rather than costing you credits, and a couple are more powerful and more clear. There are a few other places where clarifying language has been added to help new players.
Also, this release removes a couple of exploits in edge cases with auto-resolve for battles, so that is more balanced.
Ongoing Updates
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been a dry spell for the last couple of months in terms of the speed of updates on the game, but we're going to be continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.
As you've already seen, it won't always be on a consistent schedule, but if you're familiar with our post-release support for AI War: Fleet Command over the past 5 years, that's basically the arc that we are currently expecting here unless something unexpectedly changes. There are only two of us programmers, so when we have to divert our attention to something, there's not a lot of granularity available to us, heh.
At present we are also working on an expansion TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site on Monday, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in mid November, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.
TLF Version 1.034-1.039 Released (Eat Hot Lead!)
How big of a graphics improvement are we talking? On high-end cards this can literally increase your framerate by several hundred fps if you have vsync off. On lower-end cards I'm not sure exactly what it will do (it will vary), but it may let you get close to 60fps where you previously would have bogged down to 10fps if the screen was filled with bullets.
1.034 came out almost a week ago with some bugfixes, although we didn't post about it at the time aside from on the wiki. But it fixes an issue that was causing races to not ever build their Ultimate Buildings, as well as fixing a bug that made Core Coolers and Virtual Reality Centers not tell you what they do.
1.038 came out this morning, and adds new options where you can drop off captured pilots either as Expatriates or as Resistance Fighters. This makes for a really nice alternative to either giving them back to their host race, ransoming them to their host race, or selling them into slavery.
Ongoing Updates
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been a dry spell for the last couple of months in terms of the speed of updates on the game, but we're going to be continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.
As you've already seen, it won't always be on a consistent schedule, but if you're familiar with our post-release support for AI War: Fleet Command over the past 5 years, that's basically the arc that we are currently expecting here unless something unexpectedly changes. There are only two of us programmers, so when we have to divert our attention to something, there's not a lot of granularity available to us, heh.
At present we are also working on an expansion TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site on Monday, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in mid November, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.
Click here for the forum discussion on this post.