The Last Federation
TLF Version 1.033 Released (Honor Thy Word, Puppets! )
This version fixes a couple of bugs of note, and improves the behavior for when you destroy planetary buildings so that they don't just immediately rebuild. The most significant set of changes in this one, however, are all surrounding peace treaties and the fleets of races not quite honoring those, or having a bit too many "fence line shootings," so to speak. The overall effect should be a slightly more orderly solar system (but not too much! We wouldn't want to make things easy, now would we?).
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 in two or three weeks, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in late September at this point, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game. This is obviously really different from the last schedule I'd laid out for the expansion, but I think we spent the time well. And hey, the new expansion for AI War just came out yesterday (and is currently on discount, so grab it!).
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 1.031-1.032 Released (Tonight We Dine On Turret Soup)
This new version improves the art in particular for the turrets, as well as the other stationary centerpieces, to match the newer style of ships that was introduced back in July. There is also a possible fix to a bug involving you losing all your credits. :(
UPDATE: Version 1.032 is now out with a hotfix that should definitely solve the lost-credits bug.
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 in two or three weeks, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in late September at this point, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game. This is obviously really different from the last schedule I'd laid out for the expansion, but I think we spent the time well. And hey, the new expansion for AI War just came out yesterday (and is currently on discount, so grab it!).
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 1.030 Released (Birth Control)
By the way, want to see a hilarious pair of animated videos with TotalBiscuit talking about his successful TLF playthrough? Check out The Biscuit Federation.
What's Was With The Shift In Schedule Lately?
If you just follow TLF and not our other games, then you may notice my conspicuous absence lately. I had planned on getting the upcoming expansion for that out a lot sooner than is actually happening, among other things, but that hasn't been the way events actually unfolded. TLF is in a really good state, so for the most part I've been letting it be for the time being.
In the meantime, I spent the bulk of my time porting our entire back catalog of games to Linux, because I've been meaning to do that for years and finally felt like I had the time. That process took me surprisingly longer than I expected, but now AI War, Tidalis, Valley 1 and 2, and Skyward Collapse are all Linux games in addition to the Windows and OSX support that they already had. Bionic Dues and TLF already supported Linux, so I was surprised by how long it took to get the other games straightened out, but such is life I suppose.
I also took that opportunity to do some other housekeeping with general business stuff, some tweaks and bugs in older tiles, and so forth.
And then lastly, I've also been trying to keep ahead of Keith and the artists (Blue and Cath), who are working on Spectral Empire, our upcoming hex-based 4X. That's not launching until April 2015, so there's quite a way to go on it, but that's what the rest of the staff is primarily focusing on now, and so I've been needing to hold up my end.
They all already finished their work on the new TLF expansion for the most part, so all that remains is for me to carve out time in my own schedule to resume working on that and the other planned free enhancements to the base game. Now that all the porting work and other business housekeeping work is done, all the portion of my time that was devoted to that can now be redirected back to TLF. Mostly that is going to kick off next week, but from here on out I'm going to be dividing my attention between TLF and SE. Thanks for your patience in the meantime!
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 in two or three weeks, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in late September at this point, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game. This is obviously really different from the last schedule I'd laid out for the expansion, but I think we spent the time well. And hey, the new expansion for AI War is coming out on the 18th (Monday)!
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.
The official forum post discussing this release: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,16117.0.html
TLF Version 1.027 Released (Dispatched And Funded)
The biggest thing here is the increased power of a number of the dispatches -- not just those related to the RCI at planets, but several of the others, as well. There are also 4 new dispatches, which allow you to affect RCI negatively at planets, rather than just positively.
But doesn't this destroy balance? I was just talking about this in the forum threads for the prior version, after all. Well, the thing that occurred to me is that it's only unbalanced if there is no counter-cost. Before, the counter-cost was solar map time, which was frustrating to players and made them feel powerless in a bad way. Instead, the solar map time costs for those sorts of dispatches has been removed, but in place of that there are now substantial credit costs (whereas previously there were actually credit gains, of all things).
This really changes the dynamic with a lot of those dispatches, and also really changes the nature of your credit needs late in the game. It should be very interesting to see how this plays out with more players getting time on that.
What's Was With The Shift In Schedule Lately?
I actually wrote about that last week on our recently-moved blog.
Ongoing Updates
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been 10 weeks, and it's clear we definitely have a winner here. As of a couple of days ago we have now broken even on the game, meaning that we actually are making money over and above what we spent creating the game. We're continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.
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.
At present we are also working on expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site in early July, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in August at this point, 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.
The official forum post discussing this release: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15940.0.html
TLF Version 1.026 Released (Brace For Options!)
There are some overall improvements to the solar map AI in this update, and there is also an overhaul of the ship graphics and their ships.
There are also new Advanced Start options that let you customize your gameplay experience, and it's from there that the name of this update derives. There are four new options added in this update, but more are inevitably coming in the next few weeks. With a game like this -- like AI War, too -- having flexibility in how campaigns play out is definitely a good thing. That means not just in-game options, but also options when you are setting up a new game.
In AI War, the lobby is incredibly complex and daunting to new players because of that extreme flexibility. There must be over a hundred things you can choose or tune on there. Our goal with TLF has always been to make it a lot more accessible to new players by making the Quick Start pretty much only ever have two options. But then Advanced Start is something that we figure can run wild and get as complex as it needs to, in order to better serve the hardcore players. Now that we are getting a better idea of what the hardcore players are actually interested in as options, we're starting to do that.
In particular, there were some things that for new players are not a problem, but experienced players find them too easy or too tedious, and this update allows you to either make those harder or turn them off. This doesn't mean we're never going to actually update core mechanics, but it does mean that we can make a kind of baseline set of core mechanics that does not just smash new players into complete pulp (as much), but where we still have options for the hardcore fans to ratchet up the difficulty in more specific ways than the two difficulty level dropdowns allow for.
Again, all of this is super familiar to anyone who knows AI War -- except this time we're aiming not to increase the baseline learning curve despite catering to the hardcore fans at the same time. An important lesson we have learned since AI War.
--------------- What's With The Shift In Schedule Lately? ---------------
I actually wrote about that last week on our recently-moved blog.
--------------- Ongoing Updates ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been 10 weeks, and it's clear we definitely have a winner here. As of a couple of days ago we have now broken even on the game, meaning that we actually are making money over and above what we spent creating the game. We're continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.
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.
At present we are also working on expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site in early July, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in August at this point, 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 1.024-1.025 Released (Disease Resistance)
- The way that research and property development dispatches are handled, and the way goons are used up with them, is now daily rather than monthly. This makes it a lot more fair to you when you stop at any given time (if you don't complete the research all in one go).
- You can't farm the AFA missions for Credit anymore, at least not to the degree you previously could.
- Selling prisoners and free return of prisoners now work properly in all cases, which is a pretty big deal in your favor.
- Races now do their ship upgrade research in a secondary tech line, making it so that they don't get bogged down that anymore. This will put a lot more pressure on you, incidentally, on higher difficulties later in the game.
- Diseases are no longer so ridiculously insta-devastating to certain populations. They can still be really harsh, and further tuning may be needed there, but this is at least a very big step in the right direction. Diseases should be meaningful, but not quite so overdramatic as they were.
UPDATE: 1.025 is now out with some bugfixes, both from this past version and some prior ones.
--------------- What's With The Shift In Schedule This Week? ---------------
This week has been a bit crazy for me. My sister got married this past weekend, and I've had some things related to that that I've been working on while she is on her honeymoon. I'd rather not say what, as it's a semi-surprise. Anyway, that has sucked up a huge amount of my time, and I've been taking some time off to help work on that. It's not a long-term thing, obviously, but it's something that I wanted to take some time and do for my sister since there's nothing direly important in terms of short-term schedule right now (for once).
Also I've been working on design work this week for both the remaining parts of the first TLF expansion (measure twice, cut once), and for the upcoming 4x that we are (at least for the moment) calling Spectral Empire, to come out next April.
There's also just been some general boring business-related stuff that had stacked up that I have been getting taken care of, too. So it's been kind of an off week for me, but that won't be the case next week. Thanks for understanding!
--------------- Ongoing Updates ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been about a month and a half since launch, and it's clear we definitely have a winner here. We're continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.
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.
At present we are also working on expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site in early June, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in early July, 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.
Official Forum Post For Release
TLF Version 1.023 Released (Uprisings)
- A bunch of balance changes (in your favor) have been made to the various federation formation rules, so that in particular getting the federation started is not so hard. Actually this one should make everyone quite happy. But there are a variety of other things that are now easier in terms of attitude and influence in this regard, too, depending on the desperation of the race, for instance.
- There is a new "Join Federation When Militarily Supreme" way to get all of the races except for the Burlusts and the Thoraxians into the federation. This one actually is comparably rare in terms of your being able to use it, I expect, but it's really great for when you can engineer the situation to meet these criteria.
- In general the Credit costs for getting races to join the federation have just fallen through the floor, to avoid late-game grinding.
- In place of the grinding (which was never intended, but just kind of a byproduct), there are now several new mechanics in place where non-federation races react to the existence of the federation. In particular, this makes it a lot harder to just militarily roll the non-federation races once you get a sufficient mass of federation races. Even better, it also puts a lot more strategy into which races you invite first, as the potential negative reaction of that race to not being in the federation is something that you can use either for your gain or that you have to work around.
- Overall the balance of the solar map has shifted away from bombing-heaviness and in to ground-combat heaviness, which was always the intent but lately had not been the reality. This gives greater weight to races with higher ground combat strengths, which was the intent from the start -- so the Thoraxians and the Burlusts now live up to their reputations much better.
- A bunch of technologies now are available to more races, and a bunch of others are now gated by years into the game. These things really change the early dynamic, because it makes it so that weaker races can't immediately compensate for underwhelming ground power (for instance) based on simply being technologically superior. They can to some degree, but not to an extreme degree. But the longer they survive, the more they are able to level the playing field with technology, which makes sense.
- The Thoraxians now have an "evolution" mechanic, where they get progressively stronger in terms of ground power as the game goes on. Even from the start they are still the strongest at ground power, but it's no longer so extreme. They also now have an even higher home-field advantage when it comes to ground combat, meaning the odds of them getting kicked out of the game early on in is very very low.
- Oh! Also, there is a huge new mechanic for in combat where we are able to define complex shot behaviors through xml. If you're into that sort of thing, you can do that as well and submit designs to us for potential inclusion in the game. This lets us design much more interesting ship battles, in particular "boss like" battles. Expect changes to the Burlust Duels in the future in particular, and a vast reduction in the use of homing missiles in the game. The basic flagships used by the enemy have already been updated, and actually a new variant has also been added during this release (Model X2).
- And lastly, a number of improvements and adjustments have been made to bribe items, making them both more usable and better balanced.
--------------- Ongoing Updates ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been about a month and a half since launch, and it's clear we definitely have a winner here. We're continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.
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.
At present we are also working on expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site in early June, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in early July, 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.
Official Forum Post For Release
TLF Version 1.022 Released (What Lies Beneath)
- First of all, there's some rules about alliance members that have been improved such that they will behave better towards one another.
- Fixed a couple of display bugs with showing RCI impacts and with showing the defender figures at planets.
- You now start the game with the larger number of tech unlocks even if you don't do the survey platform option on the first battle.
- The balance with outpost construction by players and resource gains from freighter distress calls, has been much improved.
There are a number of other things as well, some of which show up as minor items in the release notes, such as no longer baking the ship class stats into each savegame. That's a minor thing on the surface, but it's something that is indicative of all the underlying work that went into this release.
In other words, the reason why this release is so small in surface features is that we spent the majority of our time doing plumbing, so to speak. We've been getting things ready for an influx of new content in the expansion, we've been working on some cool new physics additions that will let us really do some new stuff with bullets in both the base game and the expansion, and so on. That last is something that will be the ultimate solution to the Burlust duels being boring, for instance, but it's something that takes a lot of pipe-laying first.
The new bullet physics stuff is still ongoing, but the expansion-framework stuff is now complete, so that's a big thing off the list for us in the next month. Lots of stuff still coming for the base game as well, though, of course!
--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind. Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that. So, you know what? I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.
So what else is going on? Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least the rest of this month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming. We do have expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope) in the works at the moment (just internally for now). Suffice it to say, neither one of these two are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.
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.
Official Forum Post For Release
TLF Version 1.021 Released (Of Armadas And Outposts)
- The AI for NPC armadas on the solar map has gotten some substantial upgrades centering around allies helping allies. If races are in the same alliance, they now have a number of behaviors that involve them sending ships to defend the planets of their allies that are under attack.
- When flotillas were removed, the logic for how many flagships would show up in a mission was changed around. Overall this was a vast improvement, but there were a few edge cases where this actually exposed some other underlying issues (this is also related to armadas becoming fewer but with higher base power levels).
Anyway, what this version changes is how many flagships come into battles if it's not a "let's attack everybody at this planet" sort of battle. In other words, when a race wants to oppose you during a quest, it doesn't send an enormous armada with 18+ flagships to do so; it instead sends a much smaller force that doesn't make your battle drag out forever (and also doesn't cause balance issues with the AI leaving itself undefended, etc.
- Other improvements to quest-related opposition armadas have also been made. Previously there were cases where a quest would be canceled simply because there was no longer an opposition armada around for you to fight. That can still happen if the opposition race gets completely wiped out -- and that's fine, that's actually proper. But now if the race is still alive, they will instead dig into emergency squadrons or even spend economy RCI points in order to make sure that you have an opposition force to fight (while at the same time not just making it up out of thin air with no cost to the race).
- Outposts have had a ton of updates. You can now capture or destroy them in one stage, rather, than requiring two. Capturing or destroying them is now more involved and interesting of a battle. A clever exploit involving repetitive cooperative construction of outposts, followed by stealing those outposts, has been solved.
- Two new dispatch missions have been added at the black market. One lets you create outposts all by yourself without the help of any race, and the second lets you do research all by yourself without the help of any race. There are downsides to this in terms of no credit/influence gains, and it taking longer, but this is something that players have wanted for a while and it definitely is a sensible addition.
- The research tech dispatch has been split so that you can only now (once again) research techs that race doesn't already know with the main version. But there is now a second version where you learn a tech from a race that already knows it. This is something that players have asked for for a while as well, and it also lets us make the influence requirements for this action be different from the main action.
- This is one of my favorites: you can now hire the relevant sorts of goons in the friendly actions window at planets, and on your outposts. Boy does this save a lot of time! Some folks had asked for something along these lines quite a while ago; apologies for taking so long to put in this.
--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind. Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that. So, you know what? I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.
So what else is going on? Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least the rest of this month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming. We do have expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope) in the works at the moment (just internally for now). Suffice it to say, neither one of these two are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.
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.
Official Forum Post For Release
TLF Version 1.020 Released (Piratical Influx)
- Pirates have been really laying low lately, thanks to Piratical Exodus not being as common as it was before. So there are now a bunch of new ways that pirates build up, and they are now even more of a presence in the solar system than they previously were. They're an excellent destabilizing force. ;)
- Spreadshot and related things are now working better and more balanced, which we know was a big sore spot with people who wanted to play certain flagships, such as the Burlust Longships.
- We did a bunch of performance improvements that give us around a 12% gain when super-fast-forwarding on the solar map, and the gains are probably similar in combat as well. These are really helpful in the late game when you're on a lower-end computer or doing the super fast forward in observer mode.
- When you hover over RCI values (either the under-the-planet overlay on the map itself, or in the planetary sidebar, or in the planetary details window) it now includes a listing of the specific effects of that RCI value. That's a pretty huge amount of clarity added, and something that was a real bear for Keith to get in there because it aggregated so many things. But now you have it!
Some other big-picture design stuff also continues, as does design and artwork for the upcoming expansion for the game. But there's still lots of awesome stuff coming completely for free for the base game, so don't worry about that. :)
--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind. Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that. So, you know what? I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.
So what else is going on? Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least the rest of this month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming. We do have an expansion for both AI War and TLF in the works at the moment (just internally for now). Suffice it to say, neither one of these two are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.
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.
Official Forum Post For Release