Iceberg Interactive is having a massive sale this weekend, and to coincide with that great sale they've pushed out a monstrous patch for StarDrive 2 that squashes a lot of bugs and adds a substantial amount of content and balance tweaks that the community has been waiting for.
StarDrive 2 gets a massive update in the wake of the Iceberg Interactive publisher sale.
StarDrive 2's new patch will bring it up to version 1.1 and brings quite a few changes within it. While one game breaking bug that occurs upon startup, crashing the game, hasn't been fixed, there are quite a few new additions. This patch adds 1500 ships that can be controlled by the AI. Not an insignificant number at all. They've also substantially updated the AI and their learning ability and have made adjustments to the balance of StarDrive 2 to make it just a little more difficult, and thus more rewarding as well.
The full patch notes are listed below, straight from the Steam community page itself. So if you're a fan of StarDrive 2, then the next time you open Steam it should be updating.
StarDrive 2 is a strategic 4X game that incorporates real-time battles into the fold. The procedurally generated galaxy awaits you with many mysteries to be unlocked. Take control of heroes periodically and design your own ships to be taken into battle to defend your glory. It's currently on sale on Steam for $24.89.
New Content:
- Added more than 1500 bad-♥♥♥ ship designs to the AI's arsenal.
- The AI routines responsible for building fleets have been upgraded to provide a more substantial challenge heading into the late game. Experienced players may very well find themselves out-gunned!
- New Race Customization Options! These are "Game-Changers" to provide some more unique challenges for you.
- Titan Quest: You begin the game with Titan Construction technology but can ONLY build Titan class military vessels
- Total War: You cannot build colony ships. This should be a fun challenge.
- Newcomer: Your empire was late to the StarDrive party. Other empires start with two additional colonies in nearby systems - Added a number of new technologies and ship modules that will be available through a new in-game event
- New Galaxy Shape Added: Ring
- Added Broadside Weapon Mounts for the following weapons
- Heavy Torpedo
- Plasma Torpedo
- Anti-Matter Torpedo
- EMP Torpedo
- Photon Torpedo
- Quantum Torpdo
Tweaks & Balance
- Changed some of the Strategic AI behaviors to research technologies that you may not have seen the AI research before
- The Tactical AI now has a new play in its playbook to try and bring down those destroyers lurking on the edge of combat
- The AI will now engage in some limited technology trading between themselves. I had previously decided as a matter of design to restrict this behavior to prevent the AI from appearing to have an overwhelming advantage, but there are some techs that are just too important for the AI to go without. Therefore the AI will now trade with Known races to acquire certain techs that are important to it
- The Shipyard Checklist will now produce a red "Ammo" error if you attempt to build a ship with a weapon equipped while not having the energy or ordnance storage necessary to fire the weapon; previously this would have only produced a yellow "Ammo" warning. This will prevent players from being able to create a design with a weapon mount that is unable to fire
- The cost of future tech research increases the further down the tree that you go. This should prevent you from ever running out of future tech, which can break the game if you get that far, and it will slow down tech progression in the late game
- The 2x5 mass driver has its range reduced to 800, with a large damage fall-off occuring past 600.
- If your approval level ever hits 0, then your people will simply refuse to work or perform research because literally no one likes you enough to do anything for you.
- The AI will only demand tribute if it believes that its fleet is stronger than yours
- My mouse wheel broke and so I realized that for people without good mouse scroll wheels, the +/- buttons on the minimap needed some more fine-grained control. So that's in there now.
- Added support for Corvette-only weapons to compliment the new technologies available
- The game's initial load up time is reduced by a fair margin
- Future Tech can no longer be assimilated or stolen by spies, which kills a few wonky birds with one stone
- The maximum population of a planet is now determined by the citizens living on the planet - not the owner of a planet. For instance, if you conquer an aquatic world, the aquatic species that lives there will be able to continue to breed and grow into their planetary population cap. You will not be able to place more non-aquatic citizens there than your own cap would ever allow. If the Population cap of a planet is increased relative to your own species' cap due to a trait like aquatic or subterranean, then the population readout will reflect this in parenthesis: i.e. a world might read as 7/5 (14). Meaning 7 citizens live there - your cap is 5, but due to the bonuses of the citizens, the real cap is 14.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a bug with the AI sometimes colonizing in your space still; added some extra safety nets for scenarios where space BECOMES your core space when the AI colony ship is already en route
- Capturing a blockaded planet in ground combat will no longer cause the planet to be blockaded for the immediate turn thereafter; this bug may have been the cause of some very edge case scenarios where you might find a mirror of your own blockading fleet invading your colony. I'm not declaring that issue fully resolved but I'm still working towards isolating the cause and I suspect that this now-dead bug may be the culprit
- Fixed a few achivements that were not unlocking properly
- Fixed an issue where the AI could still potentially colonize in Player space; this was caused by the AI aborting its attempt to colonize a valid planet due to a hostile presence in the vicinity, and picking a second choice without the same territorial considerations it usually employs to choose a colonization target
- Fixed an issue with the new Approval penalty that is incurred when exceeding tolerance when also having a leader that improves your tolerance levels
- The Gauss cannon should no longer punch through shields
- Fixed a bug (it was a typo) that was causing the expansionism penalty to diplomatic relations to remain constant, when the desired effect was to have it diminish over time
- The Hire Hero window will no longer be overridden by pop-ups from quests or diplomatic interactions
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