Version 1.042 is out, and it really does a lot of interesting things.

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.