Hi everyone,

The new v107 patch has been released and there are two exciting new features to tell you about: lightning guns are now in the game and scanners can now always detect a fleet’s owner. There are also other changes and bug fixes you’ll like – read on for details…

Friend or Foe – Play with Friends

You can now see the player and fleet name for all fleets visible to your scanners and whether they’re a friend or foe.

Fleets in scanner range, but outside sensor range, used to be labelled UFOs and coloured red

The label for these fleets will now display the player and fleet name and be coloured green if you have a treaty with that player – the player’s civ isn’t displayed

Fleet intel e.g. number of ships and how they’re equipped is still only visible for fleets in sensor range (no changes were made to how the inner sensor range works)

This makes it much more fun and constructive to play with friends and cooperate with other players you have a treaty with. Because you can now ID each other’s fleets from much further away.

These fleets would have both been coloured red and labelled UFOs before this patch

Before this patch, other fleets were mostly labelled as UFOs. Because although scanners could detect fleets, they could only additionally detect the owner when the fleet was within their inner sensor range, which is a much smaller area.

If you wanted to see who a fleet’s owner was e.g. whether they were a friend, to make contact with them, to form a treaty with them, you had to wait until their fleet was much closer and within your scanner’s inner sensor range. Or move one of your fleets towards them. But making a beeline towards a fleet with one of yours could’ve been viewed by the other player as a pending attack. And having to get very close to a fleet just to confirm their identity wasted a lot of time.

Fleets in scanner range, but outside sensor range, were always shown as UFOs before this patch

False Flag Fleets

This change does put the onus on you to hide your ownership of fleets if you wish to do so e.g. use cloaked fleets, hide in systems and planet orbits. But we’re also considering a new false flag feature that would enable you to hide your ownership of a fleet:

The fleet owner would be labelled as a pirate instead of you while activated

You could activate it for any fleet, but that fleet would then count as 2 or 3 fleets towards your fleet limit instead of 1

Other players would be able to see the true ships in the fleet e.g. which civ they belong to and how they’re equipped – just not the owner (including in battle)

It would open up a lot of strategic options. For example, if you are a Syntis player and attack a neighbour, they’ll know they were attacked by a Syntis player but not which one!

Let us know on the forums what you think about the idea.

Lightning Guns – New Large Energy Weapon

Lightning guns have been added to the weapons section on the tech tree – ready for you to research

Yes, large energy weapons – Lightning Guns – are finally here. And they’re awesome!

Lightning Guns are large energy weapons that fire laser guided plasma (they were originally called ‘ebombs’ when previewed a couple of weeks)

Each shot deals the gun’s full damage to each enemy ship within its line of fire

Lightning guns are blocked by shields but deal damage to ships when shields are down/not installed and they’re powered by the ship’s power

Lightning guns add strategic depth to fleet formations and force players to rethink their current tactics. Their unique ability to strike every ship in their line of fire with every shot leaves line formations exposed to their menacing power.

Research them in the tech tree now. Upgrade your war fleets. And introduce them to your enemies!

Lightning guns have been added to the weapons section on the tech tree – ready for you to research

There are 5 levels of lightning gun and you can find their stats on the wiki. We’re happy to tweak their attributes once you’ve had a chance to evaluate them.

Wiki: Lightning Guns

Minesweepers Now Ignore Ally Minefields

When treaties were added minesweepers weren’t blocked from sweeping minefields if there was a treaty with the owner of the minefield. Automatic attacks were blocked e.g. fleet guard mode, damage from minefields; but we left players the freedom to deliberately ignore a treaty and turn on an ally e.g. attack their fleets, invade their planets, and clear their minefields.

Following player feedback we’ve changed it so that minesweepers will no longer sweep minefields if there is a treaty with the owner. When we get to expanding treaties this behaviour could be an option to include/exclude when proposing a treaty.

UX Bugs

We fixed a couple of UX bugs in this patch, including the particularly annoying one where clicking on a planet’s label while a fleet was selected would zoom to planet management instead of opening a menu.

But we want to fix a couple of UX bugs every patch. So let us know on the forum which UX bugs are annoying you and we’ll get the worst offenders fixed. For example, the coordinates getting in the way of clicking on things has come up recently, but what others should we prioritize?

We’ll be back soon, enjoy the new patch!

– The Outscape dev team

Full patch notes

Features and changes

Friend or foe: player and fleet name is now displayed for all fleets – even in scanner range (before these fleets displayed as UFOs). Note: only the names are displayed, number of ships and how they are equipped continues to be only visible in sensor range.

New large energy weapon added: Lightning Gun. Each shot deals the gun’s full damage to each enemy ship within its line of fire.

Minesweepers no longer sweep minefields belonging to players you have a treaty with

Tech tree: T3 laboratory and Cargo Transporter have swapped positions and the research cost of the cargo transporter has been reduced from 1,250 to 720. If you’ve already researched the T3 laboratory but not the cargo transporter it won’t cause any issues and any research of either already in progress won’t be affected.

Added a bloodthirst icon to the invasion screen when the Snithereal are invading an organic civ to indicate that their strength increases from x0.8 to x1.6

Bugs fixed

If a Snithereal population had a -0.50/hr penalty applied for “not eating an organic population” this wasn’t being counted in the happiness display (the server was counting it though) e.g. Snithereal happiness could have been displayed as +0.2 when it was actually -0.3 (more details)

The corruption panel on the main menu didn’t update the minimum happiness in real-time – only when first entering the galaxy

When a Syntis repair module started repairing, the time needed to repair to 100% didn’t increase proportionately as more damage was taken from an ODS. So all damage done by an ODS after the original repair order was given effectively counted for nothing. We’ve changed it so repair modules stop and have to be reactivated after taking damage from an ODS.

Minefield tooltips were displayed nowhere near the minefield/cursor (and often offscreen on high res displays)

Clicking on a planet’s label while a fleet was selected would zoom to planet management instead of opening the options menu

Minesweeper stats weren’t displayed well – the minefield density swept per hour is now displayed e.g. “Performance: 6% /h”

Updating the game client: the game should be automatically updated via Steam. Please check here if the download doesn’t automatically start when you launch Steam.