The first expansion to The Last Federation, titled Betrayed Hope, arrives this Friday along with the free version 2.0 upgrade for the base game. TLF has been a huge hit for us this year, with its unique blend of 4x strategy, simulation, and turn-based tactics.

Betrayed Hope is perhaps the most massive expansion we have ever done for any of our games, which is really saying something considering the scope of the AI War expansions. This expansion lets you freaking reverse the entire premise of the game (build a federation from the shadows) if you want (be a full planetary power and fight front-on 4x-style).

Here’s the trailer for the new expansion:

For more information about the expansion, please see the Betrayed Hope page.

But for now let’s talk about what has changed between versions 1.0 and 2.0 of The Last Federation. First of all, the release notes from version 1.0 to 2.0 are over 61,000 words long. That is quite literally the length of a respectable novel.

Here are a few key changes:

Auto-resolve option for battles.

Tons of improvements to GUI clarity, explanatory tooltips, etc.

Permadeath made optional (and off by default).

Awesome new ship graphics for during battles.

New Burlust “Turmoil” mechanic.

New ways to persuade races to join the federation.

New actions that NPC-races take when it seems appropriate to them.

Six new quests.

Added player actions to support a ground invasions, oppose them, or simply start bombing stuff independently.

Added the Ark and the Mire, two randomly seeded unique buildings that help make each game different.

Major improvements to how RCI, Attitude, and Influence numbers work so that they make more sense to the player.

Major revisions to widely-disliked missions like “Clean up AFA”, “Deliver Spacefaring Technology”, etc.

Radical shifts to solar map pacing and many revisions to how actions work to increase player agency.

New moddable “Bullet Pattern” engine that allows some really crazy new behaviors for enemy shots. Tons of new and revised bullet patterns.

You can now do practice combats at the black market to try out tactics or just enjoy blowing up tons of ships.

Substantial CPU/GPU performance improvements.

Rebalancing both in combat and on the solar map.

Multitudinous bugfixes.

And a whooole lot more.

Version 2.0 won’t officially launch until the 14th, because we’re still in super-final-almost-done polish mode for these new features and changes. However, the current steam version, and current official version in our own updater, are already updated to (at the time of this writing) version 1.900, which includes all of the changes noted above (just minus the last bit of polish we still are working on based on last player feedback).

Enjoy!

Click here to view the official forum thread on this topic.