0.99.3 Update

Stellar Sovereigns V0.99.3 update is live, bringing new quality of life features, AI improvements, better difficulty scaling and fixes.

The focus of the latest patches were to polish the game for the upcoming V1.0 release and adding the game's new tutorials. 

Tutorials

I recently added a tutorial to the game, that provides an introduction to the various user interfaces.

It starts by introducing the fleets menu and the game's way of organising vessels into task specific fleets.

The tutorials are designed to point out important features of each menu, not how to play the game.

This iteration of the tutorial explains specific aspects, giving the player a basic understanding.

To round out the tutorial's an inbuilt wiki is going to be added latter that provides further information on subjects pointed out in the tutorials as well as those that were not.

Those will be added a Wiki entry to provided information for the player.

Some aspect are may be hard to point out at the start of the game or an in-depth explanation would needlessly bloat the tutorial. 

Feel free to point out aspect that were not explained by the tutorial so I can try to incorporate it in a latter iteration.

With the help of two fan of the game the tutorials also been translated to German and an option for the player been added to switch at any time.

Thanks to AltRon and Jens the game's tutorials now available in German.

UI Option

Another option also been added regarding contrast which replaced the flat colour UI option. 

Contrast Option

Tinkering with the setting of the flat colour option, I realized that the main difference it had was its contrast related settings.

Colony View

Improvement also been made regarding the colony view to get a consistent look across the different planets and worked on the lighting of the streets and the buildings.

I also added Day Night slider for the live feed options of the colony screen as well as a n eye icon in the left top corner to hide the colony UI if you wish to have an abstracted view of the colony.

Swap Turrets

My favourite quality of life improvement in this patch is the new ability to swap two turret slot of your vessels.

This allows you to rearrange your loadout without the need to buy new turrets.

You can simply select a turret then drag its slot ui over to another slot, and if the swap is valid then a new swap turrets retrofit job will be created.

This kind of retrofit job cost very little but it still requires your ship to go to a shipyard to complete the swap job. 

Different Star Chart Icons

New star chart visuals also been added for the 3 fleet set's combat fleets and their orbital stations for the player to easily distinguish them.

1 Capital and 2 Escort of Combat Fleets

More Aggressive AI

Its been bothering me for awhile that the AI is ignoring opportunities of sniping Colony and Mining fleets, so I added  new behaviours for harassment operations.

This also prompted me to re-do the menace faction's AI to also include such behaviours, so better keep an eye out for your utility fleets.

Tinkering with these new behaviours i realized that player can just simply retreat from any engagement nullifying the AI's effort in harassing the player's utility fleets.

To compensate I added a jump drive recharge system forcing the player to stick around until the vessel's jump drive is ready to jump away. 

The player and AI can use the retreat feature that send the fleet to a jump location and it waits till ready to jump.

To further increase the effectiveness of interceptions and ambushes the combat AI also been improved to better make use of their sublight engine settings in order to effectively chase down fleeing forces.

Difficulty Scaling

In regards to AI difficulty, the severity and frequency of their new behaviours been tied to difficulty setting.

While regarding economical difficulty, the fluctuation of the resource exchange market price and the next level cost of Empire traits also been tied to difficulty.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed issue with Flag Option UI blocking star chart selection
• Fixed reinforcement to battle not arriving
• Fixed shipyard crash from swap slot job issue
• Fixed Carriers military slots issue
• Fixed interceptor fighter crafts evasion value issue
• Fixed player forces arrival to battle issue
• I am sure had more but keep forgetting noting them down...

I am still working on more Menace Behaviours and the new Wiki as well as the game's Trailer but hope to finish in time for release in end of February.  

This is all for now!
I hope you enjoy this update!