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Fleet Battles Beta 2 is here - let’s get ready to rumble!

Published on Thursday, April 26, 2018 By redskittlesonly In Star Control News

Attention, pilots - to your stations!

Fleet Battles just received a massive update and we can't wait to see you online to try it out.
We've added some new alien ships, a few devastating new weapons, and customization
options for your matches. Buckle up - it’s time to fly!

For full details on the updates, view the changelog at the bottom of the post!

Star Control: Origins Key Art

Download this for your desktop wallpaper ]

 

TOP CHANGES IN BETA 2

New Ships
Greegrox Swarm 
They might look squishy, but these space jellyfish are not to be underestimated! Each ship within their swarm represents a single unit of crew that fires an individual microbolt. Did we mention that the swarm can heal itself, too? They must go through a lot of band-aids…
 
 
  Mu’Kay Grasper
Don’t make them ink! It gets messy. This giant squid-ship can throw down ink blobs that both damages and sucks energy from their enemies. Unlike most other ships, the Mu'Kay don’t use any projectile weaponry - they rely on getting up close and crushing their opponent with their ship’s tentacles.
 
Lexite Interceptor
Be careful with these guys - they’re hardy! This fast-moving ship has “dual-shot” blasters and an extremely tough-to-penetrate shield. When the shields are engaged, the ship is pretty much invincible - but, it drains energy. You’ll have to time your attacks carefully in order to achieve victory against them.
 

 

 

New Weapon Components

  • Heal: Restores lost crew. Does that make them zombies, or..?
  • Death Ray: The name explains itself. You probably don’t want to get hit with this one.
  • Dual Shot: Fires a fast double shot. Hey, two for the price of one!
  • Ink Blob: Drops an inky blob that drains energy and crew. Clean-up on aisle three!
  • Shield: Holding down a button makes you invincible... until you run out of energy. Suggestion? Don’t run out of energy.

 

Custom Matches

First things first: you can now use your own custom ships in multiplayer mode. Woo-hoo! You can also customize your battle experience with the following knobs and dials:

  • Enable custom ships in multiplayer
  • Create a private, password protected lobby for multiplayer
  • Set the arena size
  • Adjust the number of asteroids, wormholes, and ion storms
  • Adjust the Fleet max size
  • Choose from one of three different arena maps

 

Other Improvements

We’ve made a lot of other tweaks and adjustments to Fleet Battles in order to continue bringing you the best experience! Beta 2 includes things like: 

  • Pilot Graphics - Many ships now have custom animations for their pilots. More will be coming later!
  • High-Resolution UI - Fonts and UI graphics now look better on high res displays.
  • Balance Updates - Almost all of the ships and weapons have been updated for a superior experience.
  • Improved Performance - Substantial improvements have been made to memory use and visual effect performance.


Haven’t gotten into Fleet Battles yet? Pre-order here to join the beta today!


We’ve been working really hard on the development of Star Control: Origins and are excited to show it off!
Please enjoy some of these
bonus screenshots from the game and let us know what you think. See you online!

Exploring Planets Fleet Battles Scanning a Planet
 
Jupiter Exploring Mars Meeting Strange Aliens

 

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OFFICIAL CHANGELOG

Custom Matches

Choose "Custom matches" to enable the following customization options

  • Enabled custom ships in multiplayer
  • Create a private, password protected lobby for multiplayer
  • Set the arena size
  • Adjust the number of asteroids, wormholes, and ion storms
  • Adjust the Fleet max size
  • Choose from three different Arena maps.
  • "Invite" friends to join your multiplayer matches

Gameplay

  • New ships
    • Lexite Interceptor: Dual Shot, Shield
    • Mu'Kay Grasper: Harpoon, Ink Blob
    • Greegrox Swarm: Microbolt shot, Heal
  • New weapon components
    • Heal -- restores crew
    • Death Ray. The name explains itself
    • Dual Shot -- fires a fast double shot
    • Ink Blob -- drops an inky blob that drains energy and crew.
    • Shield -- hold down to be invincible until you run out of energy
    • Note: Harpoon and Microbolt are not available for custom ships.
  • Full balance pass on all of the ships and their components
  • Custom hull sizes have been modified for better balance.
  • Changed the planet in the "Super Melee" map (the original one) to be Mars.
  • Updated names of many of the ships and their components.

Graphics / UI

  • Many of the ships now have custom animations for their pilots. Animations for additional factions will be added over time.  Pilot animations change based on the state of their ship.
  • Improved font appearance, especially on higher resolution displays.
  • Updated UI to work better at high scaling factor.
  • Improved appearance and framing of custom ship thumbnails.
  • Adds tooltips to mounts in ship editor.
  • Players are now set to "Great" graphics quality settings by default.
  • Increased the length of "Ship Design Description" text field.
  • Better looking 'Flak Cannon' explosion
  • Ship death explosion and Scryve Flak cannons VFX are now less likely to crush your frame rate.
  • Significant reduction in memory usage.
  • Updated credits with help from the community.
  • Updating gradient swatches for Tywom-style ship parts so the parts don't look so dull.

Bugs

  • Fix for rogue gravity fields persisting between matches which were causing the universe to collapse to a singularity.
  • Fixed a race condition crash in the animation system.
  • Fixed a random graphics crash.  Die "swap-chain" crash die!! Good.  It's dead now.
  • Ships with invalid components are now disabled on the fleet picker or crafting screen.
  • Killing another player in multiplayer with your secondary weapon no longer has a chance of crashing the game.
  • Entering and exiting the ship designer more than 8 times no longer crashes.