Approaching Infinity News

Greetings captains! You can now see every sector within range on the warp screen at once, with a lot more useful information than before. But first...



Based not so much on analytics, but on player feedback and personal experience, I have reduced planet-monster hit points and damage across the board. Like I said, even when "The Great Rebalancing" is over, it's never really *over*...



There are a few special actions that require holding down the control key: long rest and aimed shot, but also all your assigned activated skills. And since the skills don't always have the same shortcut keys, players need a more convenient way to be sure they're doing the right thing.



Enter the (first iteration of) the "control" menu. When you hold down the control key, a little menu pops up on the left quickly showing all your options. Let me know what you think.



For a long time now, I've felt that not all ships should be able to mine asteroids, especially the small stealth-based ones (which are unlockable, so maybe you don't know...).

So for now, to mine asteroids, you need to have at least one asteroid-mining-related skill or device. The asteroid miner ship is the only one that can mine asteroids from the start of the game, unless you take an engineering-class captain!

• Rock Plow (device)
  
• Asteroid Cracker (device)
  
• Asteroid Sieve (device)
  
• Consumption Engine (Eater device)
  
• Mining Specialist (Engineering skill)
  
• Asteroid Navigator (Transmutor skill)
  

That's a pretty big change, huh?

All the sectors you can reach are now laid out on the screen at once, where your current sector is in the middle and higher sectors spiral out to the right (and sectors "behind you" are to the left). This might not be the final arrangement, but I do think it is better overall, and much more in line with expectations for a space game.

You also get more information arranged in a more predictable, readable format. In case you have quests regarding a certain type of space terrain, or you want to attack or avoid a certain alien race, or even if you just want to see the best place to sell your cargo, the warp screen will now help you decide where to go.

• Reduced HP and Damage of gruff instigator and pirate raider.
  
• Added "incubation period" to all diseases, meaning you don't have symptoms at first.
  
• Left or right clicking will cancel auto-move / auto-explore.
  
• Diseases will no longer cause the often-misunderstood "drunken walk" effect in the early sectors.
  
• Planet scans now show the base "threat level" of any life-forms encountered there.

I intend to release a more detailed look at the next major development cycle before the end of the week, so stay tuned...

Hail space explorers! This week's update brings more balance analysis, active corrosion, and lots of fixes and micro-features. The End of the Great Rebalancing is upon us...

...of course balance changes will continue to be made, but the overall feel and result is very close to where it should be now, thanks to a month of analysis, feedback, and tweaking.



Similar to the increase in away team skill use, people are now using grenades twice as often, thanks to the simple fact that they're ammo replenishes before each mission (and they're not destroyed when you use the last one). And from what I can tell, grenades are not being over-used either. I think they've fallen into their proper niche.

Overall tactical action use during missions has increased as well, though it's still lower than I'd like. I realize that at least half of those missions are just when you're really OP and well equipped, but still, you can't get off too easy...

Also of note: complete losses of away teams are down, both by size category and in total. Gnashers replaced squither larva as the #1 killer, thanks to a very small reduction in the squither hit points. I've raised it slightly, we'll see what happens. And thanks to recent crew size changes I'm now seeing missions with a total of up to 27 people (that's HUGE!)


Yes, time for something new! From now on, weapons with the "corrosive" damage type can create a status effect on the target tile that will damage whatever entity or terrain is there. It'll go away eventually, but you probably shouldn't step in it...



Changes:

• Fire burns even more on planets with higher oxygen content.
  
• Lava terrain can now start fires nearby.
  
• Acid terrain will sometimes spread the corrosion effect.
  
• Planetary gravity now effects movement speed! 1.3 makes you slower. 3G+ will slow your movement to a crawl!
  
• Fewer total primordial liquidators can breed (be summoned by others).
  
• Updated the spawning of black hole data for a tentaculon quest.
  
• Auto-explore now avoids "unstable asteroids" (which explode).
  
• Cut down on the number of sigorn freighters that will spawn.
  
• Macro-swarms can now move through damaged shipwreck sections.
  
• If you are on fire (burning status effect) and you step on "hydrocarbon sludge" tile, it will burst into flames!
  

Fixes

• Fixed: some monsters would not become hostile even when you attacked them
  
• Fixed: when monsters dodged your launcher shot, it would not get cooldown or even explode!
  
• Fixed: minesweeper no longer just ignores mines: there will be an outcome, bad or good.
  
• Fixed a bug where "copy grenade" skill wouldn't work if your grenade ammo was zero.
  

The largest part of the Great Rebalance is concluded, thank you! So...




The major goals of version 1.6 have been accomplished, so it will be time to move to 1.7 soon. But what does that actually mean?

The focus of 1.6 has been away missions, and here are some of the additions over the past 7 months:

• A complete visual and algorithmic overhaul of planets.
  
• Added activated cool-down skills for away teams.
  
• Reworked all the passive skills too :)
  
• The discovery of fire (and poison gas, nano-swarms, corrosion, etc.)
  
• The introduction of over 20 damage types for away team weapons, and their ability to alter the terrain.
  
• Monster resistances and vulnerabilities
• to* those damage types.
  
• Your crew talks to you (in floating texts, and mostly when they die).
  
• ADDED GRENADES!
  
• Re-balanced the hit points and damage of every monster encountered on away missions.
  
• Gave monsters powers too :D
  
• Added a level editor?!
  
• Made your away team members die one at a time instead of all at once.
  

Well let me tell you, 1.7 is going to be EVEN BIGGER.

More on that later... Enjoy 1.6M9 today.

But it's much more than just a crew member's ultimate utterance in this life... These floating texts can also give you valuable information:

• Notifications that your current weapon isn't working.
  
• Suggestions about which weapons might be more effective.
  
• A warning that a particular monster might be extra dangerous.
  
• Notifications that a monster might
• leave you alone* if you don't poke it.
  
• Lots of responses to environmental cues.
  
• And yes, funny last words.
  

Of course I want feedback on this new system. Is it useful? Is the text too big or small? Too fast or slow? And what other situations do you think it would be good for?



Yes, this is still happening.

But from what I can tell, looking at the numbers, it's getting to be just about where I want it to be. Losses on the low end are decreasing, while larger away teams are facing more challenge.

[h3]And skill use is up 300%![/h3]
YES! I consider that a win on its own. And that leads nicely into the next subject...



For now, the following changes have been made to grenades:

• A grenade item is not "destroyed" when you use the last grenade in the bunch.
  
• Grenades are now restocked at the
• start* of an away mission.
  
• Each grenade restored, up to the "max ammo", costs 75 supplies.
  
• You can find a "hexa-box" in certain areas that will restore 1 ammo to your equipped grenade.
  
• The newly-introduced "grenade replenisher" device still functions as advertised, for free.
  
• The max ammo of most grenades has be (re-) reduced.
  

From a design standpoint, I want people to use grenades. I just don't want them to *only* use grenades. They are meant to be a powerful weapon of opportunity or last resort. Some are intended for other purposes, like deforestation (xenocide grenade) or digging in caves (seismic).

I'd really like to see an increase in grenade usage...



Retribution squads can be a powerful deterrent to senseless violence, but sometimes they seem to happen too frequently, or even unfairly. Changes have been made:

• A race's "offendedness" decreases over time.
  
• It takes about 50% more "offense" to initiate a retribution strike.
  
• Completing a quest for a race now decreases their offense.
  
• Races tend to get less offended over the killing of a single individual, especially if they shot first.
  

If you don't know what "retribution" is in Approaching Infinity, consider yourself lucky...

Xenocide (a combination pesticide and military-strength weed-killer) and scrambler (like a focused EMP) are two damage types with narrow use-cases. But when they work, wow, do they work!

But many monsters had some weird numbers for their resistances and vulnerabilities, and I also found that even when the game was saying "scrambler is deadly", I still had to shoot something like 10 times.

Again, changes were made.

• The vast majority of monsters are now completely immune to these damage types.
  
• They do 500% damage against anything they are actually useful against.
  
• The base damage of these modifications has been increased, since any large number multiplied by zero is still ZERO.
  
• Xenocide is still great at removing sight-blocking trees.
  
• Scrambler is useful because it can destroy short-circuits and remove nano-swarms.
  

• Base monster damage has been increased by 5%.
  
• The minimum damage of a melee strike-back has been increased to 33%.
  
• The auto-explore now tries to picks up (almost) all items.
  
• Auto-explore ignores the proximity damage of lava and cave-ins unless you set it to "terrified".
  

Good hunting, Captains!

I just discovered a bug with the new cryo tube pickup found in silver caves that gave my away team 5 million HP! That's a little too big to just let go, so you get a hotfix.

And since I was able to review over 1600 away missions from the weekend, I've made *more* balance changes:

• Further increased the low end of suit HP by 2.
  
• Somewhat reduced the high end of suit hp.
  
• Increased the possible random scaling of monsters against large away teams by about 2%
  

And then this happened:

Changes to the devices "crew toroid" and "life support", regarding away team size:

Away team size is calculated as your number of crew divided by 4, with a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 12. The officer skill "Personnel" increases this maximum by 1 per level, after the maximum. That means if you've got 100 crew, your away team maxes at 12, but personnel can bring that up to 13 or 14.

Now (not before), these two devices will increase the maximum, meaning you can start with 13 or 14 (or 15 with both), and then add your extra one or two, for some *really large away teams*!

What's the difference? For one thing, the skill reduces hiring costs while the device does not.
And the skill benefits smaller crews by always having an effect, while the devices benefit larger crews, allowing them to field more of their available resources (aka redshirts / "people").

Bonus: away team size is now shown in parentheses on the "crew" readout of your ship.



The skill "Power-Leap" now has a range of 3. This may go back down, but there are some things to keep in mind about this skill: you still get to do something *else* after you use power leap (it doesn't end your turn) , and ... skills may be upgrade-able in the future, in a not-yet-introduced area of the game, so even if they start a bit weak, you may be able to put more resources into them for upgrading purposes.

Now let me get back to work :p

Greetings Captains! After reviewing your after-action reports and official communiques, more changes are incoming.


Across all away missions with away team size less than 8, crew losses (and entire landing-party losses) have increased up to 20%! This was not intended, but thanks to modern game design techniques, it can be corrected!

Accordingly, the following changes are effective immediately:

• Slightly increased hit points of suits, especially early ones.
  
• Reduced the damage of ALL planet monsters by about 10%.
  
• Smaller away teams will sometimes encounter slightly weaker enemies.
  
• Slightly increased the upper limit for monsters to scale
• up* for larger away teams.
  

Meanwhile, deaths are actually down somewhat for large away teams (also not intended). Some difficulty increase has been felt, because there has been a significant decrease in "missions where no one dies". Less has been done this week regarding larger away teams, so that the focus can remain on getting early game missions to feel "right".



For the sake of analysis, I refer to using grenades, activating skills, and swapping weapons as "tactical actions". I recently discovered that a majority of away missions don't use any tactical actions at all.

What's wrong with that?
I want Approaching Infinity to present you with the right level of challenge, and I want you to feel like all the stuff you've collected and equipped is actually useful. I consider this a problem, and I intend to fix it.

I did get some very useful direct feedback here on Steam about this. It seems that in many cases, skills have excessive cooldowns, not enough power, or even not enough fuel (gel). And while grenades were always intended to be used sparingly, I don't think *never* using them is any fun...

To this end, the following changes have been made:

• Reduced cooldowns on majority of (ALL?!) activated skills.
  
• Increased potency of some skills.
  
• Increased the spawn rate of cyber-gel from lockers.
  
• All level-related limitations on cooldown skills have been removed! (That means a level one officer can equip 2 skills!)
  
• Fixed an error in the early game where you would find skills that you couldn't use
  
• Increased ammo for most (but not all) grenade types.
  
• Created a new device, the "Grenade Replenisher", that slowly restores the ammunition of your grenades while you are in space (but
• not* while on away missions)!
  

At this point, there's not much I can do to actively encourage weapon swaps, but the secret feature I've been working on might ;) I'll be very excited to see the results of these changes at the end of the week. I hope to see far more skills and grenades being used.

The great rebalaning isn't over yet, but I think I'll be able to reveal my "secret new feature" soon.

• Added new cave level type : silver caves
  
• Added "cryogenic freezer" pickup, which can contain crew members, sentient aliens, or zombies!
  
• Added new weapon mod : "Needle", which can be applied to most physical-projectile weapons. Its damage type is still "piercing".
  
• Added "Gyrojet" weapon modification for pistols, rifles, shotguns, and snipers. Slow-firing, with increased range and explosive damage.
  
• Added more planet names in Resistance sectors.
  
• Added lockers and furniture to former human colonies.
  
• Music tracks will now fade out if you change areas and they're no longer appropriate.
  
• Crash sites ("technology") should no longer destroy walls on loot stockades (or anywhere else).
  
• Reduced the amount that "cave depth explored" adds to survey value.
  
• Computer terminals now have 8 different animated versions (thanks David!)
  
• Reduced the number of merc bases that will spawn on any given planet.
  
• Fixed a bug where the captain's "10% HP bonus" was not always being taken into account.
  

• Artifacts can no longer be destroyed during identification. (This may change!)
  
• When identifying artifacts, the game now remembers your previous choices for you, and anything that has failed in the past will now be colored red.
  
• Added a new "bad artifact ID" outcome that reduces the artifact's effectiveness by about 33%.
  

That's it for now, but there's so much more to come!