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- Jan 28, 2011
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Tags: Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role Playing Game; Iron Tower Studio
Vault Dweller and his team took a break from content creation this month to put together a systems update for the Colony Ship Early Access build. The centerpiece of the update appears to be the addition of an Easy difficulty mode and a tutorial. While this may anger purists, it has allowed Iron Tower to make the game's standard difficulty even harder. The update also overhauls the PSI system. Psi attacks will now always hit, but can be resisted by a new Neural Resistance stat which is determined by Charisma. Plus there are new weapons and armor, new feats, and plenty of balance tweaks. Here's the summary:
Difficulty & Tutorial
Despite our best efforts to keep the difficulty manageable and engage players who struggle, some players find the game frustrating and unplayable rather than challenging. Needless to say, frustrating people was never our goal, so we added Easy difficulty mode and a tutorial explaining key concepts.
Coincidentally, now that we don't have to worry about first-time players, we can make the Hard difficulty a bit more challenging.
Feats & Derived Stats
Charisma now adds Neural Resistance (see Psi Overhaul below). We added 3 new feats (Master Trader, Frog Hunter, Slow Metabolism) and 3 new mutually exclusive mutation feats as quest rewards. Plus balance changes to the existing feats as suggested by the players.
Weapons & Armor
Improved enemies behavior in combat and stealth: target and attack selection, grenade and stim use, reaction to sound and dead bodies, alert levels, etc.
PSI Overhaul
Some fights were way too easy and we apologize to everyone affected.
Misc
Sounds good. The full patch notes are available here. With this out of the way, Colony Ship is now ready for the second half of its Early Access roadmap, where the ship's major factions will come into play.
Vault Dweller and his team took a break from content creation this month to put together a systems update for the Colony Ship Early Access build. The centerpiece of the update appears to be the addition of an Easy difficulty mode and a tutorial. While this may anger purists, it has allowed Iron Tower to make the game's standard difficulty even harder. The update also overhauls the PSI system. Psi attacks will now always hit, but can be resisted by a new Neural Resistance stat which is determined by Charisma. Plus there are new weapons and armor, new feats, and plenty of balance tweaks. Here's the summary:
Difficulty & Tutorial
Despite our best efforts to keep the difficulty manageable and engage players who struggle, some players find the game frustrating and unplayable rather than challenging. Needless to say, frustrating people was never our goal, so we added Easy difficulty mode and a tutorial explaining key concepts.
Coincidentally, now that we don't have to worry about first-time players, we can make the Hard difficulty a bit more challenging.
Feats & Derived Stats
Charisma now adds Neural Resistance (see Psi Overhaul below). We added 3 new feats (Master Trader, Frog Hunter, Slow Metabolism) and 3 new mutually exclusive mutation feats as quest rewards. Plus balance changes to the existing feats as suggested by the players.
Weapons & Armor
- Extensive balance changes, added new armguards and leg armor.
- We added Old (-1DR) and Damaged (-3DR) armor sets to boost variety on the visual side. Most enemies will be wearing old and damaged armor. New armor will be sold in stores. Unique (custom-made) – looted from notable enemies.
- New weapons: long requested laser cutter, two energy 'shotguns' (a close range energy gun, Earth-made and Ship-made) and 'SMG' (a rapid-fire energy gun), a Ship-made energy club, a clawhammer for the bashers, and a bunch of firearms: a revolver, shotguns, rifles, etc.
Improved enemies behavior in combat and stealth: target and attack selection, grenade and stim use, reaction to sound and dead bodies, alert levels, etc.
PSI Overhaul
- PSI attacks always hit (as they don't rely on sight), but the effect can be resisted and damage reduced by Neural Resistance (NR).
- You can't be faster than a thought so PSI enemies have a much higher initiative
- Charisma boosts your NR, which can be increased further with implants, helmets, feats, and stims.
- Zen stim increases NR by 40 for 2 turns
- Improved Mindworms' attacks
Some fights were way too easy and we apologize to everyone affected.
Misc
- Implants: you can extract them from dead bodies and repair them if they get damaged during extraction due to low skills.
- Gadgets: new tier and rebalance
- Expanded dialogues and quest improvements
- Attack effects' balance changes