Ongoing Alpha Test - Update #1 Release Notes

If you've been participating in our open alpha test, thank you! It's been a very exciting start, with amazing feedback, great discussions, and lots of bugs. We are happy quite a few players have seen promise in this very early version of the game, and we'll do what we can to deliver on that promise.

We see Hades' Star not as a monolithic game that we develop, "finish" and launch, but as a living game that will evolve and (hopefully) improve significantly over the years. We will be delivering constant updates based on feedback we get from the community and our own plans to evolve the game. We want to be transparent with these updates, by explaining why we did the changes we did, and perhaps in some cases why we didn't implement popular requests.

Today we are delivering our first update to the live alpha test. Here's the list of things that are changing in the update, and the motivation for the changes:

Yellow Stars

• Significantly reduced prices for additional short range scanners 
• Reduced prices for revealing sectors that are 2 cells away from the starting sector
• Motivation: Progression in the home yellow star hits a solid wall very early, so this should help speed things up during the first couple weeks in game. More tweaks will be coming in future updates.

Red Stars

• Red Star Search now costs Hydrogen. Free searches were encouraging people to abandon the star to search for a better one, which hurts other participants. We want to encourage players to send their Miners to Red Stars to get more Hydrogen than is available in their home system. We also want to encourage installing Miner modules that help with mining faster in Red Stars.  
• Artifacts now give 2x-2.5x more Credit reward
• Artifact research times are reduced to 2 hours for smaller artifacts
• We agree with feedback that Red Stars are still unbalanced and repetitive. We are completely reworking how they are generated, but the results of that rework will take a while. In the meantime we have reduced the number of Cerberus ships on red stars, until that rework is done.

Modules

• Battery lv1 increased damage per second to 10 (for 9), to make the upgrade from weak battery more enticing
• Mining modules reduced Hydrogen usage drastically. We don't want players to be restricted from going to mine in long distances or in Red Stars. 
• Most other modules also reduced their Hydrogen usage, to account for imbalances and the fact that Red Star Searches now require Hydrogen
• Expect big changes still in the Hydrogen economy overall, as we do balancing passes in future updates

Combat

• Price of battleship greatly reduced (from 2000 to 500). We want to make it cheaper to experiment with base battleships, especially at the beginning of the game where it's very likely to lose a lot of ships while figuring out combat mechanics. Some of the base cost will move to modules in a future update, so it will stil be expensive to lose upgraded battleships.
• Cerberus ships have been made weaker. Level 2 Cerberus carries Battery Lv2 (instead of Laser lv2). Cerberus hitpoints have been reduced. This is part of an ongoing effort to make early game easier. 

Improvements and bug fixes

• You can now see information of the star you are visiting on the top left of the HUD, including the owner player's name (yellow stars) and the supernova timer (red stars)
• When docked to a research station, a transport will transfer its artifact immediately when a slot becomes available. No longer need to send the transport to another destination and back again.
• Added missing confirm button before spending Crystals, when installing or upgrading modules
• Hydrogen Collector achievement should now be working
• Removed "upgrade" button from short range scanner. Those buildings cannot be upgraded.

Known issues

• Existing Cerberus ships won't change their hitpoints and weapon type to reflect the new weaker values.

As always, all feedback is very welcome.

Thank you for playing!