Ongoing Alpha Test - Update #4 Release Notes

Today brings the release of the last update to Hades' Star Alpha, which has been live for almost 3 months. This update brings some final content we felt was necessary before going into beta (especially the Weapon modules, the Leaderboards changes, and the Warp Lane Hub buildings which should bring a new level of strategic planning to delivering shipments for higher level players). During this time we were able to significantly improve the game, largely thanks to the help of early players. If you participated in the alpha - thank you!

For the next few months, we plan to slow down the rate of major features. There will still be some new modules, but the majority of the focus will be on balancing existing content and make yellow and red stars as fun as they can be. We are still on track to launching our beta version some time in March. The alpha version will be live until March 6, at which point the servers will be brought down for a few weeks as we prepare for proper launch in our initial countries.

Here is the list of changes for today's update:

Shipments

• New Building: Warp Lane Hub. Hubs can be linked in pairs to create Warp Lanes. The link lasts one day and costs a fixed amount of Hydrogen. Once the link is active, all ships can travel between the hubs instantly and without consuming Hydrogen.
• Shipments window can sort the list of shiments by destination or by reward amount

Ships and Modules

• Ships can now be upgraded at any time. Upgrade screen is similar to other object's upgrade screen and displays relevant info, including what type of new module slot will be gained by the upgrade
• Ships at level 3 and above can have a custom name assigned (once per ship only)
• A ship can have multiple modules installing at once, no longer have to wait until previous module done installing
• Hydrogen consumption for moving and jumping a ship depend on the ship's level
• Activated modules now cost a fixed amount Hydrogen paid on each activation (instead of having a constant cost added to the ship's movement cost)
• 2 new Weapon modules
• 2 new Shield modules
• 2 new Mining modules
• 2 new Support modules
• 1 new Trade module
• Transport Capacity offers more shipment slots on level 3 and above
• Weak shield renamed to Alpha Shield, strength increased
• Standard shield renamed to Delta Shield, strength increased in low levels and decreased in later levels 
• Strong shield renamed to Omega Shield, strength decreased on level 3 and above
• Laser: Increased maximum damage and decreased time to achieve maximum damage 
• Increased mineral capacity for the Hydrogen Storage module
• Greatly increased duration of mining boost, also increased its speedup modifier. Mining boost is essential for mining from red stars. 
• Increased red star life extender duration. 
• Cerberus Colossus hull strength reduced, but now comes with a shield (affects newly spawned ships only)
• Cerberus Guardian hull strength increased, firepower decreased

Red Stars

• After you have upgraded the Red Star scanner, you will still have the option to search for a lower level Red Star (if you find the new star too hard/expensive, and to help coordinate runs with other players). This way upgrading the Red Star scanner too early does not punish the player.
• Low level Red Stars were made significantly easier
• Added levels 6-10 to the Red Star Scanner, to gain access to the same levels of Red Stars. Any Red Star level after 5 will require significant coordination between multiple players to have even moderate success in. 
• Red stars now have a limit of how many battleships can be sent per player. This is to help us balance Red Stars properly, and remove incentives to create completely imbalanced fleets (many players choose to create fewer than optimal miners and transports in favor of battleships). It should also help make Red Star combat more strategic, hopefully focusing on tactics instead of having players fight the user interface trying to manage more ships in combat than we ever intended. 
• Added Influence points, which can be earned in Red Stars and now are used to calculate player and Corporation Leaderboards. For more details, see this previous blog post.

Economy

• Tweaked Asteroid spawn rates (should be getting more asteroid spawns per day, but each will be holding a much smaller Hydrogen amount)
• Hydrogen drop rate and storage for planets has been decreased
• Miners now keep working on a sector without manual intervention, as long as there are available asteroid fields in the sector.
• We expect and intend the asteroid changes will require players to build more Miner ships, and use additional mining modules to keep up with Hydrogen demand as their empire grows (including planning mining expeditions in Red Stars)
• Player info window has historical graphs for credits and hydrogen income and expenses per day
• New Tycoon achievements (for maintaining sustained income levels for 7 continuous days)

User Interface

• Selection action buttons moved to the bottom of the screen so they don't interfere with everything going on around the selected object
• Selection should work much better now, especially with respect to de-selecting by tapping on empty space
• New selection effect makes it clear what object is selected
• Can preview module range by holding down on the module button (activation can still be cancelled by dragging the finger off the button)

Other improvements

• Notifications should be working again (check your device's settings if they are still not received)
• If playing the same account on multiple devices, notifications should be sent to all devices 
• New notifications for building complete/upgraded events
• Destroying Cerberus stations now gives XP to the owner of the star system. They also explode spectacularly. 
• Fixed bug where Cerberus stations would pick a new target mid-combat for no reason
• Buy Artifact page shows yield info on each artifact type (can also be used as general reference for Artifacts retrieved from Red Stars)

Leaderboard changes and the new Influence score

If you've been participating in the alpha, you may be familiar with the Leaderboards window, which shows the players who have advanced the most in the game:



In its current form, the "Score" column is just the amount of XP a player has collected. XP is gained by doing shipments, upgrading planets, researching artifacts and completing achievements. Nobody ever loses XP, so it's an indication of how long someone has been playing, and their overall level of progress.

There are major issues with using XP for the leaderboards:

• It rewards whoever is playing the most. If a player near the top doesn't log in for a day or two, they will most certainly lose their spot. 
• Players who started playing the game later don't have much hope of catching up. 
• Spending Crystals can directly translate into more XP (i.e. by buying more shipments or Artifacts, or buying the resources to upgrade planets). 
• There is no risk of ever losing XP, so there's little movement and excitement at the top of the leaderboards. 

This is why on the next update we're completely changing how Leaderboards are calculated. We are introducing a new resource called "Influence". Influence is an indicator of the overall power a Player/Empire has to affect change in the Hades Galaxy. Initially, Influence will be used just for the leaderboards, but we want to explore more potential features that are related to this metric. 

Players gain Influence mainly via military operations in Red Stars. We are re-designing Red Stars so they start off very easy, but will keep the difficulty high on the very high level Red Stars. As of the next update, we will also allow players to start a Red Star search for any lower level star that their scanner supports. This should help with coordinating Red Star matches between players. It will also address the issue where players could be punished for upgrading their scanner too early. 

Each Red Star level has its own thresholds for awarding Influence. Very easy Level 1 Red Stars will award Influence to a player even if they only destroy one Cerberus Sentinel, but only up to a certain Influence limit. After they reach that limit, players have to upgrade their scanner and go to higher level stars if they want to continue gaining Influence. 

Players can also lose Influence, if they initiate a Red Star mission and then immediately abandon the star, or fail to meet the quotas of that star's level (i.e. because they didn't retrieve enough Artifacts or didn't destroy enough Cerberus ships).

Influence is gained collectively by all players that participate in the Red Star mission. As long as they contributed anything, everyone will be awarded based on the group's result. For example, on a Level 3 Red Star, you might have 3 participating players who destroyed 5 Cerberus ships total. One of the players only sent one battleship in, and that battleship did less overall damage than the other players' battleships and didn't destroy any single ship on its own. Still, all 3 players will be awarded Influence. Success or failure in Red Stars is always collective. It is our intent that very high level Red Stars should require increasingly more sophisticated coordination between multiple players to gain Influence.

Influence is also a metric that applies to a Corporation. A Corporation's Influence is derived by the individual Influence scores of its members. The Corporation leaderboards will use this new metric. We expect that competitive Leaderboard players will want to increase Influence not only for themselves, but also for their Corporations. The cooperative nature of Red Stars, as well as private Red Star searches from within Corporations that we will be adding in a future update, will help do exactly that.

As a final note, our design decisions account for the fact that not everyone is playing the game to climb the leaderboards. Our goal and hope for this system is to make it a challenging and fan aspect for the people who want to participate, and completely invisible for the ones who don't. It's perfectly fine to play Red Stars just for the fun of it and for collecting a few artifacts or Hydrogen every now and then. Our goal is to not make those players feel like they are missing out by not maximizing their Influence score. We do believe very high level Red Stars will be fun to try and beat with other players, but at the same time we won't be forcing everyone to play them (for example, we won't be hiding exclusive Module blueprints in those difficult Red Stars - it will still be possible to unlock all modules without playing the very hard Red Stars). 

Influence points will be introduced on our final alpha update, coming next week. Each existing player will be assigned an initial Influence score based on their XP, but after that Influence will be calculated independently based on the results of Red Star missions.

We will still be keeping XP and Empire Level as a general indicator of each player's progress, but that metric will be mostly decorational from now on.

As always, all thoughts and feedback are welcome. See you in game!