2018.6 Release Notes
Blue Stars are now available! This new star types provides a short 5 minute combat experience against other players and/or AI controlled battleships. The player with the last Battleship standing in the rapidly collapsing Star wins the mission.
To access them, build a Blue Star scanner on the Anomaly that appears in your home star.
Blue Stars have been designed to be the most accessible star type in the game. Beyond the fun 5 minute combat, different players can use them to advance faster in other parts of the game:
- You can take calculated risks by sending ships without Sanctuary in Blue Stars, and earn up to 90% of the value of a fully equipped ship per day
- You can earn new daily Hydrogen rewards by participating in Blue Stars
- The new Shipment Relay station allows you to optionally use Blue Star activity to enable partial or full shipment delivery in your home star
- The new Blue Star leaderboard seasons offer monthly Crystal rewards, not just to the top players but to all players who participate consistently in Blue Stars
- New Blue Star objectives encourage a variety of module use in Blue Stars
Other changes in this update:
Economy
- Reduced level 5 Battleship construction cost to 120,000 credits
- Reduced install cost for higher levels of the following modules:
- EMP
- Remote repair
- Delta shield
- Omega shield
- Battery
- Unity
- Fortify
- Salvage
- Supress
- Destiny
- Passive Shield
- Mirror shield
- Vengeance
- Area Shield
- Alpha Drone
- Blast Shield
Modules
- Genesis: Added sector cooldown (5d in White Star). During the cooldown period no other ship can activate Genesis in the same sector.
- Vengeance: Now starts activating automatically when the ship drops to low health. The ship must stay alive during activation for Vengeance to do the area damage. Shields cannot be activated during the activation period.
- Impulse: Cooldown reduced to 4 minutes/40h (from 6 minutes/60h)
- Laser: Maximum damage increased on level 2+ in all star types. Time to fully ramp up reduced to 30 seconds on Blue Stars only.
- EMP: In public Red Star, EMP cannot be activated if there's no enemy ship in range (instead of in the sector)
- Alpha Drone: Added 5 more levels
- Crunch can no longer be used on a sector without asteroids
- Unity, Fortify, Vengeance and Salvage can now only be installed on a Battleship
Tweaks and improvements
- Reduced hydrogen deposit required to generate relics in White Stars (300 for Level 5 planets, 150 for Level 10 planets)
- Artifacts with a research bonus now display that bonus on the Shipment screen
- White Stars: Preparation indicator shows properly when rewinding back in the time machine
- Shipyard capacity increased by 1 ship on level 3 and higher
- Tweaked selection to make it less likely to select undesirable objects (i.e. taps on low zoom levels will always pick the ships instead of the asteroids underneath them)
- Shipment icons on transports will render correctly and not on top of other overlapping ships
- Supress shows visual indicator on the target ship while it is active
- Added "Repair Now" option on Info page of eligible ships (since the button on the selection bar can be lost in certain cases, such as when the ship is docked on an active scanner)
Bug fixes
- Fixed some time machine issues where ships could get stuck after being issued move orders, requiring a time reset to fix
- Fixed an issue where ships with 0 HP would often take longer than normal to be destroyed
- Fixed an issue where very large White Star replays would not play and get the app stuck
- Fixed missing news items on Android 9