TLF Version 1.007-1008 Beta Released (Solar Map Balance And Auto-Resolve Polish)

Version 1.007 Beta is now out, and focuses on moving things towards merging the beta branch with the official one.  This one is still just in the beta branch (which you can optionally download inside the game itself from the updater) rather than as a full version that everyone gets automatically updated to.  So you can update or not for this one, at your discretion.  When the beta branch is fully tested out, we'll push it out in the normal way -- hopefully either tonight or tomorrow morning, as I really want for everyone to be able to get these new goodies.

This version has a number of important bugfixes, and some rules changes to do things like make assassins less of a constant harassment, to remove the tax breaks and repeated false evidence exploits, trade route value reductions, and things like that.

This also includes a new Thoraxian-specific tech and building type pair, which makes them more unique (underground tunnels), and a bunch of revisions to orbital bombardment to slow that down in the early game but then let it speed up progressively via 5 new techs for that purpose.  There are also 3 new Peltian-only orbital bombing techs, which replace the previous invisible multiplier they had.

In general I spent a lot of time today running observer mode games and tuning based on the results.  For the past while, but in particular in the last release, the Acutians were just outstripping the entire solar system.  The Thoraxians were also remarkably ineffective lately.  With the changes in this version, I'm seeing vastly more variance in who comes out on top in a given game, and the Acutians no longer seem to have an overtly unusual advantage.

Beyond that, I finally got to circle back around to the auto-resolve stuff and clean up the variety of things that were still wrong with it.  There may be more, and I need to keep testing on that myself.   But the major cases that were just way off or throwing errors or whatever all seem to be fixed now.  Let us know if you see anything else!

UPDATE: 1.008 is now out with a few hotfixes that I wanted to get in tonight.  I forgot I had a podcast scheduled, so there was a limit to how much more I could do before that.

--------------- Ongoing Updates ---------------
All through this week we will continue releasing at least one new free feature every day of the work week, thanks to the overwhelming support this game has had.  This is far and away our best launch ever, and that gap keeps widening by surprising degrees.  We're extremely grateful to our ever-growing community for their support, as well as to the press for taking the time out to look at our stuff.  You guys are all awesome!

After this week, we'll see -- at minimum, we'll continue putting out at least one new free feature every week for at least a few months, if not longer.  A quest, a new weapon or ability, a new ship, a new action... something.  We'll vary it up, and make it fun.  I'm really excited about expanding the game even further, as large as it already is.  Right now we're doing that very fast in response to all the huge numbers of new players and all the things that a larger audience is bound to dig up in a game of this scope and complexity; once that settles down, we'll make it less intensive but still ongoing.

More to come tomorrow, or possibly later tonight if I have enough that it's worth pushing out.  Enjoy!

This is a beta update that you can optionally download through the in-game updater.  Steam will not automatically update it for you yet, as we don't think everyone wants that inflicted on them. ;)