Flight Physics Improvements:One of our big goals was to optimize the physics a little more to allow for more cores and to take some of the pressure off slower CPUs. The end result of this work is that there should be about 20% less physics load on the CPU, and when the load gets high, fps drops will be less noticeable. So it was a pretty big win.The root of the upgrade is that we now use physics for everything flight related. This means the ship handling will feel slightly different and may be a bit foreign at first. The ship banking used to be controlled by a forced rotation over time that overrode physics (this lead to some nasty problems we will discuss below as well.) This is why the banking could feel a bit robotic, because it was. Now we use some crazy vector math to handle the banking with physics forces.From your perspective:Some ships will bank more quickly and others more slowly than before.

For Space Pirates and Zombies 2 we also have cheats for this game available. You will find a collection of cheat codes and unlockables that will allow you to overcome any obstacle on the Space Pirates and Zombies 2 cheats page. We can also offer you the Trainer for this game. In Space Pirates and Zombies, in the options screen I see keybindings for fire groups 1, 2 and 3. By experimentation, group one and two correspond to the normal left-right mouse button weapons, which seem to be shooters and launchers respectively. The group 3 key doesn't seem to do anything.

Since the banking is using real physics the shape along the spine of the ship matters. It takes very little force to rotate a pencil along its length, but a lot more to rotate something with wings sticking out from the center line.Root core placement matters. This is where the physics is centered (somewhat) So if you put the root core up front you can make turns that can slide out the tail end on fast turns (this feels pretty good) Experiment with a placement you like.Ships now nose down or up on turns. Ship pitch rotation is no longer locked, so on turns they look a lot more dynamic.One extremely awesome side effect is that ramming and collisions look fantastic.

If you see an arena event with the Krule Intention ship, try it out and you will see what the new physics can do.Extra physics info for nerds:So physics and the frame rate update at different speeds. This means that physics needs to interpolate between drawn frames to look smooth.

Now when we were doing the robotic banking, it was fighting this interpolation because we were forcibly changing the physics all the time. This lead to a “tick” it was really fast and you may have never noticed it, but you probably heard it (ears are better at picking this stuff up) So if you did a high speed turn in the past your engine sound would kind of warble. That warble was the sound of the physics being reset dozens of times per second. Tick Tick Tick.

Drove us nuts but we didn't know what it was until we fixed it. Now the engines hum instead of yodel.At high frame rates the visual tick became visible. The camera is fixed to the ship, so the ship itself never ticked as it rotated because the camera ticked with it, however the entire rest of the environment (aside from the skybox) WOULD tick since the actual thing ticking was the ship with the camera attached. These subtle little tick tick tick when looking at asteroids and turning. All fixed.Sound and flight are a lot more smooth now. We like smooth.

Missile Upgrades:The missiles have come up a lot on the forums recently as not being viable, and we agree, so we set out to fix that.Missiles now shoot twice as often, but do half damage (dps is unchanged)Missiles get a 3 second point defense buffer before being lockable. This prevents them being popped while next to the parent ship.Flak cannons now work like flak cannons and are not 100% effective within the flak cloud. Some missiles will make it through the shrapnel, others will be damaged, others destroyed. Expect around 50% to survive with some remaining level of health.Missiles, Torpedoes, and Warheads have a short warm up time before being fired while in initial formation with the mothership (to prevent friendly fire accidents)Missiles, Torpedoes, and Warheads have 50% more health.Ion Warhead clouds now have a 1 second lifespan but do 2x damage. This makes them the shield killers they are meant to be. Insane Difficulty:Its back and less fair than ever. This difficulty mode is about pain, and please do not try this mode with less than 50 hours of experience.

It will hurt you.Details:. AI does 2X damage. You do 0.5X damage.

AI levels MUCH more quickly. You can still out pace them, but barely. They get a base of 97.5% of your experience. Expect the AI to stay ahead of you for a good long while. Zombie provinces can now have 2X as many zombies. They will vacuum factions to death. Zombies will do 2X damage (that is 4X total.

There's some hard zombies). Outside of the difficulty slider there are 73 other sliders which are not connected that you can use to inflict pain on yourself.You have been warned.Note: Insane mode is still in the works so there is not achievement for it yet, but there probably will be someday once we know it is settled and evil enough. Extended Core Modes:The physics improvements above have had the side effect of making the long awaited extended core modes possible. They do eat a fair share of CPU so keep that in mind, and the story will still use the good old 15, but if you want bigger ships, they have arrived.Note: this applies to the whole galaxy. All captains get the extra cores.There are 6 modes:. Default: normal progression (15 cores total). 3 Early: Your starter ship will now have 6 cores instead of 3, normal progression.

(18 total). 3 Late: This extends the end game allowing cores to be added further along in the level tree (18 total). 6 Early: Start with a 9 core ship. (21 total).

6 Late: Greatly extend the end game core perk hunt. (21 total). 3 Early and 3 Late: This one starts you bigger and ends you bigger, and is quite fun. (21 total)Why the odd number MinMax? What you smokin?The reason for 15, 18, and 21 is to allow 3 X N brick shapes for synergies without wasted dangly bits. We hate dangly bits. Super Sandbox Sliders:So, there are now 73 sandbox sliders, and with great power comes great responsibility.

Awesome new modes are at your finger tips, but it is also possible to make a horrible untuned mess. Try for the first option, and please don't blame us for the second.To help with this, we have made a few pre-built game modes using the sliders to act as helper examples for your own tuning templates.Game Modes:. Default: Good old default. This is what the story uses. All Unlocked: If you want it all and you want it now, well this is for you.

Epic War: Brutal marathon conquest. Rising Star: Carve out an Empire. Somehow. Hidden Menace: While bandits rule, dankness looms.For most players the game modes above will be a great starting point and will add tonnes of replayability.For those of you who like to get your hands dirty, read on. Tuning Categories:Starmap Setup:These build the galaxy and cannot be changed after generation.

These are very powerful and define things like the levelup mechanics and faction spread, the guts of how the galaxy will play out.Note: the rest of the sliders can be changed in game at any time.Starmap Meta:This is how the metagame works. How many systems are needed to make part sizes, how many perks you can pick from on levelup, the levelup speed.Combat:This one is really powerful, and it is the reason alt-F8 exists. You can change darn near everything about combat in here, live.

Expect to spend a good while fiddling in here.Zombie War:How strong is the infection and how hard is it to overcome.Resources:Feast or famine it is up to you.Raids:Adjust the power, effectiveness, and frequency of raids.Cloaking:Tune the cloaking mechanics to your likingMisc:This is a little bit of everything else that doesn't fit in a category. There are some cool things in there like determining how much rez parts and goons consume, if any.

Important notes:In sandbox mode we try not to lock you down, so if a tunable won't break the game we let you tune it while the sandbox is running. If you made a bad choice, and that choice wasn't used to generate the galaxy, just change it:)To access tunables while the game is running look in the options menu (not available in story mode)Also if you are tuning ships, you can press Alt-F8 to bring up the menu more quickly.We also allow you to save your own tuning table.

Each time you load the sandbox menu it will default to your saved tunings.Note: You can even share these tuning files with friends (if you rename them they will appear in the pre-defined tuning lists at the top of the sandbox menu)Located here: C:UsersMinMaxAppDataLocalLowMinMax GamesSPAZ 2CloudTunablesJust rename MyTunables to something else and it will appear in the game modes menu. The hope is to someday set these via workshop, but there is no reason people can't share them themselves for now.

Other Fixes and Changes:. Fixed issue with controller input scaling with frame rate. Now rates are constant like with the mouse. Fixed issue where if you press escape on the select difficulty menu while already in a game it would revert to the galaxy creation screen. Zombies should respawn with a full compliment of 0 star parts.

On hard zombies do 33% bonus damage now (offsets their poor parts) on insane 2x. Fixed a bug where in rare cases a save could become corrupted due to a loading timing issue and subsequent save. Sprung up in V 0.9.0. Fixed sound persistence issue where too many looping audio sounds were active on the starmap after loading from a combat instance. Got some CPU back on starmap.

Ai captains start with more real parts. In inventory level the firing arcs are now easier to test since guns will always fire instead of only firing if they can hit something. Zombies get strike craft at zombie starbases. Keeps them threat relevant. Zombies levelup more aggressively. Going Forward:We expect a few hotfixes to come out as a result of all the changes in this build, but we are on deck to get them out as quickly as possible.While I am working on script optimization, and an endless mode for the zombie infection, Richard will be exploring our big stretch goal, VR. He will likely make a separate post talking about that in the near future.Long term the major goals left are VR, Voice Acting and Localization.

Beyond that there is the ongoing support of the new systems, bug fixing, tuning, and the addition of features as they are needed or just sound really cool.Thanks again for your support and great ideas!Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak). Hi All,We have finished upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to Unity 5.4.4.

The last time we upgraded the engine was before we entered early access. This is a huge change and is the first major SPAZ 2 engine update that you will have been exposed to.The main reason to upgrade the engine was to stay compliant with the ever changing operating systems and technology.

The last engine version was already two years old, and we feel it is critical to stay up to date to ensure SPAZ 2 continues to work for years to come.We tested the build as best as two people can, but there may be issues here and there. Please keep your eyes out for bugs and weird issues, and if you see them, please report them on the bug forums here:So this update isn't about new stuff, in fact ideally the game looks and plays identically to v 0.8.8.

The goal was to get everything working as it was in v0.8.8 and then build on that foundation for the rest of the project. Since gameplay didn't change between v 0.8.8 and v0.9.0 we can roll back to v0.8.8 without breaking saves. We want to ensure that we don't disrupt peoples' progress. First a note about dual monitor setups:So between Unity 5.0.4 and Unity 5.4.4 somewhere monitor 0 and 1 became swapped in the engine.

What this means is that your monitors may be swapped next time you play. We tried to make this as painless to fix as possible and have added an in game display switcher to the Display Menu.Beyond that, we also detect if you have dual monitors and place a one time helper button on the main menu to fix the problem. The big yellow button will go away as soon as you start a game, and it will never return. We wanted to make sure people wouldn't be frustrated by the unintended swap.

Loading/Spawning Performance Improvements:As discussed in the v0.8.8 announcement, multiplayer wasn't going to work. See:Although experimenting and trying multiple methods to bring multiplayer online ate most of the time between v0.8.7 and v0.9.0, we were able to make some improvements. Also, again, thank you all for your amazing understanding and kindness about this.After v0.8.8 we began to remove the Unity 4 legacy networking hooks from the game (took 3 days, there were tons). This means that all of our spawning routines and level loading now flow directly from function calls instead of traveling through a virtual network layer and object lookup system before reaching their eventual destinations.What this means to you.

You should notice that there is much less hitching when ships spawn and level spawning should be really fast. Everything is essentially on a direct pipe now.

DirectX11 Support:SPAZ 2 is now DX11 capable. If your card only runs DX9, don't worry, the game will default to DX9 if DX11 is not present.People with DirectX11 capable video cards can expect frame rate improvements. Visuals wise, the game should hopefully look identical, just faster.There were rendering improvements for everyone across the board, especially on the map due to some shader changes.Please report any rendering issues you see. We tried to catch em all, but there is a lot of stuff out there.

Camera input standardized:We found a really odd bug that has been around forever and fixed it. It turns out when vysnc was off and frame rate was really high in some cases, like the ship assembly level because there is almost nothing in there, the mouse input would slow way down. What was happening was the mouse input was being divided by the frame speed. This meant higher frame rates, slower mouse.What this also meant was lower frame rates, faster mouse. The mouse input changing based on frame rate is just bad so we fixed it.Since we played with vsync on we never noticed the issue until now.Now at low and high frame rates the mouse input should be consistent.What this means to you: You may need to readjust your mouse sensitivity, but once you adjust it, it will be consistent. Going Forward:The next version will focus on the sandbox and improving tuning and replaybility.We hope to release a large set of game mutators for the sandbox.We want to make missile builds more viable.A new map for the Starmap!A first crack at a really hard insane difficulty mode for experts.Beyond that there will be a focus on physics and script performance improvements. Rendering wise we probably have done all that can be done, but we think we can squeak out some more frame rate by taking a bit more load off the CPU.

Never hurts to try anyhow.Thanks everyone!Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak). Space Pirates and Zombies 2, the post-apocalyptic space sandbox shoot-o-strategy with a deceptively bad name, has scrapped plans for a multiplayer mode. Developers MinMax Games had planned to add Arena mode on SPAZ 2’s journey through early access but they say multiplayer progress has ground to a halt as they upgraded to a newer version of the engine they’re building it in. After four weeks of work without any real progress, they’ve given up. They are extending refunds for player who consider this a dealbreaker, mind.

It has been a hard month upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to 5.4.4 and there have been some really unexpected road bumps. We still aren't fully 5.4.4 ready, but one thing has become clear, the Arena multiplayer isn't going to work.Between Unity 4 and 5.1 Unity's multiplayer backend fundamentally changed, but we always thought we could transpose our multiplayer code into the new system without too much difficulty. But we can tell you after 4 weeks hard at it, we have made no progress. At all.We have tried four new multiplayer solutions as well as made a good try to resuscitate the legacy networking from Unity 4 but at this point we feel that the mounting wasted time and dead ends are really hurting development progress.There has been considerable interest in a coop multiplayer mode. In the past we have posted why that would not be possible, as it would be like running a 300 player server on a local machine. So coop multiplayer wasn't part of the plan, but Arena was.The Arena multiplayer which we had hoped to deliver was at least something, but so far it has received very limited interest on the forums.

So now we have hit this multiplayer upgrade road block and we need to make a hard decision.Do we keep pressing ahead on Arena multiplayer which likely will only have a small following and will take many more months than expected, or do we spend that time making the single player better. We think it is more important to make the game better.We have tried to make it very clear on the store page that in its current form SPAZ 2 is a single player game and we requested that people not purchase the game for multiplayer features not yet implemented, but we know many of you are still going to be quite disappointed.First of all, we are very sorry and embarrassed at this failure to deliver on our part. We let our enthusiasm get ahead of us.Secondly, we have contacted Steam and have asked them remove the two week since purchase time requirement for refunds. We are still waiting to hear back from Steam about this, but it should be possible. So if you picked up SPAZ 2 early and sat on it waiting for multiplayer, and didn't elapse the two hour playtime limit, you should be able to refund it soon.EDIT: Update from Steam: Their system is unable to remove the automated 2 week ownership time limit, but our Steam contact has kindly offered to handle the refund requests by hand. If you meet the refund requirements above and want a refund, please contact us at with a link to your Steam profile, and we will forward your link to our contact for a manual refund.Above Refund Offer Available Until July 16 2017, need an end date else we will be pinging our Steam contact forever.Thirdly, we plan to use the time we recover to double down on content and replayability. We can get to these features sooner now and make them bigger.

We are going to build new maps for the sandbox mode, release an greatly expanded set of sandbox gameplay mutators, add a much more difficult insane difficulty level, and we will focus on making the end game more challenging once you have that massive battleship.We hope that this will in some way make up for our failure with the multiplayer Arena mode.Currently we are still working on the upgrade to Unity 5.4.4 and it will feature DirectX 11 support as well as quite a bit of rendering optimization. Removal of the legacy networking hooks should also lead to CPU performance recovery. Once that is ready, we will dive back into work on the single player campaign at full speed to make SPAZ 2 the best it can be.Thank you for your support and understandingAndrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak). Hi All,Well we have been back at it for the last couple of weeks and it is time to push a new build:) It was great to have a little time with our families over the holidays, and thanks very much to you all for being understanding about that too.

We appreciate it!The goal of 0.8.6 was to tie up the smaller loose ends before we did our big 0.9 engine and multiplayer push. 0.8.6 is by no means the end of work on the single player, but for the next little while our focus will be on getting the engine upgraded to Unity 5.5+ (we are running v5.01 right now) and then to start on the multiplayer game modes. So single player will likely not change for a couple of months as we delve into these new major tasks.There may end up being an experimental build to opt into as we do the engine changes and very likely for the multiplayer changes so stay tuned for that too. Fighter ChangesFighters have been getting a lot of love in the last few builds, and now we think that we are zeroing in on something really workable for them. One of the big issues that has come up in the forums, and our meetings, was how fighters didn't work according to the rules of the other weapon systems.So fighters took no energy to use and were also able to attack during the reload cycle of the mothership, which is meant to be a battle lull for evasion and positioning. This meant that fighters were essentially a damage over time weapon that was free to use.A lot of cool ideas have swirled around the forums on how to deal with this, and what we settled on was to make fighter bays consume a small amount of power over time.This was really important because it works with the next piece of the puzzle.Fighters return to their hangars and reload when the mothership reloads. So when the mothership reloads, fighters will not be fighting and will instead repair and rearm.The power consumption over time here is important because a 100% carrier build would never need to reload therefore their fighters could still be fielded forever.

Now carriers need to be concerned about power if they want to keep their fighters fighting for as long as possible.Another fairly major change was the conversion of Shooter fighters to Defender fighters. So there was a lot of discussion on wanting to manage fighter roles, but instead of adding even more interface, we decided to take the underutilized Shooter fighters and convert them into dedicated Defender fighters with a good stats boost.So if you want fighters that stick with your mothership and form a fighter screen, you choose Defenders.

Otherwise, choose other fighter types, and they will kill whatever they find in range, while using your targeting and contextual actions to guide them as well. Disbanding StarbasesWe have added the ability to disband a starbase now. There was a good post on the forums outlining the reasons why players would want this, and we agreed, so here it is.The main use is to change the focus of a Starbase, so making the Starbase root be a Militia core for example may be something you want to do to take advantage of the shield bonuses.In other cases, you may want to clear some space for another faction to grow.Details:- Added Disband Starbase button to the Assign Starbase menu.- Scrap refund (50%) for disbanded starbases- No disbanding starbases that are waiting for battles. Capital Transports for All!Another fairly common topic has been the Capital Transport and how inadequate it was for large empires.

We were considering having one transport per 5 provinces, but in the end settled on actually giving each province its own Capital Transport. So this means you will see more of them on the map, and if you see one, it will be full of taxes.So now you don't need to manage sending them to the right bases at the right times. You don't need to worry about them making stupid decisions on which taxes to pick up either. They launch on a schedule now and you just wait to collect all the juicy taxes.When/If you start your game in progress, don't be alarmed if you see a large amount of Capital transports incoming on the capital.

All the provinces will send theirs right away but will soon settle into a schedule and they will arrive over time instead of in bursts.Details:- Every starbase now has its own Capital Transport. Protecting The LootWe all hate is when some captain ninjas out loot from beneath us.

Now there are a couple ways to prevent this.The first one is the 'Get Lost!' You need to be in contact with another captain to use it though, because bullying from across the galaxy isn't that threatening.If your threat is high enough, the other captain will leave the current province for 3 minutes of starmap time (this is a long time) But to prevent abuse, you can only tell a captain to leave one province at a time. Telling a captain to 'Get Lost!' Has a much lower relations hit than attacking them.The other way to keep people out of your loot is now to fight them. Battle circles now block scavenge nodes and resource nodes.

This means that if you are fighting someone, no other captain can come and sneak off with the loot anymore. So if you see a node you can't harvest and there is a battle nearby, that is why.Details:- Added Get Lost Button- Battle circles now block resource harvesting from nodes.

War and PeaceWe have upgraded the faction leader logic to do a better job of picking the initial wars when a new game starts. So before initial wars were random, which lead to factions across the galaxy from each other being at war. This was a pretty useless war since the faction members rarely came into contact.

Instead, we now ensure that initial wars require border contact. This means that some factions may start with no wars if they are isolated, but as they grow, they will come into contact with other faction borders and wars will happen as they already naturally do.Peace has also become a little more logical as well. So as factions are separated, they will be more likely to declare peace if their borders are no longer in contact.Details:- AI much better at picking initial wars on new game start. Should lead to more logical border conflicts.- When faction borders do not touch for a while, peace treaties will be more likely. And the Rest.What is left was mostly fixes and quality of life stuff that we wanted to get to before we jumped into the engine upgrade/multiplayer. Since we will be away from single player likely for a couple of months we wanted to get these quick fixes in. On to v0.9.0!Starting Monday (assuming v0.8.6 is all good) we will begin the large task of upgrading Unity from v5.01 to v5.5+.

This will be a major task as we expect it to take up to a month due to the amount of game objects that will need to be changed. Literally thousands of them will have now defunct components on them and they will need to be rejigged to the new multiplayer back end.Probably a week before the official release of v0.9.0 we will open up an experimental branch for people to test out. This will just be the upgraded engine without multiplayer yet, but it will need some testing because there will be over a year of Unity changes in the new engine and some things are sure to go awry over a time span like that.Once we are happy that v0.9.0 is stable and working just like v0.8.6, but with the upgraded engine, we will release that build and start multiplayer work.There will be more details on the multiplayer plans as part of the release notes for the Unity v5.5 engine upgrade. Learning what Unity v5.5 can do may guide some of our multiplayer design, so it is best to wait on that until we see v5.5 alive and running the game.Thanks everyone for your continued support!Andrew (Blorf) and Richard(Narlak). Escape Pod Interactions:You can now intercept escape pods on the starmap and then do terrible things to them. The Chipper!We have added what we call the chipper on the inventory screen. You access the screen from the starmap in the bottom button array.If you want to be rid of parts and don't want to drag them to a starbase to sell, you can chip them on the spot.

You will get 50% of the scrap price that you would have gotten at a starbase, so hauling is better. But if you don't want to haul, and don't want the parts to weigh you down, then chip em and make your own scrap.Select the parts that you want to chip and transfer them to the other side of the inventory screen. There you can either chip them, or drop them into space as before as a scavenge field (good way to get pursuers off your back sometimes, especially zombies)Infected parts are special, since they have zombie goo all over them, they give you Rez instead of scrap when chipped.

So now you need to decide if you want to clean that infected part, or convert it to some much needed Rez. Battle Wagon Logic Upgrade:We have changed Battle Wagon's target acquisition logic based on used feedback. The Fighter Swarm:Fighters now work like a swarm of angry bees and instead of needing to be directed, fighters will now seek and destroy enemies within their attack radius. Their target acquisition also takes hints similar to Battle Wagon. So fighters will prioritize your E target, then whatever you are pointing at, and then anything in range.Some effects are that you no longer 'need' to use E to send fighters after enemy ships, which will then allow you to keep your Carrier strike craft our of weapons' range more easily.If there is no (E) target, fighters will automagically sweep to whatever you are shooting at. So if you start shooting at a ship or an enemy strike craft, you will notice your swarm of angry little bees swarming to that target naturally as well. Mining Op UpgradesSo the Mining Op was underwhelming resource wise vs.

Time required to mine. We are hoping these new changes will make mining op's more of a treat to try when you see one pop up.- There are double the resource rocks in the Mining Op now.- Each resource rock contains double the amount of Rez.- We added a second tractor beam to the mothership to make pickup faster.- Rez drops from rocks come in larger denominations, now in 1,2,5,10 (was 2,5)- Resource rocks won't drop explosive wisps anymore (so you don't risk breaking the rogue miner crates, causing an unwanted battle.

Final Battle Readiness:We noticed a reoccurring problem with players not realizing when the final battle was ready to start, or not knowing what they had to do to start the final battle. We have made this a lot more explicit. Now when the final battle is ready the helper tip tells the player to kill the capital base, there is a callout indicating readiness (also in sandbox which had nothing)But most importantly we have changed the war meter once the final battle is ready. Once you achieve the threshold for the final battle, the war meter will stop counting and will instead tell you to go fight.

Other Tweaks and Fixes:- Fixed stash showing values with markup- Fixed long profile names warping in trade window- Torpedoes and Bombs (and all missiles) got a health boost. Moving ForwardNext, we will be working on v0.8.5 which contains mostly tuning and bug fixing tasks to get us solid for our extended work on v0.9.0.Version 0.9.0 will be the big engine upgrade and multiplayer rewrite required for Unity 5.5 (We are currently on v0.5.0.2)Once we upgrade the engine, we will need to rewrite our multiplayer back end to comply with the major multiplayer changes in Unity since v5.1. That upgrade will take us offline for a while, but we will have more details upon the release of 0.8.5.We don't expect that it v0.8.5 will be ready before January due to us taking a little time off to be with our families over the holidays. We will be pushing fixes to v0.8.4 though as needed.We look forward to seeing you all again in 2017!Andrew (Blorf) and Ricard (Narlak).

Configurable Strike Craft and Hangar SystemThis one was a major player request. People wanted strike craft to matter more and be configurable.

We heard you and here is what we did.The Hangar SystemThe mothership now contains up to 4 hangars (start with 2, unlock 2 more.) These hangars can be used to build multiples of any strike craft that you can afford, up to the command point maximum. The hangar menu has replaced the strike craft menu.Command PointsCommand points dictate how many total strike craft you can build.

Different sized strike craft consume different numbers of command points. So command points dictate your strike craft reserve while hangars dictate how many you have active at a time.Command points are increased through the perk system.Hull SelectionOnce you select a hangar, you can then select the hull to place in that hangar. Hulls are unlocked through combat using a blueprint system similar to SPAZ 1.Weapon SelectionOnce you select a hull, you select the weapons for that hull. All the strike craft have had their weapon mounts totally redone. Each strike craft has its own unique set of mounts and it is up to you to pick the mount config that best suits the weapons that you want on the strike craft. The Blueprint SystemIts back! So now when you kill a strike craft there is a chance that a blueprint will drop.

These blueprints first unlock the strike craft as a hull that you can build, but over time, they are used to improve the hull as well.So as you pick up blueprints, your strike craft hulls will gain stars which boost their stats significantly. As strike craft get more stars, blueprints for those hulls drop less frequently since they are getting harder and harder to improve upon.If you had a game in progress, we estimate what your blueprint progress should have been, so you don't need to restart unless you want to. New Strike Craft Sizes/FeaturesStrike craft now come in three sizes.SmallThese are the strike craft that you are used to. They drive their weapons off of their reactor (so no reloading) and don't have shields. They are very fast and pack quite a bit more punch than they used to. They are also pretty inexpensive so are great if you are on a budget or want to flood wave after wave at an enemy.MediumThese strike craft are quite a bit larger than the smalls, and some of our old craft have been scaled up to fit this new role. They can field medium sized weapons but are still able to drive them off their reactors (this means no reloading.) The medium strike craft also have weak shields.

Mediums can do quite a bit of damage but can't soak nearly as much as their bigger more expensive siblings.LargeThese strike craft are behemoths and can take on smaller motherships by themselves. They use large sized weapons and as such also need to use a reactor and capacitor combo like a mothership. This means that they need to reload and sometimes cannot fire or boost their shields, just like a mothership. By the time you face these strike craft, your mothership better be of a decent size or they will take you apart. Large strike craft have strong shields and can soak a lot of damage.Junk ClassThere are three scrap class strike craft. One for each size class.

These are always unlocked and are cheaper than their non Junk counterparts. They also take fewer command points to field, so are sometimes a good option if you need strike craft to distract an enemy. They also get blueprint upgrades and can become quite powerful. 8 New Strike Craft!The new strike craft size system meant we needed some new strike craft. There are 6 new larges, 1 new medium, and 1 new small.The Short Bus (Small/Junk)Our beloved bus is back from SPAZ 1. This is the cheapest strike craft in the game and a great bullet sponge.The Mule (Medium/Junk)Also making a return from SPAZ 1 is the Mule, the old mining ship.

It fields two small launchers and 2 medium turrets.The Freighter (Large/Junk)Another SPAZ 1 alumni. This ship is bristling with small turrets and small launchers.The Star Spot (Large)You may recognize this as well from SPAZ. It is a heavily modified Sun Spot, turned on its side. 4 omni turrets for defense as well as a large turret and large dispenser mount.The Gold Digger (Large)This is a new beast. It is a heavy carrier capable of carrying two large fighter hangars (or Krules if you roll that way) Up front it has 2 omni cannons and there are 2 small turrets in the back.The Shatter (Large)The Shatter is the Bounty Hunter's newest strike craft. It supports 4 medium launchers and 2 medium turrets. It is a dedicated launcher platform with a couple of defensive turrets for anyone getting to close.The Hammerhead (Large)Most peoples' favorite ship from SPAZ 1.

We had to bring it back. It is a turreted monster as it always was. Two large turrets in the front, and 2 medium turrets in the back. It is just a big pile of nasty.The Star Cruiser (Large)You can't have a Hammerhead without a Star Cruiser. So it is back too:) The Star cruiser is the only strike craft capable of fielding warheads, and two of them at that.

It also supports two small launchers (put fighters in there) and there are two turrets mainly for point defense.And the RestAll the strike craft have had their weapon mounts/stats overhauled as well, so none of them got away without an upgrade. Some also got a size upgrade. The Triglave for example is now a lot bigger and beefier.

Lots of New WeaponsWhile we were working on the strike craft upgrade, we realized that some mount types did not have enough weapon variety to make the certain strike craft viable/interesting to configure. This plus a few beers lead to a burst of new weapons, because instead of just solving the problem we decided to go to town a little bit. Weapons are fun to build.The Particle HoseWe didn't have an Uzi, now we do:) That was pretty much the conversation there. It is a really fun bullet hose style weapon. The bullets do not do much damage individually, but there are a whole lot of bullets. The particle hose is a medium sized weapon so it will only appear on medium and large parts.Micro HangarsWe really wanted to support people having fighters earlier on in the game.

Some people love fighters, so holding them back until large parts appeared wasn't fair. So.There are three new micro hangars. Small launcher mounts can now fit a tiny hangar that holds two zappers. Medium launcher mounts can hold a hanger that holds 4 zappers or shooter fighters as well.The Flak Cannon!It has finally arrived, four years too late for SPAZ 1, but it is here. We now have a turreted version of point defense to complement the minigun. Flak cannons are long range defense systems that will try to pop slow moving targets at a distance. They create a large cloud of flak and can sometimes pop multiple missiles at once.Flak cannons are not great at short range defense and the flak puffs will not explode too close to the ship as to prevent damaging themselves.The Cloud TorpedoThe Cloud Torpedo drops ion bomblets as it flies.

This serves two purposes. The bomblets fly ahead of and around the torpedo to soak up point defense fire instead of the torpedo, and those bomblets that do hit do ion damage to lower enemy shields before the torpedo impacts to wreck the hull. The Cloud Torpedo is best used at long range to give it the maximum time to deploy all of its bomblets.The Ion ShotgunThe Ion Shotgun fires long range and somewhat tightly grouped ion projectiles.

Its purpose is to take down shields at range. It is a small turreted weapon so it is a great early shield popping solution. Note: The Ion shotgun fires blue (Ion) projectiles whereas regular shotguns shoot red.The Mac HammerIt is a medium sized assault shotgun that says go away. Very high damage and high spread but with a short range.The Plasma DispenserTake a pulse cannon and turn it up to 11. It shoots a multitude of very slow moving and very long range explosive plasma charges. Each plasma charge also explodes on impact causing splash damage.

It is a devastating weapon. It only appears on large parts and is quite rare. CUSTOM ORDER PARTSWe had to capitalize that one. It is the number one requested feature that we have seen. We resisted at first because we felt that it went against the scrounging/empire building nature that we wanted to build for SPAZ 2, but SPAZ 2 is a game about building, and tying your hands is really not fair.So. Here's how we tie your hands.

Custom Order parts are expensive. The most effective way to build your ship will still be to use what is available in the stores and adapt to that. Later, once you have an empire of your own, take territory that best will produce the parts you want. That will always be best.However, now there is a new custom order panel in the catalog. How it works is whatever you search for in the catalog, if it can be built, someone will be willing to build it for you, but at 5x the cost. Late game, when you are swimming in money, this allows you to upgrade more freely, but early game you really need to think about that extra expense.Sometimes the custom order criteria will come up blank. For example if you ask for a small wing with a chainsaw beam on it, that can't exist so it won't be built.

If a custom part can be built though, it will. There are actually over 3000 part/weapon combos it has to search to determine viability of a request.When custom ordering a part, it will always be built at the space station that has the lowest markup. This means that you will get the best price possible, and it is always delivered (there is no extra delivery charge in this case)You can set the number of stars you want on a part as well, but it will become very expensive, very quickly.

However, while this game can be played on Facebook, kids ages 10-12 should play it via the Junebud portal. The gameplay in Milmo is fairly generic, but actions such as switching to various other implements besides the sword, including the spade to dig or a butterfly net to catch bugs, add a bit of variety and quite a bit of fun. Playing through Facebook provides the player a Facebook Page with tool-tips and the ability to use Facebook credits. Kids also get to make choices in some quests about whether to help others. Villagers and heroes. This is seen fairly early in the game when players must decide whether to help hunt down a sea monster or help the researcher to study it.The look of the game will attract younger players, and the ease of the game-play is suited to kids as young as age 10.

Final ThoughtsThanks to everyone with your patience waiting for this update as well as your great suggestions. As you can see, we hear you and we are all making SPAZ 2 better together!For those of you with games in progress. You should not need to restart. We refunded the price of all your current strike craft as scrap so you didn't lose anything and we also tried to figure out a reasonable blueprint progress for your saves.For everyone else. This update was major open heart surgery on the flow of the game so there may be issues, especially balance issues. We look forward to hearing from you about them and will tune/fix as quickly as possible.Now get in there and try this new stuff out!:)Andrew(Blorf) and Richard(Narlak).

Hi Everyone,It has been a busy month since the big synergy update. Richard and I both took a staggered week off before the end of summer to get some much needed rest/family time.

It was great to recharge, and we are right back at it full force now. It has already been 4 months since our initial Early Access release and there have been huge improvements thanks to your suggestions and support.The latest patch was all about tuning and fixing high priority quality of life issues. Thanks very much for your understanding on letting us prioritize this vs new features for this push.

That being said, a couple of fairly major improvements happened so we decided to call them out. Fighter Upgrade:There was a great discussion thread about the problems with fighters and some good solutions to make them better, so we implemented them. Fighters are now a LOT more potent, but also are on a leash. This means that though their range is that of a long range weapon, and you need to be in range to use them. So more boring picking a ship apart for 30 minutes at massive long range with no threat. Get fighters in range, and they go to work, get out of range, and then return home to defend, rearm, rebuild.

Bombers do quick heavy damage and then need to return to the ship to rearm, Fighters stay and fight a lot longer, but do less damage. More detail in the notes below.

Ramming Upgrade:Another hot topic has been ramming. It was fun but overpowered. We didn't want to lose the fun, but we wanted to add a little more realistic risk to the ram. So since ramming is hull to hull impact, we wanted both hulls to take appropriate damage. This means that you as the rammer will now need to be a little more careful what you ram and with what part of your ship.

Think of a part's armor as its hardness for the sake of a ram. If a hard nose, hits a soft wing, the wing takes a lot of damage and the nose not much at all. So the ramming is more part based now. Ram with your most armored parts into their least armored parts to do the most damage to them and the least to yourself. Build Notes:-Fighters now have limited range to prevent boring ultra long range kiting over long periods of time to take down almost any target. Instead, we want you to now fly near max weapon range and be in some danger while using the fighters, in return, fighters can now do much damage, much more in tune with other large size weapons.-Bombers and Ion Bombers shoot twice as fast and their bombs do 4x as much damage.

They have to reload more often now. Moving Forward:For our next update we will be conducting a major rework of the Strike Craft system. This will include implementing a blue print collection system similar to what we had in SPAZ 1. The mothership will now construct strike craft on its own using Scrap. We will also be adding an all new set of large strike craft as well as new unlockable configurations for the existing strike craft as their stars increase. This will be a pretty major change that will require rewriting some of the game flow and dialogue as well, so it will take some time, but we think the end result will be a really exciting addition to SPAZ 2. Expanded SynergiesWe have been tinkering with Synergies due to your feedback since their initial launch last week.

The main issue really came down to, why bother using them they don't do much. Well I think we fixed that.

Here we go.First off, we put together a video explaining the system and its new bits and pieces. The goonies ii game case photos. Please give it a watch.The biggest change is that synergies now spread to attached wings, noses and engines. The peripheral parts do not add to the synergy, but they do feed off the synergies of the cores that they are attached to.An additional bonus is now weapon damage is effected by synergies. So if you have a well synergized mass driver for example, it can do up to 80% more damage on top of any subsystem bonuses in the part itself. Synergies can add a lot of punch to a part.Now this is a really big change and some things will be out of tune.

Engines will be faster, turning will be faster etc because everything has been sort of turned up to 11 right now due to the bonuses. That will all be tuned, but we wanted to get this change into your hands for feedback and fun.Now you have a real decision to make. Create an L with 4 wings that are synergized to 10% or create a well synergized ship with 2 wings, but those two wings are 80% more powerful. When the synergy bonuses of the cores are taken into consideration, there should be a lot of thought involved with making your perfect ship. Hotfixes- Added a strike craft readout to the hud.

Active/Reserve- Fixed set bounty side objective happening before you can boutny- Level 1 bandits get fewer strike craft so less overwhelming early on- Mining Ops are richer in Rez rocks.