As of r12270 (stable), nearly all the ship, improvement, and station costs have changed.

There are a few important mechanics changes as well:

• Orbital infrastructure now uses 'construction modules' to unlock ship production tiers. The mechanic isn't as well explained in game as it should be, but, basically, to build cruisers, you'll a need station with at least 1 construction module installed. To build battlescruisers or fleet carriers, you'll need 2x construction modules in orbit (which is doable either with 1 fleet base or shipyard, or 2 smaller stations).
• Transports can now be outfitted with either 'cargo pods' or planetary assault forces. This should make launching planetary invasions in the early game much more viable. Transports without cargo pods cannot be used for trading or population transport.

These is a fairly sweeping set of changes -- and it would cause all sorts of trouble inside old saves, thus, all your old saves are now marked as 'incompatible'.

Please let me know what you think of the balance changes.

So I *finally* got a chance to try out the latest build, and I have to say that I really like these changes overall. The early-game game planetary assault in very useful now that the AI is actually capable of planting useful colonies.

-Will

wminsing wrote:So I *finally* got a chance to try out the latest build, and I have to say that I really like these changes overall. The early-game game planetary assault in very useful now that the AI is actually capable of planting useful colonies.

Yeah, I think the gameplay has been getting steadily better. Right now, the biggest problem I see is that the AIs are badly crippling each other, so the player can often just waltz in and mop up the leftovers of AI-vs-AI wars. And to a degree, I think this will necessarily continue to be problem until the diplomacy system goes in. As a stopgap, I'm considering changing the "always at war" settings for certain difficulties -- specifically, making the AI's in hard-mode maps automatically ally against the player -- which could perhaps make playtesting a bit more challenging in the short term