Naikari 0.6.0

It’s time for another update to Naikari! This is another big one, mostly because there were some changes that were partially implemented under-the-hood but needed to be finalized.

There are several noteworthy highlights to this release:

• The new game experience has been improved further: your first ship comes with a basic secondary weapon (the new Photon Dagger) to introduce this mechanic early on, a new mission has been added to teach how to equip outfits to your ship, and descriptions of some basic outfits have been modified to explain their intricacies a bit.
• Additional outfits have been added, including some medium and heavy power enhancers as well as “APUs”, which allow you to expand a ship’s CPU capacity.
• “Hypergates”, which are simply jump points that have a longer range than most, appear as you make friends or enemies with the Empire and its Great Houses.
• The Collective has been made accessible from the north, and it now starts off neutral to a new player rather than being enemies right out of the gate.

And that’s not all! There are several smaller improvements and bugfixes in this release, as well. See the changelog for a full list of changes.

As always, we hope you enjoy this release. If you have feedback, don’t hesitate to let us know what you think! :slightly_smiling_face:

Changelog

Major Changes

• Added a new outfit: the Photon Dagger. This now serves as an introductory secondary weapon: it’s available on all outfitters and is equipped to several ships by default (including the player’s starting ship). It does high damage, similar to the Banshee rockets, and is very fast (actually the speed of light, if you work it out), but unlike the Banshee rockets, it has to be manually aimed and has a bit of a shorter range.
• Added a new mission introducing the outfitter and how to customize ships.
• Added “hypergates” which appear as you make friends or enemies of the Empire and the Great Houses. (They function like regular jump gates, but over long distances.)
• Changed the Collective to be neutral to the player by default, while also adding a standard jump point between Collective and Soromid space (which previously existed but was a one-way hidden jump).
• Added support for saving and loading arbitrary snapshots.
• Added APUs (Auxiliary Processing Units) which can be used to expand a ship’s CPU capacity.
• Added some medium and large sized weapon enhancement utilities (similar to the Power Regulation Override and Rotary Turbo Modulator outfits).

Other Changes

• Made the Collective drones stronger. (They were previously nerfed so they wouldn’t be too frustrating in the old Collective campaign.)
• Changed generic cargo missions to have a special set of messages and a small faction standing boost for the destination planet’s faction if they were high-tier (“Urgent” or “Emergency” in the case of rush cargo missions, “large cargo delivery” or “bulk freight delivery” in the case of regular cargo missions).
• Changed the Shroedinger’s default weapon to the Razor MK1.
• Za’lek Test mission no longer looks through your other ships to pry off a Za’lek Test Engine from them (meaning you can now use them to hoard these engines, if you want to).
• Added conditions to prevent news entries for the Za’lek Test and race missions from being regenerated after you’ve finished them.
• Increased the number of music tracks used for the Empire and the Collective.
• Seek and Destroy mission now has its trail go cold significantly slower, ensuring you always have at least three chances to catch your target.
• Adjusted rarities of outfits: outfits which are only available in certain regions (but not only at military stations) now have a rarity of 1. Electron Burst Cannon is now rarity 2 instead of 3, since Za’lek military stations offer it.
• Reworked the Dvaered warlords event so that it’s more likely to show up, offers a higher reward, and the winners become normal Dvaered ships.
• You can now hail ships even if disabled.
• Added randomization of NPC backgrounds.
• Added some text to the Unicorp Fury Launcher and Laser Turret MK1 descriptions to help new players learn about how to properly use guided missiles and turreted weapons, respectively.
• Missions and events that check whether the player killed or attacked something now recursively check not only direct subordinates, but subordinates of subordinates, etc. This matters if you hire an escort who themself has their own escorts; it means those escorts’ kills will now count e.g. for earning bounties.
• Added the Black Market service to several stations.
• Collective Drones are now explicitly labeled as such (rather than being merely labeled as “Drone” or “Heavy Drone”).
• The event explaining how to ask for fuel now spawns a different kind of pilot depending on what factions are present in the current system (supporting the same factions as the fuel request event). It also no longer spawns in systems with none of these supported factions present.
• Slightly improved AI behavior when their leader dies.
• The Empire Recruitment mission now explicitly tells you where to find the mission computer.
• Removed the now obsolete afterburner “rumble” display (which always said “0 Rumble”, since we don’t use the “rumble” feature anymore).
• Changed the “no land” text in the Empire FLF prisoner exchange mission to something that makes more sense and avoids potential confusion over its meaning.
• Adjusted the mining AI so that miners are less likely to end up in a limbo state.
• Doubled the size of Suna and the amount of space used by the Dark Shadow mission, to bring Dark Shadow in-line with the increased radar range introduced in version 0.5.
• Added another medium Structural slot to the Za’lek Demon.
• Changed the order that stats of ships and outfits are displayed to make a little more sense.
• Changed the layout of the buttons on the list dialog (used by the Combat Practice mission) to be consistent with the rest of the UI.
• Seek and Destroy mission no longer leaves you able to ask repeat questions after you’ve already gotten the next location (which had no benefit to the player, only causing the special hail hook to interrupt e.g. attempts to bribe pilots or attempts to refuel needlessly, and introducing the possibility of accidentally paying an extra fee for the exact same information).
• Doubled the range that escorts consider to be “close” (to coincide with the increased common weapon range).
• Hired escorts now use the same AI as fighter bay escorts.
• Auto-aiming now automatically disengages if simply shooting forward is more accurate for a given bullet. This ensures that the auto-aiming system only ever increases accuracy, and never reduces accuracy.
• Improved the hired escorts explanatory text for how royalties work.
• Hired escorts now have a chance to disband when their payment is less than their promised royalty (which can happen if you run out of credits and you hire so many escorts that the total royalties you pay is greater than 100%).
• The Seek and Destroy mission will no longer spawn NPCs at Class 1 stations (as these are restricted military stations).
• Changed the music used in the credits to be the same as the music used in the main menu.
• Increased the Goddard and Dvaered Goddard time constant from 175% to 200%.

Bugfixes

• Fixed the escorts in Shadow Vigil not actually defending the diplomat they’re supposed to be escorting.
• Fixed the class of Vigilance Station (was class A for some reason).
• Fixed a bug where a previous running game’s addition of faction presence through the Unidiff system could stay added when starting a new game or loading a game without that presence addition. This was most noticeable in Hakoi, where if you started a new game after loading an established game which added pirates to Hakoi, some of those pirates would stick around in the new game even though it’s supposed to be pirate-free.
• Fixed a bug where a ship that was refueling you could abandon the refueling if it got too far away from its leader.
• Fixed a bug that caused the death menu to never show the “continue” option on saves with certain special characters in their names.
• Fixed a failure to warn of a version mismatch when attempting to load a save file from a newer version of the game.
• Fixed the Anxious Merchant mission failing to spawn.
• Fixed an occasional, generally non-fatal bug with dynamic factions (used by missions and events) which could eventually cause warnings and potentially unexpected AI behavior.
• Fixed a few planets having a non-existent graphic defined as their land graphics.
• Fixed slightly misleading display of afterburner stats.
• Fixed a bug where weapon tracking did not behave as intended.
• Fixed some missions causing your fighter bay escorts to disappear.
• Fixed a memory leak caused by the escort command menu.
• Patched a flaw in the AI code that may fix odd cases of AI pilots getting stuck rotating forever when trying to do certain tasks.
• Fixed Akios Station being listed as Class 0 when it should be Class 1.