Drox beta patch 1.002

[Shadow]

Beta Patch 1.002 of Drox Operative is available over on the Drox Operative patch page. Changes can be read here. This patch adds new manually aimed ballistic weapons, makes it easier to deal with completed quests, balances a lot of things better, and fixes a bunch of minor issues.

[Valgor]

What exactly does determine a planet's level? The level of the system it's in, the state of its development (worth, population, production, ships in orbit etc.) or the level of the race who owns it?

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Valgor

What exactly does determine a planet's level? The level of the system it's in, the state of its development (worth, population, production, ships in orbit etc.) or the level of the race who owns it?

If I remember correctly it's the level of the race that owns it.

[Nayzablade]

Awesome changes/enhancements Mr Shadow! Thanks!

Nayzablade.

[Axegrinder]

Like the new medium weapons slots among other things. Good work!

[Valgor]

While I don't care much for the new manually aimed ballistics, I'd like to see remote-triggered mines to round out the arsenal even more.

[CautiousChaos]

Looks good!

[MikeLemmer]

I think it's too likely races make race-specific components; many Drakk planets have nothing but Drives for sale, for example. I think either the ratio should be lowered, or more components listed as race-specific. (Why don't Drakk have Fighter Bays as race-specific?)

I'm also hitting some strange issues with quest items. One quest asked me to pick up something like 7 Female Smashing Tide Eggs; none of the Female Smashing Tides dropped them. (That was only one quest; the other drop-gathering quests worked fine.) I've also had the Seller Locator for Mild Nonlethal Weapons point me to a planet, only to discover they sold Severe Nonlethal Weapons instead. I'm not sure if these are beta problems, but I noticed these two within 2 hours of starting the beta, and I never had issues like these before 1.002beta.

[ScrObot]

(Not 1.002 specific)

I died with a semi-hardcore ship due to dropping below the structure threshold, but there's no message or any indication why I can't respawn. Some sort of message should be displayed in this scenario to prevent confusion. The "Try again" is disabled and the hover text says "In hardcore mode, death is permanent!"; a semi-hardcore variant could be used there instead, and/or something in the message log or a normal on-screen message.

Also, when you die with a semi-hardcore ship and the resulting structural loss puts you at or below 5 structure, a warning message should be displayed upon respawn.

[ScrObot]

Starting a new ship, when exploring planets I'm getting a lot of "found a shipwreck"s but no components drop. The same thing happened when a treasure map dropped and the secret stash didn't have anything in it.

Also, should the new manually aimed ballistics hit neutral planets and other space debris so easily? I know that things like bombs can hit those as well, but perhaps neutral planets should be removed from the pool of items that can be harmed by your weapons? (I suppose there may be some strategy to destroying a neutral planet so other races don't try to colonize it so easily, but I'm not sure if that's legit or not.)

Lastly, I feel like enabling some of the advanced options (Unlucky and Poverty) should have a corresponding XP boost, just like changing the sector's Pace does. *shrug*