Hey, the first VA update letter published to Steam. For those of you seeing this after purchasing the game once it was released - first off thank you - second, WHEW, am I working day and night to get this thing ready. I am extremely stressed, and barely rest haha! There's a lot of stuff that MUST be better, and I am losing my sanity fighting to make it the case. There are some lost battles like performance with ship cluster physics body recalculations which can be done later, but on the whole things are looking really good. ( This has all been over the last few days ) Latest changes: - Added SFX to all weapon firing, and messed with the visuals for explosions. - All Campaign battles have been given their own hand-crafted background scene. - The Workbench and Composer share a nice relaxing scene. - Fleet Fight has it's own colour vs colour scene. - Added a number of simple "save a ship with x stats" achievements for fun. - Drones have had their behavioral, and weapon values fixed and adjusted. They now correctly standoff against targets at roughly their weapon range. The Goshawk's beam now actually works, and the Gladiator missile launcher is slightly stronger. - The Laser family have had their PD abilities vastly improved, and are now 100% reliable, while still costing a decent portion of Energy investment to keep running. - Overall weapon targeting has been improved in terms of ship vs drone vs missile preferances. - Ship slowdown on approach has been fixed(?), ships should now more reliably attempt to retreat to maintain their preferred standoff based on their average weapon ranges weighted by DPS. ( PD weapons barely contribute to this value, but are present for the sake of situations where ships are left with only their PD weapons. ) - The Ekudon Cannon has had it's damage quadroupled 1000 > 4000, and had it's energy cost halved from 2x to 1x. It still takes 4000 energy to fire but is reasonably accessible without vast infrastructure. - The Workbench has had it's top bar restored, for quick access to the rest of the game such as the Composer. This was off due to technical complexity at the time, but those issues have been solved. ( Look there's a lot of game state to mannage and it was a bit overwhelming at the time so I turned it off. ) - The Campaign has been added as an item on the Quick Access hotbar. - Settings can now be accessed from anywhere in the game, generally found at the top of the screen near the Quick Access hotbar. - Battle Budgets can now be pinned, and those limits will be shown in the Composer as you build a fleet. Not yet present in the Workbench, I need to find a place for it to fit. - Fixed some broken buttons caused by accidental prefab edit cause-and-effect. My bad. - Misc bug fixes and probably plenty stuff that's important but that I have forgotten about due to not writing it down as I did it. Enjoy. - Luke AP