Land Battles Overhaul

The 3D land battles update mentioned in the previous annoucement is finished and live.
I'm going to copy a lot of the stuff from the last announcement and put it here plus any additional changes made since that post.

Fresh Start + Final Season

Along with the land battle improvements, this update comes with a fresh start for the server, which is something it seems at least half the playerbase wants. (And the land units are changed in a way that busts everyone's ground defenses.)

PvP Balance Changes

Star Movement Freedom:

Starmap level FTL blocking seems a bit overpowered, allowing one person to wall off an entire section of space for themselves. (Which is how it was intended to work)

With the goal of removing stuff that makes it easy for large corporations to snowball, and reduce the need for seasons to level the playing field again,

Overclocking FTL disruptors to block starmap travel has been removed. (FTL Disruptors remain for Solar system level redirecting of enemy attacks to the planet with the disruptor.)

Since starlanes mostly exist because of overclocked FTL disruptors, starlanes don't have to exist anymore either, meaning you can jump to any star you want like it was originally.

Starlanes removed.

FTLs will continue to fulfill their planet-level role allowing you to make a "Gate" planet with an FTL disruptor on it and put a fleet and army on that planet to defend all the other planets in the system.

To help balance out that ability to block people at the starmap level being removed, FTL Disruptors can now be built on 4 planets in a system, allowing you to have 4 "Gate" planets with defenses that protect the other planets in that system.

Citadels lowered to Standard tier instead of Elite, with reduced stats, and they can now be used in Andromeda. This means Citadels will likely not be more powerful than an endgame fleet of Elite ships anymore.

Many of the changes made including the land battles overhaul are intended to make PvP viable again like it was in the old days.

Improved Rates

More Credits. Because this update kind of pushes people to defend with fleets instead of Citadels and adds land units + modules for them that require upkeep, the base amount of credits you gain from Resorts has been increased a bit.

More Resources and more variety of Resources. Loot for defeating enemy ships now comes with bonus loot beyond the composition of the ships in the fleet to simulate items in their cargo holds.

Ships can drop every type of resource except Planet buster bombs and Gravity generators (To destroy and create planets respectively.)
That means in addition to the normal loot, you might get some extra Gold bars, Androids, Rhodium Bars, Weapon Components, or even the microtransaction currency: Time Crystals.

Along with better ship drop rates, cargo containers found floating in space are now vastly improved, giving up to 8 types of item instead of just 1. These also can give every resource type but planet busters and gravity generators.

Other changes and fixes:

Party chat added.

Limits on creating planets in the starter system removed.

Crystals added to show where slot blockers are with 3D buildings on.

Transport ship corp level required lowered from 15 to 2. Asteroid wrangler lowered from 25 to 10.

Toggle for render mode added. Forward / Deferred / Forward+.

Bugfixes:

Bug where Standard of Living would say +25m (Including +5m from SoL) but only give +20 or +23 fixed.

The last starmap visited is now remembered and reopened even after closing and reopening the game.

Bug where the reflection probe would be on at the start with reflections off fixed.

Bug with spaceport having 2 aluminum bar requirements instead of 1 being glass fixed.

So many more.

Performance Improvements and Refactoring

This update contains major refactoring to reduce the number of objects in the scene, and asset loading improvements to only load stuff in when it's actually needed to reduce memory use.

Several UI screens such as the production screen have been converted away from being in the scene disabled to only being created when needed, resulting in hundreds fewer inactive objects in the scene.

Lots of optimization tricks have been applied, like merging all the land battle scene rocks into one object.

Land battles are the heaviest performance addition yet, but the game still runs medium/high settings at 40-60 FPS on a Samsung Galaxy Note 8, a phone from 2017, so people on Steam hopefully shouldn't have an issue.

Other Performance improvements:
Ship interior optimized by making it not inactive and just toggled on when needed in the scene. (A workaround for baked lighting outside a scene had to be implemented.)

Now it takes up zero memory when show ship interior setting is disabled.