It's been a busy month, including a long move across the country, but the September minor update is here and brings with it a number of long-requested quality of life features and some major improvements to stability.

Folders & Search

The most hotly requested feature for the Fleet Editor was the addition of folders and search functionality for the fleet list, with 25 individual mentions and a combined 509 votes in our feature request channel on the official Discord. In this update the fleet list window has been revamped to introduce folders. Your existing fleets can also be drag-dropped into your newly created folders via the in-game UI, but must be done one at a time. If you want to sort large numbers of fleets at once, you can move the files directly via your operating system's file explorer and they will be reflected in the game.

I've also added a search functionality to the fleet list. Entering any text into the top bar will display only fleets which match that text, and open all folders recursively.

Happy sorting!

Steam Cloud

As part of this release I've enabled Steam Cloud functionality to auto-sync all Fleets, Ship Templates, and Missile Templates. If you have previously been manually copying these files between computers, note that Steam will upload the versions that are on whatever computer you start the game on first after the feature is enabled, and may overwrite files with the same names on other computers.

Note that changes made via your OS's file manager while the game is closed will be automatically reverted by Steam Cloud when you start the game, so if you plan to make changes to your saves folder manually you should do it while the game is running in the background.

Missile Balance Adjustments

For our first balance pass on missiles since the major update there have been some minor adjustments made. These mostly center around balancing the Cyclone, which was always the problem child for the entire internal testing period. These changes make it no longer an optimal choice over the Tempest in all cases. Their costs have gone up slightly, and the HP values have been roughly swapped between the Cyclone and Tempest to give a similar tradeoff seen with the Pilum and Atlatl. The Tempest's increased durability now means Auroras will struggle a little more to deal with groups of them, while something like a Defender still only takes 2 hits to destroy one.

The stacking penalty for missile modules has also been increased, so double stealth coatings will now have a significantly decreased effect. This only applies to modules which change stats, stacking modules like decoy launchers will be unaffected.

Stability Improvements

You don't have to look far in the #looking-for-game or #post-game channels of our discord to find someone who was disconnected from a game they were in. After some deep investigation of our netcode, the root cause of the infamous disconnected-while-loading bug has been found and squashed. I've also made some changes to the networking library we use to hopefully solve the occasional Limit Exceeded disconnect that could occur when lots of sensor activity was happening. Overall, multiplayer stability should be significantly improved.

On a completely unrelated note, the maximum file size for custom badges is now 32kb.

Other Things

And finally, a slew of other minor improvements and changes have been added. These include a deployment phase timer, shift-right-click grouping weapons on ships not in a formation, a withdraw animation for ships leaving the battlespace, and more.

As always, full patch notes follow:

Changes/Features:
- Added folder management system to fleet and ship template lists.
- Existing fleets can be drag-dropped into folders in the list.
- Added file search function in fleet and ship template lists.
- Enabled Steam Cloud support for Fleets, Ship Templates, and Missile Templates.
- Newly saved ship templates will now include missiles, if a missile of the same name is not already in the fleet.
- Does not work for existing ship templates, as they did not contain the missiles previously.
- Added an accessibility setting to disable the background noise in the tactical view.
- Opening the action menu with Shift + RMB for a ship that is not in a formation will now group its weapons as it does for all ships in a formation.
- Added a better explanation of target discrimination behavior to the EO seeker description.
- Added a 60 second time limit to the deployment phase which starts when half of all players, and one player on each team (unless the team is only one person), have clicked the Deploy button.
- Players who have not finished deploying their fleet when the timer expires will have their ship spawn locations randomly chosen.
- Tooltip when hovering over the tracked status of a ship now reads "Track by Enemy Active Sensors" for clarity.
- Ships withdrawing from battle will now play a reverse of the arrival animation before disappearing.
- Player profile badges now have a maximum size limit of 32kb.
- Added a message to the top of the badge select menu with instructions and limitations.

Balance:
- Increased S1 programming time to 6 seconds (was 3). Note that AMMs fired automatically by the PD Controller are exempt from programming time.
- Changed the stacking penalty falloff of missile support modules to 1 (was 3.5, in line with ship components) so the second instance of a module now has a 36% effect.
- Increased S2 body HP to 30 (was 20).
- Reduced S2H body HP to 25 (was 35).
- Increased S2H body cost to 4 (was 2).
- Increased S2H programming time to 10 seconds (was 8).
- Increased Fast Startup module failure rate to 20% (was 15%).
- Reduced EO seeker target selection finalization distance to 1.5km (was 2.5km) for improved target discrimination.

Bug Fixes:
- Fixed several network stability related disconnects and crashes.
- Fixed some spelling and grammar mistakes in flavor text.
- Fixed many debuff types not being applied due to class name changes.
- AI ships will no longer continue firing at their last target after it has been eliminated if no other targets are detected.
- Fixed heated metal glow effect in the hull damage shader fading out almost immediately.
- Fixed parts sometimes being immediately re-destroyed after being restored if they had a pending damage frame.
- Fixed damaged components not being able to be prioritized until they had received further damage when loading a saved game of when ships were transferred to another player.
- Ships set to WCON FREE will no longer automatically return fire at tracks that are decoys, missiles, LOBs, or on the opposite side of the ship that hits are coming from.