This patch focuses on bug fixes and continues to follow through on balance changes in response to player feedback. In the coming days we're going to be taking a look at what happens when players and the AI amass a fleet that is too large for the game to handle - players are hitting scenarios with ship counts that we didn't really think were possible. As a result, you can end up with a massive battle but it doesn't really work too well due to performance issues.

So we'll be exploring a way to bring reinforcements into the battle - this change may take a while to work up. We'll have an update on these changes next week some time. Until then, enjoy these patch notes!

• Eliminated a bug that could cause your game to hang at 100% turn
• The AI will now refit larger portions of its fleet at a time to make sure that its ships have the best available technology
• The AI will now potentially use ships designed by the player when buildings its fleet. Approximately 25% of the time, it will choose from among the best and largest designs that it is capable of building even if these designs are not necessarily in its game plan. So if you designed a badass Titan and the AI has the tech, it's going to try to build some of them. The other side of this is that if you designed a few clunkers then the AI is going to be using some of those!
• Added a new AI strategy that will focus on getting early Mass Driver cruisers deployed, with a continued focus on using long-range kinetics as it techs up
• The Plasma Cannon is now more bad-♥♥♥ and useful. Very high point blank damage with a rapid fall-off, plus damage over time. The weapon takes a large penalty vs shields but is very efficient otherwise
• I have increased the strength of Plasteel relative to steel by 50%. This provides a clear intermediate step between steel and more advanced armors. The AIs that choose to go for an armored route over Class I shields will see a nice benefit here.
• Fixed a bug where trading for or assimilating all techs in a branch would not advance you to the next branch in the research tree
• Plasma torpedo has been adjusted to accomodate changes to plasma cannon
• Potential fix in place for bug where you are sometimes intercepted by a mirror copy of your fleet. Ironically I think this was caused by an earlier attempt to eliminate the issue. Please let me know if the issue persists after downloading this patch
• Wall Street is nerfed and will cap out at 50 BC per turn. Sorry fellas. Liberal government is in charge
• Fixed a bug where the improper damage amount was being displayed in the floating text popups for weapons that do more or less damage vs. shields (i.e. mass drivers)