Attention, pilots - to your stations!

Fleet Battles just received a massive update and we can't wait to see you online to try it out.
We've added some new alien ships, a few devastating new weapons, and customization
options for your matches. Buckle up - it’s time to fly!

For full details on the updates, view the changelog at the bottom of the post!

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TOP CHANGES IN BETA 2

New Ships

Greegrox Swarm  They might look squishy, but these space jellyfish are not to be underestimated! Each ship within their swarm represents a single unit of crew that fires an individual microbolt. Did we mention that the swarm can heal itself, too? They must go through a lot of band-aids…

Mu’Kay Grasper Don’t make them ink! It gets messy. This giant squid-ship can throw down ink blobs that both damages and sucks energy from their enemies. Unlike most other ships, the Mu'Kay don’t use any projectile weaponry - they rely on getting up close and crushing their opponent with their ship’s tentacles.

Lexite Interceptor Be careful with these guys - they’re hardy! This fast-moving ship has “dual-shot” blasters and an extremely tough-to-penetrate shield. When the shields are engaged, the ship is pretty much invincible - but, it drains energy. You’ll have to time your attacks carefully in order to achieve victory against them.

New Weapon Components

• Heal: Restores lost crew. Does that make them zombies, or..?
• Death Ray: The name explains itself. You probably don’t want to get hit with this one.
• Dual Shot: Fires a fast double shot. Hey, two for the price of one!
• Ink Blob: Drops an inky blob that drains energy and crew. Clean-up on aisle three!
• Shield: Holding down a button makes you invincible... until you run out of energy. Suggestion? Don’t run out of energy.

Custom Matches

First things first: you can now use your own custom ships in multiplayer mode. Woo-hoo! You can also customize your battle experience with the following knobs and dials:

• Enable custom ships in multiplayer
• Create a private, password protected lobby for multiplayer
• Set the arena size
• Adjust the number of asteroids, wormholes, and ion storms
• Adjust the Fleet max size
• Choose from one of three different arena maps

Other Improvements

We’ve made a lot of other tweaks and adjustments to Fleet Battles in order to continue bringing you the best experience! Beta 2 includes things like: 

• Pilot Graphics - Many ships now have custom animations for their pilots. More will be coming later!
• High-Resolution UI - Fonts and UI graphics now look better on high res displays.
• Balance Updates - Almost all of the ships and weapons have been updated for a superior experience.
• Improved Performance - Substantial improvements have been made to memory use and visual effect performance.

Haven’t gotten into Fleet Battles yet? Pre-order here to join the beta today!

We’ve been working really hard on the development of Star Control: Origins and are excited to show it off!
Please enjoy some of these bonus screenshots from the game and let us know what you think. See you online!

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OFFICIAL CHANGELOG

Custom Matches

Choose "Custom matches" to enable the following customization options

• Enabled custom ships in multiplayer
• Create a private, password protected lobby for multiplayer
• Set the arena size
• Adjust the number of asteroids, wormholes, and ion storms
• Adjust the Fleet max size
• Choose from three different Arena maps.
• "Invite" friends to join your multiplayer matches

Gameplay

• New ships
• Lexite Interceptor: Dual Shot, Shield
• Mu'Kay Grasper: Harpoon, Ink Blob
• Greegrox Swarm: Microbolt shot, Heal
• New weapon components
• Heal -- restores crew
• Death Ray. The name explains itself
• Dual Shot -- fires a fast double shot
• Ink Blob -- drops an inky blob that drains energy and crew.
• Shield -- hold down to be invincible until you run out of energy
• Note: Harpoon and Microbolt are not available for custom ships.
• Full balance pass on all of the ships and their components
• Custom hull sizes have been modified for better balance.
• Changed the planet in the "Super Melee" map (the original one) to be Mars.
• Updated names of many of the ships and their components.

Graphics / UI

• Many of the ships now have custom animations for their pilots. Animations for additional factions will be added over time.  Pilot animations change based on the state of their ship.
• Improved font appearance, especially on higher resolution displays.
• Updated UI to work better at high scaling factor.
• Improved appearance and framing of custom ship thumbnails.
• Adds tooltips to mounts in ship editor.
• Players are now set to "Great" graphics quality settings by default.
• Increased the length of "Ship Design Description" text field.
• Better looking 'Flak Cannon' explosion
• Ship death explosion and Scryve Flak cannons VFX are now less likely to crush your frame rate.
• Significant reduction in memory usage.
• Updated credits with help from the community.
• Updating gradient swatches for Tywom-style ship parts so the parts don't look so dull.

Bugs

• Fix for rogue gravity fields persisting between matches which were causing the universe to collapse to a singularity.
• Fixed a race condition crash in the animation system.
• Fixed a random graphics crash.  Die "swap-chain" crash die!! Good.  It's dead now.
• Ships with invalid components are now disabled on the fleet picker or crafting screen.
• Killing another player in multiplayer with your secondary weapon no longer has a chance of crashing the game.
• Entering and exiting the ship designer more than 8 times no longer crashes.