Release Notes for Crying Suns

Patch 1.2.0 (17 December 2019)

Gameplay

• [MAJOR] Complete redesign of the special officer availability and selection feature. It's now possible to choose a special officer among unlocked ones if the special officer is ready. Each special officer has a "growth gauge" indicating when they are ready, the gauge advances each time the player goes beyond sector 1 in a run. Losing (or discarding) a run with the selected special officer put the growth gauge back to 0.
• [NEW] New auxiliary system: Cinetic converter. Converts damaged received by your battleship into reduced cooldown for your weapons.
• [NEW] New auxiliary system: Tactical log Neurosphere. The more total victory you achieve, the more you can sell it.
• [NEW] New auxiliary system: Nemesis core. All you units gain the "Exploding" ability (also improve those which already have it)
• [NEW] New officer ability: Battlefield auto-Krafter. Spawns "Krafted" units when one of your units dies.
• [NEW] New officer ability: Guerilla tactics. Improve patched squadron damage efficiency vs non-patched.
• Added the possibility to chase or choose a target when using the waypoint mode (ctrl).
• The last boss of chapter 6 has been buffed in hard mode (1 additional hull bar).
• Takeshi Sung (the special officer with 4 skills) has been nerfed and his health points reduced from 6 to 4.
• Makk and Weezz (Scrapper special officers) had their special ability changed to the 2 new ones that matched much more scrapper flavour/synergies.

Story, events and texts

• [NEW] Added 8 new events, including 2 new quest events, focused on risky choices and providing skill choices for underrepresented skills in events.
• Added a tutorial to explain the "undocking" feature.
• Added a tutorial to explain the officer growth and selection feature.
• Changed the Alpha krafter ability description to be clearer about the fact the unit spawned has the "Krafted" attribute and is "Patched".
• Changed the narrator translation for "babymaker" into "Enslaved civilian" as it was weird for them to refer as "babymaker".

Interface, Graphics and Sounds

• [NEW] Added 6 new Gaseous planet visuals.
• [NEW] Added 3 New stations visuals.
• [NEW] Added a new visual of a "destroyed" civilian ship.
• Added visual cues on damaged cells when "Exploding" units are doing damages.

BugFix Major

• Fixed a major issue where 4 sun related events were not picked anymore.
• Fixed a major issue where the game crash log were expanding in size endlessly, sometimes saturating the hard drive and crashing the game saving.
• Fixed an issue where story events could replace previously earned quests and negating them.

BugFix Minor

• Fixed a bug that changed the space background color between the chapter 6 boss fights.
• Fixed a bug where the "low life" sound effect during fight was still on after starting a new run.
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to deploy a unit on a big asteroid.
• Fixed a bug that allowed units to keep their earned shield after being redeployed.
• Fixed a blinking glitch on squadrons affected by stasis or freeze effects.
• Fixed a small visual glitch on EMP tower being destroyed.
• Fixed a visual bug that made the lens flare appearing even if objects were hiding the sun.
• Fixed a visual bug that made part of the turrets being visible even behind explosion fx.
• Fixed a few wrong colored lights on stations or battleships.
• Fixed a material bug on the Chapter 5 boss battleship.
• Fixed a visual bug where the planets backlight was "popping" too suddenly.
• Fixed a visual bug where some space objects remain on hostile system.
• Fixed a bug on the last fight that made some cells impossible to target.

META

• Changed the Expedition sandworm and kosh mech achievements that were too random. Now you only need to get to the end of and expedition involving those without retreating (or dying)
• Added a small "something" for players who get "The art of war" achievement :)
• We migrated the whole game engine from Unity 2017.4 to 2018.4 to make the game futureproof and easier to maintain.

Patch 1.1.1 (30 October 2019)

• Greetings fellow space explorers!

• Here is a new update to correct some bugs and improve some features following your valuable feedbacks:

Gameplay

• We started to improve the special officers "growing" feature. Previously, there was a 50% chance to have 1 special officer randomly selected among those available. Now the chances start at 50% with 1 officer and each unlocked officer adds 4% more chance. With all 13 officers unlocked, the chances are 100% (meaning one special officer available for each new run). We are still working on a bigger redesign of this feature but for the time being it should make it a bit smoother and more interesting.

Story, events and texts

• We made small adjustments to the final dialog, clarified a few loose ends that were not intended.
• We rewrote some lines that were insensitive and hurtful about cancer or tumor.
• Interface, Graphics and Sounds
• We improved the visibility of special officers in shops.
• Auxiliary systems that can't be stacked now cannot be bought twice in the shops.

BugFix Major

• Fixed a bug where the Shredder and Basilisk units stopped applying their ability after being re-deployed during a fight.
• Fixed a bug where people having finished the demo could not use the "reset chapter" feature.
• Fixed a bug where the Church Battleship was not able to scavenge any Neo-N while at level 0 upgrade.

BugFix Minor

• Fixed a bug where the docks were not updated after selling the brutal deployer.

• Fixed a bug a unit that had chasing target at the moment of its death, re-deployed with the same chasing target.

• Thanks again for your feedbacks and for helping us making this game everyday better and better!

Patch 1.1.0 (23 October 2019)

• Greetings Crying Suns fans,

• Crying Suns was launched almost a month ago and thanks to your valuable feedbacks since the release, we were able to define our next priorities to improve our game.

• Following your comments and reviews, we mainly worked on 3 big subjects :

• Make the game replayable

• Lower the repetitiveness of some events

• Refine some gameplay parameters to provide a better experience

Replayability:

• We developed a new “chapter selection” feature. After completing the story, you are now able to replay any of the 6 story chapters (with or without the story events, as you can reset the story on each chapter) and of course, with any of the battleships and officers you unlocked until then.
• Thanks to this new feature, you will be able to finally unlock story achievements you may have missed in your first runs! In addition, new Achievements have been added for completing all chapters with every battleship, although only your future runs will count for these achievements (unfortunately, save files from previous versions don’t contain the information about which chapter was achieved with which battleship).

Events repetitiveness corrected:

• Following multiple players reports that a small group of events appeared very frequently, we conducted a complete audit of the event procedural generation. We found several blocking issues that were provoking statistical aberrations. We also found that we had too much constraints on events generations (related to graphical environments, gamedesign constraints or POI types) which made 20 to 30 events to be mostly picked against the few hundreds of them (!) We conducted a complete redesign of our approach and the repetitions of events should occur a lot less often now. A lot of events that were almost never picked before should now reappear and most of the time there shouldn't be much repetition between two consecutive full runs.

Gameplay adjustments:

• We reworked some game parameters to improve the global game experience, including a rebalancing of Neo-N distribution (making it fairer mostly), adjustments on some weapons effects and some squadrons abilities. We also heard your feedbacks about the lack of difference between the unlockable battleships so we started to adjust their characteristics to foster diversity among them and encourage various game strategies. We will continue these improvements in the next versions of course.

• As planned in the roadmap, we also started to integrate the cloud save feature although this one will only be available from the next version as we need players to update first their data files with this version.

• At the end of this post, you will find the whole detailed list of corrections we made thanks to your feedbacks.

• Don't hesitate to use the GOG forum or our Discord channel (https://discordapp.com/invite/jgdQ7XY) to report any problem you might encounter in the game. Your feedbacks are crucial for us to improve the game experience.

• Enjoy!

• The Crying Suns development team

Changelog:

META

• New achievements for completing all chapters with each battleship. Earning those Achievements in Hard difficulty will automatically grant easy or normal version of the same achievement. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, those data were not available in the save file, so all progression on those achievements will start from scratch.

Gameplay

• [NEW FEATURE] Chapter selection is now available after completing the story. New achievements have been added for completing all chapters with a battleship. It's also now possible (after completing the story) to reset a single chapter story, allowing to try again to unlock a missed achievement.
• The space bender weapons were improved. All MK versions have now the same teleport long distance, 7 cells, instead of 2, 5 and 7 (for MK I, II and III respectively). Their cooldown and area of effect have been rebalanced too.
• Neo-N refueling random generation has been slightly rebalanced to avoid extreme situations and provide a fairer experience.
• Fixed an exploit allowing Flak weapons to reset their current pattern by undocking/redeploying them during tactical pause
• Rebalanced some battleships maximum upgrade levels
• Kaos class battleship has been improved (4 more hangar slots for squadrons)
• Boomer squadrons ability (Exploding) has been rebalanced (from 6/12/18 damage per MK level to 10/14/18)
• Jericho Class Battleship has been nerfed a bit, losing 1 level of hull bar upgrade at start (all difficulties)

Story, events and texts

• [MAJOR] Complete redesign and correction of our events distribution approach.
• [RU] Fixed a mistranslation for the Instant loader description.
• [EN] Multiple typos fixes and improvements on interface and dialogs

Interface, Graphics and Sounds

• The remaining quantity of repair available in shops was misleading, it has been improved to be more obvious.
• Improved the reinforcement feedback to make it more visible.
• Changed the display order of the mission dashboard summary during the expedition to match the order of the item in the dashboard pre-expedition

BugFix Major

• Fixed an issue where there was a weird visual "jump" appearing sometime when returning from an expedition to the command center.
• Fixed an issue where the visual displaying a weapon target was not cleaned after shooting
• Fixed an issue where a lot of people were skipping dialog by mistake, the delay before being able to skip the next dialog has been extended to avoid this.
• Fixed an issue where sometimes some objects on the battlefield were not teleported as planned
• Fixed an issue where in the battleship selection menu, the battleships starting hull bars and health points were not displayed properly according to the difficulty (in easy mode starting battleships have more level in hull upgrades).
• Fixed an issue where the "lose 1 hull bar" condition appearing in some events was marked as "not available" if you had only 2 available hull bars.
• Fixed an issue where in some cases, just after selecting a new battleship in the run customization screen and clicking on “start”, nothing happened and the players were stuck with no interface.
• Fixed an issue where the expedition dashboard was displaying wrong information (by 1) in some case

BugFix Minor

• Fixed an issue where an expedition sound was not stopped and stayed in the background when the officer died.
• Fixed an issue where hovering skills in the "resolution" part of the expedition was returning a "missing translation message"
• Fixed an issue where final boss (chapter 6) officers were not displayed "properly".