Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role-playing Game – First System Update

Earlier this year, Iron Tower Studio launched their Colony Ship RPG into early access. Afterwards, they’ve been busy fixing various bugs and adding new content to the game. But now, we get the first system update for this title that introduces some new difficulty options, overhauls some of the character systems, improves the game’s balance and AI, and more.

The complete list of changes is over here. But first, a quick overview of the new stuff:

Welcome to the first system update. The game was released on Early Access in April and until now our focus was on new locations and content. After releasing the Shuttle Bay we took a 3-week ‘break’ and worked on nothing but the systems.

These changes and improvements reflect the feedback we received over the last 7 months and we’d like to thank everyone who posted suggestions, shared builds, and participated in discussions. That’s what Early Access is all about.

Thematically we can split the changes into 7 categories:

Difficulty & Tutorial

Despite our best efforts to keep the difficulty manageable and engage players who struggle, some players find the game frustrating and unplayable rather than challenging. Needless to say, frustrating people was never our goal, so we added Easy difficulty mode and a tutorial explaining key concepts.

Coincidentally, now that we don’t have to worry about first-time players, we can make the Hard difficulty a bit more challenging.

Feats & Derived Stats

Charisma now adds Neural Resistance (see Psi Overhaul below). We added 3 new feats (Master Trader, Frog Hunter, Slow Metabolism) and 3 new mutually exclusive mutation feats as quest rewards. Plus balance changes to the existing feats as suggested by the players.

Weapons & Armor

• Extensive balance changes, added new armguards and leg armor.
• We added Old (-1DR) and Damaged (-3DR) armor sets to boost variety on the visual side. Most enemies will be wearing old and damaged armor. New armor will be sold in stores. Unique (custom-made) – looted from notable enemies.
• New weapons: long requested laser cutter, two energy ‘shotguns’ (a close range energy gun, Earth-made and Ship-made) and ‘SMG’ (a rapid-fire energy gun), a Ship-made energy club, a clawhammer for the bashers, and a bunch of firearms: a revolver, shotguns, rifles, etc.

Combat & Stealth AI

Improved enemies behavior in combat and stealth: target and attack selection, grenade and stim use, reaction to sound and dead bodies, alert levels, etc.

PSI Overhaul

• PSI attacks always hit (as they don’t rely on sight), but the effect can be resisted and damage reduced by Neural Resistance (NR).
• You can’t be faster than a thought so PSI enemies have a much higher initiative
• Charisma boosts your NR, which can be increased further with implants, helmets, feats, and stims.
• Zen stim increases NR by 40 for 2 turns
• Improved Mindworms’ attacks

Fight Balance

Some fights were way too easy and we apologize to everyone affected.

Misc

• Implants: you can extract them from dead bodies and repair them if they get damaged during extraction due to low skills.
• Gadgets: new tier and rebalance
• Expanded dialogues and quest improvements
• Attack effects’ balance changes