Hi everyone,

Gruntsatwork here, putting on my writing hat for today only, while Eladrin is on sick leave. While Dev Diaries are the domain of the Game Directors, we wanted to keep in close contact shortly after a release.

The Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion released 2 days ago and we have been collecting your feedback on our forums and every other form of social media we could find.

We will continue to do so over the next few days, working on fixes and improvements to Cosmic Storms, for example:
Individualist Machines will get access to the Storm Touched trait so that they can use the Storm Devotion civic.
Planetscapers will get a deposit on game start to clear for +1 Pop.

There are also a few balance considerations we are making that we figured would be nice to mention.

We teased them before as being incredibly destructive and as it turns out, they are! What we didn’t intend was for them to appear as often and as early as they do. Their chance to appear is significantly smaller than most other storms.

Unfortunately, with the number of players we have, even a small chance means a sizable number of you are getting messed up and with no chance of defending yourself to boot.

We are planning to adjust Nexus Storms in the following way:

• No Nexus Storms in the early game (Mid-game and forward only).
• We will increase their speed of traversal, exact number pending, to make sure they remain destructive but that you can take action once they have passed. They will still bring you close to 100% devastation on any given planet but they won’t then sit on the planet and keep it at 100% forever.

While we are quite happy with the effect of all the other storms, we are seeing your reports about some storms staying in the same space for most of their duration or in fact, long over their duration, stuck at 0 for years on end. Simply put, a storm shouldn’t stay in the same place for years. They are supposed to move on unless a player intervenes.

We are investigating this issue and hope to have a solution for you as soon as possible.

Some of you have called out the loss of impact storms experience once everyone has the storm protection techs in place. The original purpose of keeping those protections strong was relatively simple – to ensure that by the time you reach the end-game, you can continue with your strategies and plans.

It is one thing to lose a 15 minute campaign, it is another to lose a 30 hour campaign because your build just got invalidated.

We are looking into adjusting at the very least the ship protections, as we think there is some potential for smart plays if those protections weren’t quite as potent as they currently are.

Next week, Eladrin will be back, fingers crossed, to regale you with new information that mere Game Designers are not privy to.

See you then!