Greetings, captains!

This update delivers a significant overhaul of the game's propulsion mechanics and the autopilot. Details follow.

In Capital Command, ships' engines use a limited resource to push your ship through space. Previously, engines were either actively thrusting, or recharging, but never both. The change is that recharge takes place continously, even while the engines are working.

This means you never run completely out of "juice", and can always accelerate using your main engines. If there's charge in reserve, the engines will run in their normal, high-power mode. If they're depleted, they'll still work but on a lower power setting, consuming charge just as it's being generated.

The autopilot has received a lot of work, mostly fixing bugs and updating it for the new propulsion mechanics. You'll see the same flight modes, but they'll hopefully work better and be overall more useful.

That's it for now. Next, I'm aiming to make the autopilot easier to use and add a "cruise mode" that will allow captains to handle their ship completely and effectively without using manual flight control.

Thanks for reading and as always looking forward to your thoughts
The dev

Greetings, captains!

The new demo version, now live, has a number of features that unfortunately weren't ready for NextFest, as well as some that were requested by the players in their well thought-out and useful responses.

Secondary batteries (including the Scout Corvette's starting armament) no longer reset their target after they've emptied their magazine. This was a constant complaint, and quite valid. The best tactics is still to hold fire until the enemy is close enough that most shots will actually hit, so captains are advised to use Cease Fire or simply fire manually for optimal effect.

I've added a trajectory marker for the ship's auto-pilot. When active, if the ship's current velocity is not what the autopilot wants, a yellow marker is displayed in the game world. I think this conveys much better what the auto-pilot is trying to do, and gives a better sense of the player's interaction with the system. More autopilot UI improvements are likely in the near future.

Also, the trajectory marker system now has 4 operating modes. The default is what's already there - show the trajectory for the player and the current target. All-vs-target shows the trajectories of all objects relative to the current target, and all-vs-self -- all objects relative to the player's ship. Off hides all trajectory markers from the UI. You can use the button on the top-right of the screen to switch between these modes.

And of course minor tweaks and fixes, as usual.

For the next update, expect some changes to the game's propulsion mechanics. I hope to come up with something that's both tactically deep, interesting to use, as well as less frustrating and easier to understand. We'll see how that goes.

Thanks for reading
The dev