A new year and a new build! There's been a few major changes since the last publicly available build of Final Defenders (0.24), so let's take a look at 0.261!

Tactical wee treat

The biggest change of this build has been laying the foundation for the levels in the game, namely the Army and Tactic system. In the Quick Battle menu, these options allow you to pick who you're fighting ( "Armies" : either the Five Worlds' coalition forces or a pure force from one of those worlds) and what pattern of ship types they deploy when ( "Tactics" ). Combined with what city you defend (at the moment not implemented, just the one), these will combine in different ways to form the campaign missions. For now it should start to lend a little variety to your battles!

Who are you callin' yelluh?

The Royal Hanab army is the first dedicated enemy faction to go in, with all their ships now in-game; although most will be subject to changes. Many are, for now, visual reskins of their coalition counterpart with maybe a couple of tweaks (eg. the bomber is essentially the same as the Minerva bomber). These will branch out and become more defined as new systems are implemented, such as bomb dropping. The slightly goofy tan-coloured Hanab are a bit noob-ish and generally the butt-monkey of the Five Worlds forces, so they shouldn't give you too much trouble...

Fire ze missiles!

A few ships now fire missiles, which are slower and harder hitting than the lasers, with the big difference that they can be shot down. This allows some amount of defensive fire, but the system needs further tweaking to be truly tactically interesting.

It's the taking part that counts

I came to the realisation that even doing a decent job of shooting down enemies was only about 10% more effective than holding the fire button down for 3 minutes while eating peanut M&Ms... which isn't the worst thing ever, but I'll be addressing that with slightly more intelligent enemies in the next few builds. Stay tuned!