Blackbird Interactive released an update for their real-time strategy title Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. The update brought back the series' tactical pause, skirmish and multiplayer AI, along with crushing some of the usual bugs.
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak launched in January last year and it did so to some great reviews. Since then, Blackbird Interactive had stayed pretty silent on the updates front and almost turned the patch faucet off.
After all, some signs of life did show up on our radar, as the 1.3.0 patch went live recently. The patch does the usual: fixes some bugs, balances the multiplayer side of things and tweaks the AI.
Blackbird Interactive
The first feature the patch notes rave about is the Tactical Pause. I could rephrase the notes, but I'll let them do the talking:
"The player can now pause the game in the single-player campaign and in skirmish games using the “P” key. During the tactical pause, players can issue combat, movement, and build commands to units which will be carried out once the game has become unpaused."
The tactical pause has always been a part of the franchise and its omission from Deserts of Kharak is dubbed a "mistake which has now been rectified".
Blackbird Interactive
Next up, we have Skirmish and Multiplayer AI. The AI has so far been "skilled at applying early pressure and capturing artefacts, [but] it would often run out of resources and stop building units in the middle of the game" say the patch notes.
Two changes have been made to fix this problem. Hard AI resource harvesting has been tweaked in order to increase the rate at which they collect resources while slowing the rate at which they deplete resource nodes. Easy and Normal AI have not been affected by this change.
The second change was made to AI Air Sorties so they no longer prioritize targeting Salvagers, Carriers and Support units over combat units. This change impacts Easy, Normal and Hard AIs.
Blackbird Interactive
You can read the full patch notes here.
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is now available via Steam at 70 per cent off. A couple of bundles are up for grabs as well.
