19 days after launch, here is our third patch. This is the first patch in which we have made a major attempt to address balance. When NS2 launched, first 100,000 games displayed a remarkable win loss ratio: 49% Marine wins, 51% alien wins.

This balance began to swing towards the aliens after the first week, without us making any changes to the game. This is a fascinating phenomenon in game balance: As the community gets better at the game, you become better at exploiting wrinkles in the fabric of its design. The discrepancy continued to widen to an unacceptable 40% marine wins.

So, here is build 230. Charlie has been watching the balance situation very closely - Consulting, playing, watching and pondering. The following changes have been tested over the past few days and should go a long way to nudging the pendulum back towards the marines.

Behind the scenes, Brian, Max, Brian, Dushan, and Steve have all been working very hard to fix bugs, speed performance and improve the Spark Engine. This is an ongoing process and never stops. UWE is not working on any other games right now, our full attention is on NS2 and NS2 only.

Since release, we are confident we have fixed many very serious bugs that have been stopping people from playing. However, we know there are still some bugs out there that haven't yet been caught. Under the hood, Build 229 and 230 make it easier for us to identify and diagnose problems. We will to seek out and destroy any naughty* bits of code that are preventing anyone from playing.

We are having a total blast continuing to improve the game for you guys, and we really appreciate you taking the time to report bugs, comment on balance, and most importantly: Frag each other (and us!).

Balance

• Evolving Onos eggs now requires three Hives instead of two. Onos eggs are a complex matter, and are a work in progress!
• Reduced Onos armor by 100 (-8%, effectiveness vs. Exos and heavy weapons impacted less because armor).
• Welder research time increased from 10 to 15.
• Exo armor changed from to 300/390/480/570 to 400/460/520/580.
• Welder rate reduced from 125/sec to 90/sec.
• Reduced shadow step cost from 15 to 10.
• Increased blink momentum to be close to build 220.
• Increase start blink energy cost from 8 to 12.
• Shift Hatch now creates 2 eggs, but costs 5 resources and has a 5 second cool down (was 1 tres per egg, no cooldown).
• Increased trait structure (Shell, Spur, Veil) mature health by ~20%. Also increased their base health to be closer to their previous mature health.
• Reduced spore research time from 90 to 60.
• Hive build time increased from 150 seconds to 180 seconds.
• Reduced Onos Gore range by 0.5 meters.
• Added cooldown to shift hatch ability.
• Lowered max healing on Crag.
• Added minimum healing from Hives.
• Reduced mega regeneration (max regeneration is now 10 per second instead of 120).
• Doubled ARC rate of fire (halved damage)

Fix

• Fixed bug where the server would leak memory under some circumstances.
• The ghost Power Node no longer takes damage, fixes a problem where the Power Node could not be rebuilt after being destroyed in some cases.
• Fixed rare bug where a Hive could become invulnerable if it was killed in the same frame as it finishes building.
• Fixed sound bug causing ambient sounds in the world to not play correctly.
• Fixed unbuilt shifts being able to generate eggs.
• Fixed Exo and Mine tooltips.
• Fixed regeneration effect showing up in combat.
• Fixed the "filter modded servers" option not always working correctly in the server browser.
• Fixed ARC targeting issues.
• Fixed already recycled units still taking damage.
• Added protection against speed hacking.

Improvement

• Added more loading screen tooltips.
• Added a display to the server browser to show the number of servers in the list.

Sdk

• Added the ability to specify "passes" for build rules in the Builder to setup simple dependency relationships.
• Added SoundEffectInstance:SetCoords() function.

*The guys told me I should not use the word 'naughty' in blog posts. Apparently it sounds weird in America. So I'm making an effort to include it wherever possible - Hugh