Kerbal Space Program, the award-winning, indie space agency sim game from Squad, released its latest update, Economic Boom, and is available to play today. Updates are free to existing players. KSP: Economic Boom offer new players the most fully-realized version of the game, which is still in active development for PC, Mac and Linux as an Early Access title on Steam and via the game’s website.
Players will experience a new challenge as the Kerbal Space Center, where players build and launch rockets, is now fully destructible. Buildings can be decimated by poorly-steered rocketships and in the game’s Career Mode, require costly repairs for players trying to manage their space agency. A new video offers a look at the level of destruction players will cause with their Kerbals.
Among these buildings is the new Administration Facility, in which players can select and activate Strategies. The Strategy system is a new gameplay mechanic, where each Strategy, once accepted, applies effects over several game aspects, specifically Kerbal Space Program’s three in-game currencies, Funds, Reputation and Science. Some examples include:
•Aggressive Negotiations: Enables players to get a discount on the cost of parts but at a cost to Reputation on each ‘discount’
•Open-Sourced Technologies: Divert Science earnings to make them public domain, increasing Reputation.
•Unpaid Internship Program: Boost your Science earnings without spending any Funds by hiring unpaid interns to do the data crunching. Working for the space program surely is its own reward, isn’t it? Well, as long as an agency’s Reputation lasts that is.
“Career Mode is getting a significant addition with the Administration Building and all that comes with it,” Felipe Falanghe, Kerbal Space Program creator and lead developer said. “The Strategy system gives players great freedom to change the rules around, and ultimately it allows them to tune the game to fit their own ways of playing. Also, as it’s fully moddable and new strategies can easily be added, this new feature has a lot of potential for expansion.”
The team also worked with modder, Christopher “PorkJet” Thuersam, to incorporate his popular SpacePlane+ parts pack mod to the game. This was more than a simple addition however: Each part was updated for even better looks, and to offer parts made not just specifically for spaceplanes, but can be used in as many combinations as possible.
A new difficulty panel gives players the chance to choose between four difficulty levels, Easy, Normal, Moderate and Hard. There is also a way to customize difficulty through this panel as well.