Alpha build 49 - shields get a bar of their own, and a server that no longer stops

Alpha build 49 is live. There is no forced update this time: the game server restarted at 09:58 UTC and works with Alpha build 48 as well, so nobody is locked out. Exit Steam completely and start it again to get build 49. Nothing was wiped.

Shields get a bar of their own

When you watch a battle, every ship's line and each fleet beside the clock now has two bars:

• A thin pale bar for the shield. It takes the first hits, drains, and comes back when the ship is left alone for a few seconds.
• The health bar under it, with the percentage. Health is hull and armor together: the damage that lasts, the damage you repair.

A health percentage never counts the shield, here or anywhere else in the game. That fixes a real confusion: the battle screen used to show a ship as damaged when only its shield had been hit, and the battle report then said the same ship was at 100%. The two now agree.

A ship with no shield module has no shield bar. An empty shield bar means the shield is down, not gone.

The server stopped stopping

If the game froze on you last night, in a battle or in your base, this is what it was. The game server was standing still for seconds at a time: at every login, for up to 26 seconds for a commander with many ships, and for about a second at every action in a large base. Everyone online was held up while it lasted, and a watched battle froze and then caught up.

Server update 48.1 fixed that overnight, and this build goes further:

• The server now looks your ships, fleets, modules and research up directly, where it used to search through everybody's.
• A change in your base is worked out once before it and once after it, where it was about six times for one click.
• When many battles run at once they are worked out side by side on several processor cores.
• Mines, extractors and condensers bank exactly what their rate makes. They had been losing production while you were busy in your base.
• A fleet in a battle no longer takes a move or dock order.

It took six restarts between 01:02 and 03:39 UTC to get there, and the server went down twice by itself for under a minute. That is a lot for one night; thank you for bearing with it. From 03:39 UTC until today's restart, with eighteen logins and twenty-nine battles, its longest pause was a fifth of a second.

Good to know

• A restart of the server brings every deployed fleet home to its bay, and a battle that was running when it stopped is called off: no damage, no report. Deploy again and carry on.
• If you stay on Alpha build 48 the battle screen keeps its one combined bar until you update.
• If the game freezes for you again, in a battle or in your base, tell us the time it happened. That is enough for us to find it.
• Alpha Round 11 on the playtest page is still open, and its battle-screen task now describes the two bars.

The changelog has both updates in full, and the Player's Guide explains shield and health under Watching a battle.