Stars Beyond Reach Beta Release Notes

Next Beta Notes

It's unusual that we'd split a beta period into two sets of release notes, but what can we say -- these release notes have gotten to 36,000 words, and it is time to cut them off and start a new batch.

Stars Beyond Reach Beta Phase 2 Release Notes

Version 0.870

(Released June 1st, 2015)

• Fixed a few bugs where demolish actions against underground buildings would be interpreted as against the surface building above them. Thus preventing demolishing something under a lander, etc.
  • Thanks to tadrinth for the report and save

• Fixed several bugs with wounded population tracking, mostly due to wounded population once being city-wide, and then being building-specific, and more recently being changed to be kind of both.
  • Any old saves with negative wounded at the city level (shows on the top gui bar) will just have the city-wide number set to the sum of the building specific numbers (it's possible to have "unemployed" wounded, but that will be ignored in this repair).
  • Allocating citizens will now always start from scratch in terms of number of wounded, rather than working with what's there. This should prevent the city-wide number of wounded from changing during a reallocation.
  • Thanks to ptarth, tombik GarathJJ for the reports and saves..

• Fixed a bug that could lead to negative staffing.
  • Any old saves with negative staffing will have the staffing of those buildings set to zero, and then check for staff reallocation.
  • Thanks to ptarth and nas1m for the reports and saves.

• Scouting and Sonaring can now only be done within 20 tiles of one of your active Scout Stations or Sonar Surveyors (respectively).
  • This applies to both manual and auto scouting.
  • District centers and teleporters also function as scouting/sonaring "origins".
  • Thanks to nas1m, crazyroosterman, and ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The game now has a different icon for buildings with "nothing to do" that is separate from "intentionally disabled." That way you can see the ones that you disabled vs the ones that are idle much more easily.

• The images at the bottom of the screen on the bottom bar have been redone to look good at their new scale, and to have a larger click-box than before, and fit properly all in their bar.
  • Please note that the settings one still hangs off the right-hand side because the diplomacy button is there for the moment even though later it will not be.

• Added a warning icon for tiles with a known underground thoraxian presence within 6 tiles of one of your buildings.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where a building targeting a race would unset that target during end turn (because it was checking for "not owner's race" instead of "is owner's race").
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for the report and save.

• The building details window now refreshes after you toggle it on or off.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• Put in a check to prevent the creation of market items with a total quality of zero.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Fixed some mouse handling bugs that were introduced in version 0.854.
  • Most notable among the effects was the inability to overwrite savegames.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman, jerith, tbrass, and nas1m for reporting.

• Changed the pollution concept so that scrubbing is now applied after pollution generation.
  • Thanks to tadrinth and ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Now after a scout station has no more unexplored tiles in range it shuts off, with the "nothing to do" reason.
  • Thanks to tadrinth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the Yali could expand-flood a natural wonder.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a number of bugs where "flying" ground soldiers were being treated as can-path-over-anything in some cases and have-to-path-over-land in others, leading to inconsistent behavior.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for the report and save.

• The science section on the top HUD now shows the number of turns until the next tech is researched, rather than showing the current science production. This makes it similar to the social progress indicators nearby.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where terraforming tile icons were simply never being loaded, and so could not be displayed on the building sidebar.
  • Thanks to nas1m and crazyroosterman for reporting.

• The Terraforming tech tree node now lists the tile types you can place after researching it.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the atmospheric emission effects listed under the temperature tooltip were showing {0} instead of the gas names.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• Now when you hold the I key to show incident logs, and mouseover a multitile building, it pulls from the main tile's logs instead of whatever one happens to be under the cursor.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Now when mousing over a potential scout/sonar spot in those modes, it uses a tile overlay instead of an icon (notably, used to be the same icon as the "spot that can be clicked" indicator).
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Now when a building placement is rejected due to it being an explorer camp too far from the lander, the tooltip message will say so.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed a localization error with "Tile Not Found" now showing up. Why that is able to be seen is another question, but we'll address that once people give us a way to repro it.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed two localization missing errors with error states on the underground view when you are legitimately not able to place tiles in a couple of contexts.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Air Cargo Bays no longer do the cargo plane ambient action, because it was rather pointless thematically. All of those ambient actions are just visual fluff anyhow, but that one made no sense.

• The display of extra turns from being placed on more rugged land types is now on the same line as the turn count and is a bit more abbreviated-yet-clear.

• There are now better "added number of turns to build" on some of the things like jungle, mars craters, ocean and deep ocean, and mountains.

• Fixed an issue in recent versions where the number of buildings remaining until the lander would upgrade was not updating in the top bar.
  • Thanks to SugeBearX, Enrymion, Cinth, and jerith for reporting.

• When placing buildings, your lander does not upgrade until they complete, rather than when you start their construction.
  • Thanks to someone for suggesting this a while back, but we can't find their ticket to credit them or close it! Sorry about that!

• When you are constructing a building on rough terrain that is inflating the turn count it takes to construct that building, it now tells you what is going on.
  • Previously it was only telling you that in the initial tooltip during placement mode, and so after that it was confusing even to Chris in some cases. Particularly with being able to build shallow mines on mountains in this next version.

• Previously for some inexplicable reason most of the stats were shown twice in the building details window for under construction buildings.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Water wells now each produce 2000 water, not 1000.

• Wind Turbines now generate 100 water along with the electricity that they generate, thanks to a design that allows them to pull condensate out of the air.
  • They also now have less health and cost the same as a small solar collector.

• Small and Large solar panels are now more differentiated from one another. It's best to build more small solar collectors and then augment with large ones. You can do whatever you want in this case, but you'll get the best yield that way.

• Adjacency bonuses are now just called adjacency effects, because they can also now (very rarely) be penalties.

• Fixed a bug where destroyed buildings were not always being removed from city rollups, leading to stuff like bulldozing a shopping mall not reducing the population requirement for another shopping mall.
  • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for the report and save.

• A bunch of less-critical buildings have a lot more building complexity, making it so that either their construction times are longer or you need to build more engineering firms.
  • This was always part of the plan, so that engineering firms have a more firm purpose without making every building time trivial. In this case the core buildings do become kind of insta-place once you are building the really complex stuff, which is fine.

• Blast panels have been redefined to be way more useful, and also quite expensive:
  • Extremely specialized paneling that extends into any of your buildings that are adjacent to it. It costs a lot to build and to power, but provides perfect protection against sea attacks and ranged missiles, lasers, and bombers. Still just as vulnerable to helicopters and ground troops and monsters, though.

Disease Balance

• Now when a city has a new "outbreak" of a disease (meaning it goes from having zero infections of that disease to having greater-than-zero; regardless of past history), the number of infections from the initial cause is limited to 10% of the city's population, or 100, whichever is less.
  • On the other hand, the rate of curing (not quarantine or vaccination; just normal curing) for that disease will start out at 0 for the first turn, and then be capped at 5%+(8%*turns since outbreak) of the total remaining infected.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring these changes.

• If your city already has at least one disease, and you would get a disease via combat exposure, the disease from combat exposure should be only 5% as likely to happen.
  • Thanks to Cinth, nas1m, and zebeast45 for inspiring this change.

Districts, Crime, Building Caps, and Building Placement

• There are a ton of changes in here, mostly driven by very direct and excellent suggestions from ptarth. But also commentary from Cinth and others. A lot of good observations from folks.

• You (and other races) can now terraform within range 4 of your city tiles, not range 3.

• There is no longer an option for you to set tax rates on your city. This was originally something that was intended to work with multiple cities to get citizens migrating to low-desirablity cities (and in fact that did function just fine), but now it's simply an unbalanced feature that adds complexity of no real value.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• The crime source from having a higher tax rate is now gone.

• The "building count" based crime is still present after all, but it is now 100x weaker until you hit 300 buildings, after which it is 10x weaker from there on (just on the buildings above 300).
  • This makes it so that there is a sense of some cost to building upwards, but not remotely so much as before. This is a good cost vector in terms of crime, but the numbers may need to be tuned down even more, we'll see.

• Police station balance:
  • Regular police crime reduction range is now 3 rather than 2.
    • These also now reduce 36 crime per tile rather than 24.
  • Riot crime reduction range is now 4 rather than 3.
    • These now reduce 84 crime per tile rather than 42.
    • However, only one riot police station can now be placed for every 8000 citizens in your city. These are "big city" tools.
  • For those asking about auto-upgrading police into riot police, that should stop that. ;) These are two different tools for approaching the same problem, and one was never meant to replace the other.

• The rules for building placement for the AI are not much different from the prior version, with a few exceptions:
  • AIs no longer have to worry about resource transport ranges, instead being able to capture resources that are within 5 of their buildings. This is on average actually going to be slightly more restrictive than before, but it varies. This does save some CPU processing time for something that is completely invisible to the player anyway, though.

• The rules for building placement for the player, on the other hand, are now about as different as they could possibly be:
  • First of all, at least for the time being, there is no building count restriction on how many buildings you can have, and as noted previously there is no longer any sort of crime increase as you get more buildings.
  • Instead there is now a radius around district centers in which you can place buildings. If you don't have a district center within range of a building that needs to be in a district (which is almost all of them), then that building will cease to function with an "out of range of city" message. This would typically happen if a district center got blown up.
  • There are a very few buildings -- teleporters, civic centers, and the three remaining resource gathering buildings -- which are "non-district buildings." They don't get assigned to a district even when they are in one. However, these buildings must either be within a district, or within range of a teleporter, to be valid for placement.
    • This lets you spread your resource gathering out further with teleporters, and without the need for districts to handle that. And it lets you use teleporters to go make a new district, of course.

• For players and AIs, there are also no more "personnel transport ranges" or "resource transport ranges" or any of that stuff. If a resource extractor exists, it's working at full capacity. You only need the district or the teleporters in order to get the resource extractor set up in the first place.

• It's also worth noting that now players don't have to build their buildings in a contiguous fashion. This is useful in a lot of ways, so nobody is ever tempted to build a string of cemeteries over to an area just so they can build some other building and then destroy the cemeteries, etc. You have your entire district area to build in, and you can immediately build in it however you want to plan, and then you build another district later on and keep going from there. Much more fluid.

• Oh, also: players can now build buildings next to the buildings of other players at will. The AI is still restricted on that in most cases, but the player does not have that restriction anymore. That was annoying with flying saucers, among other things.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring this change.

• The area that an individual district can have in it is pretty darn small, but you can chain them together quite well, and at this point the minimum distance between districts is only 12, rather than 25. That makes it so that you can do interesting things with them without _having_ to be spread all over the map.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Cinth for suggesting.

• The number of districts that you can have is no longer simply 6. It is now one plus another 1 for every 2 government social progress levels you gain.
  • More may be done with this in future releases in terms of adding ways to gain more districts via other means -- perhaps through the tech tree -- but for now this seems like a good start.

The Great Commercial/Industrial Upheaval

• Thanks to Misery, ptarth, Enrymion, nas1m, and tadrinth for inspiring this line of thinking.

• All resources that were previously gathered by advanced or regular mines are now gathered by what are now just called "deep mines."
  • All animal resources are now gathered by Harvesters (no terrariums, fisheries, etc).
    • The optimize terrarium domes political deal now is for harvesters instead.
  • All plant resources are now gathered by extraction facilities.
  • This is SUPER nice, because now you don't have so darn many types of resource gatherers to try to keep track of. Even for Chris, that could get incredibly annoying and confusing previously.

• Since Industry and Commercial are so tied together now in terms of two different ways of making money, the Commercial section has been moved up on the left sidebar to be right under industrial.

• The income types were previously Government, Retail, Banking, and Manufacturing. In the new scheme of things this was pretty confusing, so it is now Government, Commerce, Banking, and Industry.

What Went Away

• There is now a Mine building, which is what used to be the regular mine.

• The fishery has been repurposed and no longer gathers resources.

• There is now a new Fishing Wharf building, which was previously the advanced ocean mine.

• The Industrial Teleporter has been removed, and a new Molecular Refinery has been added in its place.

• The Thought Conditioning Device has been removed, and a new Commercial Offices building has been added in its place.

• The Large Battery Array has been removed, and a new Lumber Mill building has been added in its place.

• The Small Battery Array Device has been removed, and a new Logging Camp building has been added in its place.

What Is New

• Microwave Electrical Towers have been redefined once again, and are now back to being a power building rather than an industrial one. These now have the same function that large battery arrays used to.

Commercial

• Shopping Mall crown production has been cut from 1200 to 600. Bank from 2500 to 1000. Stock Exchange from 5000 to 3000. Fighting arena from 2000 to 1400.
  • Banks can now only be built for every 1200 citizens instead of every 600. Shopping malls can now only be built for every 2000 citizens rather than every 1000.
  • The construction complexity of the banks has doubled from 6000 to 12000. This is still half what shopping malls are.
  • Shopping malls now cost 15000 instead of 4800.

• The new commercial offices building now provides 300 crown income, but is not affected by pollution much at all, and can have one built for every 800 citizens.
  • The crimes of opportunity on these is also very low (1/6th that of shopping malls).
  • These provide low commerce SP, but still higher than the bank (16 vs 9 at the bank, vs 48 at the shopping mall).
  • These are staffed by 80 people each.
  • These only take 150 power to run, so the same as the bank.
  • Their health is 220, so a bit better than the 160 of the bank.
  • These cost 4800, which is what shopping malls used to cost.
  • Their construction complexity is only 6000, so quite low.
  • Thanks to tadrinth and mercatortator for suggesting.

• Shopping malls, banks, and office buildings now all provide a crowns boost to adjacent shopping malls. This effectively makes the shopping mall your crown jewel of your commercial districts.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

Industrial

• The crown cost of rural farms has been dropped from 9000 to 4000.
  • Thanks to Enrymion for suggesting.

• The cost of factories has gone up from 9000 to 18000.
  • Their construction complexity is also up to 48000 instead of 9000, and they are now staffed by 177 instead of 120.
  • Their health is also up to 600 from 480, and their crown generation is up to 900 from 600 (bear in mind these guys use an obscene amount of power).
  • These no longer add any construction capacity at all.
  • You are now limited to one of these per 2000 citizens, like the shopping mall on the commercial side.

• Factories now provide a substantial boost to manufacturing crowns income on all adjacent buildings. This is a bit the reverse of shopping centers, making it so that factories increase outwards rather than other things increasing inwards toward it. The bonus here is also more substantial, which helps to offset its huge power cost (relative to the shopping mall).

• There are now two separate categories of crops: agriculture and fishing. Most of the bonuses that apply to agriculture don't apply to fishing, as these are meant to be two different systems of generating food.

• Fisheries now produce a small amount of crops, but this is not affected by the atmospheric quality at all, since you are catching fish rather than growing crops.
  • They also provide manufacturing-style income of 150.
  • Depending on the depth of water you are placing these on, you get a bonus of a certain amount to both crops and crowns: either 10% or 25% or no bonus.
  • You can have one of these for each 800 people, and they take 10 people to staff. This is actually super dangerous if you are relying on these for food, because if their effectiveness drops thanks to being understaffed, your food drops as well. The pure food production buildings don't have this disadvantage, so it's something to consider.
  • Fisheries give a huge penalty to one another when adjacent to one another from overfishing.
  • Building description from the game:
    • An excellent way to generate both some income and crops.
    • Fishing can reap excellent bonuses from being in deep waters, and more importantly they can really buff up a fishing wharf even more.

• Fishing Wharfs have been added to the game, producing a bit of money and a teeny bit of fishing-style crops. But these are sort of a reverse-bonus building, where fisheries really do a lot to help them out in a very substantial way.
  • Building description from the game:
    • A fishing wharf by itself is pretty unproductive. It produces very little in the way of food or crowns, so you're likely to overlook it as being pretty pointless.
    • But! As a place to sell fish from adjacent fisheries, THAT's where the fishing wharf really shines. You can get quite a bit of income cranking out of these if you set things up right.

• Mines are a new industrial building.
  • Their description from the game:
    • These mines can only be placed on spots that have a mining bonus of some sort -- typically a rocky, mountainous, or desert-like area. They also can't be packed closely together at all, so you want to plan each one carefully.
    • Mines are extremely expensive and slow to build, particularly if you are building them on rich mining terrain such as mountains. But once built, they are powerhouses of income.
    • The big limiters for these are planning their placement properly, gaining access to rough enough terrain with your districts, and having enough upfront capital to make these a worthwhile long-term investment.

• Logging Camps are a new industrial building.
  • Their description from the game:
    • These camps can only be placed on wooded tiles -- dense jungles give increased yields. These camps also can't be packed too closely together, so you want to plan your layout of them as a group.
    • Logging camps are cheap and quick to build, and provide a moderate amount of income depending on where you have constructed them. Constructing lumber mills to augment them makes them a lot more productive.

• Lumber Mills are a new industrial building.
  • Their description from the game:
    • These mills can only be placed on wooded tiles -- dense jungles give increased yields. These produce income all on their own, but provide extra boosts when placed adjacent to lumber mills.
    • Also consider putting your repair crews next to lumber mills, as the easy access to materials makes them twice as effective.

• Some science changes in light of a few new goals here with molecular refineries being relevant without being OP:
  • Explorer camps now only produce 1 science per turn, not 2. (This is actually unrelated and just needed to happen in general.)
  • You can only make one science lab per 2000 citizens in spacious housing now, rather than 100. For linguistics it is now for every 1000 rather than every 100.
    • Your population counts are expected to be a lot higher.
    • Also, individual linguistics centers now product 80 points per turn rather than 40, so that you don't have to have so many of them.
  • The Ansible now produces 360 linguistics in addition to the science it generates. (This is actually unrelated and is just a nice second purpose to the Ansible.)

• Molecular Refineries are a new industrial building.
  • These produce 4 science and 4 linguistics.
  • Their description from the game:
    • The pinnacle of materials science analysis. Super expensive and complicated to build, and takes a lot of people to run. Can only be placed on spots that have a mining bonus of some sort -- typically a rocky, mountainous, or desert-like area.
    • On the one hand, this refinery is good simply for generating some income via mining, and it even provides healthy bonuses to adjacent mines. On its own, it generates a very paltry amount of direct science and linguistics points, but that's simply because so much of its space is dedicated to mining and machinery.
    • Where this really shines is when science labs and linguistics research centers are built around it; you can then really pump out a ton of analysis.

Tech Tree Reorganization

• Tech tree changes:
  • In place of the terrarium dome (which no longer exists), the logging camp is now unlocked via biology.
    • It's now worth noting that this makes it a very attractive alternative first tech to retail training.
  • Thanks to Eternaly_Lost for suggestions that led to making more attractive early techs.
  • Repair Crew is no longer unlocked by the Architect Training Tech -- you don't really need it that early anyhow.
    • Commercial Offices is now unlocked by Architect Training instead, which makes THIS yet another attractive alternative tech that could be your first.
  • A new technology called Tractor Beams has been inserted between micro-production and flight control.
    • This has both the harvest facility and the extraction facility in it, which are both excellent sources of income, making the micro-production route yet another attractive early path through the tech tree.
  • Drilling has moved to be after weapons production and before interior ballistics, and now provides access to all three kinds of mines at once, but not the oil power plant. It is also now 10x cheaper and no longer requires you to be at social level 1.
  • Protective Paneling is now a tech that comes after Advanced Military Leadership and costs a lot more.
    • The basement deep mine is now assigned to this as well.
  • Retail training now costs 64 science instead of 48.
  • Product Development is now a direct descendent of retail training, and is available from social level 1 onwards (instead of 3) and for a quite low (comparably) science cost.
    • Dense computing retains its science cost but drops to a social level requirement of 2 instead of 3.
  • Industrial Chemical Processors are now unlocked at the same time as the harvester and extractor.
    • Thanks to tadrinth for suggesting that the resource-using buildings be available sooner in the tech tree since you get resource-gathering buildings pretty early.
  • Teleporter Depots have moved to Formalized Diplomacy since the two are so related (Civic Centers and teleporters). Should be a help to players in general, and it just makes good organizational sense.
  • Economic Embargoes have moved up behind Economic Planning, though their requirements have otherwise not changed prequisites-aside.
  • Architectural Aestheticism now comes after High Capacity Living, not directly after Architectural Training.
  • Terraforming now comes directly after lander records recovery only, and does not also require enhanced horticulture.
  • Landscape Grading now comes directly after terraforming and does not also require flight control.
  • Lander Records Recovery no longer comes after flight control. Instead it comes after the pair of biology and micro-production, and is much further to the left on the tree therefore.
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
  • Physician Training also now requires micro-production as well as biology (versus just biology) before you can research it.
  • Brokerage Licensing now costs vastly more and can't be researched until a higher social level, but is no longer a prerequisite for anything else.
  • Hydroponics is now something that comes after culinary artistry, and it costs a bundle more than before in terms of science.
  • Culinary Artistry is now something that you can't get until social level 4, and it costs way more in science, too.
  • There is now an Organic Foods tech between Independent Cooking and Culinary Artistry. It was always odd how you got cheap diners and middle class eateries at the same time.
    • That actually got created as a minor conundrum well into the game's development, after the number of techs was collapsed back down a lot. But now this new version of the tech tree is doing a much better job of differentiating between like-to-have techs and need-to-have techs.
  • Large stealth frames (bombers) are now much more expensive in science, and require social level 7 rather than 3. These really are not an important early-game tech, so having something to work toward there is good. Some buffs in their direction may be needed in terms of the actual building, we'll see what people think.
  • Creative Writing no longer depends on Computational Psychosemantics, but instead is directly after Formalized Diplomacy. The same with Spy Training.
  • Computational Psychosemantics now costs a vast amount of science, and can't be researched until social level 7. It's now one of the tech cul-de-sacs, making it an optional thing depending on your play style. Misery has been a great inspiration in terms of my trying to add more of those in order to make the tech tree more unique -- more of a tree with actual leaves, rather than something that has such a large amount of inevitability in it.
  • The science cost of creative writing has been halved, because it's definitely a goal that this be available more readily than it previously was.
  • The fishery and fishing wharf now both are unlocked by a Commercial Fishing tech, which comes right after flight control.
  • Military Shipbuilding now comes as a child tech after sonar, and is no longer in the research path in the way of anything else.
    • At this point, all of the water-related stuff is on its own offshoot in the tech tree, and no longer in the way of any other techs. So on Mars and Europa, you don't have to pointlessly research these techs for buildings you can't use.
      • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting this issue.
  • Oil Power Plants are now unlocked via a new Oil Drilling tech.
  • Holo Resorts are no longer granted by Architectural Aestheticism. Instead they are unlocked via a new Tactile Holography tech. This now comes between Physician Training and Emergency Medicine.
  • Biochemistry is now a direct descendent of sonar, and only costs 800 science instead of 3200 (and requires only social level 1 instead of 3). This is good, so that the player can use yet more resources earlier in the game.
  • Both Perovskite Solar Cells and Microwave Transmission now descend from Mass Communication, and have no children. This much better reflects their optional status, and puts them into a much better branch in terms of what their prerequisites are. That way so darn much isn't after sonar.
  • Statistical Mining Models now descends from oil drilling instead of from sonar.
  • Lithospheric Geophysics now descends from Oil Drilling and is a cul-de-sac of that branch of research instead of being a common prerequisite for a bunch of other stuff. It is also now extremely expensive in science and an extremely late-game tech.
  • Efficient Incineration now descends from Biochemistry instead of Hydrothermal Convection. Same with Efficient Materials Recovery.
  • Hydrothermal Convection itself also now descends from Biochemistry.
  • A new Forestry tech has been inserted between independent cooking and Brewing, and grants access to Lumber Mills.
  • Plasmafication now descends from not only Efficient Incineration (as before), but also now Efficient Materials Recovery. This is a pretty pricey tech.
  • Molecular Security now descends from Advanced Military Leadership rather than Biochemistry. It also now requires social level 18 rather than 10.
  • Molecular Refinery (the building) is now unlocked via Biochemistry.
  • Gene Manipulation now descends from Hydrothermal Convection rather than Biochemisty. It also now requires social level 15 rather than 8.
  • Magma Deflection now descends from Hydrothermal Convection.
  • Nano Wormholes now descend from Magma Deflection where previously it was Supercavitation. Again not making an ocean tech required anywhere in the tree.
  • Supercapacitors actually now depend on Perovskite Solar Cells and Microwave Transmissions where they used to depend on Mass Communication. The idea is that these are extraordinarly hard to get. And the stuff beyond them, of course.
  • Ocean Current Deflection is a new tech that unlocks the ocean current redirectors and which descends from Hydrothermal Convection just like Magma Deflection does.
  • Aquifer Surveys now descends from Hydrothermal Convection.
  • Monster Containment now descends from Plasmafication instead of Mind Control.
  • The Repair Crews building now is unlocked by Weapons Production.

• Techs that are now gone:
  • Enhanced Horticulture
  • Bulk Teleportation
  • Lithium Nanofiber
  • Deep Ocean Drilling
  • Commercial Shipbuilding
  • Deep Drilling.
  • Statistical Mining Models
  • Planetary Insight
  • Mind Control
  • Automated Teleportation is technically still there right now, but it has impossible prerequisites and so is sitting outside of the tech tree. That will be patched up in a future version when its building actually has a purpose.

• Changes to techs that races get for free (each player race gets 3, this only notes the changes):
  • Boarines now get Neo-Historism instead of what was Shipbuilding.
  • Skylaxians now get Computational Psychosemantics instead of Product Development (this is a huge upgrade for them).
  • Zenith now get Landscape Grading rather than Neo-Historism (another huge upgrade).
  • Fenyn now get Efficient Materials Recovery rather than Planetary Insight (a pretty sizeable upgrade).
• The planet rage rogue growth rate is now always shown as if the player had Planetary Insight in past versions. That's going to change soon anyhow.
  • Krolin now get Tactile Holography instead of Bulk Teleportation (this is kind of a downgrade).

• There are still some social progress screen entries that no longer make sense, but that will have to wait until the next version -- this is huge enough as it is.

Autosaving

• Thanks to Eternaly_Lost, windgen, Cinth, and tbrass for inspiring these additions.

• Added new slider to the settings menu game tab: Autosave Interval
  • If this is zero, the game will not autosave. Otherwise, it will autosave every N turns, where N is the value specified.
  • Defaults to 0.

• Added new slider to the settings menu game tab: Autosaves To Keep
  • If this is zero, the game will never automatically overwrite autosaves. Otherwise, it will only create N autosaves (where N is the value specified) before it starts looping back around, overwriting the oldest autosave.
  • Defaults to 1.

• Added new toggle to the settings menu game tab: Compress Autosaves
  • If this is checked, the game will use normal compression on autosaves. This saves disk space but takes somewhat longer than an uncompressed save.
  • Defaults to off.

Performance/RAM Fixes

• Made a few changes to how a few threading things are handled that should help with the thread-related errors, and which actually help with transient memory allocation a bit, surprisingly.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• The cleanup of RAM when unloading a savegame is now vastly better.

• Fixed a very substantial memory allocation issue where sprite batches could be up to 4000 large, but this was causing too many intermediate-sized batches and other complicated issues there. After some experimentation, reducing the maximum batch size to 250 sprites per batch leads to actually a slight performance gain in high-load cases (less CPU work), at the cost of only a few more draw calls (40-something added in Chris's test case were it had 80 prior to that, and was batching 24,000, so that's hardly anything).
  • This was actually responsible for some really incredible amounts of RAM usage that would spike the game up to the point it would eventually crash. In particular during mapgen this was the issue, but also during extended play sessions your RAM would likely creep up over time and kill your machine.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Shrugging Khan, and Sounds for reporting.

Version 0.854

(Released May 28th, 2015)

• A few changes to which buildings are immune to the effects of brownouts, and which are not:
  • Can now brown out, but could not before:
    • Crematoriums, recycling centers, hazmat, molecular security control, panopticon, holo resort.
  • Can no longer brown out, but previously could:
    • Shrine, all forms of housing. (Note: police and food/water/meals buildings already were, and still are).
  • This should cause a bit less chaos of the "everybody dies" sort during brownouts, while still leaving plenty of "fun."
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed a rather sizeable texture memory leak relating to the minimap -- this does help explain a number of the out of memory errors that were specifically centered around that part of the game.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the repeated reports that finally helped us find this!

• Fixed some runaway RAM usage that has been happening for the last few versions during mapgen, in some cases leading to crashes previously. You also won't see the map generating anymore, although you still get the text. So the world is more of a mystery now, like it's supposed to be (that was just a developer testing tool).
  • Thanks to Aklyon for reporting.

• Left-clicking a tech-unlock notification to open its details window now backs the main map GUI out of any mode it was in, to avoid the mouse-up from after clicking that window's close button causing a building to be demolished, etc.

• Left-Clicking the various listboxes (reports, overlays, etc) will now tell the game to ignore the next mouse-up to avoid unintentional interaction with the underlying map (because the mouse-down will close the listbox, and thus the listbox won't be there to block the mouse-up, etc)
  • Thanks to steelwing for reporting.

• Now if you're dragging a scrollbar via the mouse, that drag action will not also pan the map.

• Fixed a bug where joining a side via the incident window would not refresh the table, thus making it possible to join multiple times.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

• The bottom bar icons have been upscaled (poorly, for now -- that's just a temporary and very blurry mess) to a better size that is easier to see and click. The bar itself has also been scaled up.
  • There is not quite enough room on the bar for all the items, you'll also note -- drumroll, please, the diplomacy icon won't be staying. Or its entire tab. A much better way of handling that, in the main view, is coming up.
  • Thanks to Cinth for helping inspire us to upsize the icons bar, although it was already bugging us too.

Map Types Work!

• The snow planet now uses new terrain types unique to it (along with a regular snow and the thick ice), to provide a more alien-feeling world.

• Map generation in general now uses better algorithms for providing more realistic terrain.

• The Continental map type has been renamed terrestrial.
  • The Snow Planet map type has been renamed Europa.

• A new Mars map type has been added, and is quite... well, a lot like Mars. ;)
  • Please note that with these newer very-different map styles (Mars, Europa), the existing natural wonders don't fit in well visually. We'll be dealing with that in the coming month.

Version 0.853

(Released May 28th, 2015)

• The F3 debug menu now has a lot more information on threading and related info, and certain kinds of error logs should as well.

• A variety of small "less RAM turnover per frame" improvements have been made to the underlying engine.

• Put in some error catching that was probably related to cross-thread updates during the interturn again. Tiles with an error will draw ERROR on them so long as they are having trouble rendering, and log an entry ONCE per series of errors. That way the game doesn't go fatal-error-ballistic on you over what might be a very temporary thing, and if it's not a temporary thing then it will help us figure out what is going on and where.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was introduced in the prior version where if you had a modal window open and then you got your mouse cursor near tiles with an icon overlay on them that would normally give you a tooltip, you'd get a nullreference exception. (This was the actual problem from the above item, but the above item is still good as it makes the game not wig out so much when this sort of thing does accidentally happen).
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug from way back when we shifted to larger image collections where the tops of terrain tiles that stick up (trees, mountains, etc) were all mismatched with their bases!)

• In the upper area of the screen where it warns you when you have quarantine on, it now also warns you if you have toxin screening and genetic screening on.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• In the upper part of the screen where it tells you the "most important" bit of information, it was only giving you one line at most, and those would overwrite one another so that you might actually miss some critical information about the fact that you have a quarantine on (for example) because of an incoming incident or whatever.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.

Version 0.852

(Released May 28th, 2015)

• Fixed a bug in recent versions that could cause some old saves to hang when loading.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where the types of housing were showing a localization error in the tooltip for housing.
  • Thanks to Cinth, tadrinth, and SugeBearX for reporting.

• Fixed a flood of errors and out of memory exception that was possible in the diplomacy screen viewing certain political agreements (not sure which ones yet).
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Various balance changes to pollution-emitters and crime caused by pollution:
  • Science labs no longer get crime from pollution, and produce half as much pollution as before.
    • None of the space center buildings cause crime from pollution anymore.
  • Disease control and genetic optimizer also no longer cause crime from pollution anymore, and the former now creates half as much pollution as before.
  • The thought conditioning device no longer causes crime from pollution anymore, but now causes 2x as much pollution as before.
  • Broadcast stations are now sensetive to pollution (in terms of causing crime).
  • The various types of meals production buildings now all cause crime from pollution.
  • Advanced fuel mixer now creates 1/3 as much pollution. Warehouse and guildhall none. Commercial and industrial chemical plants and computer cluster about 1/3.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Cinth for inspiring these changes.

• Terrain Riser and Bore are now fully automated, not staffed by anyone.

• Fixed a bug from the prior two versions where the little icons on top of buildings blocked mouse input to the building, making it so that you could not middle-click a building where an icon was in the way.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• The tooltip text for buildings that have been intentionally disabled versus those that have no target selected has been split, so that it is clear which one each is.

• Previously, the automated terraforming slider would not appear until you have budget committees also unlocked. Now it will appear as soon as you have the terraforming tech.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Version 0.851

(Released May 27th, 2015)

• The game now has a little portrait of your racial leader (who you are playing as) in the upper left corner. It's subtle enough not to be too huge or in the way, but gives you an idea of who you are playing as.
  • We looked at doing completely-re-themed GUIs, and had some success with that, but ultimately it was taking too long and they were by nature of uneven quality and mood. We decided that having one really great GUI was better than having 8 good-but-themed GUIs.

• Embassies and other buildings that previously targeted cities will now target races, picked via dropdown on the tile details window (like buildings that pick a resource) rather than having you click the target on the map.
  • Note that buildings from old saves will load as not targeting anything.
  • The building will show the "targeting" graphic much like the stuff that picks a resource, and shows the icon of the target race.
  • You'll be able to set this even before the buildings are fully constructed.
    • Thanks to jerith for suggesting that bit.

• Improved the clarity of the population top bar tooltip:
  • It now notes that the occupancy stats are as of last turn.
  • It now lists all present housing types, not just those with occupants.
  • It now includes how much of each housing type is available.
  • It now lists the housing types in priority order by which they are occupied.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring these changes

• Now AI saucers aim for a particular district, instead of a particular city. Usually the district closest to the attacking race.

• Now when you click a social progress node to spend the point in that category:
  • There's no more confirm popup.
  • It doesn't immediately research the node.
  • It's displayed with a special ring for visual feedback.
  • It will have a tooltip (obviously visible right after you click, since your mouse is there) telling you "This social progress node is now queued to be researched at the end of your turn. If you change your mind before then, you may click this node again to deselect it or click on another node to select it instead."
  • When you end the turn, any queued social progress nodes will be unlocked before the AI players take their turns.
  • Thanks to tbrass and Enrymion for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug in the disease notifications where it would happen even for non-player cities.
  • Thanks to tadrinth, Cinth, and crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where fighting-capable buildings like saucers could be "too damaged to function."
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• All of the repair capacities for player and AI buildings were 100x too high in the last versions, ever since we lowered the building health values by 100x. Oops! No wonder things were insta-repairing, practically.

Mouse Handling Refinements, Again

• A huge amount of replumbing of our mouse handling system in our general engine has been done so that all of our various controls can now respond to middle-clicks consistently. Previously some could and some could not.

• Some mouse handling changes:
  • The ability to drag the view via the middle mouse button has been removed. If you'd like to rebind those controls, of course you can. But right now the only way to do it is with the left mouse button, which is what is likely most commonly expected from players of other 4X games.

• Left clicking your district centers no longer opens the city management window, and left-clicking science or linguistics buildings no longer opens up their subscreens.
  • Left clicking scouts and sonar stations does still open their mode, though. Same with attacker buildings.
  • The general rule here is that if it changes gui modes on the screen you are in, that's fine (and actually really nice). But if you're being taken to a subscreen, then that was disconcerting and people didn't like that. Plus there are already direct icons for all those things (well, except linguistics) right on the screen.
  • Thanks to tbrass, ptarth, and jerith for weighing in on this.

• The game now consistently uses right-click, including the currently open left sidebar section.
  • To view the details of a tile or tech or whatever, you now have to either middle-click or ctrl+left-click.
    • You can rebind the Ctrl key to be something else.
  • Thanks to Mick, Cinth, ptarth, nas1m, and jerith for suggesting.

Player Medical Balance And Revisions

• Accelerated Birth Center now has 40 births per turn rather than 20.

• Major Trauma Center is now Trauma Specialists.
  • These no longer cure any diseases per turn at all.
  • These now have twice as many local and dispatch combat deaths into woundings provided.
  • These now heal 60 wounded per turn rather than 40.
  • These no longer have a per-turn crowns upkeep.

• Small Hospital is now Hospital.
  • These now have 5 births per turn rather than 0.
  • These now cure 10 diseased per turn per disease rather than 3.
  • These now have a vaccine research rate on them that is 0.01, or 1/100th of that which is provided by the disease control.
  • Thanks to Enrymion for suggesting the vaccine research on these.

• Disease Control
  • These now cure 20 diseased per turn per disease rather than 6.

• On trauma specialists, their construction cost and complexities are both halved.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change plus some others related to these.

No More Crown Upkeep Costs / Shifted Other Costs

• The power costs on trauma specialists has dropped from 4k to 2k, and their construction cost and complexities are both halved.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change plus some others related to these.

• No buildings have crown upkeep costs anymore. That was needlessly complex, and it could lead to situations where you had 0 crowns and negative crown income, but no consequences, too.
  • Power draw is already a plenty fine method of doing an upkeep cost, and having power AND crowns as a potential upkeep cost is definitely not ideal for understanding what is going on. Power draw has a great system of penalties and so forth already, so just sticking with that one makes a lot more sense.

• All of the buildings that used to cost upkeep in crowns now have increased power costs.

• The crown costs overlay has gone away, since that is not relevant (there are no crown costs per tile anymore!).

• Previously, some player buildings had their crown upkeep costs go up when they had less than maximum staff.
  • These buildings instead now either take damage slowly over time (requiring repairs) if they have less than max staff, or they emit larger amounts of pollution than normal, or in many cases both.

• Previously, the crown consumption of buildings was affected by the city management sliders, but now it is applied to power usage instead in these cases:
  • Hazmat (hazmat stations)
  • Crime Control (police and riot)
  • Research (science and linguistics)
  • In the case of power producers and the power slider, those now affect total pollution output, instead.

* Known issues at the moment! CrwnUseReductionHuge, WorkEthic, and RoboticHelpers are all temporarily pointless.

• • Figured you would want the release sooner than later, though, so we're letting this slide until the next one.

Version 0.850

(Released May 26th, 2015)

• Put in some extra checks to prevent saucer spawning/movement on the map-edge tiles.

• Previously only trash-consuming buildings that produced power from the burning would burn stored trash after littered trash was exhausted, but now all trash-consuming buildings will do so.
  • Thanks to ptarth and tbrass for inspiring this change.

• Changed the rules of the SnowyPlanet map style to bypass the normal terrain-type restrictions for placement of resources and natural wonders.
  • Thanks to tbrass for inspiring this change.

• Extended the boat "what spot do I attack from?" logic to handle the recently added ability to attack underground targets and to consider "in range of the surface above the target" as in-range, so that it doesn't just drive up on top of the underground target (which may be on land).
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Replumbed the "can tile type X be placed on tile Y?" logic and other related can-build-this logic to be have an alternate mode where it returns a full list of all the preventing reasons rather than just stopping when it hits the first error.
  • This is used for the tooltips when you're in placement mode mouseovering the map, and for the tooltips on the build menu items. So it will tell you both that you're short on crowns and that you don't have enough citizens in whatever housing, etc.
  • Thanks to jerith, Kizor, and tbrass for inspiring this change.

• Now when a city goes into brownout it prioritizes buildings that finished construction in the last 3 or so turns. This way you can see that there's a disruption and have time to deal with it, but it won't immediately ravage your pre-existing city.
  • Thanks to Kizor and ptarth for inspiring this change

• A few more performance improvements that affect both framerate in general and interturn. Nothing major, but on heavy load this added about 1fps for Chris when he was chugging at 28fps.

• Extended the recent "can terraform under all your buildings" rules to also allow the building on a tile to satisfy the "must be adjacent to building or terraforming" requirement of terraforming a tile.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report and save.

• It's now no longer possible to disable a building that provides graves or trash-storage.
  • Also, if you try to disable a multi-tile building's sub-tile, it instead targets the main tile.
  • And fixed a bug where some methods of disabling a building were not honoring restrictions on what could be disabled.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where when the "if the player doesn't know the current underground building type, don't show that building" rule was added it didn't always give knowledge of the current underground building type to the player when the player had just placed that building. This lead to the buildings not showing up immediately (and possibly not ever).
  • Thanks to zebeast45 for the report and save.

• The tooltip when placing terraforming now shows the current terrain that would be replaced.
  • Thanks to jerith and ptarth for suggesting.

• The tooltip for city wreckage now lists the terrain type under the wreckage.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting

• The tooltips while holding-X-to-enable-or-reenable something now show up in the bottom-left corner.
  • If you see other map-based tooltips hovering near the cursor instead of the bottom-left, let us know.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Extended the rule where "buildings attacking you are revealed" to give you sonar data instead of surface data when the attacking building is underground.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where pressing escape with the tech details window open would close that window and the whole tech tree, instead of just the window.

• The Save Game and Load Game windows now close when you press escape.

• Now when you are in building-placement mode for a surface building type and are viewing the underground (or vice versa), the game won't show any spot as valid, to avoid confusion with players thinking it would place the building on the spot being viewed.
  • Applied similar logic to terraforming: if not viewing the surface, you can't terraform.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.

• Switching to sonar-view or scouting-view now switches the map to underground or surface, respectively.
  • Thanks to zebeast45 and jerith for suggesting.

• Added a new slider to the city management window: Auto Terraforming
  • After you end each turn, the game tries to automatically terraform the specified number of tiles near your city, preferring the tile types that generate the atmospheric compounds you need more of.
  • Thanks to Enrymion and jerith for inspiring this addition.

• Now the exit-game confirmation prompt tells you how long it's been since you last saved the game.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.

• The "number of attacks last turn" icon at the top of the screen has now gone away. It was one more piece of visual clutter that in this case really wasn't warranted. Since we've added the right-hand sidebar attack notifications and ability to cycle through them, that's actually a lot more powerful and useful in general. Anything we can do to make you less overwhelmed with tons of icons and numbers is always good. ;)

• Simplified the rules about what kinds of attacks can attack underground buildings/monsters:
  • If you don't have sonar intel on the current type of building there, you cannot attack the underground target.
  • If there's a building above the target (that doesn't belong to you) and you're not attacking with ground soldiers or underground monsters, then:
    • If the surface terrain or surface building blocks bunker busting attacks, you cannot attack the underground target.
    • If the surface terrain is not water, and your attack does not hit all tile layers at once (missiles do, for instance), then you cannot attack the underground target.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed a bug where bulldozing an under-construction building would not do certain important post-destruction bits of logic, like clearing its building-specific data (staffing, notably) or removing it from the city's internal list of buildings.
  • Also put in a check when loading saves from before this version to clean out the building list of cities thus affected.
    • Though note that the crime tooltip will still show the results from the previous turn, in terms of the number of buildings causing the crime. That will update after the next end-turn.
  • Thanks to Enrymion, crazyroosterman, and tadrinth for the reports and saves.

• Fixed a bug where selecting Work Land, even without selecting one of its sub-options (demolish, etc) would start trying to draw "can you do this?" overlays on mouseover tiles, which could make it look like demolish was "sticking" on, etc.
  • Also fixed some bugs where gui state was being cleared incompletely after releasing shift, etc, but those might not have been impacting much.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Moved the disease-curing math for hospitals to happen before the disease-progression math, to avoid "disease deadlock".
  • Thanks to nas1m and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• Now when your city goes from having 0 infected of a particular disease to having more than 0, you get a central-screen message telling you about it.
  • Thanks to nas1m and Cinth for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where render code would sometimes mark an AI race as newly-met, triggering the central-screen message and so on.
  • Thanks to jerith, ptarth, Mick, and crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Added extra checks to ensure that a shut-down building gets no crime allocated to it. Though it should already have been working that way due to excluding buildings with no staffing.
  • Note that any time you enable or disable a building the city reevaluates staffing.
    • Added further checks in the reevaluate-staffing logic to make sure that shut-down buildings have 0 staffing.
  • Note that crime deaths only happen at buildings where: staffing > 0, not shut down, net crime > 0.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• The expanded sonar tech is now just called sonar, since there is no longer a basic sonar.
  • Thanks to tbrass for catching this.

• Fixed a bug where your Linguistic Centers were useless until you got Formalized Diplomacy. Now you can start researching languages immediately with them once you have Civil Service. This was a bug related to us changing the requirement of linguistics research centers from one tech to the other.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The main player military buildings (all but cobalt bomb launcher and coordinated military command) no longer give off any pollution.
  • Otherwise it triggers the pollution emission overlay (rightly so), which was confusing since that seems almost like a range indicator but is not.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• A bug in the hydroponics farm definition was causing it to only give a boost to adjacent water production, not a boost to adjacent water and food production. Fixed.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Trash dumps now give a 30% capacity boost to adjacent trash dumps. This way you can really make tottering piles of trash in one area. And large cities don't get too obnoxious with how many dumps they need.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman and jerith for suggesting.

• Engineering firms and repair crews now provide small amounts of manufacturing income.
  • Thanks to ptarth and unknown forum debaters for inspiring this change.

• Microwave Towers were previously used for between-cities transfer of power, but since you only have one city now, that makes no sense anymore and so the building had no purpose.
  • These have been repurposed into an industrial building that provides big bonuses to adjacent industrial buildings in terms of power reduction and crown output (via increase efficiency).
  • Thanks to ptarth and unknown forum debaters for inspiring this particular functionality.

• Fixed a bit of outdated text in the factory description saying that Banks were unlocked from a tech that no longer did that.
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where lasers probably were not leading to combat incident report icons on the targets they hit.

• All of the on-building icons in the game (the ones that give status, etc) now have tooltips specifically for them that say what the heck that icon is about, and usually what to do about it.
  • Note that these will later have more variants in terms of text that is appropriate for viewing your buildings versus an enemy building, and viewing enemy saucers or enemy "buildings are alive" (spire, neinzul) units instead of just the single version that is there now. But for now the clarity is very nice, either way.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting. Now sure how we didn't think of this before!

One City To Rule Them All / And Hello City Districts

• Having to switch between multiple city interfaces was horrible, and nobody had to tell me that. Surprisingly, nobody did (that I saw) until right after I made this change. Anyhow, there is now only one city in your entire empire, which was already the case for AIs. Managing multiple cities was a chore and I hated it. I think the reason most people did not report it before was that they avoided using it at all because it was intimidating. That's sign enough in itself.
  • But! There was some useful stuff about multiple cities. We're now having the concept of City Districts, which don't require you to do interface context switches, and aren't as separate as a fully city, but retain some of the useful qualities. Please note that the set of features assigned to these is starting as small as possible and will grow as needed, so long as it doesn't increase complexity in an un-fun way.

• In prior savegames, multiple cities are now combined into one.

• All of the stuff with migration between cities in an empire (which I bet most players did not even know existed) is now gone. Also all the stuff with "sister cities" transferring things between one another.

• When you build a new civic center, it will always be a part of your existing city, now. You can only ever have one city in the game. Switching between cities and having different HUDs for that was just too much of a nightmare. People had not really complained about that yet, but the fact that almost nobody uses multiple cities is telling. And Chris also just felt super uncomfortable with them in practice, despite originally being the one to design them.

• There is now a concept of districts, of which you can have six. These districts have names, just like your cities used to. Your city no longer has a distinct name, only its districts do. Its buildings are assigned to district based on proximity. More to come there.

• Some of the stats on the civic center have been shifted downwards a bit, since they are now contributing to your same city, not a new city.

• Civic centers now have to be placed at least 25 tiles away from all other district centers that you own (that includes your lander), which is pretty darn far. If you think you can turtle with a bunch of districts all on top of one another, that's definitely not the intent. ;)

• The hotkeys that previously cycled you through cities now quickly jump you between district centers, which can be useful.

• Various things, like crime in particular, key off the total number of buildings.
  • This is something that previously was inflated a lot by accidentally counting up the total number of tiles in multi-tile buildings.
  • Additionally, there are now various buildings that are considerd "minor freebies" that no longer count toward that total at all: Explorer Camps, Cemetaries, Trash Dumps, all of the resource gathering buildings (but not the resource using ones), and the terrain riser and bore.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman and Enrymion for reporting these prior two issues.
  • Lastly, one of the benefits of having multiple cities used to be that you could reset the crime and support more buildings, right?
    • Well, each district center -- including your lander -- now includes a certain number of "freebies" (24 for your lander, 20 for civic centers) of buildings that don't count toward your building total.
    • This makes it a SUPER good idea to continue to build civic centers and have multiple districts, to keep crime down. But it doesn't come with the interface complexity that the prior versions of multiple cities did. Win all around!

• Molecular Security Control and Remote Automated Teleporter are now all-or-nothing for your entire faction, not per-district things.

• Coordinated Military Command previously was one-per-city. Now it is one-per-8000 citizens.

Left Sidebar Reorganization

• Thanks to Cinth for variously suggesting and inspiring these changes that should make things clearer in terms of organization and easier for new players to find things.

• The category icon for food has now been shifted to a three-part icon representing the crops/water/meals triangle. Before it was just showing the crops icon, which was understandably confusing if you were looking for restaraunts or water wells.

• There is a new Exploration category, and the Explorer Camp, Teleporter Depot, Scout Station, and Sonar Surveyors have all been moved into that.

• The old Technical and Wonders categories have been removed.

• A new Science category has been created, and now has the science and linguistics labs, plus the four buildings that are used for inventing market items.

• A new Industrial category has been created, and now has the factor, engineers, and repair crews in it. (More coming later there).

• The Terraforming category on the sidebar now includes the Artificial Volcano, Oceanic Current Redirector, Terrain Riser, and Terrain Bore.

• From the old wonders category, those items have been moved as follows:
  • Cobalt Bomb Launcher to military.
  • Ansible and Space Center stuff to Science.
  • Superdeep Borehole to resources.
  • Genetic Optimizer to health.
  • Panopticon, Thought Conditioning Device, and Blockade Checkpoint to government.

• The demolish action now has its own top-level button on the left sidebar, rather than being under the terraforming section.
  • Thanks to ptarth and jerith for suggesting.

Version 0.840

(Released May 22nd, 2015)

• Fixed an offset issue with the tabs in the diplomacy window in the prior version. That screen is currently partly updated -- the art has been done for it, but has not been fully coded in, so that's to come soon.

• You can no longer see woundings and deaths from pollution and disease on AI cities. Still happens, but that's priviledged information! Besides, it looked strange seeing it on the map.

• AI cities are now only affected 10% as much as normal by pollution that they produced, however. Pollution coming from some third party (you or a different AI) hits them much harder. This lets us have proper AI pollution without them also needing to scrub (which would make it rather pointless), so races can poison one another without fully poisoning themselves much at all.

• The strength of a few buildings on the player side that pollute have been reduced, and the ranges in which they pollute have gone down a lot.
  • This accomplishes three things:
    • First of all, a bit of a performance bump, as with the AI stuff below. Though it's not too big a deal.
    • Secondly, seeing your pollution better, again like with the AI stuff, which is very useful as a visual cue.
    • And lastly, making it so that your hazmat can be a little more centralized and you don't have to worry about such ridiculous spreads from your buildings.

AI Pollution Updates

• There are a lot of changes noted below, and overall they have several different effects:
  • Firstly, the performance is VASTLY better for pollution emissions, particularly when we're talking about massive old-savegame-style Acutian cities. In those cases, on our fast CPUs, it can save 500ms of interturn processing just for the Acutians alone.
  • That said, things are also now thematically more appropriate between races. Some have a lot more actually, and some have less. Still much better performance, because the range of pollution emissions was the killer, not the amount itself. The ranges are all lower, which works better for other reasons, too.
  • Specifically, with the pollution being more concentrated, now you can actually SEE it more of the time from AI cities. Before it was getting so spread out that the same amount of pollution would be very thin just because it was spread out so much. Now it's more concentrated and thus actually looks a lot more appropriate.

• The spread of where acutians let off pollution is a LOT smaller, and more intense. Their underground buildings also no longer pollute.
  • This will make for really massive improvements to the interturn when they have any substantial number of buildings, and it will actually make their smog look better, too.

• The Andors only had a few polluting buildings, but now have none.

• No underground buildings pollute anymore, because that gives away their positions and can look like an error if you don't know what is happening.

• The military buildings of all the AI races now pollute more consistently.

• The Boarine mines pollute a bit more.

• The Burlust military now pollute a bit more than most other races, and so do their core buildings. Lots of fires burning over there. Still not remotely on the Acutian scale, though.

• The Evucks miliary pollutes less than average, and most of the rest of their buildings are clean. But their injection wells pollute a lot more than usual extractors for other races, and their chemical plants and disease centers are pretty well smog pits.

• The Fenyn ranged countermeasures were accidentally polluting, but no longer are. So none of their buildings now do.

• The Krolin are also pretty pollution-efficient with their military buildings, same as the Evucks. Their excavator is also a lot less polling than most races. This is a race that is clean because it has to be, given how in and out of water it is. Also because it's very organized in general.

• The Neinzul no longer pollute at all, because I'm not sure what gasses they would be letting off. Methane...? ;) But it makes more sense just to have them be clean.

• The Peltians have a similar pollution level to the Boarines, just a little less. They're very agrarian, so most of their pollution is purely accidental.

• The Skylaxians are kind of above-average polluters, but not by a whole lot. They have a whole lot of science going on, which has some waste products.

• Spire still have no pollution, and never did.

• The Thoraxians now have an overall higher pollution profile than before. They work the land hard, and don't really care. They have a pretty free pass, anyway... for reasons that some players have already figured out, I notice.

• Still absolutely zero pollution from the Yali. Same reason as the Krolin, except even moreso. It would be really super deadly for these guys.

• The Zenith are now more pollute-y than average, which you can assume is from biological processes in this case. A lot more going on there than methane. ;)

Major Crime Shifts

• The crime that comes from the number of citizens in your city has dropped dramatically, and is better calculated now as well, so that you can support larger cities (in terms of citizens) without so much crime from that.

• The crime that comes from population density has been shifted downward by two orders of magnitude. It was definitely untenably high before, particularly when going for high-population cities.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• A new crime source, number of buildings in your city, has been introduced. This starts out light, but then starts going up extremely sharply once you start getting past 60-80 buildings in a single city. Once you pass 300 buildings, it becomes absolutely unbearably brutal, so a number of pre-existing savegames from a few versions back are probably unplayable now from a balance standpoint.
  • The idea here is that, particularly with all the resource bonuses and natural wonder bonuses and adjacency bonuses, we want you to build smart and tight rather than just doing an infinite sprawl of gargantuan cities in terms of building count. Let's see tons of citizens without the brute force of just slamming down as many buildings as possible.

• The Informants cultural option now has no downsides to it and is also more powerful in crime reduction. But it doesn't help with citizen or building count crime.

Tips For Existing Players

1. Unfortunately, your existing savegames are probably going to be shot all to pieces with crime if you have a really large city in terms of building count. Sorry about that. You might be able to repair them, but probably not. (There's redshirt blood everywhere!!!)

2. In new savegames, you're going to be tempted to build rampant numbers of new buildings like you used to. And you'll be tempted to build just one giant city. Both are big, big mistakes.

3. There's a huge incentive for multiple cities now, although really you don't have to do that if you don't want to. Simply making excellent use of adjacency bonuses, resources, and natural wonders is a new way for you to make single-city games with low building counts but very high population counts viable.

4. And, frankly, if you want building counts as large as you used to have, it can still be done. But not in one city, probably. If you have a really good setup with riot police and just a really dense and concentrated look at that aspect of things, then sure, you can probably do just what you always did, honestly. But that gets into the territory of players in AI War who want to capture every planet. Yes you can do it, but it is very hard, and it's definitely not viable when the difficulty is high (which isn't really addressed here yet, but that's beside the point).

5. TLDR: The game has changed, notably. It's a lot less of a citybuilder, and more of an empire-builder now. But even more to the point, those resources and in particular those natural wonders are absolutely crucial now. If you didn't feel that exploring was exciting or meaningful before, boy is it now. Personally I'll probably keep to one city, but just with it spread out all over the place in fragments.

The Rebirth Of Teleporters

• The rebirth of the teleporter!
  • The old functionality of teleporters is completely gone. It was awkward and obscure anyway.
  • Teleporters are now unlocked via the Expanded Sonar tech, so you can get them far earlier in the game (very very early, in fact).
  • Teleporters now give you 15 air transport range, at minimal cost, with no pollution, with a relatively quick build time.
  • From the description of them in-game:
    • This building is absolutely critical! If you want to build a new little offshoot of your city, then you want to plunk down a teleporter and then start building next to it.
    • Can't get the teleporter where you want it? No problem. Put down one teleporter, let it complete, and then place another one.
    • You can build lines of teleporters like telephone poles, and get to very distant places on the map with minimal usage of buildings. This is critical in not driving your building count too high (which in turn causes crime.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

Version 0.826

(Released May 22nd, 2015)

• A variety of end-turn-logic performance improvements (both AI and non-AI).
  • This cuts down the interturn times substantially, although for some legacy savegames where the game state has way more buildings or whatnot than is really intended, the interturn times may still be a few seconds.

• AIs now have strict caps on how many buildings they can construct of each type, making it so that they won't be flooding the world with stuff anymore. Their excess wealth in the future will be used on a form of upgrade system, but for now that's not yet ready.

• The notification icons on the sidebar were previously having hue shifts applied to them, which they were not supposed to.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• For a lot of military buildings, AIs are not restricted on how many they can build, but they are restricted on how closely they can put them together. In general we're working on preventing the superblobs that you could sometimes see in the past. Once again, in a future update things will go toward upgrades when military buildings can't be built because of these restrictions.

• Fixed a bug where in the prior two versions you could not right-click in the placement menu to see the details of a tile type.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman, ptarth, and jerith for reporting.

• Fixed a longstanding (since before public beta) bug where right-clicking to view the tech details in the tech tree did not work.
  • Thanks to donblas and nas1m for reporting.

Version 0.825

(Released May 22nd, 2015)

• The racial bonuses and penalties for all three kinds of combat have now been greatly trimmed, so that they are neither so incredibly low (peltians) or so incredibly high (thoraxians).
  • Thanks to ptarth and others for reporting.

Version 0.824

(Released May 21st, 2015)

• The real graphics for all of the flying saucers are now in place -- previously all of them were temp graphics except for the Acutians. We're super pleased with how these turned out and how much better this makes the game feel!

• The way that adjacency bonuses from buildings work, which were mostly introduced last turn, has been vastly scaled back to more numerically-sane values. No more getting 6400 housing from a single building after stacking bonuses, etc.
  • The scale of the natural wonders and resource effects have not been touched for now, because those are a lot harder to stack and they are supposed to be very special.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and others for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with bonus meals not working properly in the prior version.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ, ptarth, and jerith for reporting.

• Yali saucers should no longer drag deep ocean with them. If you see it happen again, please do let us know!
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• When Neinzul and Yali use their "saucer-style" versions of themselves (which look identical but are roaming), they come in holographically like any other saucer. However, they did not have a graphic for it. Now there is an overlay of either red or blue on them that gets the same idea across, although a little less fancily.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• You can now see the map size and map style in the escape menu.

Performance!

• Moved the "what tiles are eligible to build/attack/etc" logic to a separate thread so it doesn't cause jerkiness in the animation of shift-placing buildings, and also lowers the load on the main thread in general.
  • Many gui computations have also been moved there, which should help keep the framerate more steady (though not necessarily improving the overall framerate).
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• An enormous amount of caching/baking code has gone into place, which basically solidifies the parts of tiles that aren't changing at a given point, and then "flags them as dirty" when they need to update. It also has a rolling sweep of all tiles that it refreshes at a rate of 1000 per second.
  • On a Huge map, the largest the game supports, that's 17,557 tiles (for reference, a Standard size map has 13,267 tiles). So on a Huge map it takes 17.5 seconds to do the rolling refresh of everything, but this should be a backup of last resort anyhow. Doing a full refresh of all of the tiles happens when you switch between selection modes or underground and aboveground, anyway.
  • A full update takes around 14ms, on Chris's computer, which is a 2013-era i7 quad core. Note that these updates unfortunately only use one core, so that part doesn't matter (though other parts of the game will use up to 16 cores if you had them). Anyway, so even a full update isn't something that will cause you sudden lag.
  • That said, the overall savings per frame (again on Chris's machine -- and the GPU is irrelevant here as we are not drawing any fewer frames of stuff; this is all CPU-side) is that 14ms PER FRAME.
    • To put that in context, as of 0.823 Chris was getting 20.3fps when zoomed all the way out on a specific savegame's Huge map. Now in the this version, zoomed out to the exact same place, his machine gives 28.3fps. That's a drop from 49.26ms per frame to 35.33 per frame. And of course when zoomed all the way in, it's more like 200fps, or about 4ms per frame. Different zoom levels are gradations between those two numbers.
  • Overall a little more than 1ms of those savings came from the "what tiles are eligible to build/attack/etc" thread shift, but the real gains with that one is in preventing periodic spikes of jerkiness and lag during situations of high intensity. The benefits of these caching/baking additions don't really help with any sort of spikes whatsoever, but they greatly reduce the baseline CPU requirements.
  • As a last note, you will still notice a periodic hitch in the smoothness, which actually gets worse the higher your framerate is. This is the garbage collector in unity running. For whatever reason, which we will investigate later, there's a lot of extra transient ram being used per-frame, and so that causes way-too-frequent GC collections. Since the ram usage is based on actions per frame, it's literally worse when the game is running faster, counterintuitive as that is.
  • Oh, the actual last note: It's possible that there may be some graphical strangeness that results from this, such as something not animating properly or being offset strange. The smog may not transition properly from one state to the next (meant to check that). We solved everything that we saw, but it's a sizeable game. Anything you find, please do report in mantis with a savegame and steps to reproduce. It's an easy fix for us to make, but we just have to know about them and be able to test them. Thanks!

• Revised our mouse handling logic to better capture mouseup events. Previously we were having some issues where those were not always actually being caught, and so doing things like left-clicking on your barracks to select barracks as your attack mode was having an uneven success rate, making that feel very sluggish.
  • Thanks to ptarth and jerith for reporting, though we also found this ourselves also.

Version 0.823

(Released May 20th, 2015)

• Changed the saucer movement logic to a simpler form of pathing ("move in the general direction of the target") that takes way less CPU time. Previously in a heavy-saucer case it could take over 10 seconds per turn.
  • Thanks to Kizor for the report and save.

• Vastly improved the efficiency of scanning; that "cloud" display around the explored area of the map relies on each tile knowing how far from the explored territory it is, which relies on a distance-flood notification each time a tile is explored, which is enormously expensive if it's a bunch of tiles being explored all at once. Now it queues and inlines and combines that a lot, removing all "skipping" and lagging during the animations around end-turn (related to this, anyway). This generally takes well under 1ms now, and only on a single frame per end-turn.

• Previously it was possible for players to find themselves in an international incident because their leader decided of his/her own accord to join it after it started! So this would lead to no warning of the incident coming, as well as involving the player in a ton of incidents they probably did not want to be a part of.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report that led to this discovery.

• Since some attack animations were never finishing due to soldiers standing there and never disappearing, there's now a 10-second safety timeout on the "just stand there" phase at the end of a soldier-actor's lifespan.

• Now when an AI race is no longer in any incidents it quietly recalls all remaining saucers it owns on the board.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug from the prior version where the Escape key would not open the menu after your first time doing it.
  • Bear in mind that you can still get to the menu by using the settings icon down in the bottom center of the screen (the little yellow gear).
  • Thanks to ptarth, nas1m, jerith, and crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Some render-logic optimizations. Not huge gains but maybe 10% when zoomed all the way out late-game on a big map.

• A bunch of buildings now give adjacency bonuses:
  • Police Station, Riot Police, and Molecular Security Control hugely reduce crime from even starting next to them (in addition to stopping it once it does start).
    • This makes the precise placement of the first two a lot more relevant now.
  • The various levels of housing and meal preparation give bonuses to the same levels of housing and food (so dense apartments benefit both dense apartments and cheap diners, and vice-versa).
  • City Parks now provide a big bonus to adjacent buildings giving appeasement. And they also provide a boost to all adjacent housing.
  • Shrines provide a smaller bonus to adjacent buildings giving appeasement.
  • Wind turbines now benefit others of their sort next to each other, and all types of solar panels work best in big fields of themselves, too.
  • Rural arms now give a boost to other farms, and wells boost other wells.
  • Hydroponic farms now give a boost to farms and water wells.
  • All of this, plus the resource and natural wonders stuff, is ultimately aimed at soon making it so that cities are by nature smaller, but more carefully planned.
    • That said, the whole thing with the planet reacting when your city is too large isn't yet there, so that does somewhat limit this for the moment.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting changes with the farms and the city parks.

Resource Definitions! (And Natural Wonders)

• The giant update that includes proper full definitions for all 80 resources is now in!
  • These resources actually have meaningful uses now -- very much so -- that you can see, and that you will be definitely interested in using. These are not slight bonuses.

• Previously, the game had 10 different categories for resource usage. These categories are used for defining which buildings the resources are processed by, as well as having market item effects that are specific bonuses for specific resource gathering types.
  • 6 more categories for resource usage have been added, because the 10 previous categories just didn't have enough categories that felt right with the new functionality being assigned to the resources.

• Fixed an issue where above-ground resources showed ??? for extractor type when viewing underground.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The display of the usages of resources and their flavor descriptions are now consistently shown throughout the HUD so that you can actually see what a resource does and plan for that before actually capturing it.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• All natural wonders now have proper adjacency bonus definitions that should make them powerful attractants on the map. They don't yet have flavor descriptions, but that's just a cosmetic detail.

Version 0.822

(Released May 18th, 2015)

• When AI saucers appear, there is now a 5 turn grace period where they are still "teleporting in" and thus you just see a holographic view of them.
  • During this period they can't take any damage, can't deal any damage, and have a special visual look to them. Hostile ones show up with red wireframe overlays, non-hostile ones show up as blue.
    • Please note that the wireframes are based on the final versions of the saucer graphics, and thus don't align perfectly with the current temp saucer graphics. That will correct itself when we get the final saucer graphics in there.
  • The overall idea of this mechanic is to give the defender -- whether that's a human or an AI who is reacting to a saucer raid by another AI -- a chance to build up proper defenses and thus have an interesting combined-arms battle.
    • The length of time (the 5 turns) will be configurable in the future, so you can have more of this, less of this, or none of it at all. But this does add a more thoughtful element to saucer raids, versus just getting instantly bashed in the head and then having to react.
  • Thanks to nas1m for coming up with this idea completely!

• All sidebar notifications now include the turn they happened in the tooltip.

• The sidebar attack notifications now:
  • Combine multiple ones from the same attacking race during the same turn, displaying a "x91" or whatever to show the number of individual attacks.
  • List the attacking buildings and the destroyed buildings in the tooltip.
  • If you left-click repeatedly, centers on the different locations hit during that turn by that race.

• Previously, Molecular Security Control and Remote Automated Teleporters were still doing their thing even when disabled. Fixed.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• Vastly improved the performance of panning the camera and zooming in and out, by making the culling and draw sorting of tiles happen precalculated.
  • Thanks to tombik for prodding us about doing this sooner than later.

• When a race is newly subjugated to you, you now get the maximum language skill (7) with them immediately.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• The bottom plate of the game now directly has buttons that open the city management and the incidents subscreens, and those are no longer in the reports submenu.
  • When incidents are not present at all, the incident icon shows up as very grayed out. When there are incidents but not ones that involve you, it's yellow. When there are incidents involving you, it's red.
  • Thanks to ptarth for helping inspire these changes.

• Some of the tougher international incidents are now limited to entering the game later on to let all the races get a bit more established first.

• International incidents no longer will stack the deck quite as hard against the player, since that's pretty much game over when it happens.
  • Thanks to nas1m, ptarth, timfortress, and others for reporting.

• The range on the saucers has been reduced quite a bit, particularly given that they are mobile, so they they are not so overpowered.
  • Thanks to timfortress for suggesting.

• The Join and Invite buttons on the international incidents page now have tooltips noting which go with which side.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• The text on the international incidents page still isn't the prettiest, but it is no longer all garbled up.
  • Thanks to nas1m and zebeast45 for reporting.

• Water production and hydroponics farms are no longer susceptible to brownouts, nor are any waste-handling buildings or holo resorts or police forces.
  • Those particular things result in a huge death spiral of your entire city just because of one brownout, however temporary.
  • It only makes sense that those key infrastructure bits would be able to have some degree of redundancy during a brownout.
  • Thanks to Kizor for inspiring this change.

• Ack! Disabled buildings were still:
  • Requiring water.
  • Requiring power.
  • Generating power.
  • Transmitting power.
  • Providing extra construction skill.
  • Making progress on market item construction.
  • Getting wounds from excessive pollution.
  • Taking damage from power overload (if a power plant with that budget way up).
  • Being hit pointlessly by brownouts when those happen.
  • Having criminal activity cause deaths and/or woundings at them.
  • Cremating bodies.
  • Generating trash.
  • Incinerating trash.
  • Doing diplomatic stuff.
  • Doing spy stuff.
  • Doing thief stuff.
  • Thanks to Kizor for the report that helped us discover this.

• Saucers are no longer able to be repaired, period, regardless of the repair capabilities of their originating cities.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Hyfrydle for reporting this inequity.

• If a race -- player or AI -- already has a disease in a city, then their chances of getting another disease go down increasingly with each disease that they have. Hopefully this helps to avoid some of the worst dystopian disease cities, although it won't eliminate them by any stretch. It will make them rarer, anyway.

• The game now makes more sure to place new buildings as part of the city you have selected.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where diseases were transfered to the attacker by attacks other than ground combat.
  • But if it's the Evucks on the offense, and the attack is not fully intercepted, the defender is now at risk of getting infected regardless of the type of attack. Evucks can make _anything_ worse.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting the bug, and inspiring the nastiness.

• Now shift-clicking a targeted tech node won't unqueue it unless it's the last in the queue. This is actually the behavior of similar games in the genre, but we thought it would work to allow unqueuing in the middle. Turns out that leads to some very unintuitive consequences.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where left-clicking the building icon on a tech tree node would bring up the details window for that building, where only right-clicking was supposed to do that. Left-clicking that part should now work fine for selection/queuing.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Now the check for insta-unlocking a tech (or prereq) when targeting it does not fire if you're trying to queue the target after something else, since that would violate the semantics of "put all research towards the first thing in the queue before moving on to the next part".
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• On the tech tree, the mouse wheel will now scroll the short-list instead of the main tree if the mouse cursor is within the short-list.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• Fixed the SoldierHitDamage missing loca.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The top bar crown income display now includes the net impact of all your political agreements from the last turn (it doesn't predict the impact of newly added/removed agreements because the ability of each party to pay is not known ahead of time).
  • It also mentions the gross income and gross expenses from these on the crown tooltip.
  • Thanks to jerith for inspiring this change.

• Power production is no longer affected by staffing percentage, meaning that a power plant now produces the same amount of power regardless of what its staffing level is.

• The OilPowerPlant, BiomassPowerPlant, WasteToEnergyPowerPlant, GeothermalPowerPlant, and NuclearPowerPlant all now have ongoing operating costs.
  • The above buildings no longer lose functionality when staffing is below 100%, but instead have higher operating costs in crowns.
    • So do: MolecularSecurityControl, CoordinatedMilitaryCommand, HazmatStation, and RecyclingCenter.
  • The resource usage buildings all now have ongoing operating costs, and those also go up when staffing is lower. They already didn't lose functionality, so some sort of staffing penalty is a good thing.
    • Same with all of the other wonders, now having operating costs and increased operating costs from staff.

Revised Mouse Controls

• Added new keybind: Grab And Pan Via Mouse After Short Delay (defaults to left click)
  • While you hold this down, the mouse grabs the viewport and you can move it around with the mouse.
  • This differs from the normal "Grab And Pan Via Mouse" in that it won't start the grab-and-pan behavior until it's been held for about half a second, avoiding the feeling of quick left clicks messing with your view.

• Left-click interactions with the map now happen on mouse-up instead of mouse-down.
  • And if the mouse-up happens less than a second after the mouse-down, it doesn't trigger these at all.

• Previously, left-clicking any building that generated science would take you to the tech tree (unless there was some higher-priority window for it to show you). Now this only happens for the ScienceLab itself.
  • Thanks to tbrass for inspiring this change.

• Previously you had to ctrl+click a tile to get the details window, now that's just right-click.
  • Right click no longer cancels building-placement/etc, nor does the "right-click a building to open the build menu to place more of that building" behavior, since those would conflict with this.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100, Kizor, and many others for inspiring this change.

• If you're in any kind of map gui mode (attack, work land, place building), pressing escape will now fully cancel you out of that. As opposed to the old method of backing up one step at a time via right-click (which no longer cancels any part of these modes).
  • Thanks to jerith for inspiring this change.

• There is a new keybind that is for both the escape key and mouse button 4 by default that lets you back out of the current HUD submenu easily. This lets you get out of attack mode or placement mode with a quick press of mouse button 4 (if you have one) rather than having to hit the Escape key on the keyboard.

Version 0.821

(Released May 15th, 2015)

• Changed the requirements of ceasefire from "the race you're talking to must have attacked the other race in the last X turns" to "the race you're talking to must be in an active incident on opposite sides from the other race".
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for inspiring this change.

• Now if the player is in a ceasefire with another race, the player is unable to attack that other race.

• Saucers will no longer spawn on natural wonders, and will skip over them during pathing (in the same way they skip over other saucers).
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring these changes.

• The remote engineering brigade belonging to players has been removed from the game.
  • Originally it was conceived as a two-purpose building. The first purpose was to allow for the construction of other cities after building this first and then a civic center. But now civic centers can be built directly, so that use is irrelevant. The other function was to allow for the construction of other pockets of main city buildings, but with the changes to helipads and similar that is also now irrelevant.
  • There was temporarily some thinking on our part that this might be used as a way to stealthily approach an AI city and build up forces there to counter the first-mover advantage, but that is inherently awkward in a ton of ways. Instead the international incidents, and the changes to ceasefires included in this version, handle that much more gracefully. Direct assaults on AI cities that are expecting you are meant to be difficult anyhow, going back to the original design intent.

• The graphics for the remote engineering brigade have been repurposed and given a base, and are now a new Ranged Countermeasures military building. These act as an interceptor for missile and laser attacks, which until now were basically unblockable.
  • This makes it so that all attacks now have a counter except for the high-altitude bombers, which consist solely of the cobalt bomber right now. Oh, and I suppose monster nests and torpedos, but those are something more niche and we'll consider them later.
  • This gets back to the spirit of combined-arms warfare without having a "push to win" way around certain situations.
  • Thanks to ptarth and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Bombers are no longer able to attack flying buildings, or saucers. It's against their nature of doing an actual surface bombing.

• All laser attackers -- yours and those of enemies -- are also now anti-missile/laser capable.
  • Thus the solution to saucers of "just build lots of missile launchers and they can't defend at all" is no longer valid.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• All of the AI saucers that are ground troop interceptors now have the ability to attack as well as defend. Otherwise you just get way too many ships hanging around that are defensive-only in nature with them. Given that these are raiding forces, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Previously, all laser attacks had an invisible special property that they would disable any enemy building that they hit for a turn.
  • Now the saucer lasers don't have this, and a few other types of buildings also don't have it (yours still do, though, and so do the race specialty buildings for the AI main cities).
  • THAT said, now it also has a tooltip properly in there that says "Special Attack Effect: Disables Hit Buildings For A Turn" on the ones where this is relevant.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• This is something that we've been considering for a while for sea attacks, but now with the saucers and in general some of the other combat-related stuff, this is definitely clearly warranted.
  • Some buildings, they now have full immunity to ranged (laser, missile, and low altitude bomber) as well as sea attacks.
    • These are noted as having very heavy blast paneling, and it helps to make it so that certain key buildings in your city or enemy cities can't just be hit with the largest munitions. More finesse is required.
    • If you like, think of this like needing fighters to take out a Death Star in Star Wars, or needing to use very slow sword/knife strikes to penetrate through personal armor in Dune.
    • The buildings that now have this paneling are:
      • All of your landers.
      • Your civic centers.
      • Molecular Security Control.
      • Your Missile Silos and Ranged Countermeasures.
      • Your Blast Panels and Cobalt Bomb Launchers.
      • Your artificial volcanos, oceanic current redirectors, and monster pits.
      • Your superdeep boreholes, blockade checkpoints, and terrain risers and bores.
      • All AI-controlled city centers and "forward bases" EXCEPT the Fenyn and Peltian ones and Spire ones.
      • Andor Visitor, Acutian Enforcer, Boarine Raiding Towers, Krolin Dropship, and Thoraxian Predator.
      • Boarine Electrical Towers, Boarine Hidden Barracks, Evuck Chemical Plants, Skylaxian Fab Centers, and Yali Submerged Silo,
      • All AI-controlled Evuck underground buildings (hello paranoia!)
      • Krolin Prison, Secret Police, Armory, and Special Forces.
      • Thoraxian MLRS, Bunker Busters, and Armory.
      • Every last Zenith building in existence, and their saucers too. They are made of sturdy stuff that even the Spire don't match in this way (the spire just have a bajillion health in general).
  • This sounds like a lot of buildings, but that's just because there are so darn many buildings in this game (looks like about 150 player ones, and in the ballpark of 400 AI-only ones, although a number of these are variants of one another, making the "true" number closer to really only 300 total between the two rather than 750; but still).
  • Oh, anyway: so this sounds like a lot, but really it leaves the ranged and sea attacks still free to absolutely wreck the heck out of cities and make way for ground troops and air support and whatnot. This actually puts them into a much more interesting role, and gets rid of the need to have any sort of "blowback penalty" for using ranged attacks (which had been what was in the original plans for ranged attacks, but we never could settle on an ideal penalty there that didn't feel forced. This is much better.)

• The health of the following buildings have been increased substantially:
  • Player side:
    • Terrain Riser and Bore.
    • All of the resource-gathering buildings.
    • All the resource usage buildings.
    • All medical facilities.
    • All of the waste facilities, in some cases 100x because they were so incredibly low.
    • Most of the commerce stuff.
    • All of the food stuff, to various degrees ranging from large to huge.
    • Power generation stuff in a large way.
    • The technical stuff to various degrees.
    • All of the residential stuff except explorer camps.
    • Cobalt Bomb Launcher, blast panels, super capacitor stuff.
    • Civic centers and landers bigtime. The healths for the landers now vary by race, too.
    • All the civic stuff. Hey, that's pretty much everything! What do you know.
  • AI side:
    • All of the resource-gathering buildings.
    • All of the raiding-style buildings.
    • Burlust Warlord Lodges bigtime.
    • Fenyn mothertree and sistertrees bigtime.
    • Fenyn holy guard and aviary.
    • Krolin Castles.
    • Neinzul nests bigtime.
    • Spire mothers bigtime.
    • All the rest of the spire stuff a nontrivial amount.
    • Thoraxian queen's nest bigtime.
    • Thoraxian MLRS, bunker busters, military buildings, and even saucers a nontrivial amount.
    • Yali Ocean Palace Throne Room bigtime.
    • All the rest of the Yali stuff a bigtime.
    • Zenith golems bigtime.
    • All the rest of the zenith stuff a nontrivial amount -- also fixed a bug where their fusion cores had no health set!
  • What's the rationale behind all these health changes?
    • Well, when a lot of these were originally set, particularly the player ones, the game was in a much earlier stage. And combat wasn't nearly so common, particularly not coming into the player's territory.
    • Going back to the original design intent of the game, capturing anybody's city is supposed to be HARD. Losing your own city purely to enemy forces is also supposed to be hard. The threats from within and from without are both supposed to be substantial, but no one thing (disease, flying saucers) should dominate the day.
    • To that end, of course that means that things like the attack strengths of flying saucers need a look, but a lot of the player buildings were so fragile that one hit from literally anything would send them up in smoke.
    • The AI buildings were usually in a better range, because they had been better tested in terms of the players attacking them, whereas the AI wasn't fighting back too much before. But some of the most powerful AIs, like the spire for instance, really had an underwhelming amount of health in terms of just how impregnable they are supposed to seem. The ranges for those were not immediately clear in the past, but are a lot clearer now.

• Added a new "desired graphics quality" option to the graphics tab of the settings menu.
  • We noticed that the graphics quality had taken a real hit in recent versions of the game, and it's been because of the compression that we put in place for players with low-RAM systems.
  • We've done some things to lower overall RAM usage in general, but we're going to be stating the minimum system requirements as 3GB of RAM to be on the safe side.
  • Meanwhile, those who want to play below the system requirements, or who have a RAM-hungry OS or a lot of background programs open and not too much RAM, can use the quality settings that are newly added to turn down the quality and save up to about a GB of RAM during play.
  • We'll be automatically detecting prior crashes due to low ram and some other things of that nature to help aid players in turning down their graphics settings if they have too little, but for now it defaults to high and you have to turn it down yourself if you want to.

• Previously, the gap between the minimum health and attack powers and the maximum health and attack powers was so large that things had to be at a larger scale. In this version the healths of things have largely been increased, and the attack powers have stayed constant or gone down a bit. This brings things a lot closer together.
  • This now has led to a situation where there were generally two useless zeros on the end of every health and attack value (not quite all, but most of them. As ptarth points out, this is harder to read than just using a smaller but equivalent number.
  • The other reason for typically using larger numbers is if those numbers are integers and thus you need larger numbers for multipliers to not be too coarse. But we're using floats, so this works fine.
  • Therefore all the healths and the attacks have had their values divided exactly by 100. The effectiveness of market items that add health or attack power has also been divided by 100.
    • That said, the market item values in old savegames will still be 100x too large for the first turn, so watch out! After that one turn it will be what it should be.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Missile silos are now 50% more expensive and take 50% longer to build.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The construction skill added by the various buildings of all the AI buildings have been thirded, except for the Yali, Neinzul, and Spire.
  • This should keep the races from expanding out quite so quickly, therefore better balanced.

• Even with the various new health boosts for player buildings, the AI saucers were still incredibly overpowered. Their strength has been cut down substantially.
  • The Neinzul and the Spire remain unusually dangerous, for the moment, though.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the reporting.

• All of the ground-based AI races except for the Zenith now have the Ranged Countermeasures buildings (the Zenith don't need them).

• All of the military buildings now get a better weighting from the AI, so that they will try to fight out the battle with enemy forces before spending too much time going straight for the enemy city center. The AI does still pay a lot of attention to food and power production and all that sort of thing as well, of course.

• Added an "All Buildings" entry at the top of the city management screen's list of building types, and double-clicking that allows you to enable/disable all buildings in the city (that may be enabled/disabled).
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for suggesting

• Removed the "cancel" button from the city-naming popup that happens when you place your lander (or another city center). The lander's already placed, and the first turn simulated, at that point, so it can't really be canceled.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Added new toggle: Show Non-Player City Names
  • If this is checked, the game will show you the names of non-player cities under their city centers similar to how it shows you the names of your own cities.
  • Defaults to off.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed the format of the upper-right-corner message log timestamps to avoid showing minutes or seconds as single digits.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where Boarine Pelage's description was using its second effect number (temperature resistance adder) for both that and its disease resistance multiplier.
  • The actual game logic was using the right number in both cases. If disease is going nuts it's because of something else.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The game now considers a race's "main" city (its first one, and only one in the AI case) to still be so if its city-center is destroyed.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting AIs creating other cities when rebuilding.

• Fixed a bug where the player placing a civic center next to a building from one of their center-less cities would make that the center of a new city rather than taking over as the center of the old one. This appears related to when the main tile of the new civic center is not adjacent to an old city building.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the game could hang during the logic where saucers "move".

• Reworked the math for attack power and (to a lesser extent) most other properties to be more straightforward (gives different results now), clearer and more explicit in the tile details window.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting some really muddy math.

• Fixed a "hilarious" issue where the races were bringing terraforming along with their saucers.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• Fixed a localization error relating to viewing properties of an attack building with a coordinated military command adjacent to it it.
  • Thanks to tombik for reporting.

• Fixed an annoying text wrapping issue in the save and load windows with long filenames.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Up at the top of the screen, when there are incidents that you are involved in, it now shows that as well, not just ones that are brewing -- previously it ignored ones that were in progress.
  • Now when you hover over that, it also shows you all the incidents that you are aware of. And any that involve you show your race's name highlighted in your race color, making it really clear that you're in it.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring these changes.

• When a flying saucer is hostile to you, it now has a flashing red border around it, making it clear that it is a threat, unlike before. We may adjust the visual for this down the line, but it's at least clear for now.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the sound "MissileHit6" could not be found.
  • Thanks to tombik for reporting.

• Spire, Neinzul, Saucers, and other flying or hovering stuff now have appropriate shadows and are much better tied to the tiles that they are actually on.
  • Thanks to jerith and nas1m for reminding us.

• Fixed an exception that would happen when viewing the Thoraxian Zoo details.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman and jerith for reporting.

• Personality conflicts and ideological conflicts can no longer target the player as the primary focus; the racial leader qualities that you have chosen shouldn't be factored in this way, because it might well conflict with how you are actually playing.

• Fixed an exception from formatting errors on the invite to incident screen.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

Version 0.820

(Released May 14th, 2015)

• Put in some revisions to how font images are loaded in order to brute-force make sure that they always make it into RAM and don't have any problems on secondary threads.
  • Thanks to kmunoz for reporting.

• Put in some logic to make sure that asynchronous threads for loading images and so forth don't kick off too soon in the game startup sequence, since that seems to have been able to cause some issues in some cases.
  • Thanks to kmunoz for reporting.

• Put in some brute-force self-correction logic so that if -- for whatever reason -- a sprite dictionary did not load its underlying file properly, then the game will forcibly reload that texture using the main thread. This should cause at worst a small hitch in the performance during the brief instance in which the error would have first happened previously. Hopefully with the other recent changes this is just overkill anyway, but it's the sort of overkill that shouldn't cost anything in terms of cases where a problem does not arise.
  • Interestingly, and this may just be perception, but with this change and a couple of other related ones, it seems like the game is actually loading slightly faster at startup now.
  • Thanks to kmunoz for reporting.

• A variety of map icons have been made sharper and a bit larger. Mainly status icons for buildings, and places you can build, etc. The disabled icons are WAY clearer with this now, too.

• The spire all now use lasers rather than missiles, and they all are now armed in various ways.

• The spire no longer put off any pollution whatsoever. They're definitely above such petty concerns.

• Both of the Neinzul and Spire now have raiding versions of themselves, which act in the same role as what the other races get in terms of saucers.

• Both the planet and the computer adviser now have proper icons, and the speak to all icon has been updated to be what we finally want it to be as well.

• Now if the Yali haven't placed a building in 7 turns they'll start periodically sinking the land tiles nearest their city center, though it won't consider tiles with buildings on them.

• The escape menu now has a section on the right like in TLF that shows the current difficulty, time played, time started, and your current profile name.

• Having a Thought Conditioning Device now boosts the effect of selling-broadcast deals further, including the amount of entertainment dependency and social progress generated (if you have the appropriate techs).

• Previously whenever you switch to the tech tree tab from the diplomacy screen (or other tab) it would flicker back to a non-dimmed view of the world map briefly. Now it won't do that anymore. Bringing up the tech tree can still occasionally have a slightly longer load due to loading lots of images, but the background should stay darkened.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the tech-tree shortlist was drawing about 2 pixels away from the left edge of the screen, letting bits of the tree show through if you had scrolled over.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• The atmospheric compatibility window now has the BlocksHUDButStillShowsGameWorld flag, preventing interactions with stuff below it.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Demolishing a building no longer costs crowns or power if the building is currently under construction.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Work-Land options no longer show the green "can do this" indicator on the map's edge tiles, since the game wouldn't allow those actions after all. Going the other way, punching this one kind of action through the general "no actions allowed to originate from or target edge tiles" rule, would be excessively complex.
  • Thanks to jerith for the report and save.

• Added a new overlay: Last Sonar Surveyed
  • Tiles never sonar surveyed show purple. Tiles with sonar data >= 20 turns old show red, >= 10 orange, >= 3 yellow, and < 3 show no overlay.

• Picking a node on the social progress screen now has a confirmation step.
  • Thanks to tbrass for suggesting.

• Now, in addition to the rule where you lose if you have zero population, you lose if you have no lander or other city center and either:
  • You don't have the tech to build a Civic Center.
  • It's been 20 consecutive turns without you having any city center.

• Clicking the minimap now centers the viewport on the clicked pixel's tile.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and jerith for suggesting.

• Previously, many resources (the animal kinds mostly) would be destroyed if their terrain type shifted to a type that was not their native types. That was pretty frustrating, even though it got better in recent versions.
  • Now the resources in question only get destroyed if they are moved completely out of the sea (and that includes ice) for water-only resources like fish (the fish can survive under ice); or if they are moved into water if they are a land-based animal.

• Moved the "charge the cobalt launcher" (similar for other things that charge up) logic from happening during end-turn-logic (on a separate thread) to happening on the main thread when the human player ends their turn and before the AI players take their turns (on separate threads).
  • This will avoid situations where the cobalt launcher eats your entire power-economy, leaving you with zero power to do any actions during the turn, but also avoids power being unspent (and thus wasted) in a case where the launcher could eat more.
  • Thanks to tbrass for the report and save.

• Now when a building is destroyed the game is more aggressive about clearing data on that building "layer" so that another building occupying its place later doesn't inherit its shut-down status, etc.
  • This may impact lots of other things unintentionally, we'll see, but in testing it was fine... well, after fixing the bit where it improperly cleared the self-destruct flag, anyway.
  • Thanks to tbrass and ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Cemeteries and dumps no longer require any power or staff. This keeps them from dumping their contents if they get powered off, which wasn't really something that was anticipated, heh.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The various button-style cells that you can click on the city grid and the new incident screens now look like buttons and have a mouseover, etc.

• Fixed an issue where you could jump to the city centers of AI cities even if you have never explored the tile that their city center is on.
  • Thanks to Kizor for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with linguistics in the prior version where you were gaining perfect understanding of alien languages at skill level 4 rather than level 5.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

International Incident Additions

• Added "International Incidents" to the report list
  • Shows a grid with one row per ongoing incident involving at least one race known to you.
  • Name of the type of incident (and whether or not it's still in the warning phase), or if you don't understand the languages of any of the participants it just says you don't know what's going on
  • Name of each aggressor
  • Name of each reactive
  • If you're not in the incident, buttons to join each side (if you have enough language skill)
  • If you're in the incident, a button that brings up a window where you can pay other races to join your side

• There is now an internal pair of strength ratings for each race (offensive and defensive), which the AIs recalculate every turn and which they use to make better decisions about juicy targets, dangerous threats, etc.

• A variety of new international incident types:
  • Thoraxians Are Hungry, Land Grab, Homicidal Mania, Assassination Attempt, Skylaxian Retribution For Breach Of Trust, Subjugation Attempt.

• There are a variety of of new international incidents (45) that are based on specific personality conflicts between leaders, and which address the willingness of others to help aggressors and reactives in said situations, etc. There is also a new variable on the racial leaders themselves that determines just how bad their attitude with the other race has to be before they'll actually act on these conflicts.
  • These will thus actually come up pretty rarely, since the attitude between the races have to be pretty bad already before they will act on this. So it's something that will show up generally in the much-later game if at all, depending on how everyone has been getting along up until then.

• There are a variety of of new international incidents (14) that are based on specific ideological conflicts between leaders, and which address the willingness of others to help aggressors and reactives in said situations, etc. There is also a new variable on the racial leaders themselves that determines just how bad their attitude with the other race has to be before they'll actually act on these conflicts.
  • These will come up far more frequently than the personality conflicts, since these are actually based around tangible things beyond "I don't like you." So the willingness of the leaders to engage in these sorts of conflicts tends to be pretty high, and for a lot of the leaders they can actually have a very good mutual attitude with another race but still get into a conflict over ideologies.
  • For the most part these are about the peace-loving and so forth leaders really being uncomfortable with those leaders who want subjugation, genocide, or territory. This provides a reason for the "good guys" to preemptively attack the bad guys.
  • There are also some semi-humorous ones, though, like those interested in wealth attacking those that value art and the environment. Or environmentalists attacking those that value wealth or technology. So some interesting conflicts can come out of that.

• Added a humorous new brawler-style Burlust international incident that will come around where the Burlusts attack because "It Is {WhateverTodayOfTheWeekIs}."
  • Chris made a joke when talking about incidents that they would be caused by a variety of things, like "it's Tuesday" for Burlusts. ptarth had the great thought to actually make an incident of this sort that queries the system clock to insert in the actual day of the week just for a bit of humor value. Functionally this fits really well with the Burlusts, and it definitely does help illustrate their brawler nature, too!
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• New "Preemptive Strike From Fear" international incident type.
  • Starting at turn 200, any mix of the Skylaxians, Boarines, Evucks, Fenyn, Neinzul, and Peltians can get scared if there is some other race on the map that has 4x or more the military might of their strongest member. A ragtag bunch of them will then band together into a preemptive strike against that foe, who may strike back with devastating results, or may be taken down some notches or destroyed themselves. Or might be you.

• Fixed an issue where previously the races considered each other hostile as soon as they were in the "incident brewing" stage, not just actually in the incident proper.

• Fixed an issue where previously it was always showing -1 for the number of turns remaining until the next international incident, rather than showing the actual value.
  • Additionally, it now shows more info for each brewing incident, which we didn't have time to get in there last release.
  • Thanks to donblas for reporting.

• Incidents now actually have proper human-readable-style names. Again just something we didn't have time for last release.

• Implemented logic where an AI can decide to launch a saucer-raid against a race on the other side of an active incident they're involved in.
  • This is actually really huge deal, because now the AIs can actually launch remote offensives rather than just fighting with people they happen to be near to. They did have small raiding camp capabilities prior to now, but that was too ineffective to really be notable.
  • Aka, the AI will now do MAJOR harassment of other AIs, and also of you, if you/they are on opposite sides of international incidents. We've been talking about this sort of offensiveness coming for the AI for a week or two now, and now it's here. You have been warned! (Then again, if they are still too easy, we know where the knob is to turn up the heat.)

Version 0.816

(Released May 12th, 2015)

• Fixed a bug that might have been preventing resource trading from ever working, even pre-alpha. Or maybe a line was accidentally deleted between now and then, not sure.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug that was making the existing-agreements display of a resource trade always show a zero quantity.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug that was making sale of resources (and per-turn market items, possibly) charge the seller the crowns cost instead of giving it to them
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Increased the AI's valuation by two orders of magnitude to adjust for the earlier reduction in resource production magnitudes.

• Removed the rule where you can't place terraforming on a tile with a building that doesn't draw the underlying tile. Added a rule where it blocks terraforming a tile with a building from a different race.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Removed the rule where placing a building on a terraformed tile moves the terraforming to a nearby tile.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Changed the rule that prevented hitting loose underground monsters by any non-bunker-busting attack to instead only apply to air-vehicle attacks.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman and tbrass for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where rogue waves were insisting on a minimum monster level of 10 instead of 1. Since the Grial is the only loose (non-pit) monster that's not an arthropod (which are used during the heat victory path), that meant it was Grials All Day, Every Day. Which, incidentally, is the name of a recently launched Burlust restaraunt chain...
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman and askityMask for reporting.

• Landers were previously staffed by 100, but are now staffed by 0.
  • Their citizens entertained is up from 200 to 300, however.

• Civic Centers were previously staffed by 25, but now are staffed by 0.
  • Their citizens entertained is up from 50 to 100.

• The Middle Class Eatery, Fine Dining, and Lager House no longer require staff.
  • It's just robots all the way down when it comes to the food industries now, as it already was for all the other buildings in that sector.
  • This keeps you from having strange max population fluctuations that can result from a variety of situations with your city being attacked, etc.
  • In short it could be managed before, but required a ton of micro at best, and even then led to "a cycle of death and despair," as tbrass put it well.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• The staffing requirements of the Philosopharium, Inventor's Workshop, and Broadcast Station have been doubled to 140 each from 70 each previously.
  • Literati Society is up to 100 instead of 50.
  • Science Lab is up to 160 instead of 20.
  • Linguistics Research Center is up to 90 instead of 10.
  • Engineering Firm is up to 60 from 18.
  • These are all "nice to have" buildings that provide secondary services (science, linguistics, extra construction capacity, inventions, etc), and so they provide a wonderful place for high employment. The loss of these doesn't send your city into an form of death spiral whatsoever, but the proper staffing of these does make your city very much more effective. This sort of relationship where perfect staffing is a big nice thing but imperfect staffing is not a gut-punch is very much the goal.
  • Thanks to ptarth and tbrass for inspiring these changes.

• Implemented some social progress rules that had simply never been ported during the redesign of that feature:
  • It won't force you to spend a Cultural point if Devotion is the only currently valid choice, since Devotion ticks off a race of nightmare death machines.
  • It won't let you accumulate more Cultural progress if you've got a point sitting there waiting to be spent (on Devotion).
  • Thanks to CricketMask for the report and save.

• The game now uses a completely new method for taking screenshots, which bypasses whatever method it is that Unity is normally using that is for some reason barfing on some machines. Even if the new method has an issue, it should do so in an orderly fashion and not kill the game like before. Fingers crossed! No idea why the unity method was working on some systems and not on others, but this should hopefully resolve it for everyone.
  • Thanks to ptarth and timfortress for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where double-clicking a savegame to overwrite it caused it to try saving twice.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug from version 0.812 onwards where the building details was showing the tile layers reversed, so the foundation hex was on top of the building.
  • Thanks to ptarth, nas1m, and jerith for reporting.

• When looking at the details of underground buildings, it now properly shows their graphic. In the further past it showed an error message, and more recently it was just blank.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• At language skill level 5, you now gain full "conversational competence" with other races, and can fully understand them. Going up in further levels -- up to 7 is possible, with advanced linguistics -- has a limited set of benefits right now, mainly to do with your diplomats being more effective.
  • In future beta versions coming up soon, these two higher levels will increase your persuasion with those races, allowing you to get them to do things you can't at the lower levels.
  • Thanks to ptarth, nas1m, jerith, Zebeast46, crazyroosterman, and others for reporting both confusion and the goal of being able to speak more clearly without quite so many hoops.

• Advanced Linguistics has been renamed to "Computational Psychosemantics," since by that point you're less concerned about understanding the language and more concerned with using it to manipulate native speakers.
  • Thanks to jerith for this suggestion.

• Fixed the missing localization for CannotPlaceThatTileBecause_BuildingCannotBeUnderMountainOrRocky
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with basement mines complaining about being unable to be placed under rocky terrain prior to complaining about being under another resource gatherer on the surface (note: the complaints are both valid, because the rocky ground is still there).
  • Also shifted things, however, so that the basement buildings of the player can now be placed under mountains or rocky ground so long as there is a surface building above it.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Agreements that involve you paying money every turn will now be canceled early (with penalties for you, if applicable) if you do not have enough crowns to pay for it that turn.

• Changed the R key's range display to always go off the main tile of a multi-tile building, rather than the particular tile being mouseover'd.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Cities whose center is still under construction are no longer checked for warning about low power or housing, etc.
  • Thanks to jerith for inspiring this change.

• Now when you intentionally disable a multi-tile building it uses the same overlay icon for all the tiles of that building.

• Added tooltip to the science section on the top HUD, which states the tech currently being researched and the expected number of turns until completion.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Added the traditional "who are my neighbors" caching to tiles, which makes checking that a lot faster. It's data that never ever changes during the game, so keeping a simple cache of that makes a lot of things much quicker to calculate.

• Put in extra checks against array-index-out-of-bounds in the logic during tile placement where it updates the lists of tiles within X range of the placed building's city.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Some efficiency improvements on the AI threads when they are making military decisions, so that they can skip a fair bit of dictionary indexing that previously happened.

• Fixed some issues where AI-controlled (but not rogue-controlled) monsters, missiles, lasers, and torpedos would actually never attack!
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where buildings that were going to be destroyed were being flipped to their destroyed state for a moment and then back to their proper pre-destroyed visuals. This certainly looked very strange, and was worse the longer the non-AI portion of the interturn was. It no longer happens at all.

• Now when a race offers to be subjugated and you refuse, it won't pop up that offer again for 10 turns.

• Super-capacitor shields now only protect their own tile and adjacent tiles and can no longer "target" another tile.

• Now clicking a tech tree node with the normal "Keep Doing More Of Same Action" key-bind held (defaults to shift) will queue that tech after the already targeted techs (if any), allowing you to set up multiple chains of research to run in series like in other games of similar genre.
  • Since there's now more of a difference between a "target" node and node that is simply "queued" to get to the target, the targets show their estimated-time-to-completion circle in blue instead of green.
  • Shift-clicking an already-targeted node will remove it from the list of targets, while leaving the rest of the target list intact and the game will recompute how best to get to the remaining ones.
  • Shift-clicking on a node that is already queued-but-not-targeted won't do anything, since the meaning of that is ambiguous.
  • Thanks to tbrass, ptarth, and donblas for suggesting.

• Clicking on a building-lost, somebody-attacked-you, natural-wonder-found, or new-race-found notification will now center your view on the related tile
  • Thanks to ptarth, tbrass, nas1m, and YoukaiCountry for suggesting.

• The various things for "Plan Research" and "Pick Social" and "Place Camps" and so forth now also say "And then end turn" in small text under them, to help with confusion about where the end turn is button for new players.
  • Thanks to Enrymion for inspiring this change.

International Incidents

• A new concept of international incidents has been added to the game. These are basically some sort of disagreements on the international stage that rise to the level of warfare. It could be that the Fenyn hate the pollution that the Acutians are putting out. It could be that the Burlusts are just having a Tuesday. It could be that the Evucks feel like the Peltians are encroaching on their territory and causing risk to them.
  • These sorts of incidents, when they are AI-initiated, start out with a warning stage. At the top of your screen, it tells you when incidents are "brewing." These may involve you or may not involve you, and you can choose to get involved or not get involved.
  • There will soon be a lot more meat to the who "get involved or not" aspect of these, but we're doing this one piece at a time.
  • Note! These are a lot of fun, thematically. If anyone wants to suggest reasons for international kerfuffles, then please feel free! The creativity that comes out of a group is just amazing.

• Previously, the decision of whether or not to attack your buildings was based around whether or not the AI disliked you (or whatever other race).
  • While dislike is certainly an important consideration in whether two nations fight, it should not remotely be the sole (or even primary) basis. There are plenty of examples of fruitful alliances in history between nations that disliked one another.
  • Whether or not an AI will attack another nation (player or AI) is based around whether or not the AI is involved in an "international incident" with the other race in a hostile capacity (races can be involved in incidents in an allied capacity).
    • If race A and race B are involved in multiple incidents with one another, some as allies and some as enemies, then they will consider themselves hostile to one another militarily if ANY of their incidents have them as hostile to one another. Hostility takes precedence.

• You as the player can freely attack any race at any time. If you do, and you are not already involved in a hostile incident with that race, it will create a minor border dispute incident with that race. That race will respond as they see fit, and the incident will last for something along the lines of 8-16 turns after you fire the last shot at the enemy.
  • So past a certain point, you want to buckle up and stop attacking them and just focus on defense if they are still able to attack you, otherwise you'll be locked into a deathgrip of war with them until somebody is dead or they offer to be subjugated to you.

• 58 new alien-only buildings, all of which are flying saucers, have been added to the game.
  • These are not coded to actually appear as yet, but there are 5 for each of the ground-based races (ground attack and intercept, air attack and intercept, and laser), and then 3 for the Yali (no ground troops).
  • These are going to be used as part of how the AIs attack one another and you when there is an international incident going on. Right now it's a matter of getting these set up with the appropriate data and so forth so that we can do that other coding.
  • Also please note that the graphics for these are currently WIP, so you'll notice that they are extremely simplistic colors and the shapes and sizes on two of the types are not quite right yet. But they work great as stand-ins for now.

• Andor gifting is now an international incident. The Andors are the Reactive party in this, and whoever is angry about the gifting is who is the aggressor. They now do more gifts than before, and to a slightly different selection of races based on attitudes. And this causes war to break out between the gifters/giftees and the haters. ;)

• Lots and lots of logic and math has gone into place for international incidents with various sides joining in and not joining in, and supporting having theoretically hundreds of kinds of events without causing massive interturn times while still having a good spread of types of incidents, etc.
  • Most of this was just framework building, but on top of this there are now the first two "normal" incident types that get calculated via the main queues system for incidents. One is about fenyn getting mad at the acutians if they are emitting more than 50% of the smog in the world. The other is about the burlusts getting greedy about a variety of races if they are deemed too weak.
  • These incidents work in the sense that the races will declare war, however the actual logic for having them send over flying saucers to attack (logic which is functional now, by the way) is not actually hooked in to the incidents themselves. So we have both capabilities as of this release, but they're not tied together.
  • In short, lots more testing and data needed on this mechanic, and some things need to be tied together, and some interface work needs to be done on it, but the core of this is functional, which is a big step.

Version 0.815

(Released May 8th, 2015)

Since this version has some untested stuff in it, there might be problems. If so, there is now a beta option in Steam called 0.814 that will let you go back to the prior version. This weekend is Mother's Day, so we won't be around to fix anything broken, but we wanted to give you the new stuff.

• Much progress was made on "International Incidents," but that's not something that is actually playable in the game yet. Thanks for your patience with this period where we're distracted with that.

• The Boarine terraformed terrains were something we were always visually unhappy with, and now we've had a chance to go back to them and visually reimagine them in a much cooler way.

• Removed the angle, and kept the line, on the frame on build list so that there is not the illusion that there is a click to expand function.
  • Thanks to ptarth and GarathJJ for reporting.

• Several minor graphical updates to some menus and buttons.

• New music track: Anti-Gravity.

• There are now "destroyed" variants for all of the alien terraformed terrains.
  • We'll be doing more with this soon.

• The diplomacy window now allows you to talk to the computer advisor and to the planet.
  • Right now there's nothing to say to them, though, and their graphics are temporary. Stuff that's coming up soon!

• Wrapped the "update non-fixed animations" logic (which actually includes a lot of gui stuff) in a manner similar to what we did with the main drawing logic, so that intermittent errors there from threading kerfluffles don't bring the game down but do get logged, and if there's a real error that sticks around it is treated as a normal fatal error.
  • Thanks to Eternaly_Lost for reporting.

• The "Speak To All" portrait is now finished, rather than just being a temporary screen grab from the Tales of Woe videos.

• There is now a -- completely untested -- building called the Terrain Bore. It works like the Terrain Riser, except you put this under mountains or under land in order to reduce the mountains to rubble or reduce the land to water.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• There is now another completely untested building called Oceanic Current Redirector. It very slowly cools the planet, basically the opposite of the artificial volcanoes.
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter and Watashiwa for suggesting.

Version 0.814

(Released May 6th, 2015)

• Now when the draw-game code hits an error it doesn't treat it as a fatal error unless it hits such errors for ten consecutive frames (or unless the game's in developer mode, we need to see the frequency of these things). All such errors, even those ignored by this rule, are logged to "DrawGameErrors.txt" in your RuntimeData directory.
  • Basically this is to avoid the game freaking out because the UI was trying to process some information that the end-turn thread just changed in some uncomfortable way. Since the end-turn thread is the only one actually writing to sim-state, and those writes will always succeed, the read-only failures in the UI aren't of great concern.
  • On the other hand, if we make some error in the rendering code it will generally cause an ongoing string of errors, not just the one, and we do want those to show up as normal fatal errors.
  • Thanks to tombik for inspiring this change.

• The PollutionSelfScrubbingStrength property now shows on tooltips without holding down ctrl, since that was too obscure.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Moved the logic for applying PollutionSelfScrubbingStrength so it's checked for all tile-layers with that stat, rather than only buildings in a city.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the details-window would always treat the building/layer as owned by the player's race for purposes of techs, market items, etc. The sim computations weren't doing this, thankfully.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• New musical suite "Into The Black Hole" for playing during gameplay. Of course, none of the music actually plays at all yet in the game, but it's there! We do need to fix that up sooner than later, but have not had time yet.

• Fixed a bug where the "cannot place buildings on natural wonder" rule made no attempt to check sub-tiles of a multi-tile building's placement.
  • Thanks to CricketMask for reporting.

• There are now separate icons that show up on buildings that get attacked for each type of attack (rather than just the one tank for all of them).
  • Thanks to CricketMask and ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where some particles and vehicles and so forth were drawing way too high, so it looked like boats were flying over clouds for instance. No wonder they looked like planes!
  • Thanks to CricketMask for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where quitting the game could cause fatal errors because the logic for setting the overlay back to normal was trying to reference stuff that had already been cleared.

• Changed mapgen to pick the player starting location first before seeding any other races. Hopefully this will avoid the situation where an islands map would sometimes have no valid player spot left and you'd get a nicely generate map with nothing explored and no way to put your lander down. A cute way for the game to say "GG", but wrong.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Fixed another bug where the UI (the map mouseover tooltips, this time) was treating all tiles as belonging to the player for purposes of computing techs/social-progress/etc bonuses.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Changed the city grid to a display kind of like the tech tree, with a single grid showing both all-city and human-city-only stats, and a horizontal scrollbar if it's too wide for the screen.

Version 0.813

(Released May 5th, 2015)

• Changed the rule that non-Yali AI buildings under another race's buildings were auto-sonar'd to only happen of that "another race" is a player race.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Changed the rule that a non-Yali AI with only underground buildings would have all those buildings auto-sonar'd to instead have that AI try to surrender to the largest eligible race.

• Now when a race loses a building and no longer has any housing, meals, crops, or water (and needs at least one of those), it tries to surrender to someone.

• Now when a non-buildings-equal-population (non-spire, non-neinzul) race loses a building and has less than 1000 population no longer has any birth rate, it tries to surrender to someone.

• Fenyn terraformed terrain did have a scrubber strength of 2,3,and 6. It now is 20,25, and 30.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Now when allocating population to jobs, the game allocates healthy people first and only allocates wounded if there are not enough healthy to go around.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where crown upkeep on buildings was always being treated as zero.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Damage to buildings from disease-induced-insanity is now reported in the incident log like many other forms of damage.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Now when graveyards and trash dumps are destroyed, rather than simply removing capacity while leaving the usage the same (often leading to negative capacity) it moves the stuff from "filling capacity" to "out in the streets".
  • You can thank ptarth for this.
  • Note: old saves can still have residual "negative capacity".

• Fixed a bug where the inventory window tooltips for actual market items were not showing.

• Fixed a bug where the old for-all-races landers were trying to show up in the civic build menu.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa, ptarth, tbrass, and YoukaiCountry for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in auto-sonar exploration that could lead to slowness in general (probably), and definitely was leading to complete halting of the game in some cases.
  • Thanks to CricketMask and UsF for reporting.

Version 0.812

(Released May 5th, 2015)

• The headers for the various subscreens with a fancy header are now using the new font that we've been working towards getting ready.

• Cleaned up ALL the glows for the alien icons so that they should not have any sharp cut offs.

• Cleaned up all sizes of icons. They're now very clear, well defined and sharp.

• Updated the end turn buttons, as well as made them more button like.

• Texture compression was accidentally disabled... gah! So out of memory exceptions on low-RAM systems were a definite likelihood in the last version.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

Version 0.811

(Released May 4th, 2015)

• Monster Pits no longer have to be placed next to foreign cities.

• Put in a couple of early-out checks that make the calculation of valid spots for building placement a bit faster.

• Fixed up some logic that was overly aggressive in re-checking the validity of buildings under construction.
  • This was both causing slowness, and it was also causing some AI buildings to get destroyed at strange times.
  • It also was the cause of the Military Command and Molecular Security Control self-destructing themselves the turn after you placed them.
  • Thanks to ptarth and tbrass for reporting parts of this.

• When the game is running in fullscreen mode and you alt-tab out of it, it no longer will keep running in the background.
  • If this game had networking, that would cause network failures when playing multiplayer. As it is, since this is a single-player-only game, this prevents a flood of messages from being written to the unity log and thus can prevent out of memory exceptions that can happen if you leave it in this state for long enough.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug preventing any attack action by or against a building not owned by any race (i.e. the independent rogues/monsters).
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for the report and save.

• A variety of rules for the underground AI have been put into place.
  • They are no longer allowed to build underground buildings under terrain that is not either terraformed as their kind of land, or a surface building of their own. This will keep a lot of things more orderly in general, and it also prevents the AI from just building back up insanely when you're attacking them and trying to beat them back.
  • They are also now properly barred from constructing buildings under things that drill into the earth -- any sort of resource gatherer, really. This just makes good thematic sense, and it also helps to keep the cities constrained somewhat -- in a good way.
  • They also no longer are allowed to build under mountains or rocky ground, which can be a useful way to hide from the Thoraxians now, actually.

• Fixed a bug where the various work-land options (terraform, clear land, etc) would not actually enforce the requirement to have enough crowns and power.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ, pumpkin, and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• Fixed a bug where the tech tree shortlist would not always show the top item.
  • One side effect is that the shortlist could look empty when there was still one unresearched node out in the tree itself.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• The tile details window now shows info on the resource on that tile, if any.
  • Thanks to topper for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the work-land listbox was not filtering out terraforming if you didn't have the tech for it.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• The notifications sidebar now only blocks mouseclicks from interacting with the underlying world if the mouse is actually over one of the notification buttons (i.e. when it shows a tooltip).
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Amended the display-range-of-building-being-placed code to not try to highlight every single tile on the map when placing the thought conditioning device (which has an infinite range). It was more of a CPU conditioning device before.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• A ton of stuff has been switched over into large dictionaries rather than being separate files.
  • These are also broken out by layer they are used in, for maximum efficiency, unlike before. This absolutely decimates the number of draw calls it takes to render the game.
  • This also makes loading the images vastly faster (it's more noticeable if you're on a non-SSD hard drive), and uses less RAM.

• There are now two different visual looks for city wreckage -- one for when the building was destroyed in combat, and the other for when it was simply bulldozed by the owner.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• There are now individual graphics for the lander for each player race. These are a blend of the graphics of the player cities in general, and the flavor of the races when the AI has them.
  • Later these will have some more individualized stats, but for now it helps make it abundantly clear what race you are playing as.

• Fixed a bug where the tooltip on political agreements would show the "from" race's name for both the "from" and "to" race, even though it got the different colors right.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the general-offers and superpower-offer windows did not block mouse interaction with the underlying diplomacy window.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The ceasefire offers window now includes entries for ineligible races (unless that race is the one being talked to, or dead) with the ineligibility reason.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Previously whenever most buildings were placed the surface terrain under them was replaced with a special "Building" terrain. Now it just keeps whatever was there, though it won't show up for most buildings.
  • And now city wreckage will be placed over whatever terrain was there, rather than being the terrain itself.
    • NOTE: when loading an old save all "Building" terrain is converted to rocky ground rubble, and all old city wreckage (which was terrain) is converted to the new building-layer wreckage and the terrain layer is set to rocky ground rubble. So there may be rocky ground rubble in some odd places when loading old saves.

• Now when placing a building on certain terrain (e.g. forest) and then destroying it, it will be "flattened" into grass or whatever.

• The top-bar crime tooltip's entry for police now shows the actual effective reduction accomplished last turn rather than the theoretical maximum reduction (which isn't very meaningful).
  • Note that the number won't update in old saves until you end the turn.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Now when you're mouseovering a target you can't attack with your selected ground troops because the surface terrain is impassible to them (rocky/mountain terrain vs non-flying troops), the you-can't-attack-this message is clearer.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where ctrl+clicking a building would bring up the tile details window even if the player didn't know about that building.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Extended the range checking of attacking to allow targeting a multi-tile building's sub-tile if the main tile is in range. This may increase CPU costs but probably not very much since multi-tile buildings are relatively rare.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• When you have unspent social skill points in a category, the text at the top of that category on the social progress screen now shows up highlighted so it's much easier to tell which tree to look in. Later other changes will be made to the nodes themselves in the relevant tree to help players see their options more clearly, but right now that screen is still in kind of a "rough graphics" stage to say the least (actual icons themselves aside).
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed up some data definitions related to the AI military buildings (for all except the Yali, Neinzul, and Spire, which were already fine), and tweaked a bit of logic with them. This fixes an issue where previously it was possible for the AIs to get "stuck" and not be able to build any more surface buildings. It's a long story, but anyway, it's all fixed now. As a side benefit, all of these AI military buildings now have their own wholly unique data definitions, making it so that we can differentiate the AI races better with them.

• The Acutian AI military buildings now generate pollution that is commensurate with the rest of their buildings. Previously since these were all defined as one big set of buildings for all the AIs, they weren't in character remotely enough on this group of buildings. ;)

• When you are viewing the City Grid and switch to the next turn, it refreshes the city grid. That way you can much more easily keep track of things in realtime with changes in cities.

• There are now some auto-terraforming advantages for a few races when in the hands of the AI, making them more thematically fitting in their areas as well as providing some interesting challenges specific to them:
  • The following all applies only to land that is not already terraformed, land that is not mountains, natural wonders, water, ice, or rocky.
  • Thoraxians: anything adjacent to or under their buildings is auto-terraformed.
  • Burlusts: anything adjacent to or under their buildings that is not desert is automatically turned to desert.
  • Acutians: anything adjacent to or under their buildings that is not desert is auto-terraformed.
  • Andors: anything adjacent to or under their buildings that is not some sort of forest appropriate to their latitude automatically becomes forest appropriate for their latitude.
  • Boarines: anything adjacent to or under their buildings that is not desert is auto-terraformed.
  • Fenyn: anything adjacent to or under their buildings that is not jungle becomes jungle.

• The Peltian Water Purifier is now the Peltian Grub Catcher, and provides an alternate food source to their main orchards.
  • Also, the Skylaxian Water Purifier is now the Skylaxian Replicator Room.
  • And you know what? A ton of other AI buildings had stats, functions, and various other things updated. Like 40 buildings. Sorry, it's just too much to list! Suffice it to say, things are much better balanced on the AI side.
  • A number of the AI buildings now have lore-based explanations for their functions, providing some insight into their races. It's only something like 15 buildings out of 300+ alien buildings, but it's a start!

• The AI races have been rebalanced quite a bit so that they no longer get into that food-water-meals/staffing death spiral that the players were previously getting into.
  • As with the players, the solution has been pretty much providing some automation to some of the buildings so that there is no longer a chicken and egg problem and some of the production buildings provide food and water and meals without needing staff, while others don't.
  • Huge thanks to ptarth for helping us figure out what it was that was causing the AI to stagnate in this way!

• It is no longer possible for any city to have 0 repair points -- that caused all sorts of GUI confusion, among other things. There is now a baseline 100 repair points that every city -- human and AI -- gets for free. That's not very much, but it's something, and beyond that is up to the city owner.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The way that the AI prioritizes building staffing is now more similar to how the player staffing is prioritized.

• The AI is no longer blocked from building certain types of construction unless it has 80%+ staffing. That was previously causing the AI to sometimes never build those types of buildings.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The AIs have in general had their crown allowances majorly cut, to make them far less able to expand so fast.

• AI attack buildings now prioritize continuing to attack the same race(s) they attacked in the last 10 turns, if any.

• Removed a rule preventing the ending of a turn while certain actions were still being animated (e.g. building placement).
  • Thanks to ptarth and Hyfrydle for reporting.

• The maximum population for AI cities is now increased to be the maximum number of jobs in the city if that is higher than the available food/water/crops/housing.
  • This keeps it so that birth rates can continue on more smoothly for the AI, and it prevents all sorts of circular logic issues for the AI that was keeping them from growing.
  • But, on the player side, it allows for more fine-tuned growth based on how you build housing, as ptarth preemptively pointed out with the patch notes.
  • Please note that AIs that are overdrawn on having more citizens than they "should" be able to support with their current meals/crops/housing/water will be having a new mechanic in upcoming versions that actually makes for interesting opportunities for you. Right now it seems a little cheaty for the AI, but it will actually be a bargaining chip for you with a new "distress" mechanic that will result from the AI being overdrawn. It's basically the AI's counterpart to crime, but where crime is an internal concern (great for you as a player, but invisible to you if the AI is faffing about with it), distress is an external concern (actually visible to you, and something that you can interact with in an interesting way).

• The AIs are finally reasonably intelligent about diverting their resources to housing, meals, etc, when they are running short on them. The game still gives them some flexibility there so they don't death spiral, and the distress mechanic will thus be relevant still, but the AIs now behave more like you'd expect.

• Shopping Malls now entertain 200 and employ 110, down from employing 310 and entertaining none.
  • Additionally, the _enter column now lets you directly set the citizens entertained count on the PlayerBuildings spreadsheet.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• A variety of revisions to the inventory screen to make it a lot better-looking and (much more importantly) more informative. Still way more to do here on both fronts, but this is a start.

• Previously, the housing priority was Dense, Spacious, Luxury, Bunker. That made no sense! Now the priority is Luxury, Spacious, Dense, Bunker. Who wants to live in cramped apartments while luxury homes are just sitting there?
  • And more to the point, from a gameplay perspective, this makes the requirements for things like the opera house and whatnot a lot more tractable.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Previously, for buildings of types where you have to have a certain number of citizens in housing of various sorts, it was always giving you the first building for free in every city.
  • In some cases, that was fine: City Park, Shrine.
  • In other cases, that was fine but only in your first city: Science Lab, Linguistics Research Center, Philosopharium, Inventor's Workshop, Broadcast Station, Literati Society, Shopping Mall, Bank.
  • In other cases, the first one should never be free anywhere in order to really make them balanced right: Middle-Class Eatery, Fine Dining, Lager House, Stock Exchange, International Bank, History Museum, Opera House, Fighting Arena.
  • This won't completely stop the "ICS" issue, not remotely, but this is a good first pass at the easiest part of it.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

Version 0.810

(Released April 30th, 2015)

• Put in proper texture compression on loading, cutting the game's RAM usage by well over 1GB once you've been playing for a little while in particular. This does make image loading take slightly longer, but the difference is marginal and you may actually get a better framerate out of it as well.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman in particular, and also ptarth, for leading us to notice the issue!

Version 0.809

(Released April 30th, 2015)

• Fixed a bug where toxin screening would prevent the "has this race experienced this disease?" flag from being set, thus preventing vaccine research.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• The notification sidebar and the reports/etc listboxes are now more consistently hidden by sim-suppressing windows like save-game.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for reporting.

• The birth rate icon is now more visible on low-contrast monitors.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• A variety of more GUI refinements.

• Fixed a bug from recent versions where city buildings could be counted twice for things like housing-provided.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• Mapgen for temperate lakes maps now no longer considers the whole map's land as one huge landmass but as several subsections; it still looks the same but is much easier to seed AI races on.
  • Also, it now no longer declines to seed more races than landmasses on any map type: if somehow it runs out of landmasses it will double-up if necessary.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman and tbrass for reporting.

• Changed the design of the Islands map type to be compatible with the initial-building-area needs of the player and the AI races. Generally larger islands, less forest, etc.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman, ptarth, tbrass, and Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where some old event log entries could hit a localization error because they were trying to show social progress category "None". Now it will just say None. Please let us know if you see this in any new game.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the last couple of versions in the game where the viewport display on the minimap was not lining up correctly because its masking images were out of sync with the revised minimap frame visuals.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where if you made an optimize-retail deal with the Acutians and then their trust/attitude towards you went very sour then the impact of the deal would actually apply a strong negative multiplier to your retail-outlets' crown production and thus totally lay waste to your economy... wait, that's a bug?
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• The Fenyn Absorption Facility can no longer be placed on water. That was an oversight and looks strange. The Fenyn-as-AIs are now simply unable to gather water resources (some of the AI races can, others can't).
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Previously the lander would generate its pollution-removal from the bottom tile since that's actually where the game sees its "main" tile (for draw-order purposes, notably). The center tile was used for some UI-only purposes but otherwise ignored. Since it looks strange to not have the pollution-removal come from the center that center tile distinction is no longer UI-only and is used for this, we'll see if it works out.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where several things were considering under-construction buildings when they shouldn't have been (notably, the number of buildings needed to upgrade the lander).
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the evucks "charge time" to use their infection power was basically just one turn. Let us know if it's still too fast with the correct threshold.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the space-win only required having the space structures, not actually finishing and charging them.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Previously, the larger your cities got, the more of a toll crime and a few other factors would take on your inter-turn time. Specifically, ptarth had a case that was taking more than 18 seconds between turns even on a very nice computer.
  • We've greatly optimized deaths from crime, wounds from crime, wounds from accidents, and body cremation so that it's nowhere remotely so CPU-intensive anymore. It takes a few tens of milliseconds instead of tens of seconds.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The Zenith have been completely rebalanced as an AI race.
  • Previously they were halfway between the Spire and Neinzul, where 1 building = 1 citizen, and the rest of the races, where citizens live in buildings. This caused various problems on a number of levels.
  • Thematically, the Zenith citizens are actually not the Zenith themselves, but rather those little service organisms that look after the Zenith. The Zenith are the buildings, but they aren't what does the work in the city, and so aren't what is tracked as population. Previously we were trying to have it both ways, and that wasn't really working out.
  • Anyway, so the Zenith now track population like the bulk of the rest of the races, and handle staffing that way also. They still don't have to worry about food, water, or meals, though.
  • We were already going to do this anyway, but thanks to ptarth for one save that definitely reinforced the need to do this.

• Fixed an issue where the max population of the spire and the neinzul was set as higher than their building count even though they are each a 1 population = 1 building race.

• Adjusted the birth rates on a LOT of the alien races when they are in the hands of the AI so that they actually have a reasonable chance of growth in population.
  • We couldn't really test this super well prior to the city grid being added, which you might recall was after beta started and during the midst of a bunch of other stuff, so now we're figuring out those things fresh.

• Fixed an issue where the AI was trying to build resource gathering producers in a bunch of random places for no real reason, of course failing, and wasting a bunch of CPU time doing so.

Version 0.808

(Released April 29th, 2015)

• Fixed a bug in the past couple of versions (since the first performance update) that was leading to certain stats from multi-tile buildings like the lander to be multiplied by how many tiles were in that building. So for instance, the lander's construction skill was multiplied by 7, making it so that you could build a whopping 14 buildings at the first turn.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• The building status and a couple of other status lines on buildings no longer show "(when complete)" on their properties when they are under construction, since those particular things are actually true even prior to them being complete.

• Explorer Camps and Remote Engineering Brigades no longer have their building times affected by terrain.
  • Thanks to tbrass and ptarth for reporting.

• The extra turns to build in general on forests and rocky ground is VASTLY less than it once was.
  • Thanks to tbrass and ptarth for inspiring this change.

• When underlying terrain is making a building take longer to construct than usual, it now shows text explaining what the normal turns would be and what the actual turns are, and why that's happening.
  • Thanks to tbrass and ptarth for reporting.

• Previously, under construction buildings could cause deaths based on entertainment provided in them when they were not yet open to the public but were destroyed. And additionally, AI buildings that were destroyed would cause crown lossage based on AI Store even when the building was still under construction. Both fixed.

• When you are planning to place a new civic center, it now properly shows the predicted turns it will take based on its own construction skill (what will be the basis of the new city), and not based on your skill at your prior city.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Added key bind "Show Incident Log", defaulting to I.
  • While this is held, the tile mouseover tooltip will show that tile's incident log (if any) instead of most of the normal info.

• Added the blocks-viewport-movement (and underground toggling) flag to most of the windows in the game, only leaving out some dev-only windows and the few windows that are actually supposed to show as part of the normal HUD. If we missed one let us know.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

• Fixed the click-handling rectangles of the diplomacy and inventory tab buttons to be the same height as the others.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa, ptarth, Dominus Arbitrationis, and others for reporting.

• Pressing escape while the building-details window is open will now simply close that window rather than also opening the escape menu.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• Fixed several issues with the predicted power consumption and net power in the city power tooltip.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Now when placing the initial lander it highlights the footprint that will actually be occupied (if the placement is valid).
  • Thanks to windgen and mrhanman for suggesting.

• When you are placing the lander, it no longer shows any of the overlays for crime prevention or whatnot.

• Changed the rule for sea interception from "interceptor must be in range of the tile the attacker will fire from" to "interceptor must be in range of the tile being attacked".
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed the linguistics progress logic to carry over progress when going up a level.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• AIs are now more aggressive about wanting to build enough housing, food, and water to have room for population expansion.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• There are now warnings in the tooltips for the Debug options in the extras menus, that note that possible crashes can result from using them during general gameplay.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for inspiring this change.

• There is now a new debug option in the extras menu called "Show Raw AI Attempts At Construction."
  • This helps us troubleshoot some of the AI activities, such as right now the AIs being unable to do... well, much of anything it turns out. Some sort of glitch in the recent versions, related to performance improvements.

• Previously, the AI built its buildings outwards in pretty predictable fashions even when it could build further away from itself. Now it uses a more randomized approach that keeps efficiency while building much more interesting AI cities.

• Fixed a bug where the "Is this adjacent to a friendly building?" logic was only looking at neighboring tiles, not at the surface of the same tile (in the underground case).
  • Thanks to TheVampire100, ptarth, and tbrass for the reports and saves.

• Fixed cities not rebuilding rollups when loading a game, which was making the AI basically helpless in the last two versions if you loaded a savegame.

Version 0.807

(Released April 28th, 2015)

• A variety of parts of the GUI have seen visual polish to better match the recently-revised HUD.

• Fixed a bug in the last two versions or so where I accidentally deleted cheap diners from actually... producing any meals. Gah!
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and ptarth for reporting.

• A lot of math has been updated with the "number of building defenders" at each building for both players and the AI races.
  • One of those is that under construction buildings now have an extra batch of guards, actually. And in general there are at least 5 defenders when at all possible now, but not insanely high amounts ever.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• All guard posts now require 20 staff rather than 5.

• For all buildings that have ground attack or defense, the peltians (in the hands of the AI or the player) now use 4x the normal number of troops to somewhat make up for the fact that they are only 10% as strong as other races. Have fun with all those corpses!
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where hovering over the buttons on the left was still highlighting the hexes behind them -- doubly problematic when you were in placement mode, since it would give you "can't place here" messages based on the tile behind the button, which was really super unhelpful.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where when the building details window is open, you could still highlight buildings behind it and click them and such.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

Version 0.806

(Released April 28th, 2015)

• Shortened the interturn processing times. In the heaviest test cases the reduction is about 85%.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• Reduced the per-frame UI computation workload to roughly 1/3rd or 1/4th of what it used to be in intense gamestates.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• When building on certain types of terrain, such as forests for example, it now takes longer to do than it normally would.

• The Terraforming options for removing forests and clearing rocky ground are now gone. You can just build directly on top of them now, and it simply takes longer to construct.

• Since the switch to the new interface (or around that time anyway), the game has not been properly showing you the reasons why you can't construct a given building on top of a certain location. That's kind of important info!
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Various changes relating to resources have been made:
  • Resources are no longer stockpiled by anyone, but instead disappear at the end of each turn like food and such do.
    • This removes the "optimum" strategy of toggling on and off resource users constantly to keep your stockpiles up when you're not actively using the resource bonus.
  • Each resource producer now only produces 2 of that resource rather than 1000, except for the basement ones, which produce 1 instead of 600.
  • Each resource consumer now only consumes 1 of that resource rather than 800. This makes things a lot cleaner.
  • The destruction of AI buildings with AIStore on them now destroys crowns from them, rather than resources.
  • Stealing from AIs now gets you crowns, not resources.

• Trade of resources with the AIs probably is really undervalued right now, I haven't had a chance to look.
  • Also, the AIs aren't currently using the passive bonuses of their own resources like they should be yet; I didn't have time to put that in, but will shortly.

Version 0.805

(Released April 28th, 2015)

• The property "Holo Pods" has been renamed to "Citizens Entertained" so that it can be used more broadly. The functionality is the same, and the HoloResort is still called that.

• Now the City Park entertains 8 citizens, adding to its general crime prevention. It also has some light pollution scrubbing capability on itself like the terraformed land does, making it a useful thing to have for yet another reason.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting the entertainment here, and that in general parks need more of a purpose.

• Fixed a bug that was probably causing at least some of the adjacency bonuses from natural wonders to not work.

• Lager Houses now provide a boost to adjacent air offensive and defensive capabilities, making them something much more attractive to actually use.

• Fighting Arenas now provide some entertainment as well (for 100 citizens), and also provide a boost to adjacent guard towers and barracks. Here again making them something actually useful!

• In the prior version, the power consumption, crown consumption, and trash production was absolutely crazy thanks to an error that should have made them go down with staffing being lower than 100%, but instead made it rise as staffing went up. Holy smokes!
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 and ptarth for reporting.

• The frame for the minimap has been completely redone (although it's similar) to match the style of the new GUI.

Version 0.804

(Released April 27th, 2015)

• Previously, for mapgen purposes other than standard, it was using the side length of the hexagon of the map to calculate its size. Now it uses the area of the respective hexagons, which is a lot more accurate.

• Nine more of the underground buildings now have their art. Only seven left to go!

• The game previously had a total of 34 resource types that you could discover in the world. Despite our originally expectations, this just really felt too slim to us. We have now added another 46 resource types, for a total of 80 types.
  • 10 resources (one from each usage type) are removed from the each campaign. That was already the case previously, and with 34 resources that might have been what helped make it feel too slim. Anyhow, no more Panda Ants everywhere.

• The seeding logic for the resources has been overhauled rather thoroughly in order to account for the larger number of resources and the desire to have many fewer of most of them (in fact just one or two instances of many of them).

• The amount of planetary rage generated by various things has been considerably rebalanced. Pretty much all of the multipliers have been substantially altered, and the multiplier for the total number of tiles used has gone away.
  • The multiplier about power use was indeed previously supposed to be based on the amount of net power you had left over after power usage, not on your gross power production, but that was quite confusing to say the least and has now been changed to just use gross power.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• A bit of caching for the GUI tooltips for planet rage to make them not tank the framerate so heavily.

• Cryo Pods and the concept of cryogenic freezing has been removed from the game.
  • This was something that sounded good on paper a long time ago, but even prior to beta it was a mechanic that was making Chris really uncomfortable. It was the sort of thing that was needed to balance out a secondary problem (to do with staffing and population growth), but it was a very inelegant solution.
  • Thanks to ptarth, Misery, GarathJJ, mrhanman, Watashiwa, and Hyfrydle for inspiring these changes.

• Your maximum population is no longer restrained by staffing availability in any way. This was confusing previously, and needlessly complex. As well as causing a few other issues -- for instance, the problems surrounding staffing and crime from unemployment were what made cryo pods a necessity in the first place.
  • Now the only requirements for your max population are housing and meals, period. This does mean that your population can easily grow into the realms where you start getting crime from unemployment, so...
  • Thanks to ptarth, Misery, GarathJJ, mrhanman, Watashiwa, and Hyfrydle for inspiring these changes.

• What was previously the Cryo Sleep building has been redesigned into a new Holo Resort facility instead. This is unlocked via Architectural Aestheticism rather than Emergency Medicine, so this is much easier to get early. Your lander also has some holo pods in it to start out with, too.
  • Anyhow, the purpose of the Holo Resort is that it entertains up to 400 unemployed citizens. So long as you have enough holo pods for each unemployed citizen, you get no crime from them. This accomplishes what the cryo pods were originally trying to do, but in a much more elegant way.
  • Basically it allows you to freely birth an excess of citizens -- which is highly desirable to do by the way -- but not have unemployment be a constant problem.
  • This also frees you from the need to constantly be shutting on and off buildings that use staff when you take some mild to moderate citizenry losses, because that was both annoying and fiddly. If you take a devastating blow to your city, then sure you'll still want to power down some buildings. Or if you take repeated midsize blows, then too. And that's fine, because it's not happening all the time.
  • Thanks to ptarth, Misery, GarathJJ, mrhanman, Watashiwa, and Hyfrydle for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed an issue with the text relating to the requirements for citizens being in spacious+luxury or in luxury housing, where it was reporting the opposite message for each, and with negative numbers usually.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ, pizzatiger, mrhanman, and Hyfrydle for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the text relating to the requirements for certain amounts of citizens in certain types of housing where it was always saying the base number (eg 100) rather than the actual number that it needed for the number of buildings currently in the city (eg 200 to place the third building).
  • Thanks to GarathJJ, pizzatiger, mrhanman, and Hyfrydle for reporting.

• The amount of trash produced by buildings now goes down proportional to how staffed they are.
  • Same for pollution cleaner strength and crime reduction strength.
  • And the medical stuff, including births.
  • And pollution output.
  • And crown and power and water per-turn consumption.
  • And planet rage.
  • And market item production rates.
  • And vaccine research, and debt points generated.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting -- boy there were a number of oversights here!

• Cheap diners are now run by robots, and thus require 0 staff. They also now only provide 600 meals instead of 800, and give off no social progress or crime at all.
  • The idea here is that this breaks the death spiral that can happen with staffing issues based on needing food but being unable to produce it because you need citizens who need food. ;)
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Notification icons now appear on the right-hand sidebar whenever you discover a new natural wonder.

• Civic Centers now provide housing for 100, rather than 25. They also now only require 25 staff, rather than 100.
  • They also now provide 9000 power rather than 3000, and now 10 births per turn rather than 0, and they have 50 of the new holopods. These things make getting a new city established way easier even if you don't do things in an ideal order.
  • Note that this also sidesteps the issue of the minimum "max population" being 100 and there being too little minimum food or housing for that to actually make sense.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The amount of crime that comes off of your littered trash is now vaaastly lower, particularly in the very early game. Or more specifically, when populations in a given city are very low.

• Natural wonders no longer show a "building effectiveness percent," since that was definitely meaningless.

• A small note on natural wonders now points out that their bonuses are in fact adjacency bonuses.

• The bonuses that natural wonders have been cut from 4 to 2 and are no longer linked to resources in any way. They also now have their own spreadsheet for importing.

• Fixed a bug where the adjacency bonuses from natural wonders were not functioning at all.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The last of the underground buildings now have their graphics, making it so that all 119 of the underground buildings are fully complete visually!

• The lager house now also has 50 holo pods in it, providing some entertainment as well as food.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

Version 0.803

(Released April 24th, 2015)

• Previously, scout stations were tied to the Flight Control tech, but in 0.801 (or something like that), this was shifted to Interior Ballistics instead. However, the interface for using the scout stations, and the scout stations actually doing anything, was still checking Flight Control, so in the last two versions you had to have BOTH Interior Ballistics and Flight Control unlocked in order to actually have any scouts. Whoops! Fixed.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for reporting.

• When cemeteries or junkyards are destroyed, their bodies or trash is now let loose on the city rather than just disappearing into nothingness.
  • This actually makes those buildings something worth protecting, like your power generation and other aspects, rather than something you can just happily let get destroyed. It also stops an exploit where you could keep building cemeteries in range of enemy guns and have them gun them down repeatedly while you lose more and more bodies (yay you) from your city.

• The staff requirements for Disease Control Center has been dropped from 400 to 100.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

• Initial disease infection amounts (as a percentage of your population) are now generally much lower than they were before, particularly when you are contracting diseases through ground combat fighting.
  • That said, the infection percent from Evucks is now actually higher -- slightly.
  • This emphasizes just how nasty it is from the Evucks, and beyond that it's not remotely such a terrible thing to have happen to you out of the blue.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for suggesting.

• Some adjustments to crime severities at higher populations:
  • The amount of crime per unit of littered trash is no longer so increasingly dire as your population goes up. It does get worse, but not so incredibly bad.
  • The amount of crime per shut down building is really REALLY toned down.
  • The progression of crime from unclaimed bodies also is now a lot less severe.
  • The crime for unemployment has a lower threshold now, as well as scaling lower.
  • The crime for hungry citizens was absolutely off the charts nuts after you passed 4200 citizens in particular. It's now a lot more reasonable all the way through.
  • Same deal for homeless.
  • Thanks to topper for helping inspire these changes by jumping on the grenade there.

• The ability to hike up your tax rate to gain more income was just incredibly overpowered. This has been shifted to being additive when it's an increase in tax, and remains multiplicative when it's a decrease in tax. This makes for vastly more reasonable tax amounts.
  • The same has also been applied to the research rate and the power rate, for the same reasons. I wasn't sure if the crime control and hazmat rates really needed this; if it seems so, then please let me know.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• You can now only have one stock exchange per each 8000 citizens, not every 1000 citizens. Otherwise it was way too easy to just spam these with low citizen counts.
  • Similarly, for the fighting arena it's now up to one for every 5000 instead of every 1000.
  • And for banks it is now one for every 600 instead of one for every 200.
  • For shopping malls, it's one for every 1000 instead of one for every 500.
  • History Museum and OperaHouse are now 1200 instead of 400.
  • Note that this does kneecap your ability to just spam the commercial sector (which is the idea), but you can make early money by supplying a lot of food, and in general this encourages a push toward capturing resources, which are a substantial source of income.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• All of the market item effects are now additive rather than multiplicative, so that they don't go so nuts in terms of causing mass inflation of your values when you have just a few of them.
  • Note that the social progress and tech things are still multiplicative, because they are meant to be more powerful, though.
  • In turn, the way that the market item effects are applied is now based on one of 15 different "learning skills" for each type of race. In other words, Acutians get more out of crown-generation market items than peltians do. That racial differentiation was why I had it as multiplicative in the first place, but now it's additive with a racial multiplier against the additive component.
  • It is possible that some of the market item effects may be pathetically useless to you at this point; it's hard to say. If you see anything that seems off, please do let us know!
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

Version 0.802

(Released April 24th, 2015)

• The missing icons for attacks and linguistics regarding the Peltians are now created.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for reporting.

• When you lose buildings to ice melt, limestone cavern collapse, or flooding, there are now icons for that rather than just the little text notification.

• The remaining evuck and peltian underground buildings now have proper graphics.
  • So that's 5 more done, and 15 left to do!

• The map icon images have been put into better dictionaries that lead to more efficiency when drawing them.

• The smog and radiation overlay images have been put into better dictionaries that lead to more efficiency when drawing them.

• Gave the underground building images the better-dictionary treatment.

• Fixed an enormous inefficiency in how the game world borders were being drawn (how many draw calls they would require, etc).

• Increased the max number of sprites per batch from 1200 to 4000. This should lead to better performance on really large maps and in particular on older GPUs, but we'll see.

• A variety of parts of the hud now have the new better sprite dictionary treatment.

• Fixed a _huge_ performance issue with drawing the hex overlays over tiles, where it wasn't previously batching them at all.

• The game should now properly prevent players and the AIs from placing buildings on top of natural wonders. If you do see the "Ack!" message again, please do let us know, though. And a savegame is helpful.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for reporting.

• When you first discover a new race, there is now a notification on your sidebar and a big center-screen popup. It's rather important, after all...
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for suggesting.

• Ten more natural wonders have been added, bringing the total up to 34. Just a couple of days ago it was only 9 total! We're done adding these for a while, and all the new ones beyond the first 9 don't have their true functionality assigned to them yet.

Version 0.801

(Released April 23rd, 2015)

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where the current overlay was not showing up properly highlighted in its menu.

• The city management window how has a button for each type of building in the city (except the city centers, which cannot be toggled on/off) and double clicking one will try to turn all buildings of that type in that city off (if any are on) or on (if not).
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• The groundwater studies tech has been removed, and biology now unlocks the water well directly.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Flight Control is now a prerequisite for lander records recovery and aquifer survey and landscape grading, and has been moved around so that there's not that huge horizontal gap in that one part of the early tech tree.

• Toxin Screening deaths were not previously being logged correctly and were throwing an error to let us know about that. Fixed.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Added budget-management city management sliders for crime control and hazmat effectiveness/cost.

• Fixed an issue with natural wonder seeding where a couple of them were not actually seeding in all cases.

• Previously there were 9 natural wonders. Now there are 15 new ones (so 24 in all), and there will be quite a few more before too long.
  • The idea here is that, yes, this makes exploration more interesting. But also these have nontrivial strategic value, meaning that they provide good medium-term benefits for both you and the AIs.
  • A number of the natural wonders do not yet have proper definitions for their bonuses, though. That's coming!

• Fixed a bug that has existed since before the start of the beta, where the tops of the natural wonders were getting cut off. Looked mighty strange!

• The data for the resources has been pulled out into a separate excel file instead of being baked into the game, and it's now easier for us to balance and possible for players to tune or mod as well.

• The outer world border has been cleaned up so that it no longer has the jagged edges like before. Nice having an actual artist fix that up rather than Chris just winging it. ;)

• The images for a lot of the tile overlays have been adjusted so that you can tell them apart better. Useful in particular for experienced players so that they don't have to look at the bottom of the screen to see which overlay is active when they are placing a new building.

• Fixed a bug where buildings under construction were still showing up as possible attackers, and thus could prevent already-constructed buildings from actually attacking until these finished.
  • Thanks to ptarth, TheVampire100, and crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with a white background around the Mind Control tech.

• Fixed a bug where when the tech tree shortlist is open, it was making it so that you could not see the furthest-right tech.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where some of your own buildings could show up as "targets" that nonetheless you could not really attack.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for the save that showed this.

• Holding down the shift key now lets you see your combined attack range of all your buildings in your current "attack with this building type" mode.

• You can now hold down the R key to see the attack range of any single military building (friend or foe).

• Holding down Z now lets you see the range of any interceptor building that you hover over.
  • Holding down Ctrl plus Z now lets you see the range of all interceptor buildings of that same interception category in the city of the building you are hovering over (so all ground interceptors in that city, etc).

• New key, also mapped to Z: See "Other" Range Of Hovered Building
  • If you hover over certain specialty buildings (Embassies, Thieves' Guilds, Spy Safehouses, International Banks, etc) with this key held down, you can see their working ranges. These buildings require a target that is within their operational range, and this lets you see that operational range.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Previously embassies and spies had to target city center buildings, which was just really very confusing (never noted on the GUI, and rather hard to note), and potentially problematic in practice given that AI cities might be too large for you to do this.
  • They now can target any building in an AI city.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The range of all the "targets another city" buildings have been reduced from 20 to 10.
  • This makes it so that you have to get closer to your intended target, which was always the goal anyway.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a couple of things in data definitions that was preventing some of the AIs from building in desired patterns. You'll see... quite a difference in the Thoraxians, for instance, with their tunnel entrances. Finally acting the way they were always intended to!

• Adjusted some things in the data definitions for player buildings to avoid confusion with players not being able to build their main buildings next to things like their resource extractors of various sorts. This may need further updating later, but for now this seems like the simplest way to be clear to players (and strategically it makes sense to me, too).
  • Thanks to pizzatiger for reporting.

• Enemy resource extractors are no longer valid targets for diplomacy, spy, or whatever targeting.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Civic Centers can now be placed anywhere within personnel transport range, or next to an existing destroyed city even if it is not in personnel transport range.
  • They cannot, however, be placed next to a building from another city.
  • This greatly simplifies the method for creating new cities, which was previously really confusing.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Hyfrydle for reporting.

• When you are in placement mode for a building that uses the "other targeting, it now shows you a preview of its range while you are placing it.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• When you are in placement mode for a building that has an attack range, it now shows you a preview of where it's range will be while you are attacking it.
  • When you are placing a building with interception capabilities, the same thing also now happens.

• During the mode where you are selecting another city to target from a building, the game now shows your range for targeting (pretty important), and also shows you which tiles are actually clickable via having an icon on them (also pretty important...).
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The overall attack ranges have been shrunk a bit for buildings, to encourage closer combat. It's not a big shift in the main, but for a few AI buildings the shift is from an insanely high number to something more reasonable in particular. Some, like the spire, should no longer dominate their area so fully (if the spire hated you and you were at all near them, goodbye you, previously).

• Drastically fixed up how the crime for crimes of opportunity and pollution scale up as city populations get very large. The scaling factor was previously very far off, which wasn't apparent back when disease was killing us really fast anyway.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The crime number at the top of the screen is now a lot more useful, because it looks at the total net crime on each tile, not the overall crime prevention potential versus the overall crime (because not all crime prevention potential is realized, since it falls outside of tiles which would have crime, anyway). Bottom line, this actually shows your real value now, not a giant negative number that doesn't make much difference to you.

• Fixed an issue where none of the Language Skill Up icons were ever being found properly because it was looking in the wrong directory.
  • The Peltian ones are legitimately missing for attacked by and missing, but that's a different matter.
  • Also fixed a related localization missing error.

• Fixed a bug where the Krolin data definitions accidentally had their soldier type unlinked sometime recently, and thus their ground troops could not properly attack!
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the temperature change mechanics could cause natural wonders to get overwritten. Oops! That's fixed, and additionally the game will now complain if a natural wonder is ever overwritten by any process during the game, so that we can fix that also.

Version 0.800

(Released April 21st, 2015)

• The new HUD is now in place -- hoo boy was that a massive undertaking, taking us a whole lot longer than we expected. Finally done now, though! And we should be able to get releases out daily during the week again, which is good.

• Fixed sea robin definition saying it was gathered on land by fisheries instead of gathered on water by fisheries.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• There are now hotkeys that allow you to toggle between your cities quickly (home and end).

• The remaining Thoraxian, Andor, Acutian, Boarine, and Burlust underground buildings now have actual graphics. Still 20 underground buildings to go.

• Previously, the max number of simultaneous buildings you could ever achieve in a city was capped at 7. This would lead to confusion if you scrapped engineers after getting above that level (more engineers still made your constructions faster, just not more at once in those cases).
  • Now it's capped at 40, instead.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The appearance of the small icons for buildings in the tech tree has been adjusted to be a little clearer, larger, and more attractive. This also is the same thing to be used on the new hud.

• The items in the build menus are now actually sorted in a way that makes sense, heh.

• The Cities Grid screen is now in place.

• On screen resolutions narrower than 1680 pixels, previously the tech tree shortlist would overlap the tech tree scrollbar and the tabs inappropriately. Fixed.

• The overlays now show better proper-english names, and also have tooltips explaining what they are actually doing!

• Fixed that bug where both the reports and overlays windows could be visible at the same time.
  • Thanks to mrhanman and mllange for reporting.

• The requirements for social progress level ups is now vastly higher, bringing better balance to it so that you aren't going through social levels every turn after a little while.
  • Thanks to Misery for reminding us of this.

• Cemetaries now have 5000 graves each, rather than 500. Originally I wanted to keep these small so that you'd really _feel_ your deaths in the city, but this was just too small.

Disease Balance And General Improvements

• Added Quarantine toggle to city management window
  • Quarters birth rate.
  • Reduces infection rate and new-births-with-disease by 10% per turn the quarantine has been running against that disease.
  • Each turn, cures 1 person of each disease per turn the quarantine has been running against that disease.
  • If the quarantine is turned off, the internal counter for each disease's quarantine drops by 2 per turn until back to zero.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for inspiring this change.

• Added Genetic Screening toggle to city management window
  • Halves birth rate.
  • No new births will have genetic diseases.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for inspiring this change.

• Added Toxin Screening toggle to city management window
  • Each population unit that would be infected with a toxic disease instead costs the city 500 power and the race 200 crowns.
  • If the resources are not available, the population unit is killed.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for inspiring this change.

• The infectiousness and mortality rates from diseases are now a lot less extreme, and getting one with high mortality and high infectiousness is now not such a possibility.

• Sloth from diseases no longer causes trash and pollution production to go up. That was what was leading to the immediate death spirals with lots of the diseases.
  • Instead it now is a reducer for crown, science, linguistics, social progress, and resource production.

• The diseases button now actually works, and pops up a description of what the heck each disease actually does, and what its stats mean, etc.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ, mllange, and mrhanman for reminding us about this (it was one of those TBD things I warned the redshirts about, but it's super important).

• Hospitals and similar now work on curing infected citizens as well as healing wounded ones. This helps a bit in the fight against disease, mainly against diseases with low or no mortality. Quarantine and vaccination is still by far the best.

• Once a race has ever started working on a vaccine for a disease, they now continue working on that until they find a cure -- even if there are no current infections.

• You can now actually see your progress on vaccines! It's shown under the new diseases popup.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for reporting.

Version 0.772

(Released April 15th, 2015)

• The starting languages that you know are now a lot higher in a variety of areas, making diplomacy actually possible with some races closer from the start (though not always the races you want, of course).
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• The radius revealed by the lander at the start of the game is now 7 tiles rather than 5, which means that no matter where you place it you should be able to get explorer camps on all sides of it comfortably.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Fixed the bug from version 0.771 where you could not place explorer camps unless the shift key was held down.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle, mrhanman, ptarth, and crazyroosterman for reporting.

Version 0.771

(Released April 15th, 2015)

• The recent changes button now properly points here.

• The default profile name is now "Benevolent Dictator" instead of Hydral.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

• Savegame size has been reduced to about 2/3 its prior amount (and is now much faster to save and load, too) thanks to some shifts with what is being saved about specific layers on each tile.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Savegames have been shrunk a further 10% or so by adjusting some of what is recalculated upon savegame load with regard to tiles themselves.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Another bit of savings on savegame size in particular in savegames that are very high up in turn counts, by culling the number of event log entries from more than 100 turns ago.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Ground soldiers can now always target underground buildings in range that they have sonar data on.

• Fixed a bug where combat damage wasn't being applied to undergound buildings.

• Boats, Missiles/Lasers, and Torpedoes can now directly target any underground buildings that are not under another building.

• Resource adjacency bonuses (natural wonder and from resource-usage buildings) are now actually shown!

• Previously, resources on the surface would only be revealed if you got your buildings close enough to them -- not just if you scouted their area. That was a super bad idea, as it led to the impression that there were not many resources around. Note that underground resources still require you to sonar survey them.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• Placement of explorer camps is only required for the first two turns now. After that it's completely optional.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for inspiring this change.

• Flying buildings now will show up properly under the fog of war, rather than over.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• The game no longer gives you a localization error the first time you go to start a new campaign.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was letting you place explorer camps waaaaay away from your lander, but not showing the little "building valid to be placed here" icons, hence us not noticing it before.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed the visual offset issue on the social progress screen when the resolution was not 720px high.
  • Thanks to mrhanman and tbrass for reporting.

• The trash production values on each building have been majorly revamped, because some of them were accidentally producing waaaay more than intended. This was then causing a crime death spiral.
  • Thanks to ptarth and others for reporting.

• The amount of crime at each building from crimes of opportunity, from inherent in the business, and from pollution (for extra-sensitive buildings, anyway) is now vastly shrunk at the start of the game, and gradually grows to become the full amount at population 10,000 and up.
  • This way you aren't so hosed if you don't know to put police stations near to a stock exchange early on. Instead you'll discover that gradually and have time to react.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.