Stars Beyond Reach Beta Release Notes

Version 0.821

(This isn't done yet, we're still working on it.)

• 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.

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.