Stars Beyond Reach Beta Phase 2 Release Notes

Version 0.874

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

• Fixed a bug since the introduction of the holographic-phase of a saucer's spawn where the AI would never consider those saucers eligible to fire (saucers spawned in saves before that version were fine).
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Now when saucers have nothing to shoot at, and are too far away from eligible targets for their normal movement logic, they just warp out.
  • Thanks to ptarth and others for inspiring this change.

• Added an additional check to market item creation to prevent the actual creation if no eligible market-item-effect-type could be found. It will also show an error message in this case so we can learn whether or not this is actually happening.
  • This should be the last way that new quality-zero market items can be created. Already-existing quality-zero market items from previous saves will still be there, since stripping them out would mess with other parts of the schema that might reference them.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Now if a resource-using building loses access to a supply of that resource, instead of clearing the targeting of that resource it goes into a new shut-down mode.
  • It will also start in that shut-down mode (the tooltip for the shut-down icon mentions this), so that it doesn't immediately start giving the bonus before the resources have actually been consumed during end-turn.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change

• Now the market item percent completion display on the inventory screen factors in minimum quality, such that if the quality is at a lower "completion percent" than the construction, the quality percent is shown. Otherwise you'd see crazy things like 900% complete, etc.
  • Thanks to ptarth and crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Added the "ignore next mouse-up" behavior to the close buttons on some other windows, notably the buildings window. This should prevent accidental building placement/demolishing when a valid target happens to be right under the close button.
  • Thanks to Mick, mooncows, and others for reporting.

• A ton of buildings (all except the multi-tile ones) now have been "de-cluttered." There is still more to do here, and some of them now feel too empty, but it's a big step forward!

• Fixed a null reference bug that could occur when animating a rural farms tile being destroyed by an attack (by an underground monster, at least).
  • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.

• A the last two new 8-minute atmospheric music tracks to the game. There is one more full musical suite yet to come.

• Fixed an issue with the Evuck Council Chambers not having a type for its power production.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Updated the tooltips for building effectiveness to break out the percent of staff you have there and the wounded percentage as two totally different things.
  • Before it could look like you had fully-staffed buildings with nobody working, but actually you had every one of them also wounded.
  • Also, now when you have wounded citizens working at a building, the minimum effectiveness of that building is 1%, rather than dropping all the way to 0.
  • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for reporting.

• Turn limits have been removed from the game. That's been planned for quite a while, and it also removes a couple of interface issues with the top bar, etc.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Cinth for various related reports.

• Fixed a graphical issue where being in a power shortage caused a warning to overlap the turns count.
  • Thanks to ptarth and nas1m for reporting.

Power Generation And Consumption

• Fixed a pretty heinous design issue where buildings that were only partly staffed only cost some of their power requirement.
  • That sounds fair, really, though, right? I mean, for other negative things like pollution production and trash production, we can do that and it's great.
  • Well... the problem comes in with rolling blackouts and death cycles and so forth. In a lot of scenarios it becomes utterly impossible to know what your real power requirements are, and you wind up getting into death spirals on occasion from vital services shutting on and off in rolling brownouts caused by vast underpowering caused in turn by your power draw constantly fluctuating while your power production remains constant.
  • It may be less "fair" in some ways to have your buildings always pull full power even if they are at low efficiency, but it's actually a lot simpler to understand -- and your buildings ought to be running at full efficiency most of the time in a healthy city, anyway.
  • Note that disabled buildings won't draw power -- those that are disabled for any reason other than brownout, that is -- so of course you can still do emergency power management that way. But the difference there is that you're not prey to those unintentional cycles of doom.
  • Please do note that this is going to break a lot of existing savegames in terms of putting them into immediate brownout.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Cyborg for reports that led to this discovery.

• A variety of changes (detailed below) to when you get various power production technologies and how much they cost. This is particularly relevant in light of the other changes to fix power costs when staffing is low.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Oil Drilling is now an extremely cheap tech, and available right from social level 0, rather than requiring social level 2.
  • Oil Power Plants also now individually put out 3x more power and 3x more pollution.
  • The Biomass Power Plant now puts out vastly more power, and a lot more pollution, but at a better ratio than oil power.
  • Both of these also now cost a lot more crowns.
  • Efficient Incineration now costs a little more than a quarter than what it used to, so you can get Biomass Power Plants and Crematoriums much earlier more easily.

• The Nuclear Power Plant is now amazing, but costs a ton more, puts out more pollution (but at the best ratio yet of the non-solar/wind options), and now costs a LOT more science and social level to unlock.
  • Liquid Lead Cooling (its tech prereq) now comes after Efficient Materials Recovery rather than flight control.
  • The changes to this make it WAY easier to handle late-game things like the space victory or artificial volcanoes without spamming tons of power plants.

• Geothermal Power Plants are now available at social level 4 rather than 6, and they produce a ton more power than before, and at a bit better power to pollution ratio compared to biomass.

• The Waste To Energy power plant now produces the same amount of power as a biomass power plant, but at a higher initial construction cost and only very slightly less pollution output.
  • However, it has the side benefit of consuming trash. It now consumes 4x more trash than it did in previous versions.
  • Plasmafication, which unlocks this, is also now available from social level 7 on instead of 9, and costs about 2/3 as much as it used to.

Linguistics Changes

• Thanks to kasnavada and nas1m for inspiring these changes.

• The Linguistics window is gone. So is all concept of you having a global "target language" or "target language level".

• Linguistic Research Centers now take a target race.

• Linguistic Research Centers, Spy Safehouses, and Embassies now generate language research points towards the language of the race they're pointed at.

• The city grid now has a column for "language skill" showing the current level of knowledge for that language. The tooltip shows the "language" part out of 5, and the "manipulation" part out of 2 (levels 6 and 7), and also the translation-sample "proverb" that used to show on the linguistics screen.

Version 0.873

(Released June 4th, 2015)

• A new 8-minute atmospheric music track has been added to the game. This one is string-based -- cool edgy strings in there to start it off (some tremolo strings underneath some sustained strings), and it ends with some more ambiance and a harp playing the lead part. The idea here is that this, like the piano ambiance track, creates some separation from the more intense melody-driven musical suites. There is another musical suite still in the works as well, but these ambient tracks do a great job of setting tone and atmosphere while giving you a break from music that's completely driving.

• Fixed a few bugs from the prior version's not updating other logic dependent on the player having InteriorBallistics, leading to them not being able to scout unless they both had scouting stations AND InteriorBallistics.
  • Thanks to kasnavada for the report and save.

Version 0.872

(Released June 4th, 2015)

• Fixed a null exception in the computation of the DistrictBuildingCounts property for civic centers under construction.
  • Note: there's apparently a bug whereby a new civic center can fail to get assigned to a new district when placed, which is what leads to the nullref. If you see that happen with a civic center you place in this next version, please let us know.
  • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the vivisection room's bonus was not displayed properly in the building details window, leading to errors and really weird text.
  • Thanks to MayhemMike and crazyroosterman for the reports and saves

• Made the mouse handling system much more aggressive about blocking tile-mouseover, to prevent edge cases like the left-sidebar buttons not blocking mouse interaction with the underlying map when it "wraps" up from the bottom on 720px-high displays, etc.
  • Notably, this prevents the issue where you click on Demolish to select it and BOOM. What can we say? The demolition crews are all-Burlust.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman, Shrugging Khan, and Kizor for reporting.

• Explorer camps can now be placed within air-vehicle range of your lander, rather than within ground-soldier range of your lander.
  • This also prevents the confusing listing of "too far from your lander" in the reasons you can't place an explorer camp on a water or mountain tile that's within air vehicle range of your lander. It was correct, in that your explorers couldn't get out there, but...
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• The main tooltip for wreckage tiles now shows what building used to be on them.
  • Note: wreckage from old saves won't show this, as it wasn't remembering this back then. But newly exploded buildings will show this. Sooo... go explode things?
  • Thanks to ptarth and jerith for suggesting.

• Toxin screening now no longer prevents the first-ever batch of that toxin infections you experience. But after that any further infections will be caught by screening.
  • Thanks to Kizor and ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Made the top line of the atmospheric-compatibility-top-hud-element's tooltip use the same round-down math as the hud element itself, to avoid situations where the element says 24% and the tooltip says 25%, etc.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and windgen for reporting.

• If you're not in attack mode, and you have attack buildings, left clicking the building of another race will put you into attack mode (with no attack building type selected, yet).
  • If you're already in attack mode, but don't have a specific attack type selected, the game will search through the available types of attack, preferring:
    • Can I damage the target at all?
    • Can I damage the target without being intercepted?
    • Can I kill the target?
    • Can I kill the target using the least amount of energy?
  • Thanks to Shrugging Khan and Sounds for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the end-turn-cue data wasn't being cleared when a game was closed (for loading or starting another, for example). Leading to some load-orders resulting in you being stuck with the game demanding you place more explorer camps when you couldn't, etc.
  • Thanks to Cinth and jerith for reporting.

• Linguistics generation changes.
  • Spy Safehouses now generate 20 linguistics points (will be with the race they are targeting, soon).
  • Molecular Refineries no longer generate any linguistics points.
  • Embassies now generate 40 linguistics points (will be with the race they are targeting, soon).
  • Thanks to kasnavada for suggesting changes along these lines.

• Extraction Facilities and Harvesters can now be placed on land or water tiles. (oops that they could not before).
  • Thanks to ptarth and tbrass for reporting.

• Civic Centers and Coordinated Military Command buildings are now immune to limestone collapse. (oops that they were not before)
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fisheries and Teleporter Depots are now immune to crime.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Changes to prevent crime death spirals:
  • The effect from litter and unclaimed bodies on crime is now 10x lower than they were before, to help prevent death spirals from them.
  • The chance of death from crime is now 1/3rd what it previously was.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Races choose to join incidents based on a variety of factors. Previously it was way too likely for them to want to join, however. Now they are 1/10th as likely to join an incident in progress. We'll see how this plays out, if that's enough of a reduction.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• The player buildings are now separated from their underlying "roads," which will soon be race-specific. We are working on de-cluttering the player buildings and making their functions more apparent as well, but this process is only just starting. About 26 of them are part-way through that process, and the underlying roads are just a very plain base right now. It's may temporarily look slightly worse before it looks the best that it has yet, but it's coming along quite well already.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version where various buildings had their highlights offset during placement mode, hover-over, etc, etc.
  • Thanks to nas1m, Cinth, mooncows, and ptarth for reporting.

• The player and alien buildings have also now been compressed down into smaller (and fewer) dictionaries, which reduces RAM usage yet again (with no added compression or anything), improves the game load time slightly, and improves the framerate slightly.

• A new 10-minute atmospheric music track has been added to the game. This one has a lot of nature sounds in it, as well as a very calm and quiet sort of piano piece. The idea here is that this creates some separation from the more intense melody-driven suites.

• The basic panning speed for the WASD keys has been doubled.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• Fixed several bugs preventing auto-scouting from working properly in some cases. Notably:
  • Ceasing to scout eligible tiles, sometimes because it was hung up trying to scout the very edge of the world.
  • Scouting the same tile over and over again, or nearly so, making it look like only one scout is sent out.
  • Thanks to Shrugging Khan and Cinth for the reports and saves.

• Fixed a bug where the basic way of saying "do this for all fully-constructed buildings owned by this race" was not doing anything to exclude under-construction buildings from the same logic. Kind of surprising things were working as well as they were before. May be some significant behavior shifts from this fix.
  • But notably this does fix the "immediately get space-win when all space center buildings are placed" bug.
  • Thanks to Kizor for the report and save.

• Added some more general "if hud blocking windows are open, don't allow mouse events on the map" logic. Prevents placing of buildings while looking at the temperature window, for example.
  • Also added some more general "if left-clicking a window close button, ignore the next left mouseup event". Prevents placing a building by clicking the diplomacy window close button when it just happened to be over a valid spot, for example.
  • Thanks to MayhemMike for reporting.

• Fixed an issue introduced a week or so ago that could make text go absolutely batshot insane sometimes, which would particularly manifest on the disease listing window.
  • Thanks to Cinth, crazyroosterman, nas1m, and Kizor for reporting.

More Tech Tree Changes/Additions

• Aaaack this must have been so confusing for people: Fixed a bug where middle-clicking buildings in the tech tree was not working in recent versions.
  • Thanks to tadrinth, Magus-k, Shrugging Khan, and ptarth for reporting.

• The Fishery is now unlocked via Biology rather than Commercial Shipbuilding.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

• Thief Recruitment is no longer on the tech tree, since the Thieves Guild does nothing now.

• Hydroponics has also been cut, as it was just not useful enough and definitely in the way.

• Neo-Historism as a tech has gone away, and is now replaced by Luxury Construction. Basically the same idea, but a new icon and name. And a lot more costly now.

• Abstract Reasoning is a new tech, and is what unlocks the Philosopharium. Having this separated from luxury housing (these both came from Neo-Historism before) allows us to make luxury housing more expensive and philosophy less so.

• The Civic Center and Teleporter Depot now are unlocked via a new Colonization tech, which is separate from Formalized Diplomacy. This separates out the functions of expanding your empire versus talking to other empires, which really are two very different matters.
  • This is now a top-level option on the far left, and very inexpensive.
  • Wars of Aggression is now a direct descendant of this.
  • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.

• The Sonar tech is now called Scouting, and is also now a direct descendant of Colonization, and is much less expensive.
  • This now unlocks both sonar scouts and regular scouts, rather than regular scouts being under interior ballistics.
  • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.

• Wars Of Aggression is also now a direct descendant of Colonization, but retains its prior cost and so forth.
  • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.

• A ton of other changes have been made to the first part of the tech tree to get it better organized and better let you find the ways to expand outwards as well as those things you need to make a basic city in general.
  • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.

• Okay, a bunch of other changes to the tech tree, getting too bothersome to note them all.

• There are now 10 different techs called "+1 district" at various places around the tech tree. They all cost a flat 500 science, no matter what tech came before them.
  • The previous way of getting more techs from government social progress levels remains, but this is yet another way. This had actually been intended from near the start of the shift to the new districting method, but we hadn't had time to add them until now.

Version 0.871

(Released June 3rd, 2015)

• The in-game Recent Changes link has been updated to point to the new release notes page.

• The construction complexity added by forest and jungles is now vastly less.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• The disease number on the top HUD now shows the highest infection count of any disease in your city, rather than the sum of all infection counts, to avoid confusion.
  • Thanks to nas1m and jerith for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug in the last version where diseases often couldn't cure at all.

• The disease tooltip now includes the number of cured and newly-infected of each disease since the last turn.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring this change.

• Added columns to the city grid:
  • Number of saucers attacking this city
  • Number of saucers owned by this city
  • Total attack power of all air attackers
  • ditto ranged
  • ditto sea
  • ditto ground
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for inspiring this change.

• Tweaked some sprite batching code to hopefully have a more happy medium between performance and RAM use. Honestly it's not a direct tradeoff, because actually the higher-RAM approach costs some performance in some other ways.
  • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for reporting.

• Now pressing escape or right-clicking while having both a build menu and a building-details window open at the same time will consistently close the details window, and not the build menu. Pressing again will then close the build menu.
  • Thanks to jerith and ptarth for suggesting.

• Now buildings are immune to understaffing damage for ~5 turns after their construction.
  • Thanks to jerith, Cinth, and ptarth for inspiring this change

• Now when placing a district, it marks the tiles you'd "gain" (in the sense of being theoretically able to build on them).
  • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for suggesting.

• Mousing over the race icon of another race in city grid now shows the various bits of intel that used to show up on the diplomacy window "intel reports" tab.

• Now when a spy safehouse is targeting another race, every turn it hurts their attitude towards you by the same amount as an embassy would help it.

• Now each market item won't be created until its quality reaches at least 1.1x (for the player) or 1.33x (for an AI race) the quality of the highest quality item previously produced by that race.

• The hex-shaped-ish building efficiency display bar has now gone away. It only fit around buildings that were not drawn over the underlying terrain (otherwise it looked badly offset), and the buildings in front of these display bars could obscure them, too. Which was intentional for visual purposes, but still a problem to some degree.
  • Now there is a circular icon that shows up on the building in the row with all the other status icons (when this needs to show). Additionally, like all other status icons, this now has a tooltip which explains what the heck it even means! Even better than that, it shows the details of WHY the efficiency is what it is in this particular exact case. Low staffing, pollution, whatever.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring these changes.

• Shopping Malls now entertain 600 citizens rather than the 200 they entertained in past versions.
  • Office Buildings no longer entertain 200 citizens (that was an oops).
  • Thanks to tadrinth, jerith, Cinth, and ptarth for reporting.

• The music for the game is now properly hooked up so that it actually plays, except for the race-specific music, which will only play under circumstances which don't exist yet (but will soon).
  • Thanks to lots of players for reminding about this... a lot. ;)

• Fixed a bug on 768px high screens where the demolish icon could be hanging down off the screen.
  • Thanks to nas1m and Kizor for reporting.

• Molecular Refineries can now be placed on mountains properly.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• The game has now had a lot of its sprite dictionaries compacted in terms of how many wasted buffer pixels they have. A bit tricky on some of these, but this leads to some better RAM usage as well as a slight framerate improvement.

• When multi-tile buildings are placed, it now makes you place them so that their entire footprint is within your district, thus avoiding them getting shut down if you place them in the southeast corners of your districts.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Coordinated Military Command buildings have completely lost their old functionality.
  • Now they let you place military buildings within 6 of them even outside of normal district boundaries.
  • Advanced Military Leadership, which unlocks these, has switched places with Crowd Control and is now unlockable vastly sooner. It's also now called Wars Of Aggression.
  • Thanks to zebeast45 for suggesting.

• Tech tree changes to make the tree less crunched together:
  • Landscape Grading now comes after Plasmafication, mainly to get it out of the way of the earlier part of the tech tree and not make that bit so overwhelming.
  • Brokerage Licensing is now after Mass Communication, again just to get it out of the way visually on the early tech tree.
  • Gene Manipulation now comes after Plasmafication, to make some room on its part of the tech tree.
  • Brewing now comes after mass communication in order to thin out the left side of the tech tree yet a bit more.
  • Large Profile Stealth Frames now comes after Budget Committees, which Chris finds amusing. Not sure if you also noticed his joke with Creative Writing being the prereq for Budget Committees.
  • Forestry now comes after Weapons Production.
  • Commercial Fishing now comes after Sonar.
  • And then a variety of other things have been shifted just spatially near themselves.
  • All of these changes also help to avoid the illusion from the last version that the tech tree is teeny or missing when you first start out.
  • The gameplay impact of all these changes is extremely minimal, but it feels a lot better early on in as well as once there are a ton of techs unlocked. It presents you with no more ultra-high-level social-level-requirement techs right from the start cluttering up your view, too, which is also good. And in general the techs are more organized with the higher-value stuff to the right, even though the cul-de-sac nature of it has not been diminished.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring these changes.

First Diplomatic Carnage

• Diplomacy is getting a complete makeover, and this is the first salvo in that.

• The entire concept of Trust has gone away. Attitude is enough.
  • Everything that previously used trust in some way now uses attitude.

• The entire concept of gathering intel as it used to exist is gone. That's going to work differently coming up.

• Getting other races to do certain things for you is now gone:
  • Reverse Wind (this was too powerful, sort of, and also too confusing when used).
  • Set Attack Bounty On Race (international incidents made this obsolete).
  • All of the stealing and spying stuff that other races would do for you (this was of super dubious value to begin with).

• You now always know who the leader of the other races are as soon as you meet them.

• The concept of thieves and stealing as it existed before is now gone.

Spies, Intel, and The Panopticon

• City Grid visibility:
  • Now if you haven't met a race, you don't see their city here.
  • Even if you can see a city here, by default you can only see the race icon, race name, and population.
    • But if you had a spy safehouse targeting that race at the end of your last turn, all the other info for that race will show.
  • Added a "Status" column that will show either "No Intel" or the race's attitude towards you (nothing shows for your own race) with a tooltip containing the race's leader's name and numeric attitude.

• Panopticon updates.
  • From the in-game description:
    • Shows you all the intel about races that you would normally get from Spy Safehouses, but without any negative consequences from finding out this information (no attitude loss).
    • This is also a requirement for achieving an espionage domination against another faction. While the panopticon is active, all of the spy safehouses that you have will gather between 1 and 4 military and pride (gossip, personal stuff about leaders, etc) points of intel each turn.
    • The more military intel points you have against a race, the better you will fight against them, which is useful in general. But once you reach 1000 intel points in either the military or pride category, your espionage domination of that race will be complete.

MapGen

• Two new terrain types have been added: grass with trees, and savanna. The former is just sprinkled around in regular grass, and the latter shows up a bunch in the tropical zone.

• On Terrestrial maps, the way that the zones are calculated is now a lot better, and you wind up with larger poles and not so huge of a tropical zone. You also now have breaks between the zones that are more natural and randomized, rather than being these strange uniform straight lines.

• On all maps (that previously had this problem), there is no longer such a huge amount of forest and/or jungle on them.
  • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for reporting.

• Okay, let's put it this way then: pretty much the entire seeding of the Terrestrial map is completely different now. It's way more interesting, and you get way more terrain variety from what we already had, and so on.

• You no longer seed smack dab in the middle of the map anymore, which in itself makes things a lot more interesting.

• Temperate Lakes no longer have icecaps.

• Temperate lakes actually has... well, proper lakes.

• The way that all the maps look now is actually pretty darn different. Europa looks very much better now, too.

• Fixed a bug where in some cases a Tiny map would fail to properly generate.
  • Thanks to Kizor for reporting.

Prior Beta Notes

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

Stars Beyond Reach Beta Release Notes