Stars Beyond Reach Beta Release Notes

Version 0.803

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

• 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.