The Last Federation:Post-1.0 Release Notes

Version 1.017

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

• Fixed an offset display issue with the alternating row backgrounds in the tech grid and so forth from the last couple of versions.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Now when the Federation Progress screen lists a deal that is blocked by mutual racial attitude being too low, the little summary line no longer says the generic "Not Yet Ready To Make Deal" (which info is already communicated by the red title) but instead states the attitude requirement and current levels.
  • Further, this notice now takes precedence over listing unmet credit/proxy/leverage/influence requirements since those are relatively more straightforward to meet. All details are still listed in the actual mouseover tooltips for these deals, as before.
  • Thanks to L4m3ness for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where if you did research dispatches in one game, quit that, and then started another new game without quitting the application entirely, the old "partial progress" towards those techs would be remembered. So basically anything you'd fully researched would only take 1 month to research in the new game, etc.
  • Thanks to Greenicetealeaf and Histidine for the reports and saves leading to this discovery.

• Fear Empires now disappear when the race is reduced to only holding one planet. This way you don't have to outright kill a race to win just because they once had a fear empire.

• When the RCI of one planet is going to go up or down as a result of some sort of deal or action or quest, it now parenthetically says what race owns that planet.

• Fixed a bug where all spy probes were having their seeding points pushed waaaaaay out from the player due to the spy probes now having those really-long-ranged guns. Since this distance was further than the distance the player usually was seeded from the dropzone... yea.
  • Thanks to Kizor and jonasan for the report.

• Spy Probes now seed at least 1000 range from the dropzone, and at least 500 range from each other. This makes it more likely to not have to alert everyone in high-probe-count situations.
  • Thanks to Drak and others for inspiring this change.

• The "per-month" effects of a dispatch mission now happen at the same time of month that the dispatch was started, rather than always at the beginning of each month. This avoids some exploits related to spending the last day of each month on a dispatch and the other parts of the month doing other things, etc.
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring this change.

Improvements To Betrayal From Within The Federation

• The Federation Screen now shows, for federation races, how betrayed they feel, how betrayed they need to feel before they actually leave, and the % progress that represents.

• For the sake of clarity (and balance, when it comes to the "Warm Up To Hydral" action below), there are now separate entries for races feeling betrayed by grumbling about you versus you attacking them.
  • Thanks to TheDarkMaster for inspiring this change.

• Added the following to the explanation of the recently-added "Grumble About Hydral" action:
  • If you can increase your influence with them to above -100, they will stop grumbling. If you increase your influence with them to above 50, they may gradually start to forget their grumbles. If you let them grumble for too long, they may leave the federation! See the Federation Progress screen for details.

• Added a new "Warm Up To Hydral" race action that only kicks in when they have previously grumbled about you and you now have 50+ influence with them:
  • You once had quite bad influence with {ActingRacePlur}, but since your influence with them is now at least 50, they are starting to warm up to you again and actually forget their past grumbling.

• There is now a third category of "Betrayal From Within Federation - Hostile Acts Against Us" that now plays into the betrayal percentage. This purely is a matter of differentiation from attacks for thematic purposes.

• The various "betrayal of federation" influence types no longer are multiplied by difficulty level when they increase.

Quest Improvements

• Three of the types of quests previously did not identify the name of the client race in the race title, instead making you have to know it from the color and the style of name. Now it includes that info.

• When there are consequences from another quest that you did not take after you do take a quest, the quest you did take now is much clearer about where those previously-mysterious other consequences came from.

• Fixed an issue with the quest to deliver spacefaring tech through destruction, where it was showing a blank icon and assigning the turrets to you. Instead those turrets are now properly assigned to the ally race you are helping, and the ally race icon shows.
  • Thanks to alocritani and Histidine for reporting.

• The deliver terraforming specs mission now only appears if you are not playing with the tutorial on (aka, it only appears if you have the All Game Mechanics Enabled From Start turned on). It's a very difficult mission, and not something to hit new players with, but also not something we wanted to tone down. Yay variety and all that.
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring this change.

• The deliver terraforming specs missions now give you a 4x-usual-rate Credit bonus for destroying enemy ships.
  • Thanks to Drak for suggesting.

• Emergency Response Hangars are now forbidden from seeding in the Deliver Terraforming tech quest type.
  • Thanks to Misery and Ragwortshire for inspiring this change.

New Quests!

• Four new quests, all in the same vein, have been added for most of the races except the Skylaxians and the Andors. These particular quests task you with punching a hole in the military defenses surrounding a planet that has a high RCI value on behalf of a race with a very low RCI value of the same type. The client race winds up stealing RCI from the second, and influences and attitudes shift at the same time. You also gain double credit reward for this particular fight.

Auto-Resolve Improvements

• Fixed an issue with auto-resolve where a side that had no ships remaining, but had allies that did, could still muster some strength and kill enemy ships.

• Fixed an issue with auto-resolve where factions were counting themselves for the "ally strength bonuses," and not just their actual allies.

• Capped the auto-resolve "ally strength bonuses" at 5% of the strength of the actual power of a faction, to keep this from getting strangely inflated when one side is weak but has a strong ally.

• The number of pilots that you rescue in auto-resolve has been reduced again, as it was still too high.

• Rejiggered a lot of the math with regard to auto-resolving battles.
  • Bear in mind that the goal of auto-resolve is not to be a literal interpretation of what actually would happen during a real combat.
    • For instance, in most auto-resolves you are assured of winning the combat, which is not true during an actual fight. But the game is meant to be hard even if you win every battle, so that makes a good amount of sense for the people who want to use auto-resolve.
    • Therefore, the goal of auto-resole is to provide an appropriate risk/reward ratio that is sensible with the framework of the game. It's not trying to mimic regular combat (few auto-resolves in strategy games really do).
    • Previously if you were overmatched, it would mostly penalize you with lots of excess turns to finish it. This could quickly reach into the thousands or hundreds of thousands, however, which was just ludicrous. The formulas have thus been shifted around a lot.
    • In place of just penalizing you with extra turns (which it still does), it now stops rewarding you with as many credits after you are fighting beyond your "overmatched point," and also stops giving you any rescued pilots beyond that point.
  • Overall this lets you get the full benefits of the auto-resolve up to the point where you would be overmatched, and then drastically reduced rewards after that, plus a much tamer form of turn penalties (which translates into solar map time).
  • This isn't any more representative of how a real combat would play out, and it isn't really supposed to be (real combat is such a variable thing based on skill, how long you are willing to spend being incredibly micro-intensive in a battle where you are overmatched, etc), but in our tests this does feel a lot more natural and balanced for auto-resolve purposes.

Version 1.016 (Finish Him!)

(Released May 7th, 2014)

• Put in some changes to the grid control that should prevent the freezing that a couple of people were having in the prior version on the planetary summary/details page and _definitely_ the tech page.
  • Thanks to windgen and Sounds for reporting.

• Previously, the game would let you attempt to sabotage un-sabotageable buildings, and would charge you the Credit for it, but wouldn't actually sabotage the building. Now it doesn't include those in the list.
  • Thanks to timfortress for reporting.

• Fixed a slew of typos.
  • Thanks to LaGrange for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with Boarines not being able to join federations due to environmental collapse or overwhelming attacks because it required a boarine regent with a blank priority.
  • Thanks to LaGrange for reporting.

• Velociter Type B has seen a bit of a rebalance:
  • The speed of the Velociter Type B shots has been slowed down substantially, making them easier to dodge.
  • Velociter Type B ships no longer appear until 1 year into the game, so that new players aren't caught off guard by them.
  • Thanks to Histidine, dada11dada22, and Mick for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the count of outposts on the racial power grid was still showing numbers for outposts the player had stolen for a race in the column for that race, even though the tooltip did not show that.
  • Thanks to alocritani for reporting.

• That old rule about all ships starting to deal more damage after 50 turns of combat has been removed, as that was invisible (some people are probably going "what?"), and was confusing.
  • Thanks to a variety of players for suggesting this, and ptarth for reminding me about it.

• When you use the Andors to research a vaccine, they now keep a copy of it for themselves as well as giving the player a copy of it.

Clarity Of Where Techs Came From

• The manner in which techs are acquired is now vastly more clear in the notifications, and all of the techs that a race gets are actually reported on.
  • There are actually 9 overall methods that a race might gain a tech (and a couple of those have sub-methods, but they are similar enough to be grouped together), but previously either they were not showing at all (the majority case), or just were showing as "tech researched."
  • As with the war notifications, now this is hugely more clear just what the heck is actually going on.
  • Thanks to nas1m, MaskityMask, and GC13 for inspiring this change.

Solar Map Balance

• The attitude threshold for races sharing techs with other races in the same alliance as them has been raised substantially.
  • This may actually have been a factor with some races speeding through the tech tree in previous versions.

• Previously you would lose "Hostile Alliance" type influence with any race that was in any alliance if you had more than 100 influence with that race. Including the federation.
  • This was simply based on some old logic that still assumed that influence was capped at 100 (which it was until partly through alpha).
  • Additionally, that "Hostile Alliance" influence factor type was confusing in the first place, because its text made references to the Solar Axis Pact in all cases. Now there are separate versions for the SAP, TP, UIS, and TOS, which are the only alliances that causes this style of influence drop (and which all have their own much-lower influence floors, of course).
  • Thanks to Histidine and Ragwortshire for reporting.

• Several of the outsourcing influence gains have been reduced:
  • Boost Scientific Research: from 30 to 5.
  • Boost Outpost And Building Construction: from 30 to 5.
  • Help Construct Acutian Industrial Building: from 30 to 8.
  • Help Research Vaccine remains at 30, as that is super important.
  • Thanks to Histidine, worldstone, and Drak for suggesting.

• The baseline technological prowess of the Skylaxians and Evucks has been toned down a bit. This won't affect existing savegames, however.
  • Thanks to Conductorbosh and others for inspiring this change.

• Races are no longer shy about getting into new wars simply because some outposts of theirs are being attacked.
  • In the prior version, this was causing races to be hugely passive.
  • Thanks to Conductorbosh for reporting.

• Every month, certain races now get annoyed with other races based on planet counts:
  • The Skylaxians and Andors get angry at any race that has more than 1 planet if they only have 1.
  • The Thoraxians and Burlusts get jealous of any race that has more than 1 planet if they only have 1.
  • The Thoraxians and Burlusts get discontented from having only one planet, and get progressively more unhappy with other races based on that. This one doesn't kick in until after 9 years, however.

• The Skylaxians and Boarines are now willing to do attacks of opportunity.

• All races now consider an attack of opportunity valid if they have 2x the forces of the opponent, rather than it having to be 4x.

• The military strength threshold for races going to war if they have less than -500 attitude toward another race has been lowered so that they will attempt war so long as they at least equal the strength of the other race, rather than having to have double the strength of the other race.

• The entire action structure, which is largely hidden from the player, is now shifted to be split into military and peaceable segments.
  • Previously the race could only have 2 actions total, and military actions would often compete with peaceable actions.
  • Now there can be two of each category, and military actions will only compete with other military actions.

• The rate at which space outposts are constructed is now 3x slower, because those were popping up like weeds in recent versions, particularly given how much hardier they now are.
  • This would have been a big problem in terms of blocking up the military actions queue (or constantly getting canceled) prior to those two action queues being split, so this was actually one of the prime motivators for that split.

• The power of all the attitude/influence-based "spreading" race actions from the last couple of versions have been halved in effectiveness. The burlusts spreading hate in particular were really causing a log of devolution into madness.

• Fixed a, ah, rather critical bug in the prior version of the game where races would not attack each other in most cases unless they were already involved in a war. There were certain circumstances where wars could still break out, but they were exceedinly rare, leading to rather peaceful solar systems.

• Armada construction was recently slowed down an enormous amount, but it was a bit much. It's now double what it has been for the last few versions, which is still quite slow to what it used to be.

Three New Racial Actions

• Added a new race action: Grumble About Hydral.
  • Only happens to fed races that hate you, and makes them feel betrayed. If this goes on for too long, then they will leave the federation!
  • This is something that really changes the dynamic of the late game, because you can no longer just ignore your influence with races who are in the federation.

• Added a new race action: Collaborate On Self Improvement.
  • Only happens when a race and some of its friends have really poor planetary conditions (at least one RCI bar < -100 somewhere), and gradually improves the RCI of all involved.

• Added a new race action: Embargo.
  • Only happens when a race really dislikes another that has at least a moderately prosperous (econ > 25) planet. Whittles away at the econ values of the hated races.

Auto-Resolve Improvements

• If you are playing with tutorials on, the game now gives you a message during the first combat mission about not allowing auto-resolve if you try to do it. This is to prevent you from missing some tutorial messages that are important and which only come up during that particular combat. Been meaning to put that in for a while, but have not.

• The following scenario types now have max turn caps for auto-resolve that makes them always winnable, even if they do take a really long time:
  • Freighter Convoy: 999
  • Destroy Pirate Base: 999
  • Smuggle In Resistance Fighters: 999
  • Raid Pirate Convoy: 999
  • Raid Hydral Technology Lab: 999
  • Capture Civilian Outpost: 999
  • Capture Technology: 999
  • Quest: Scientist Defection: 999
  • Quest: Attack Detention Facility: 999
  • Quest: Bring Something To Race While Blocked By Another Race: 999
  • Deliver Spacefaring Tech: 500
  • Quest: Deliver Technical Documents: 500
  • First Encounter: 100
  • These caps act as kind of a safety valve to make sure that these quests are always complete-able no matter what in autoresolve, despite whatever other factors may be going on.
  • Thanks to windgen and ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The ability to auto-resolve battles is now available in permadeath mode. On reflection, that's more appropriate.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where civilian goodies and docking targets were being counted as enemy ships during auto-resolve, and where hydral powerups were not properly being counted as allied ships during auto-resolve.
  • This led to inflated auto-resolution turns in a number of types of cases.
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

• Fixed a bug with auto-resolve that was causing you to always lose the quest for bringing spacefaring tech via shooting down enemy ships.
  • Thanks to casualsax for reporting.

• The number of turns taken to auto-resolve combat is in general now scaled a bit better.

• The number of pilots that you pick up during auto-resolve is now MUCH more appropriate.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• If you auto-resolve the deliver-spacefaring-tech mission, it now treats it as if you alerted ALL of the spy probes.
  • Thanks to L4m3ness for inspiring this change.

Spy Probe Improvements

• You can no longer use special abilities in any of the missions with spy probes, as that again makes them too trivial.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue with the spy probes not properly warping out after detecting you, and thus hanging around invisibly, etc.
  • Thanks to Drak, Kahuna, windgen, Histidine, and nas1m for reporting.

• The number of spy probes in the smuggling spacefaring tech missions are now 2x more than before, and 1.5x more than before in the delivering technical documents missions. This makes for huge amounts of overlap and basically impossible to dodge all the probes. However, you can choose which ones you alerting versus which ones you are not.
  • Thanks to GC13 and jonasan for inspiring this change.

• Spy Probes no longer inappropriately warp out during delivering technical documents missions.

• During missions with spy probes in them that you are trying to avoid, now only the first one warps out when you alert it. All of the other are simply activated and start coming for you.

• Fixed an issue where spy probes could still fire at you before they knew you were there.

• Now once spy probes are alerted to you, their speed goes up 50x.

• Spy probes now have a new sort of gun that is long-ranged, concussive, and powerful, making them rather terrifying.

Player Weapon Balance

• The attack power of the spreadshot has been reduced slightly, its range has been reduced to 2/3 its prior value, and it now fires far fewer salvos at a time.
  • Thanks to timfortress, conductorbosh, lifehole, Drak, I-KP, dada11dada22, jonasan, and CygnusX1 for suggesting.

• The attack power of mass drivers has been doubled.
  • Thanks to dada11dada22 and jonasan for inspiring this change.

• The attack range of the player minigun is now a bit larger, its attack power is now 50% higher, and its shots now move slightly faster.
  • Thanks to jonasan for inspiring this change.

Version 1.015 (Nuanced Bloodshed)

(Released May 6th, 2014)

• Updated the consequence prediction and result text in the game to not use annoying capitalization (Ctrl+U in Visual Studio is an amazing thing).
  • Thanks to Ljas for reporting.

• The following actions now place MUCH looser restrictions (from 3ish per side to 99 per side) on the number of total armadas committed to the combat (they still get "queued" so that only so many are actually present in the battle, but they'll show up as others get destroyed):
  • Help Defend Against Invader Armadas
  • Hold Off Overwhelming Attack
  • Defend Outpost
  • Help Invader Armadas With Attack
  • Attack Planetary Defensive Armadas
  • Attack Planetary Defensive Armadas On Your Own
  • Thanks to Drak and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue from the prior version where delivering terraforming specs would throw an error if you tried to accept it after the race became spacefaring.
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where disease spreading from invasion troops to planetary populations would cause a sidebar notification and voice clip even if the planet already had that disease.
  • Thanks to timfortress and topper for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where it was possible for both sides of a trade route to send the same resource.
  • Thanks to nat_401, windgen, Misery, timfortress, L4m3ness, and Andrew D for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where an Acutian or Burlust planet being captured would not always actually have all of its CEOs/Warlords killed. This could result in things like a Thoraxian hive queen's political menu including Acutian industrial categories.
  • Didn't actually prevent things like the Thoraxians showing Acutian categories if there are actually still CEOs there, as we want to know if there's some other bug letting them still be there (though an old save with them will still have them, until the planet is captured again).
  • Thanks to Histidine for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the "Execute Deal" button would not show up on the actions/deals screen because it wasn't factoring in the dropdown choices you'd made.
  • For example, it was possible for the Andors to be able to create the federation with the thoraxians for (in that case) 3000 credits, but without the dropdown choice the game thought it cost like 40,000 credits, and wouldn't let you do it without that much.
  • Thanks to Zeru for the report and save.

• Fixed a longstanding, buried bug where a lot of the contract prediction logic (including credit cost calculation) would assume a related race of whoever happened to own the first node added to the map during mapgen. Generally those calculations wouldn't actually be used but could cause a contract option to be red when it should be white, etc.

• Added a "timestamp" display to the notification sidebar tooltips, including the date and how much actual game time ago that represents.
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for the suggestion.

Solar Map Balance

• There is now a new tech/building combo that is unique to the Burlusts, called Warzone Ground Weaponry.
  • This can only be built by the Burlusts on their own worlds, and they start with it on their first world, but it is also retained if another race captures one of their planets.
  • This gives whoever controls the planet a 4x ground combat boost against any invaders. Naturally this is no protection against orbital bombardment.

• Terraformers are no longer reduced in effectiveness by negative environmental RCI.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed some more things with piratical exodus still lasting far too long and showing a timer of ??? and so on.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Races will no longer attack critically-weak planets, or do attacks of opportunity, if they are already involved in a war, or if their number of armadas is too low to also defend their own planets at the same time.
  • Thanks to GC13, timfortress, lifehole, and ptarth for reporting.

• Pirate fleets will now never attack other pirate fleets.

• Non-pirate fleets will now never attack outposts of races that they have -10 or higher attitude towards.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where fleets attacking an outpost would eventually capture/destroy it even if still opposed by defending fleets.

• The Underground Tunnels building type can no longer be sabotaged. It was an oversight that previously it could be.

• Burlust warlords dying from internal war no longer trigger Burlust Turmoil. Because, frankly, it's just business as usual to them. They would probably be more disturbed by a _lack_ of random internal warlord murder.
  • This avoids the Burlusts immediately being in a state of Turmoil (and thus declaring war) as soon as they hit spacefaring, etc.
  • Thanks to timfortress and L4m3ness for inspiring this change.

Planetary Summary/Details Improvements

• The advanced details for planets/outposts now includes a note on if you have a diplomat with them or not, same as it does with the informant.

• In the advanced planetary details, RCI is now defined also as "Reported Condition Indices."
  • Thanks to GC13 and SuperCactus for suggesting.

• For player outposts, emergency reserve squadrons no longer show up in the details for the outpost, and instead security goons now show up.
  • Thanks to alocritani for reporting.

• Fixed the names for a number of the Acutian Industry buildings, which were far too long and verbose.

• A huge number of improvements have been made to the advanced planetary details sidebar stuff.
  • Things are better ordered.
  • Things no longer run over from one line into the next.
  • Everything is broken out into really sensible sections that start out collapsed and can be expanded and collapsed at will.
  • Things actually have headers so that it's clear what each group of stuff is, whereas sometimes it previously was not.
  • Thanks to a variety of players for feedback that led to this, including Tormodino, Sacarathe, Drak, ptarth, jinksy, Sounds, Foogsert, Aswin, GC13, Mick, and Meneth.

• Previously, moon colonies were not being shown anywhere in the planetary summary/details. Now they are shown under the new location info section.
  • Thanks to Enrymion, Aswin, and GC13 for suggesting.

• A new "Compatibilities With This Planet" section has been added to the planetary details/summary page, so that you can see what the various compatibilities are from each race with a given planet you are looking at. This has some strategic implications, and someone had asked us for that, but now we can't find where that request was. But here's the feature!

• Previously, the columns in some of the grids were right-aligned in order to make it easier to see what values went with which column. However, this bugged a number of people.
  • Now there is alternating brightness on the gridlines between every other column, which helps to make it easier to follow lines across with your eyes.
  • Also, on the plantary summary/details page, every other row is now a bit darker, which makes it even easier to tell despite the shift to left-aligning.
  • Same with the technology grid.
  • Thanks to nas1m for requesting this, as well as someone else long ago that we said no to, but now we can't find their request. Anyway, here it is now!

New Race Actions On The Solar Map

• Paired with the two spreading-style race actions from the prior version of the game, now all of the races have a unique spreading-style action.

• New race-specific action for Evucks: Spread Mistrust Of Federation
  • The Evucks are not a part of the federation, and either have less than -50 attitude toward a federation member, or you have less than -50 influence with the Evucks. All non-federation members who have at least a 0 attitude towards the Evucks lose a bit of attitude every month toward every federation race, and you lose a little bit of influence with all those races, too. The mistrust of the Evucks can be infectious...

• New race-specific action for Thoraxians: Spread Fear Of Federation
  • The Thoraxians are a part of the federation, which is frankly quite alarming to most non-federation races. Any non-federation members except the Burlusts lose a bit of attitude every month toward every federation race, and you lose a little bit of influence with all those races, too. Fear of the Thoraxians is hard to overcome even for races who are on seemingly good terms with the hive.

• New race-specific action for Peltians: Spread Calm
  • The Peltians are not a part of the federation, but either have 10 attitude toward a federation member, or you have 10 influence with the Peltians. All non-federation members who have at least a 0 attitude towards the Peltians gain a small bit of attitude every month toward every federation race, and you gain a small bit of influence with all those races, too. The faith that the Peltians have in the ideals of the federation can be at least a small influencer...

• New race-specific action for Skylaxians: Spread Science
  • The Skylaxians are part of an alliance with other races, and wish to share their scientific abilities with co-members with whom they have a mutual attitude of at least 0. All such members get a new Skylaxian Micro-Lab gifted to them on each of their planets every month. These micro-labs aren't all that huge of a science boost on their own, but every bit adds up...

• New race-specific action for Acutians: Spread Industry
  • The Acutians are part of an alliance with other races, and feel it is in their interests to share their industrial abilities with co-members with whom they have a mutual attitude of at least 0. All such members get a new Acutian Micro-Factory gifted to them on each of their planets every month. These micro-factories aren't all that huge of a ship-construction-speed boost on their own, but every bit adds up...

• New race-specific action for Boarines: Spread Defenses
  • The Boarines are part of an alliance with other races, and feel it is in their interests to share their defensive abilities with co-members with whom they have a mutual attitude of at least 0. All such members get a new Boarine Ground-Defense Turret gifted to them on each of their planets every month. These turrets aren't all that huge of a local-ground-power boost on their own, but every bit adds up...

Version 1.014 (Hotfix)

(Released May 5th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug in the prior version of the game where you could not actually start new campaigns properly.
  • Thanks to kamikazi1231 and horndoggy for reporting.

• Now that property development and research technology give you the full amounts regardless of goons or science boosting speeds, the amounts of Credit and influence you gain from them has had to be dramatically dropped to make them at all balanced.

Version 1.013 (Love, Hate, And Challenge)

(Released May 5th, 2014)

• When a race cancels a quest, the time until that quest can come up again in general is now divided by 25.

• When quests are over in various fashions, there is now per-race time limiters on how long it can be before a quest comes up again of that sort.
  • Specifically, with things like rejecting a quest from one race, that makes it so that race won't ask you about that specific kind of quest again for a very long time.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed a couple of typos.
  • Thanks to LaGrange for reporting.

• When you quit the game by using a method other than actually using the in-game buttons (such as using the close button on a windowed version of the game), it will now properly shut down steamworks (if you are on the steam version of the game), save your settings, and save your ironman game if you are in the middle of one.
  • Update thanks to Drak: This also does work with Alt+F4 or Cmd+Q, and so on -- even using "End Task" from the task manager (which is supposed to shut down a program in an orderly fashion, by the way, so that's essentially the same as hitting the X on a program). However, if you use the processes tab task manager to "force quit" the game, that is something that insta-kills a program (aka "drop everything and die right now"), and of course that's not going to save anything.
  • Thanks to dbfoxtw and Greytalon for reporting.

• Directly after a combat is won or lost, ironman now autosaves. This should prevent any exploits with being able to work around the ironman restrictions, but please do let us know if you find any more!
  • Thanks to CricketMask for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where an outpost-construction-fleet that reached its destination but was unable to build would just sit there for all eternity unless killed (even if the spot became viable again later). Now it will try to find a new spot to build.
  • Thanks to Histidine and Drak for the reports and saves.

• Fixed a bug where the outsource-to-build-acutian-industry-building action was constructing the building on the outsourced outpost (where it had no impact on the sim) rather than on the planet you'd started the action.
  • Thanks to L4m3ness, DocPhoenix, Dragonblade, Loha4, and TheDarkMaster for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the recently added "don't allow selecting non-spacefaring planets" logic for deals with related-planet-selection was actually checking that your client was spacefaring, rather than that the possible planet choices were spacefaring.
  • Thanks to L4m3ness for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where, in some conditions, ships in cowardly flight would get constantly shifted back to attacking or some other AI type. When cowardice was forced by the situation (some races run if they have no flagships left) they would consistently run, but it would not ever actually reach the "ok, we've been running for 2 full turns now, so disappear" point in the logic.
  • This made it often impossible to fully win a defend-against-AFA or defend-against-Assassin mission because you had to kill all the little guys, and the little guys flew away from you as fast as their little engines could carry them.
  • Along with this, also removed the requirement that a cowardly ship be offscreen before it was allowed to disappear.
  • Thanks to worldstone for the report and save.

• Updated some things related to quests to make sure that some of them would not be canceled inappropriately if planetary circumstances fluctuated, for instance.

• Fixed up the "deliver terraforming specs" mission type so that the race has to be spacefaring for the quest to appear, but not for it to avoid being canceled.
  • Thanks to nas1m, wyvern83, and Drak for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with quests where their notifications were not actually showing you the name of the quest that was created or canceled or whatever.

• Fixed an issue with quests where their text was incorrectly yellow.
  • Thanks to alocritani for reporting.

• Improved the "Canceled Quest" message so that rather than being incredibly vague, it actually now tells you why the quest was canceled (there are a variety of reasons that a quest could validly be canceled, and this helps to give a sense of context rather than just papering over a "bug" that is not actually a bug at all).

• Put in a fix that should prevent some unreadable text over-wrapping on the action/deal windows at times.
  • Thanks to Kahuna for reporting.

Clarity Improvements

• Now all deals where you pick one related race will do the whole "show invalid options in red, with tooltips explaining why" thing. Certain invalidating reasons still completely hide the option, but its pretty obvious in those cases (the race not having any planets, etc).
  • Thanks to nas1m, Misery, and lifehole for inspiring this change.

• The planetary overlay figures "enemy armadas" and "enemy armada power" previously had a tooltip that displayed a list of each distinct race and fleet-type that was attacking the planet. Now those tooltips also list exactly what happened during the previous day's fighting there:
  • Attacker space power lost to planetary defense guns.
  • Defender space power destroyed by the attackers.
  • Attacker space power lost to defensive armada fire.
  • Planetary population killed by orbital bombardment.
  • Planetary population killed in ground combat.
  • Attacker troops killed in ground combat.
  • Thanks to chemical_art, Misery, lifehole, and many others for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a misleading tooltip about Burlusts attacking from internal turmoil, where the tooltip was still saying that you directly killed the warlord, where in fact it would happen from a warlord dying from any cause.
  • Thanks to Drak and ptarth for reporting.

• The deploy orbital bomber tooltips have been updated to show the actual effects of each bomb that hits rather than being vague.
  • Thanks to alocritani for suggesting.

• Updated the confirm popup text for withdrawing to reflect the fact that it is now instant rather than taking 5 turns.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and nas1m for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where various "join the federation because our planet is scarytown" deals did not have the "requires non-federation planet" flag set, and thus would show up (generally redded-out) on federation planets.
  • Thanks to GC13 for the report.

• Fixed a bug where if you executed a deal or an action that concluded instantly but then could not re-select that same type of deal/action on the interface, it would still point to the old deal/action reference, thus giving unsightly error messages and not letting you proceed. Overall it was really just a cosmetic thing, but it was a commonly reported one to be sure, and very unsightly and potentially confusing. Now it just selects nothing in these cases.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, Cire, Prokofiev, nas1m, TheDarkMaster, Histidine, ptarth, windgen, LaGrange, and Maverick for reporting.

Solar Map Performance Improvements

• Made some dramatic performance improvements to ground combat; previously it hadn't been happening very much but now it's basically as common as orbital bombardment (moreso, with Skylaxians), so it was slowing some cases down heavily.

• Made some other more general performance improvements, mainly to operations that check all planets (so that they only check the planets, not all nodes in the game). Not as dramatic as the ground combat stuff, but should help.

• Moderately improved performance of ultra-fast-forward by suppressing the NPC-combat particle effects during it. It was generating tons of them that would never even be seen due to the rate of time passage, etc.

Solar Map Balance

• Now when a race is starting a normal Attack-Planet action it will try to aim at the least defended planet of the race they want to fight.
  • Doesn't apply to the various opportunistic attacks, which either already have a planet in mind or are against races with such a puny total space power that the targeting doesn't really matter.
  • Thanks to timfortress for inspiring this change.

• Removed the negative-influence-with-attacking-race effect of the "Help Defend Against Invader Armadas" action because that action is sometimes just vs pirates, and either way you already get negative influence for shooting down the attacker's ships (and if you don't shoot any of them down, they probably shouldn't mind that you just happened to be flying around during the battle).
  • Note that if you've got an old save in the middle of such an action, the influence change will still apply that particular time.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

• In recent versions of the game, the length of events lasting was one of the things that had been adjusted to last super long periods of time. These now happen 8x times faster than before, in terms of how long they last. This was one of those cases where actually slowing them down made them MORE of an effect, rather than less.
  • Thanks to Misery, Winge, Coppermantis, jonasan, and DarkenMe for reporting.

• The RCI-influencing buildings and techs are now 8x more effective than before, and the general RCI trends are now 5x more effective than before. Since the changes in 1.010, they have indeed been too weak rather than too strong. Hopefully this is a better middle-ground, but we'll see how it feels.
  • Thanks to Warpstorm and Histidine for reporting.

• A number of deals and action types no longer have the "abetting the enemy" consequence type. These typically refer to indirect actions that involve two races, or that involve the Andors or Evucks or Acutians doing something else to another race. This excludes a number of confusing or outright wrong cases without affecting the balance of the game much, and also cuts down on the huge number of lines of consequences that could happen in some cases.
  • Thanks to Histidine and Prokofiev for reporting.

• Dispatches which benefit from your science or manufacturing multiplier now have their credit and influence rewards multiplied by that.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Dispatches where you expend goons to save months now give you the credit and influence for those saved months.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the base rate of ground combat on the highest difficulty was 20 times that of easy, rather than 2 times (the middle difficulty is 1.5 times).

• Diplomats can now be hired and fired for non-spacefaring races, since there are quests related to non-spacefaring races.
  • Thanks to windgen and Drak for suggesting.

• Fixed a number of buildings that you were supposed to be losing influence when you destroyed them, but their sign was inverted and thus it just ignored them.

• Added a new building type that is automatically granted to federation members, but which does not show up on any other planets (and is removed from any planets that withdraw from the federation): Federation Ministry
  • One of the large benefits of being inside the federation is that federation planets get RCI boosts when their values are very negative. The ministry provides more RCI depending on how negative the RCI is:

6 per month when less than -2000 5 per month when less than -1500 4 per month when less than -1000 3 per month when less than -750 2 per month when less than -500 1 per month when less than -250 0.5 per month when less than -100

• • This logic was there, but invisible and inverted, in the prior version of the game. Being invisible was definitely not good at all, but all of the negative signs were inverted such that you'd always get +6 per month if you were in the federation and had less than 2000 RCI (goodness).
  • Thanks to Histidine, ptarth, and genrtul for reporting.

• If a race likes the Andors less than 0, or the Andors like a race less than -50, then they will no longer do their "Send In Assistance" action for that race. That prevents a variety of cases where ingrateful races could spiral into Andor hatred.
  • Thanks to GC13, Drak, and worldstone for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the game would not clear your "partial progress towards constructing an outpost" with a race after the outpost was completed. This meant that constructing the same type of outpost again for the same race took zero (or negative) time.
  • Thanks to windgen, dfinlay, L4m3ness, and jonasan for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where planetary natural birth/death rates could still be positive during a ground invasion, when the population was lower than the actual theoretical natural death rate.
  • Thanks to GC13 for the report and save.

• Piratical exodus, piteous plight, and evucks infecting an enemy planet will no longer happen more than once every 9 years individually for a given race.
  • Technically the repeating exodus and plight actions were the designed behavior, but they seemed like a bug and were certainly annoying.
  • Thanks to alocritani, Redtank, Bossman, GC13, timfortress, and L4m3ness for suggesting.

• Previously, it was possible for the Andors to waste part of their planetary budget on building personnel transports even though they don't use those or even construct them with the budget allocated to them. Fixed.
  • Thanks to GC13 for reporting.

• Now a race won't join an existing Solar Axis Pact unless its attitude towards each current member (and the attitude of each current member towards it) is at least 0.
  • Thanks to Lilli for inspiring this change.

• Made some adjustments so that Acutian Industry buildings can now also be constructed via the property development dispatch, and so that there are appropriate resource costs and so forth associated with those.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for suggesting this change.

• The Evucks will now no longer ever try to ignite a gas giant that they have if they have more than one planet.
  • Thanks to Orelius, wyvern83, Redtank, and Thasero for reporting.

• The base credit cost of getting the Thoraxians to recall their raid ships is now 1000 instead of 100.

• The credit cost of attacking the skylaxian senate, the andor parliament, and the thoraxian hive queen have jumped from 0 to 15,000 to be in line with all other assassinations and to avoid some exploits that were related there.
  • Thanks to Brids17 and Raide for reporting the exploit.

Harder Strategic Difficulty Levels

• You asked for harder strategic difficulties, and so here you go! ;)
  • Hard mode itself now has slightly higher negative influence shifts compared to Normal, to make a bit better of a jump there.
  • Added a new Harder mode:
    • Races become spacefaring 4x faster. Compared to Hard, there are even more events going on in the solar system, and influence losses are substantially more severe.
  • Added a new Nightmare mode:
    • Races become spacefaring 5x faster. Compared to Harder, there are even more events going on in the solar system, and influence losses are very very severe.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic and Aswin for suggesting.

New Race Actions On The Solar Map

• Various players have been asking for more sidebar-style actions for the races to take other than just building space outposts and attacking. Of course there's plenty more than that already, but it's certainly weighted toward there being a lot of fighting showing up.
  • These race-specific ones help to make the choices as to who goes into the federation when, and who stays out, more meaningful. Each of these actions only happens when the race in question is either in or out of the federation, and is either helpful or harmful depending on your circumstances. So, yet another factor to consider, particularly at advanced levels of play.

• New unique Burlust action: Spread Hate
  • The Burlusts are stirring up hatred throughout the solar system. Everyone who has at least a 0 attitude towards the Burlusts loses a bit of attitude every month toward every race that the Burlusts have less than 0 attitude towards. If the Burlusts were in the Federation, they wouldn't do this kind of thing...

• New unique Andor action: Spread Love
  • The Andors are working to create harmony throughout the solar system. Everyone who has at least a 0 attitude towards the Andors gains a bit of attitude every month toward every race that the Andors have greater than 0 attitude towards. This is only something that the Andors are willing to do since they are in the Federation.

Version 1.012 (War And Spies)

(Released May 2nd, 2014)

• Added some colorization in to the category headers in the friendly actions, hostile actions, and black market deals, because otherwise the list could get pretty darn overwhelming. The idea here is like with the buildings and the techs.

• Fixed an issue where teleportation was under the visual sort category of Science instead of Ground Power.
  • Thanks to YunoRaptor for reporting.

• Goons have been moved up in the black market window so that they are now directly under your flagship stuff, rather than way down at the bottom. This much better reflects their importance.

• Rewrote the explanation of tariffs to actually make sense.
  • Thanks to I-KP for reporting.

• When popups are showing with buttons for you to click, the game no longer allows panning in the background.

• When you are in a popup window, it now does a better job of disabling parts of the GUI underneath so that when you click cancel or OK or whatever, it doesn't accidentally click something else under it, too.

• Fixed a bug where every deal required at least 5 peltian voting proxies... even if it wasn't a peltian planet.

Key "Player Power" On The Solar Map Improvements

• Fixed an issue where a lot of times you could not get races to declare war on another race.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines for the savegame that helped us find this.

• Assassinating a hive queen now has a major new advantage: it completely removes any bonuses against bombing that that planet has until a new hive queen is installed. All the drones are running around on the surface.
  • Consequently, the influence loss with the thoraxians is also now 4x higher.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines for inspiring this change.

• The way that races adjust credit/leverage/proxy costs based on their attitudes toward other races, and your influence with them, has been improved so that costs are more reasonably capped in terms of how high they will go.

• In the prior version of the game, the monthly effects of each attitude building had been slowed to be 1/5th as effective as previously. Now that has been bumped back up to be 20% higher than the 1.009 values.
  • Thanks to Histidine, dada11dada22, Misery, and nas1m for suggesting.

Five New Evuck Political Deals

• Five new military-category political deals have been added for the Evucks, where you can get them to affect either the RCI values of enemy planets, or to halt shipbuilding at a planet.
  • Use Spy Probes To Ecologically Damage Planet
  • Use Spy Probes To Undermine Planet Economy
  • Use Spy Probes To Cause Planetary Unrest
  • Use Spy Probes To Poison Population
  • Use Spy Probes To Disrupt Shipbuilding
  • These are powerful new tools that make the evucks a much more useful ally, rather like the inverse of the Andors, heh. It gives you a lot of new "always available" (so long as the Evucks like you) options for affecting the solar system in negative ways.

Better Clarity And General Logic On Wars

• Previously it was actually possible (through some very old code) for races to decide to attack one another, ignite their gas giant, or send a planetcracker at someone else, for NO REASON AT ALL. Just because they felt like it, really.

• Previously, the Andors, Boarines, Peltians, and Skylaxians would do attacks of opportunity against other planets, but now they will not. They need a better motivation than that.

• The chance of burlust warlords dying during internal wars has dropped from 30% to 10%.

• Previously, when an attack was declared by one race against another, there was no indication of why. There are actually 8 internal reasons why a race might attack another, and now the icon of the attack notification shows which reason it was, and the description on that icon explains further what the cause was.

• Previously it was possible for races to accidentally go to internal war for... no reason, really. Fixed.

• The deals screen is now much more specific about _why_ a race is unwilling or unable to accept an "Attack Other Race" deal.
  • Thanks to Cyprene, forte712, LaGrange, lifehole, iplaytlf2014, Conductorbosh, and others for inspiring this change.

• Now when looking at an "Attack Another Race" deal, the dropdown will include all races rather than just the valid choices (though it will exclude the client race, and any races with no planets), but display them in red.
  • Further, mouseovering a red option will display a tooltip with the reasons why that option is invalid.
  • Thanks to nas1m, Misery, and lifehole for inspiring this change.

Quest-Related Improvements

• Now when a quest is canceled early due to whatever reasons (it no longer being valid for some reason, anyhow), it now logs an event explaining that. The message:
  • Hey! Those guys canceled their quest before the time ran out! Did they die or something? Lose the location the quest was related to? Find themselves no longer in need of the sort of help the quest was requesting? Whatever the case, they considered the quest to no longer be something valid as a desire, and so they retracted their offer. At least none of the consequences of ignoring it apply...
  • Thanks to Josep for inspiring this change.

• The message on the Accept Quest window about how the other quest is lost when you take this one is now shown in yellow, making it much more prominent, since it is pretty important.

• On the Accept Quest screen, there is now a new "Reject Quest" option, which immediately clears that quest and gives you the same consequences as if you had ignored it. The benefit of doing this is that, since you can only have two quests active at once, you can clear the way for a potentially more-interesting quest to appear without having to wait for this one to expire first. With more quests coming, this is pretty relevant.

Diplomats

• New Friendly Action: Hire Diplomat
  • COMPUTER REPORT: Hiring a part-time mercenary diplomat to interact with this race on your behalf will make this race a lot more likely to reach out to you with quests. For any races that you particularly favor, who you want to run quests for, you should hire diplomats for them and fire any diplomats for races that interest you less. It won't guarantee that you ONLY get quests related to your favored race(s), but it dramatically increases the chances.

• New Friendly Action: Fire Diplomat
  • COMPUTER REPORT: Having a part-time mercenary diplomat to interact with this race on your behalf is making this race a lot more likely to reach out to you with quests. If you don't really want to have a higher chance of quests with this race, then you should fire their your diplomat that works with them. It won't guarantee that you get NO quests related to your this race, but it no longer inflates your chances of getting quests with them.

Version 1.011 (Hotfix)

(Released May 1st, 2014)

• Reverted the smuggler and birth/death rates to their values from 1.009.

• Made some logic adjustments to death rates so that races suffering from a disease or low public order or medical or planetary compatibility don't just have CALAMITOUS lack of population.

• Toned down the benefits of science lab tech upgrades more than a bit.

• The benefits of science labs is now additive, not multiplicative. This is part of what was letting the Skylaxians run rampant before.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version where (cough) combat was actually happening faster, rather than slower, on the solar map. Not sure how that one slipped by us.

• In observer mode, fast forwarding and super fast forwarding now move even faster than before, because things take so much longer to resolve (which is a good thing for regular games, but boring in observer).

Version 1.010 (Pacing And RCI)

(Released May 1st, 2014)

• Changed the rule where if a race was attacking another race or being attacked by them, that the attitude buildings would have no effect. That was just confusing.
  • Thanks to GC13 for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where if a planet had multiple of the same type of attitude building, it was acting as if you only had one of that particular type.
  • Thanks to GC13 for reporting.

• Fixed a missing localization issue in the error message that happens when you try to load a savegame that has been deleted.
  • Thanks to Drak for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where much achievement-related statistics data was not being persisted across save/load.
  • One example of this was that you could get the "won after taking down the Solar Axis Pact" achievement if you won without having save/load'd since the dissolution of the pact, but could not get it if you'd saved and loaded since that dissolution.
  • Another example was that you could go hog wild destroying pirate bases, but as long as you did a save/load before actually winning you'd get the achievement for winning without destroying any pirate bases. Also applies to a lot of the "win without ever..." achievements.
  • Thanks to Orelius, SNAFU, Elijah, jonasan, Draco18s, tubasteve, Aswin, and Billick for reporting.

• Previously it was possible to broker trade troutes, colonize moons, dump toxic waste on, and do other such things against planets that are not yet spacefaring. Fixed.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, ptarth, alocritani, Enrymion, Kalpa, Coppermantis, and Tyr for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the post-combat log of what your Orbital Bomber units did to the planet's population was showing an error line instead of the fact that you'd just wiped out 1 million people of the owner race.
  • The population damage and building destruction did appear to already be happening properly, though. Bear in mind that with any significant fast-forward after the battle the population losses may be replaced pretty quickly.
  • Thanks to conductorbosh and dmraneo for reporting.

• Each hit from an Orbital Bomb that you drop now does 6x more damage to population (6m population rather than 1m), and has a 25% better chance of destroying a random building. Each bomb hit also now costs you 3 influence with that race rather than 1, so your influence-to-kill ratio is now much better. BUT if you destroy a building, you also lose 10 influence for each building killed in that way.
  • Overall this should help the feeling that orbital bombers were not actually accomplishing anything meaningful.

• Fixed the description of the Plant Evidence of False Conspiracy action, which still referenced old static chances of success, which no longer apply.
  • Thanks to GC13 for reporting.

• Fixed a description inconsistency relating to the Andors destroying assassin fleets. Specifically, it was saying that the assassins were destroyed because you were in Andor space. But in reality, it was actually destroying them because the assassins passed _through_ Andor space on their way to get to you. So the behavior was correct, but it seemed wrong because you could be at someone else's planet and get the message about the Andors helping you from somewhere else in the solar system.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where a semi-recent performance improvement to reduce the load from asking "what node is this fleet docked at?" was making it so that the _player_ was assumed to still be docked at a planet even if the player was now trying to dock with a nearby outpost; so nearby that technically the player was still in docking range of the planet.
  • Now it will properly always treat the player as docked with the nearest dockable node.
  • Thanks to windgen for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the logging of an event starting on an outpost would include a "{0}" in the title (that's where the race name usually goes, but isn't necessary here).
  • Note that this won't repair old logged events, as those strings are saved as-is upon logging rather than recomputed each time.
  • Thanks to windgen for the report and save.

• Ground invasions will no longer try to pull the last few ground soldier population units from a sending planet, to avoid actually emptying out the population.
  • Thanks to ussdefiant for the report.

• Improved some wording on the Evuck politics screen.
  • Thanks to lifehole for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the black market's start-of-game seeding logic for "stay at least X pixels away from all planets" was actually only checking the destroyed hydral planet, not the homeworlds.
  • Thanks to windgen and Drak for reporting.

• Now when attacking armadas confront defending armadas of a planet or outpost, each defending armada can only engage two attacking armadas per day.
  • The other attacking armadas are free to bombard/invade the planet/outpost, if they've been in orbit long enough for that.
  • Thanks to lifehole, topper, and others for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug in the tooltips for the attacker-armada-count and attacker-power figures on the planet overlays where the power levels listed for each attacking force were using the older style of reporting the force's "effective power" (base power + tech bonuses, largely) rather than the force's "NPC-autoresolve power" (base power + flotillas * 10 + tech bonuses + various other stuff), which the figures themselves were using.
  • Thanks to windgen, ptarth, Hyfrydle, and GC13 for reporting.

• Previously, for every 1 Environmental RCI above 50 that a race had, they would gain 0.1 compatibility with their planet.
  • Now that has been dropped to 0.02, since the RCI values vary upwards so much higher nowadays.
  • Thanks to nas1m for a report that helped us find this.

• Previously, if a planet's Environmental RCI was below 0, then it would lose planetary compatibility VERY fast until it hit 0.1 total compatibility, or -100 RCI, whichever came first. Then it would actually go bonkers and possibly increase; the math was still assuming that -100 was the lowest RCI could go, which hasn't been true for a long while now.
  • Now it works more like the positive environmental RCI does. For every Environmental RCI below 0, it loses 0.02 compatibility, until it hits 0.1 total compatibility, below which it will not go.
  • Thanks to nas1m for a report that helped us find this.

• Previously, the environmental RCI impact on planetary compatibility was not mentioned in the tooltips for either the environmental RCI or the planetary compability. Whoops.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where in fast-forward or super-fast forward on the solar map, the game could let of egregious numbers of particles during big battles in particular (we're talking 60,000 at one time as opposed to a few dozen or hundred). This makes it so that the hitching and incredible lag and hangups that you would sometimes see when fast-forwarding in late game are now completely gone.

• Previously, when one race destroyed the space installation of another race, it only caused a drop of 1.4 attitude. Now it causes a drop of 20.
  • Thanks to topper for suggesting.

• When the Andors do their "Send In Assistance" action to other races, the other races are either grateful or resentful for it, and the Andors are pleased with the other race in terms of being glad to assist.
  • Additionally, whenever the Andors do one of their foreign aid style of contracts initiated by you, the relations also go up.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where the after-battle, after-deal report was showing incorrect "your influence is now" numbers, which also made the influence ranges look wonky. Everywhere else it was correct, but on this particular screen it was trying to sum some values and really not doing what it was supposed to for this part of it.
  • Thanks to Mick, alocritani, Draco18s, Aswin, Erheller, and Drak for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where viewing certain deals and actions would show your current influence with races as being more than what it actually was.
  • Thanks to Konqq and Foogsert for reporting.

• Fixed three chatter lines where the Skylaxian and Thoraxians had their text swapped.
  • Thanks to Histidine, Darloth, wyvern83, nas1m, ussdefiant, SuperCactus, for reporting.

• Made absolutely sure that no new chatter entries or similar can appear for Skylaxian elections after they are dead.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for reporting.

Pacing Of The Solar Map

• The pacing of the solar map has been altered to give the player more time to react to things.
  • Basically this lets you have far more of an effect on things, because things spiral out of control far less fast.
  • Thanks to a lot of players for making suggestions in this area.

• The following things now happen half as fast:
  • Usable land area expansion.
  • Personnel Transport Production
  • The rate of pirate base additions during piratical exodus.
  • Actions taken by races
  • The rate of pirate ship spawns from pirate bases.
  • The length of time events last.

• The following things now happen a quarter as fast:
  • The time it takes for races to build buildings.
  • The time it takes for races to research things on their own.
  • The buildup of spy probes.
  • The rate of skirmisher spawns from racial planets.
  • The buildup of smugglers.
  • Armada improvement rates.

• The following things now happen an eighth as fast:
  • New armada construction rates.
  • Birth and death rates.
  • The rate at which bombings, ground attacks, and NPC space battles take place.

Improvements To The Speed Of RCI Fluctuations

• The following things now happen a tenth as fast:
  • Natural RCI trends (positive or negative).
  • The monthly impact of buildings on increasing RCI values, and the monthly impact of attitude buildings in general.
  • Monthly RCI value gains from technologies.

• In general, some of the "periodic boosts to RCI" from techs were just insanely too powerful. Those have been converted into the more modest monthly gains format.

• The following things now happen a twentieth as fast:
  • The rate at which RCI values change during diseases, and the rate at which population dies during diseases.
  • The amount that RCI bars are affected during combat at a planet.
  • RCI shifts during housing booms.
  • RCI shifts during repair parts shortages.
  • RCI shifts from rise in suicide rates, mass riots, mass brawls, flooding, and shortages of doctors.

• RCI gains from techs and buildings no longer improve a planet anymore if that planet has already reached 2000 RCI for that stat.

• The economic RCI gains from destroying enemy fleets has been removed (it was one per armada, before).

• If an RCI bar is ever above 2300 in value (unlikely now, but still), then it will drop in value by 1 per month. There is still no absolute cap, but this creates a soft cap.

Version 1.009 (Merging Beta Branch With Official)

(Released May 30th, 2014)

• Attacked-By-Assassins and Attacked-By-AFA fights no longer prevent you from withdrawing for 40 turns, but each surviving enemy flagship adds 4*"hull % left" months (so 4 months max per flagship) to the time you spend "getting away".

• Now when you sabotage a planetary building, that planet cannot insta-buy more buildings (using mined resources) for 20 months.
  • This prevents a situation where you destroy, say, a Space Elevator, and the race insta-buys another one during the 1-month-fast-forward period that follows the contract. It was valid (it did pay the resources), but looked like a bug.
  • Thanks to GC13 and others for reporting.

Solar Map NPC vs NPC Battle Improvements

• Now when a planet/outpost's owner changes (through ground invasion, surrender, etc), all NPC fleets attacking it have their "number of days of NPC-combat that must pass before big changes like bombardment or invasion can start" counter reset as if they had just started attacking it.
  • This should avoid really fast flipping-back-and-forth situations when two non-allied races are sieging a planet and one just happens to take control before the other (and the other doesn't feel inclined to stop trying to take control).
  • Thanks to lifehole for inspiring this change.

• Fleets conducting ground invasions now have much more reliable "supply lines" of Ground Soldier population and Personnel Transport stockpile.
  • Previously ground invasions would often stall out because, while the soldiers and transports were available in abundance, they weren't actually being brought to the front.
  • Thanks to lifehole for inspiring this change.

Typos

• Fixed a misspelling of "Produces Hologram Channels We Disike"
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed a grammar issue in the Thoraxian ticker scroll issue for wiping out another race.
  • Thanks to Kalpa for reporting.

• Fixed a grammar issue in the description for the "Eliminate Tariff Against Planet" deal.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for reporting.

• Fixed "Pacification Gas" being misspelled.
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

• Improved the grammar on the advanced start text.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed some typos in the combat difficulty level descriptions.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• New wording for the Starting Year text.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the "New Pirate Convoy Signal" text.
  • Thanks to LaGrange for reporting.

Version 1.008 (Hotfix)

(Released April 29th, 2014)

• Fixed an issue in the prior version with the Thoraxians starting with two underground tunnels on their first world. Whoops.
  • Thanks to GC13 for reporting.

• Previously, races were willing to surrender their planets to Andors, who would then accept them. Now when a race would surrender, the Andors instead simply declare a mutual truce with that race for a while.
  • Thanks to GC13 and Hyfrydle for reporting.

• The ground combat multipliers for the Burlusts and the Thoraxians were admittedly a bit high in the last version, and have been toned back, heh.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Left and right clicking the race icon above a planet or outpost now works the same as left or right clicking the planet before. Previously right-clicks on the race icon worked like left-clicks, which was super annoying.
  • Thanks to several players for reporting this, although we can't find the reports at the moment for some reason.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version where right-clicking planets was no longer opening their summary screen.
  • Thanks to GC13 for reporting.

Version 1.007 (Solar Map Balance And Auto-Resolve Polish)

(Released April 29th, 2014)

• Deployed squadron/drone ships now start at about 25% faded-in, to avoid the appearance of a just-destroyed deploying ship (or emergency response hangar) continuing to deploy ships after death.
  • Thanks to Chthon and alocritani for reporting.

• Now when the Evucks join the Federation, if they were working on igniting a gas giant they now cancel that action.
  • Previously, when they would just keep at it, this would result in their immediate ejection from the Federation (as with any other alliance).
  • Thanks to ulu, wyvern83, Ved, and Zephyr for reporting.

• Previously the description for the deal where you convince the Burlusts to join an existing strong federation was misleading because it claimed that it wouldn't be allowed if there was more than one "weakling (non-Acutian, non-Thoraxian) race in the Fed already. No such rule existed in the code, but one has been added now, to match the description.
  • Thanks to L4m3ness, Aswin, and Coppermantis for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where a race having a vaccine would sometimes not actually eradicate the last remaining cases of the disease because of some math rounding errors not letting the very last unit of infected population be cured.
  • Note that it does take time post-vaccine for the remaining cases to be cured; the vaccine just prevents new infections and puts the disease into remission.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines and L4m3ness for the report.

• Assassins rule changes:
  • Now only spawn once per interval, rather than once-per-qualifying-planet per interval.
  • Interval is now at least 4 years.
  • Federation races now never qualify.
  • No longer spawn from being in orbit of a planet of a hostile alliance, to avoid messing with the 4-year interval thing.
    • Though these will still sometimes spawn from a Hire Burlust Spies action, but there you know what's happening.
  • Thanks to Histidine, Ajnin, Hyfrydle, and wyvern83 for inspiring these changes.

• The game now allows you to bind keys to any of the mouse buttons (up to 5) for any function.
  • Thanks to Sacarathe for suggesting.

• The "Cancel" and "Open Menu" keybinds have been split, and you can now use right-click to cancel being in a window with great ease, which is really convenient.
  • Thanks to Cyprene, orzelek, Azurian, pepboy, Raide Ucchedavada, and alocritani for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where squadrons (including player operation-spawned squadrons) could sometimes just sit there doing nothing at all, because they were being issued attack orders that they immediately then discarded as invalid.
  • Thanks to Inquisitor83, nas1m, dada11dada22, windgen, Meneth, Faulty Logic, tubasteve, YunoRaptor for reporting.

• In order to convince a race to enact huge tax breaks, they must now have both an environmental rating and a medical rating of at least -100.
  • This removes an easy exploit for getting certain races to Scarytown RCI levels.
  • Thanks to ifehole for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the new RCI-desperation-based join-federation deals were not actually adding the races to the federation.
  • Thanks to lifehole for reporting.

• Fixed a text issue that claimed concussive-vulnerable hulls increased Energy damage (it was working properly, but saying the wrong thing).
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed it so that after you execute a "join federation" or "Create federation" deal, it automatically closes the deals window, whereas previously it was giving error results and staying in the window.
  • Thanks to Kalpa for reporting.

• The ship stat bonuses from the Mark levels are now a more sane progression. It's still something good to keep up with, but the numbers no longer get to just ridiculous amounts anymore. Though on Mark VII there is a very severe jump and that one is intended to be kind of cataclysmic (it's really not expected to happen often at all).
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

Attitude Manipulation Adjustments

• The amount of resource income generated per trade route has been reduced to 2/5 its former value.
  • The amount of Economic RCI gain from trade routes is now 1/20th as high as it used to be, and the amount of attitude gain is now 1/10th as high as before.
  • Thanks to lifehole and a number of other players for inspiring these changes.

• Now every time you plant false evidence of a conspiracy, the race you planted the evidence with becomes more resistant to future plants, whether or not you succeed or fail. This resistance is reduced over time.
  • Different races also have different susceptibilities to false evidence now, and different amounts that those chances of success fall each time you do one, and different amounts of time it takes for the chances to go back up.
  • Thanks to lifehole for inspiring these changes.

Solar Map Balance

• Thanks to GC13, lifehole, ptarth, Conductorbosh, Histidine, th_pion, and Zulgaines, for getting us to look into it.

• The thresholds at which races go to war based on attitudes have been lowered to reflect the larger range of attitudes that pop up in general with races these days.

• The assembly rate for Acutian robots has been reduced quite a bit, to represent the complexity it takes to create them. They have no natural death rate, so this is fitting anyhow.

• The ship construction speed multipliers inherent to races have been tuned, in particular lowering the ridiculous values that the Acutians had.

• The baseline ground combat effectiveness of the Burlusts and the Thoraxians is now vastly stronger. This helps to offset the improvements in ground combat technologies that other races get, because these races are just supposed to be the epitome of ground wars.

• The Thoraxians are now less penalized for being on low-compatibility planets than they previously were. Their birth rates are also now up some, and their starting populations on planets are as well.

• The maximum number of armadas that races will build has been roughly quartered, and instead the races put more effort into improving their armadas. The net effect of this is:
  • The overall amount of stuff flying around in the very late game is lower, and thus performance is better.
  • As the player, you have a better ability to make an impact on things, since the aramda counts in the late game are not so overwhelmingly large.
  • Races that become spacefaring late are not at quite such a disadvantage.

• A new tech type and building type pair has been added for the Thoraxians only: Underground Tunnels.
  • This reflects their tunneling nature, and thus makes them incredibly resistant to orbital bombardment.
  • They have this tech from the start of the game, and tunnels on their starting planet. It takes them a while to get tunnels dug when they take a new planet, though, so they are vulnerable at that time.
  • And if another race does capture a Thoraxian planet, then they can also use the tunnels to protect themselves!
  • Protip: if you see races taking "forever" to take down a Thoraxian planet, you can greatly expedite that by killing the hive queen there.

• Greatly reduced the starting population of the Acutians, as it turns out that was one of the major factors contributing to their being an absolutely dominant force in recent versions.

• The general effectiveness of orbital bombardment has been divided by 20, which makes it so that planets are harder to take over via having forces in orbit around a planet early in the game if you don't have enough ground troops to really carry things out.

• 5 new technologies have been added which become available as the game progresses, and which strengthen orbital bombardment levels eventually to levels beyond what the baseline previously was.
  • The first two of these are auto-learned by races within a few months after becoming available, outside of the normal tech research queue.

• Previously, the Peltians had an invisible 100x multiplier to their orbital bombardment strength. This has been removed.
  • Now there are 3 unique-to-peltians technologies for orbital bombardment, each of which gives a 5x multiplier, and each of which is auto-learned shortly after becoming available (they also start with the first one unlocked right at the start of new games).
  • This ultimately gives them a 125x multiplier, but it's now something that is visible, and something that is unfurled a bit over time rather than just being slammed on you right from the start of the game.

Auto-Resolve Cleanup

• Fixed an issue where cleaning up local spy probes did not work properly in auto-resolve, and also threw a bunch of error messages.
  • Thanks to Cire for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where confirmation popups could be too tall to quite fit on the screen.

• Fixed a text issue where any "delivery" stype auto-resolve missions would not show up properly.

• Put in some logic to prevent any auto-resolving of combat that would take more than 1,000 additional turns beyond the current one.

• About a quarter as many pilots are now captured during auto-resolves.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• During combats where your goal is not to kill all the enemy ships in general, your computer now takes steps to avoid enemy ships (as you would), thus reducing the damage your ship takes and thus the overage from turns. This makes things like the deliver spacefaring tech missions actually possible to auto-resolve, whereas before sometimes they would take like 57,000 turns.

• Fixed an issue where searching for hydral tech did not work properly in auto-resolve, and also threw a bunch of error messages.
  • Thanks to Histidine and alocritani for reporting.

• Fixed an oversight where it would still let you auto-resolve after combat was over.
  • Thanks to alocritani for reporting.

• Fixed a number of math issues relating to pilots and credits granted and influence cost during auto-resolve when the enemy forces were overwhelmingly strong in particular.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a number of issues relating to auto-resolve not properly counting as a withdrawal when that was what actually happened; so for instance, assassins would just keep hammering you repeatedly.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

Version 1.006 Beta - Besieging And Federating

(Released April 28th, 2014)

• Due to continued complaints that massively-overwhelming sieges still take forever to actually flip a planet, the divisor applied to slowing down orbital bombardment has been reduced 100x (increasing the effective rate of bombardment by 100x). So a planet that actually has intact defense fleets can still hold out for a while and you can intervene (either to help fight off the attackers or to help clear away the defenders), a planet with no orbital defenses at all will go down relatively quickly to a large attacking space force. Kinetic bombardment is pretty effective, after all, let alone nastier stuff.
  • Thanks to conductorbosh, NickAragua, and others for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a (very substantial) issue with auto-resolve in the prior version where it would not actually count auto-resolutions as victories in most cases, and would thus lead to you not getting the stated rewards from before accepting the contract (though you would get the ship kill rewards and so on from during the auto-resolve period).
  • Thanks to GC13 for reporting.

• Now when a race successfully attacks an outpost it has a 20% chance of capturing that outpost rather than simply destroying it.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for inspiring this change.

• Pirate convoy signals are no longer generated when there are no pirate bases left alive.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report.

• Fixed a bug where on the hardest strategic difficulty, races were becoming spacefaring 3x SLOWER than normal, rather than 3x faster. Oops.
  • Thanks to Telding for reporting.

• Made it so that no race can become spacefaring faster than 2 months into the game.

• Fixed a bug where the "X months will pass after you do this" logic (for example, for the Colonize Moon deals) was simply not being applied at all.
  • Thanks to Mick, Andrew D, Kalpa, Telding, MaxAstro, and ScrObot for the reports.

• Fixed a bug where a ton of combat missions had a "X months will pass after you do this" value set, despite that rule being superseded long ago by the rule that a certain amount of solar time passes per turn spent in combat.
  • This was normally harmless as combat missions would not show this value in the prediction text, but some related contracts (which led to the combat missions) _would_ show this value in the prediction text, which was misleading.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for the report.

• When a race is at war with a member of the UIS, SAP, TP, or TOS, there is a monthly attitude drop from that race against all members of that alliance.

• Burlusts and Thoraixians that are in the federation will no longer auto-attack critically weak planets "just because."

• The Burlusts and Thoraxians no longer attack races that have critically-weak ground power when the aggressor race's space power is less than the defender race's space power. That was a mistake that was causing them to just be overly aggressive and absolutely suicide themselves in a lot of cases.
  • Thanks to eRe4s3r, Raide, Misery, GC13, and Karchedon for reporting.

• Previously, the counter for the trifecta of superiority moving towards forming was something that was invisible. Now this shows up in the form of the three races having increasingly negative influence values toward you. Once this reaches 100 for any of the races (which takes 100 months), then the trifecta forms. Previously it only took 30 months.

• When a race is in the UIS, SAP, or TOS, if they have -50 or worse attitude toward any other members of their alliance, then it will grow increasingly discontented over time and eventually abandon the alliance (happens when your "Dislike Of Other Members Of {AllianceName}" influence with them reaches 100).
  • This provides a non-genocidal way of dealing with these three specific forms of hostile alliance after they have formed, based on attitude manipulation.
  • Thanks to Conductorbosh for inspiring the need for this sort of thing.

• The "New Pirate Convoy Signal" icon now has the correct text. Just ran out of time to do that last version.

• The descriptive text on political deals and actions is now less dark.
  • Thanks to Prokofiev for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the scrollbars in the federation progress window were not drawing properly.

• A bunch of improvements have been made to the Federation Progress window, so that you can now see certain things that you are missing at a glance without having to mouseover (Credit, VP, Leverage, and Influence). It also shows the full description in the tooltip, and some cases where the influence amounts may have been showing wrong are now fixed.
  • Thanks to Sacarathe for suggesting.

• In the federation progress window, all of the potential options even for cases in which a race is not yet spacefaring now show properly.

• In the federation progress window, if the federation has not been formed yet then it sorts the federation creation options before the join federation options. It is useful to be able to see both, but more important to see the one before the other.

• Fixed an oversight in the planetary details where the RCI values were showing with huge floating point precision way beyond what is needed.
  • Similarly, fixed the same sort of thing in the tooltips for the race relations bar graph.

• Fixed the issue with Quantum Power Plants having no description.
  • Thanks to nas1m and Misery for reporting.

• Universities no longer have such a huge RCI hit when sabotaged.
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

• Technologies all have a colored category that makes them easy to find and figure out at a glance what they in general do. Buildings previously did not have this, but now do.

• Previously, when you were selecting a building from the property development dispatch, the sorting there was just... wacky. Now it is actually sorted by group and then alphabetically, making this WAY more pleasant to deal with.

• When a race is in the federation and has a really bad RCI value (less than 100), then it automatically increases that value a bit every month, thanks to being in the federation. Yay team! The more negative it is, the faster it increases, and it gradually slows down as it moves from -2000 or lower to -100.

Better Federation Creation Management

• Fixed a bug with creating federations for safety or creating strong federations where the stated requirements were not being checked properly all the time.

• When a fear empire exists, any races that are not a part of some form of alliance now have attitude drops toward any federation races and the fear empire race, and influence drop with you, based on wariness from the fear empire.
  • This gets back at some of the original intent of the fear empire making things more difficult in terms of dealing with non-federation races (which previously was expressed as no races being able to get positive influence gains with you, which was way too strong and also very opaque).

• When a race is at war with one or more federation members, then the attitude of that race toward all the federation members drops substantially per month, as does your influence with them.

• Normally when races hit their equilibrium population on a planet, it can then cause them to become warlike or go to internal war or just stay at equilibrium. Depending on the type of race, and the randomization of that particular solar system, this becomes more or less likely to be bad things versus just sticking at equilibrium. All of this is not new.
  • The new thing is that now when a race is in the federation, they will always just stick at equilibrium in these circumstances rather than going to internal war or warlike. Other factors beyond the above can still cause other states, but the equilibrium population having been reached now is tamed by being in the federation.

Nah, No Federation Points

• Interesting beta-branch experiment, but didn't work out.
  • Thanks to kasnavada, tubasteve, GC13, Faulty Logic, and many others for inspiring this change.

Increased Requirements For Baseline Federation Creation / Joining

• The requirements for getting races into the federation are now much steeper:
  • Generally the credit costs are now at least 10x higher to get races into an existing federation, because goodness these things had costs in line with just buying a new weapon before, which was crazy. Those values were set long before it was clear what the range of credits the player would have would be, and then just haven't been revisited.
    • More revisions here are something we're open to, but overall player games were going on for far shorter (in solar map time) periods than desired. That prevented opportunities for butterfly effect stuff to really kick in properly.
  • To directly convince a race to join an existing federation, you previoulsy had to have -25 influence with them. Now you need:
    • Acutian: 200
    • Andor: 25
    • Skylaxian: 50
    • Thoraxian: 400
    • Evuck: 400
    • Peltian: 25
    • Boarine: 200
  • Convince Burlust to join strong federation also was -25 influence required, but now requires 50.
  • Pressure Burlust to join federation also was -25 influence required, but now requires -200.
  • Having two races create a federation also was -25 influence required, but now requires 50. The credit costs of these have also been increased 3x (which is not nearly as steep as the increases to get more races into the federation, but still is significant).
  • Burlusts creating a strong federation, or the peltians creating a federation for safety, now costs 3x as much in leverage or voting proxies, but now only requires -50 influence rather than -25, since they are particularly interested in
  • Previously, having one race invite another into the federation required an attitude of 90 mutually, but now it requires 300.

• The influence requirements for convincing races to join the federation are now altered by which races are already in the federation (these are all cumulative):
  • Acutians: -50 if Boarines in, -100 if Burlusts, -100 if Thoraxians.
  • Andors: -50 if Boarines in, -100 if Peltians in, -100 if Skylaxians in, +100 if Burlusts, +100 if Thoraxians.
  • Boarines: -25 if Andors in, -25 if Evucks in, -25 if Skylaxians in.
  • Burlusts: -100 if Acutians in, +100 if Andors or Peltians, -50 if Boarines, -75 if Evucks in, -200 if Thoraxians in.
  • Evucks: -50 if Boarines in, -100 if Skylaxians in, +100 if Burlusts or Thoraxians in.
  • Peltians: -50 if Boarines in, -100 if Andors in, -100 if Skylaxians in, +100 if Burlusts, +100 if Thoraxians.
  • Thoraxians: -50 if Boarines in, -100 if Acutians, Evucks, or Burlusts in, +150 if Skylaxians in, +50 if Peltians or Andors in.
  • Skylaxians: -100 if Andors or Peltians in, +300 if Burlusts in, +100 if Acutians, Evucks, or Thoraxians in.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for suggesting.

• If a race is actively at war with any federation races, they will not be willing to join the federation at that time.

Non-Spacefaring Reactions To Federation Formation

• When you form the federation, any races that are not yet spacefaring now get progressively worse attitudes toward the federation races until they become spacefaring, and you also progressively lose influence with them. Once they are spacefaring, this attrition stops.
  • Thanks to madcow and a number of other players for inspiring this change.

New Political Deals For Convincing Races To Join The Federation

• New political deal that allows you to get races into the federation: Join Federation Due To Overwhelming Attacks
  • COMPUTER REPORT: If the federation already exists, this race is being throttled by non-federation races, then this can be an excellent chance to get them into the federation for purposes of protection!
  • The costs here are vastly lower in terms of credit and influence required, compared to normal "convince to join the existing federation" costs. However, the race must be under "overwhelming attack" on at least one of their planets.
  • This is for all the races except for the Burlusts (which would not dare such a cowardly reason for joining the federation) and the Evucks (who become increasingly paranoid, not open, when under such attacks).

• There are eight new race-specific political deals for joining the federation that involve having absolutely abysmal (-2000) RCI values in a specific category (each race has a different category). In these deals, the desperation of the race is such that there is very little influence required on your part (-200 or better), and the Credit cost is also quite low.

New Buildings For Affecting Race Attitudes Over Time

• 15 new buildings have now been added to the property development dispatch option.
  • These buildings all have an ongoing monthly effect on the attitudes of races towards one another IF they are not at war with one another. Each building is kind of a passive export that some races appreciate, and some don't. So you get some positive and negative effects with 2-4 other races beyond the one that holds the building, and this is a great way to build up relations between races outside of trade.
  • There are another 13 attitude factor types for races to go along with these, too.
  • The races do not build these of their own accord, so this is entirely something you get to manage.

NPC Fleet vs NPC Fleet Autoresolve Combat Overhaul

• Basically this was using logic that was mostly from way before alpha, and that logic was much better suited to the strategic realities obtaining at that time than now. Now most significant NPC vs NPC fleet combat involves dozens if not hundreds of armadas, and (at least later in the game, with tech bonuses) very large power values.
  • This may result in NPC fleet battles happening substantially faster in some cases (but waaaay slower in others like those we tested, since they were insta-gib situations). If it's out of control please let us know and we can tweak some dials.
  • Thanks to L4m3ness, GC13, an3r4, Histidine, wyvern83, and many others over the months for reporting various things which pointed at oddities under-the-hood.

• Previously individual armadas would pair off and shoot at each other, with the weaker armada only having a very small chance of damaging the stronger one (and even then only a little bit, relatively), while the stronger one got to basically unload on the weaker one. This made some sense with one-vs-one combats but not in dozens-vs-dozens where there would often be a large mix of very-small and somewhat-larger armadas, so the overall result was being unduly impacted by which armadas happened to "draw" which opponent armadas for each round.
  • Now in a round of such combat each armada will do its damage to the other armada, simultaneously. So the less-powerful one will still get mauled (relatively, it still takes months for similarly-sized forces to really smash each other) but the more-powerful one will now get hurt in due proportion.

• Previously the various bonuses which multiplied a fleet's autoresolve strength (tech bonuses, boarine rage multiplier, burlust turmoil multiplier, etc) were only being applied to armada attack power, not to its ability to absorb damage. This led to insta-gib situations later in the game. A much-more-rapid conclusion is still possible if one race has a MUCH higher effective bonus than its opponent, but that is desirable.

• Previously if hundreds of attacker armadas pounced on a planet with only a dozen or so defender armadas, each day all of the attacker armadas would do a full round of combat with a defender armada. Interestingly, this often tended to massively favor the _defender_, as the defender generally has larger individual armadas and was getting full shots at every single one of the attacking armadas despite being greivously outnumbered. So it was possible for an attacker which (in terms of the numeric power displayed on the overlays) out-strength'd the defender by over 5x to still actually _lose_.
  • Now each attacker armada still attacks a defender armada each day, but:
    • It always picks a defender armada that has not yet fought that day, if there is one.
    • If there isn't such a defender armada, it picks one that has fought the least number of times that day (so if they've all fought once, it will pick them all once again before any one is picked a third time).
      • In the example where all the defenders have fought once, and one is picked again, it divides the attacker's effective attack power by 1.15 and divides the defender's effective attack power by 1.4.
      • If all the defenders have fought twice, and one is picked a third time, the divisors are 1.3225 and 1.96, respectively. And so on, basically 1.15^x and 1.4^x.
      • This represents the growing difficulty to efficiently fight in crowded conditions, and that the defender is going to get the worse end of such a combat since all the attackers are coming in will full weapon charges vs their outnumbered weapons, etc.

• Fixed a bug where the space power numbers displayed in the overlays (for both attacker and defender) were not actually accounting for all the various things which impact autoresolve combat.

Version 1.005 Beta - Holy Smokes It's Big

(Released April 25th, 2014)

Combat Balance

• Squadrons deployed mid-combat now cannot fire that turn, they must wait until the next turn to fire. Avoids insta-death from Lancer squadrons that didn't even exist when you were planning your move, etc.
  • Thanks to zharmad for the suggestion.

• The number of attack squadrons that races commit (as opposed to guard or other functions) now varies by race during battles. The Andors and Peltians are more cautious than before, whereas the Thoraxians are more aggressive and the Burlusts are just unbridled aggression. The others are mostly not shifted much, although the Acutians are a little more aggressive.

• The way that races calculate their relationships between one another during battles is now far superior compared to what it used to be, when it comes to things like pirates and assassins and AFA members and whatnot.

• When you use Mercenary Hotline, only races that main government factions in a battle will give you the negative influence from that. Pirates and whatnot don't care.
  • The same when you break neutrality on a side, or betray a side during combat.
  • Also, while the game was already trying to prevent influence losses from you shooting enemy ships that are not actually from a planetary government, it now does a better job of that.

• Now, when you're cloaked, enemy ships and homing missiles stop chasing you.
  • Thanks to topper and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Previously, when a side in combat had no friendly spawners (flagships, or invisible spawn points for certain battles where a race has squadrons but no flagships) remaining all ships on that side would switch to Attacker mode to just get it over with. Now, for the Andors, Evucks, Peltians, and Skylaxians, those ships will instead go into the existing "Cowardly Flight" behavior mode and try to get away.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for inspiring this change.

• The attack-planet-defenders-on-your-own action is now just you vs the planet defenders, no one else. The attack-planet-defenders-with-help action is as before, pulling in whoever's there (plus some help from your chosen ally).

• Fixed the description of one of the help-defend-planet sorts of actions that was implying the planet's race was at war with the race of the attacker. This was not the case if the attackers were pirates.
  • Thanks to jonasan for the report.

Auto-Resolve Option For Battles

• For each ability that you have in your posession, you now get a multiplier to either your hull strength or attack strength, and then also to your autoresolve power. They are broken out by category:
  • Direct Weapons: 1.01 to attack, 1.1 to autoresolve.
  • Offensive: 1.005 to attack, 1.05 to autoresolve.
  • Operations: 1.005 to hull, 1.05 to autoresolve.
  • Specialty: 1.004 to hull, 1.04 to autoresolve.
  • These apply whether or not you have them actually equipped.

• Down in the lower left corner of every battle, there is now an auto-resolve button that can be clicked at any point during the battle.

Big Revisions To Widely-Disliked Mission Types

Heavily Revised "Clean Up AFA" Missions

• The "Clean Up AFA" missions:
  • Now no longer refer to getting ally help in their description, nor ask you to pick an ally to have come help you (that wasn't generally working, anyway).
  • Now spawn considerably fewer enemy flagships in most cases.
  • Now no longer have the objective "kill all enemy ships", but rather "kill all AFA barracks"
    • One barracks is seeded for each 10m AFA Insurgents on the planet (max 20 barracks), and destroying one kills that many of that planet's insurgents.

"Smuggle In Resistance Fighter" Overhaul

• Thanks to GC13, Raide, Misery, and others for inspiring these changes.

• Now instead of the troop ships following you in pairs (with the others basically doing nothing until the previous pair either makes it through or dies), all 10 troop ships will be active from the start.

• Rather than following you, the troop ships beeline towards the drop zone. They use a sort of "follow the leader" movement so they don't all clump up to make one big target.

• Fixed some bugs where the "if a side is in situation X, all that side's ships should go on the attack" logic was interfering with the troop transports.

• Fixed a bug where you could not select a technically-dead race (no planets left) for the mission, even if that race had pirate bases to supply the troops.

• Fixed a bug where some "attack target offset" logic added way after the smuggle-resistance contract was making the troop transports go very strange places.

"Deliver Spacefaring Technology" Overhaul

• Thanks to Misery, zespri, pepboy, Kingpin23, and others for inspiring these changes.

• 3 times as many spy drones are now seeded.
  • Across a wider area, as well.

• Spy drones now warp out when alerted.

• Spy drones no longer have squadrons to deploy when alerted.

• Turrets are no longer seeded in these.

• You only suffer the influence loss with races whose probes you alert.

• And the prediction now states that you only lose influence with a race if it catches you in the act.

Solar Map Balance / Fixes / Etc

• Now when you mouseover the attacker-armadas or attacker-armada-power figures of a planet/outpost's metamap overlay, the tooltip includes a list of each attacking force (for example, "Burlust Armadas", "Boarine Armadas", "Boarine Pirate Armadas", etc) and the total power of that force.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for inspiring this change.

• The Federation Progress screen now specifies when a race is dead, and no longer shows deals which could (hypothetically) be used to get them into the Federation, or deals (under other races) where the dead race could be used to get that other race into the Federation.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic and topper for reporting.

• When NPC fleets are engaged in combat in deep space, instead of drawing the icons stationary on top of each other it now draws:
  • One of the fleets (generally the defender) stationary, with a pulsing red glow. Also has a tooltip that mentions the fleet is engaged in combat.
  • The other fleets (the attackers) moving around it as smaller icons (same deal as float around the planets during combat there).
  • This should make it clearer that the fleets are not "stuck", per se, they're just shooting at each other.
  • Thanks to topper, Aklyon, Misery, and others for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug with the planetcracker targeting logic (used whenever one is built "naturally", or if one you pay them to fire has to "retarget" for whatever reason) where Mono was rejecting the compiled code as invalid... at runtime (sigh). Didn't so much fix it as rewrite the code to be simpler and thus to not confuse the runtime.
  • Thanks to dbfoxtw for the report.

• Previously Acutian planetcrackers that hit a now-friendly target would actually "bounce" and retarget something else. They will now always hit the planet they're aimed at (unless it's no longer a planet). Even if that planet is now friendly to the Acutians. Even if that planet is now _owned_ by the Acutians. Once fired, that planet's going down. Orders ARE Orders, after all.
  • Thanks to Orelius and Draco18s for inspiring this change.

• "Metamap AOE" (Acutian planetcrackers cause a small radius of this, Evuck Gas Giant Ignition causes a LARGE radius of this) no longer destroys (other) Acutian planetcrackers. Just in case, y'know, you're launching them in _salvos_ (develoepr shakes head).
  • Thanks to dbfoxtw for inspiring this change.

• This doesn't yet have any purpose beyond being thematic, but it's going to play into some upcoming game mechanics:
  • For a number of types of positive influence gains that you can get, if the race is in a hostile alliance other than a smuggler empire or the betrayed, you will instead gain influence in a new "Helped Us Despite Our Hostile Alliance" category. Later on, this will play into opening up the availability of some certain quests related to these races, but for now it's just a thematic thing.

• The planet name "Pekka" has been renamed to "Pikdor," since (unbeknownst to us) Pekka is a common Finnish name.
  • Thanks to Kahuna for reporting.

• Destroying a pirate base now:
  • Grants 1000 credit.
  • Gives you 5 influence with all non-SmugglerEmpire races, in addition to the 5 influence it was already giving you with the race you selected as your ally in the fight.
  • Thanks to Aswin, GC13, and Misery for inspiring these changes.

• Raiding pirate convoys now follows the pattern of search for hydral tech: there has to have been a pirate-convoy-signal (they're announced on the right sidebar like with the hydral signals), rather than just letting you repeatedly raid pirate convoys over and over again.
  • Thanks to Aswin, ptarth, Histidine, and others for inspiring this change.

Solar Map Performance Improvements

• Thanks to tbrass, Lancefighter, and others for inspiring these changes.

• While on fast-forward the little "non-sim decorations" for armadas in orbit, satellites, etc are only updated every 250ms, rather than every single sim step (particularly since not all of those sim steps are even visualized on fast forward).

• Now the completion of a new armada no longer immediately causes a race to do the full "reevaluate fleet priorities" logic, but causes it to do so the next time the solar month changes.

• Some building-construction related checks have been moved back from per-frame to per-solar-month (and only then when needed) since they didn't really need to be done that often and were causing signficant CPU load at that frequency.

• The auto-resolve combat now uses coarser calculations for individual armada-vs-armada shots when dealing with larger power differences between armadas (the computation involved something that was done X times, where X was basically the numeric difference in strength between them), saving a great deal of CPU cost that was happening every game-second and thus causing spikes in lag (from 20ms frames to 80ms frames, for example) for just the first frame of each second.

• Overall, in the very-heavily-loaded solar map test case we used for this:
  • Pre-changes:
    • Normal speed solar map - each frame took about 25 milliseconds.
    • Fast Forward solar map - each frame took about 55 milliseconds.
    • Ultra Fast Forward solar map - frame length isn't the main thing here, but it took about 35 seconds to simulate 50 months.
  • Post-changes:
    • Normal speed solar map - each frame took about 12 milliseconds.
    • Fast Forward solar map - each frame took about 21 milliseconds.
    • Ultra Fast Forward solar map - about 30 seconds to simulate 50 months (less of an improvement here, there's just so much math going on, etc).

Federation Points

• Thanks to Boo and galdor123 for inspiring these changes.

• The game now tracks "Federation Points" for each race.

• A race will not join the Federation under any circumstances if its Federation Points value is not at least 1000.

• Each spacefaring race that is not in any alliance will gain a certain amount of Federation Points each month.

• Performing certain contracts/quests can cause you to gain or lose Federation Points (sometimes with more than one race).

Other Really Major Items

• Fixed a couple of confusing things with hostile alliances:
  • On "The Betrayed," added a clarifying note to its tooltip stating that no further influence can be gained with that race.
  • On Fear Empires, there was previously a rule saying that while it existed, you could not gain any influence with ANY other races. That has been changed so that you just can't gain influence with the Fear Empire race, and the tooltip now reflects that.
  • Previously, you could not gain influence with Smuggler Empires, but now you can.
  • Thanks to kasnavada, TheRobin, Azurian, Lunysgwen, Zulgaines, Histidine, Karchedon, wyvern83, and others for reporting.

• Peltian Voting Proxies were previously incredibly easy to come by. Now:
  • The passive income of voting proxies from having positive influence with them has been changed as follows:
    • You don't gain any with them if they are not yet spacefaring, or are in a hostile alliance.
    • You don't start gaining these until you have 25 influence with them, rather than 0.
    • Your monthly gains are now ( influence - 25 ), max 50, divided by 50. Previously your gains were just influence / 3 per month (wow, good grief).
  • Previously, any influence gains with the peltians would give you amount / 3 proxies on all the peltian planets. Now it is amount / 10.
  • Thanks to Draco18s and Misery for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed a bug where Andors were still doing ground-invasion checks. they would not actually invade, but the "if the planet is down to 1 population unit just land some of the fleet crews to take it over" alternate rule was still firing for them.
  • Thanks to SNAFU for the report.

• Fixed a bug where Burlust Turmoil was preventing Stop Attacking deals with other races towards the Burlusts, rather than with the Burlusts towards another race.
  • Thanks to Cire for the report and save.

Version 1.004 (x64 Linux Build)

(Released April 23rd, 2014)

• Taking shield damage no longer causes your docking timer to increase -- just hull damage or the usage of abilities do.
  • Thanks to Ewan, Zulgaines, lesslucid, Coppermantis, GC13, Maverick, chainlinc3, PumaPagan, Habadacus, Fiohnel, Mk1, Raide, Kalpa, Kingpin23, and tubasteve for reporting the difficulties in the prior version.

• Fixed an issue where the Max Per Planet on some buildings was 0, when really it was meant to be infinite. Now it's set to a more-reasonable 400 in general.
  • Thanks to Kalpa for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where Terraforming Kits were costing only 18 months for player construction. They now cost 150.
  • Thanks to Kalpa for reporting.

• Fixed the descriptions on the prototype flagships of players that were incorrectly stating they had various different stats as well as things like being untrackable by missiles in some cases. As of late alpha, based on player feedback, the only things differentiating the various flagships are what kinds of weapon slots the flagship starts with, and what passive weapons (if any) the flagship has.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter and ptarth for reporting.

• Thoraxian Exterminators, Acutian Executors, and Boarine Tuskers have had their ship speeds reduced to avoid kiting players.
  • Thanks to Ljas for reporting.

• The game has a wonderful new icon courtesy of our friends at GOG.com.

• A 64bit linux build is now available so that linux users do not have to install the 32bit libs if they are on a 64bit version of their OS.

Version 1.003 Permadeath Becomes Optional

(Released April 22nd, 2014)

Solar Map Balance / Updates / Fixes

• When planets are taken over in the solar map, recent rule shifts had made it so that they would be increasingly bad off on RCI values. However, this was something that really could make those planets unrecoverably bad off. Now the RCI values are all reset to between -10 and 0 when a planet changes hands (except via resistance fighters, where it doesn't change at all).
  • Thanks to Gwan Solo, Geldon, and Raide for reporting.

• The "while a planet is under bombardment/invasion, birth rate = 0" has been reverted back to its previous "while a planet is under bombardment/invasion, birth rate is capped at the natural death rate", as it proved far too harsh especially for the Thoraxians.
  • Thanks to eRe4s3r for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the planetary sidebar was reporting the raw budget percentages for a planet rather than the effective budget percentages (specifically, when under overwhelming attack the effective budget ignores the raw decisions and pumps it into armadas).

• Fixed a bug where a planet under overwhelming attack would set its effective budgets for Armada Construction and Armada Improvement to BOTH be 100%. While the sentiment behind "I'm gonna give it 200% of all I can!" is commendable determination, it is poor math. Now it sets them to 50% each.

• Now, even when the building budget is 0%, a planet will at least check to see if its current building project(s) are valid to continue, and if not pick something else to build.
  • Previously it was possible for it to look like it was stuck building, say, a 6th Ion Cannon (max 5 per planet) because it happened to be building one before it came under overwhelming attack (thus freezing the building budget) and then got its 5th ion cannon in some other way (buying with excess raw resources, etc).
  • Thanks to alocritani for the report and save.

• The direct "player is asking a race to join the federation" deals now are only available if the player has >= -25 influence with that race.
  • Thanks to Konqq for inspiring this change.

• When you steal the tech of a race, they are now upset by 20 instead of 10.
  • However, other races are only upset by 12 instead of 24.
  • Additionally, races at war with the race you are stealing from no longer care at all.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• Raiding a trader convoy now angers the race by 14 instead of 10.
  • However, other races are only upset by 9 instead of 21.
  • Additionally, races at war with the race you are stealing from no longer care at all.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the Attacking Splinter Factions event could be triggered on a planet, despite there being no actually-eligible races to draw the "splinter attackers" from.
  • If you attempted to do the defend-from-splinter-attackers contract when this happened, the combat would immediately end due to no hostiles having been spawned.
  • This change will also cause splinter-faction events currently running but now invalid (from an old save, or some very strange confluence of events in a newer game) to be removed. Though if you load an old save with one it will still be there until you unpause and let it check.
  • Thanks to Ljas for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the Boarine Vote-to-join-federation deal would not show up under Interplanetary Relations (because it was trying to show up under Federation Deals, which category the Boarines don't have).
  • Thanks to GC13, Smithgift, and many others for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where many "why this building cannot be built on this planet at this time" checks were simply not being made when populating the "buildings you can pick for a Property Development dispatch" dropdown.
  • Notably, this allowed building more than the maximum allowed number of a particular type of building on a planet, when that planet could not build more itself.
  • Thanks to Raide for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the Property Development dispatch was only letting you pick from building types that the planet already had at least 1 of.

• Now, when a planet is trying to put budget into Armada Improvement (squadrons), but there are no armadas to improve, that budget is automatically funneled into Armada Construction instead.

• Put in a fix to where some of the racial actions were not showing their name properly formatted with actual values inserted.

• Put in an update so that races will now actually properly unlock new ship types as they become available! This includes things like the Model T, the Sine Turret, the Taser Turret, the Racial Special Flagships, etc. Those were all generally not appearing before.

• Fixed a bug where the effective power of armadas was being incorrectly reported on the solar map overlay.

• When you escape from forced combat, it now tries to take you to the destroyed hydral planet rather than the black market (and then defaults to the black market after that). This is partially because the black market is not even visible in the early game, but it also makes a certain amount of thematic sense.

Clarity / Tutorials

• For the "Broker Truce" Andor deal, the following clarifying note has been added to the description:
  • THAT said, there is a cost. Depending on how much the races hate one another, and how they feel about the Andors, AND your personal influence with the Andors, the Credit cost of this may be so insanely high that nobody could ever afford it. Or it could be quite cheap. If it's too costly, we need to spend time improving the factors that we can in order to bring the cost down, or find another way to achieve our ends.
  • Thanks to domday for inspiring this change.

• The solar map overlay now always shows the effective ground power of the defensive troops stationed at a given planet.
  • Additionally, when there are attacking armadas, it now shows the effective ground power of the troops that they have brought along with them.
  • Thanks to TotalBiscuit for pointing out how opaque the ground battles were without numbers like this, and the associated tooltips for their icons.

Burlust Turmoil

• Now when a Burlust Warlord is killed, the entire Burlust race enters a period of turmoil:
  • If by assassination, 4 years.
  • If by dueling, 3 years.
  • Otherwise (generally because a planet is taken), 1 year.
  • For non-prime warlords, the amount is halved.

• While in turmoil, all Burlust metamap space power and ground power is doubled.

• While in turmoil, all Burlust ships hit twice as hard in normal combat.

• While in turmoil, no Burlust Warlords can be duelled.

• While in turmoil, all influence (but not leverage) gains with Burlusts are halved.

• While in turmoil, all Burlust defensive structures (ion cannons, regional defense shields, bomb shelters) stop working.

• While in turmoil, the Burlusts will pick the weakest other race (that is not literally allied with them, or non-spacefaring) and immediately attack them with pretty much whatever they have.

• While in turmoil, the Burlusts will not accept a brokered truce from you (either directly or via the Andors).

Combat Balance / Updates / Fixes

• Fixed a bug where the beginning-of-combat logic that creates the player's ship object was using sometimes using stale precalculated values. In tests today this resulted in hull/shield strength maybe 15% too low. It now recalculates those values just before that operation.

• Fixed a major bug where the "when loading a game, regenerate the player ship's stats to account for any balance changes in updates since the game was saved" logic was actually using radically different stat-computation logic than what is normally used whenever a new ship design is created.
  • This was causing massive drops in hull/shield health when saving and loading mid-combat.
  • Thanks to Kalpa, dasystm8, Dredrick, windgen, mattbornski, pepboy, Hawk52, and others for reporting.

New Enemy Flagship And Rebalanced Velociter

• Velociter flagships are no longer so fast, no longer have such a long strafing time, now fire more bullets, and now have bullets that are slightly stronger. They also no longer have shields at all.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The Velociter Flagship line has now been split into two: Type A and Type B.
  • Type A is basically what existed before, but with the new modifications.
  • Type B is a new variant that uses concussive sniper-style shots, which is quite interesting -- these destroy your shots if they touch them, and they can fire them from super far away, but they don't move that fast.

Docking Improvements / Exploit Fixes

• When you are cloaked, you cannot dock with ships until your cloaking fades. Too much power used on maintaining the cloaking, you know. This was supposed to already be the case, actually, but something was preventing it in some but not all cases.
  • Thanks to TotalBiscuit for pointing the related exploit out.

• While you are docking with something, if you take damage or use an ability, it now adds a turn back to your time-remaining-to-dock. So you can't just camp on a dockable and spam abilities, or just sit there and tank shots if you have a lot of health.
  • Thanks to TotalBiscuit for pointing the related exploit out.

• The time remaining for docking is now expressed in turns rather than seconds.

Permadeath Is Now Optional

• There is now a new option in Advanced Start called "Permadeath." With that option on, things work like they have been up until now. That now defaults to off, however. Without permadeath toggled on (and it is automatically off in all older savegames, now):
  • When you are on the very brink of death in battle, you'll always warp out just in the nick of time, instead. This then takes you to the hydral planet, or the black market.
  • Depending on your strategic difficulty, you will lose either 6, 12, or 20 months of time to fast-forwarding while you retreat and repair your ship. This is a nontrivial penalty, in that things on the solar map may get out of hand -- so just fighting until you die still isn't the best idea; withdrawing is better. However, if you do wind up making a mistake that gets you killed, it's not just something that encourages savescumming by putting its boot in your face.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, MaxAstro, Azurian, tbrass, GC13, NichG, Professor Paul1290 and others for inspiring this.

Version 1.002 (Tech Acquisitions And Planetary Attacks)

(Released April 21st, 2014)

Balance Updates And Fixes

• Fixed an exploit where some ability counts would reset back to the values they started out at, leading to a save/reload exploit.
  • Thanks to Azurian and alocritani for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the Shortwave Virus's range was being displayed as much larger than the 1000 units specified in its description (and unit definition).
  • Thanks to topper, Faulty Logic, Mick, and pepboy for the reports and saves.

• Fixed a bug where the Shortwave Virus would only affect about half of the targets in its actual range (due to how the data was stored internally; if we later _want_ it to be only partly effective we can add that back in a non-buggy manner).
  • Thanks to topper, Faulty Logic, Mick, and pepboy for the reports and saves.

• For the sake of narrative consistency, the Acutians no longer care at all if you sell slaves.

• The races now react with proper pleasure or alarm at the following things that you can do:
  • Undermine Rival Economy (10 pos, 30 neg).
  • Dump Toxic Waste On Planet (50 pos, 150 neg).
  • Are there others you notice? If so, please let us know!
  • Thanks to TotalBiscuit for pointing this out.

• Races which are not yet spacefaring no longer know about your selling of slaves, or acts of extreme brutality, etc.
  • Thanks to TotalBiscuit for pointing this out.

• Made the alliances follow the rule of "if it's a hostile-to-player alliance, they cannot join the federation" that was being assumed in various descriptions, etc.
  • Incidentally, all non-Federation alliances are hostile to the player. Thankfully they all begin in a non-aligned state.
  • Thanks to Konqq for the report and save.

• Raiding races for technology or for resources now pisses everyone off to some degree.
  • However, if some race other than the thoraxians, acutians, or burlusts is raided who is NOT in an alliance with the above, then they don't care. This helps to clean up an exploit where you could repeatedly raid for resources with very little consequence.
  • Thanks to Surfer for reporting.

• Withdrawing is now something that is instant, if you are able to do it. No more waiting around for 5 turns to do so. This lets you push things to the brink a bit more, which ultimately is fine. We aren't trying to encourage save-scumming via the permadeath mechanic, and this particular aspect really did play up the tendency of players to do that.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and others for inspiring this change.

Planetary Attack Balance and Fixes

• Fixed a bug from recent versions where the orbital-bombardment and ground-attack checks would only ever happen at all for an attacking fleet if the defending planet had _exactly_ 1 defending armada (so if it had zero, no bombardment or invasion).
  • As a result, planets under cripplingly overwhemling attack previously appeared invulnerable.
  • Thanks to alocritani, Kingpin23, ShiroIchida and others for the reports and save.

• Fixed a bug where sometimes a planet was so well defended that each attacking fleet's "shot" at the population during bombardment was so small that it was treated as zero. Increased the precision of that math to compensate.

• Now, for each 1 million population that dies in a bombardment or invasion, a planet has a 10% chance (per million population lost) of losing 1 point in an RCI category (econ, environmental, medical, order) that is currently greater than zero. This helps the attackers make some kind of progress even when being held off by a very large population, etc.
  • Thanks to alocritani, Kingpin23, ShiroIchida, GC13, Orelius, Azurian, Ryusacerdos, kasnavada, DeBunny, Feragore, AcidWeb, Ljas, Hyfrydle, Ramarren, rocmat1, zespri, and others for inspiring this change.

• The rule that "while a planet is under bombardment or ground attack, its birth rate is capped at its natural birth" has been strengthened to "while a planet is under bombardment or ground attack, its birth rate is zero".

Technology Acquisition Improvements

• Whenever you raid a race for technology, it now permanently increases the future credit cost of raiding them for further technology by an amount that is specific to the race. This prevents continual spamming of this sort of raid, and makes a nontrivial opportunity cost to who you decide to raid for what.
  • Acutians: +200 Credit per raid.
  • Boarines: +200 Credit per raid.
  • Burlusts: +300 Credit per raid.
  • Evucks: +400 Credit per raid.
  • Peltians: +100 Credit per raid.
  • Skylaxians: +300 Credit per raid.
  • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for inspiring this change.

• Now you can research techs with races even when they already know it. This is something we viewed as superior to being able to buy it from them, as determining credit worths of them would be extremely tricky and would really penalize you in the late game. So, instead:
  • If a race already knows a tech but you do not, the time to research it with them is thirded.
  • However, you gain no credits or influence with them for taking this action, unlike if they are learning it too.
  • Thanks to a lot of players for suggesting that they really wanted a way to get techs from friendly races, including but not limited to Hyfrydle, GC13, Raide, indarien, Azurian

GUI Enhancements

• After completing an instant action (buying or selling something, political deals, whatever), it now just does a smaller popup rather than the full "contract complete" screen. This popup also is just over the normal actions list screen rather than taking you out of it, so you can do multiple political deals or actions repeatedly with ease.
  • Thanks to 6xsnake6x and others for suggesting.

• The "you've been attacked by the AFA" and "you've been attacked by Assassins" combats now start with a popup to more prominently display the scenario description that also shows in the bottom-left-hand-corner of the screen, since there's generally no preceding context for the player to realize what's going on.
  • Thanks to Tridus and chemical_art for inspiring this change.

• When switching between message log modes, it now logs which mode you are switching into, so that for instance the "disappears after a big" message log doesn't confusingly just not show at all when you enter it.
  • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.

Misc Fixes

• Put in an adjustment so that the textbox when you are first selecting your profile name should be selected automatically when you first come into the game, if it was not before. This is in an effort to help compatibility with tablet PCs, although honestly whether or not the game will work with them is a BIG question mark, as it isn't designed for games without a physical mouse and keyboard by nature.
  • Thanks to Madmarcus for suggesting.

• Additionally, the starting name for your profile now defaults to Hydral, just in case the above does not work.
  • Thanks to Azurian for suggesting.

• For races that are at war with one another or in an alliance with one another, but both have neutral-range attitudes to one another, previously the war or alliance lines were not showing on the race relations screen. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Misery, alocritani, and pepboy for reporting.

• The Burlust Duels no longer start out with a voiceover comment about having been hunted down.
  • Thanks to topper for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the Help Research Vaccine action was forgetting which tech it was supposed to research before it actually ended, resulting in no tech for anyone.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug in the Contract-results text logic was giving an error message when trying to tell you about a negative RCI trend ending.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and Phlarr for the reports and saves.

• Tooltips no longer show when there is a popup or a confirmation popup showing, to prevent visual clutter/confusion.
  • Thanks to topper for reporting.

• If popups are so tall that they need to scroll, they now will do so.

• Fixed a bug where the evuck credit cost increases from prior meddling were being applied to the current deal that you were doing with them, and not just future deals.

• Fixed an issue where if a race discovered a technology before you were finished co-researching it with them, you would not get a copy of it.
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for reporting.

Version 1.001 - Bugfixes, Large Screen Resolution Support

(Released April 19th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug that could cause an exception when trying to launch a planetcracker at another planet.
  • Thanks to Techmech, WhiteSeraph, shrikey, Orelius, MaxAstro, and ussdefiant for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where looking at the options to give blackmail to the burlust warlords would give you the leverage immediately.
  • Thanks to SNAFU for reporting.

• Fixed an exception that could happen when trying to do a random number that has a negative max range.
  • Thanks to Feragore for reporting.

• Put in an extra bit of code that should make sure that the "Valuable Learning Experience" achievement properly triggers. In some cases apparently it was not doing so before.
  • Thanks to Chthon for reporting.

• When a planet only has a single armada at it, ground combat is now allowed to still happen. This way planets can't avoid ground combat simply by virtue of being able to crank out a single armada too quickly.
  • Thanks to Histidine for inspiring this change.

• The game now allows you to select screen resolutions larger than 1920x1080.
  • Thanks to Volkira, Azurian, havlentia, Dav, Zero, LintMan, Penumbra, and MattyMuc for suggesting.

• Put in an update so that if steamworks fails to initialize for whatever reason on the steam versions of the game, it will not stop the application from loading.
  • Thanks to Red_Machine for reporting.

Previous Release Notes

The Last Federation Alpha Release Notes