Stars Beyond Reach Beta Phase 2 Release Notes

Version 0.871

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Diplomatic Carnage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spies, Intel, and The Panopticon

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

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

MapGen

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

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

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

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

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

• Temperate Lakes no longer have icecaps.

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

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

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

Prior Beta Notes

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

Stars Beyond Reach Beta Release Notes