Stars Beyond Reach Beta Phase 2 Release Notes

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Version 0.907

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

  • Fixed a bug that was causing lag the first time you clicked into a textbox.
  • The extraction facility has been removed from the game for the time being, since it's useless for the moment (we missed this one last version).
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Social Progress has been removed.
    • The techs that were gated by total social level are now gated by the current turn number.
  • On the tech tree, it now shows the number of turns remaining until various techs are unlocked, rather than showing the turn number you must reach (so it's a countdown timer instead). Hovering over the number shows you the tooltip about what turn it is and what turn it must be, though.
  • The temperature mechanic has been mostly removed, no longer showing the temperature or having a temperature screen or any way that the races can alter planetary temperature or temperature-based impact on stats.
    • There's still the natural temperature fluctuation, which can lead to terrain changes over time.
  • The atmospheric composition mechanic has been removed.
  • Player-side terraforming has been removed.
  • Removed meals.
    • Crops have been renamed to Food. Now rather than needing 1 crop + 1 water + 1 meal-production-capacity + 1 housing for each point of max pop capacity, it's just 1 crop + 1 water + 1 housing.
  • The science top-hud section has been moved up from the lowest section.
  • Three new concepts have been added:
    • Industrial Output
    • Financial Output
    • Cultural Output
    • Some buildings produce one or more of these, and that production goes into a running stockpile for that output type, the total value of which is shown on the top bar in the same place as the social progress used to be.
  • Right-clicking now dismisses an open event (where it's displaying the speaker and the choices), as if you had clicked the last option (the one where it says you'll be back soon, etc)
    • Won't dismiss the event if your time is up and clicking that last option would cause the "on expiration" effect, to avoid accidental cases of this.
  • The "computer notes" shown above the speaker's text in the event dialogue has been moved to a separate section below the speech and to the left of the choices.
  • The leader portrait and end turn button no longer show during an open event dialogue.
  • The icon for the max population counter now has the text MAX over top of it, making it more clear what it is.
    • Thanks to Watashiwa for suggesting.
  • The lander models for stages 2-5 have been updated visually again to make it so that they are no longer sticking up quite so far and blocking buildings behind them from being seen.
  • Fixed a bug where previously passive sonar was not working on the non-main tiles under multi-tile buildings.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Fixed an issue where BuildingLostDueToMissingResource was popping up as an error message in a lot of cases.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug in the prior version where if you were getting events at all, you'd be able to get the same event over and over again, rather than there being a 30 turn grace period between specific events like was supposed to happen.
  • Food is now produced from restaurants, based on how many fishing/agricultural food sources are in their territory and adjacent territories.

Scouting/Sonar Revisions

  • The sonar surveyors buildings is now useless (though it will be repurposed) and has been removed from the game.
    • Scout stations now both sonar and scout all in one.
    • This not only lets us do something more interesting with the sonar scout building in the future, but it also makes it so that the regular scout buildings never become pointless.
    • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.
  • You can no longer directly issue scout or sonar orders.
  • Scout stations now have a reduced range of only 10, rather than 20. Since they are doing sonar sweeps, this keeps them from being absolutely slow off the mark in actually
  • The logic for how scouts choose their target tiles, and sonar along with that, has been rewritten from pretty much the ground up. It's all centered around the scout building itself now (which originally it was just giving a generic scouting point, and thus things centered around district centers).

New Military Model

  • The concept of "interceptions" is gone. There will instead be status effects (soon, but not this release) that encourage combined arms warfare through more interesting (and less get-my-calculator) means.
  • No buildings have immunities or resistances to any form of attack now. That again was a calculator-specific sort of thing that was just annoying. Status effects will be way more interesting.
  • The concept of militia, who are able to strike back at enemies during a fight -- thus providing a way of defending yourself even if you're caught somewhat unprotected in some area (and that goes for your enemies also) is now in place.
  • The concept of the "number of attacks per turn" is now gone.
    • AIs will still only attack once per building they have during the interturn. And on that note, they can ONLY attack each other during the interturn, not you. Same deal with monster attacks.
    • Attacks involving you (offensively or defensively) will be using a new "battle mode" that is one of the big foci of this new version.

Version 0.906

(Released August 19th, 2015)

  • Fixed a bug in the prior version that did not let you build in unclaimed territories.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

Version 0.905

(Released August 18th, 2015)

  • Two new player buildings have been added: a basement prison, and basement luxury apartments. These are both related to events.
  • There is now a separate icon for the "building damaged from insufficient staff," which makes it no longer look like a helicopter accident.
    • Thanks to FroBodine for suggesting.
  • Removed Planet Rage
    • Some of the same functions are carrying over into the "Anger" interaction-group with the planet, that's still in progress.
  • All the various forms of non-military-domination have been removed.
  • Fixed a minor text thing with the delete savegame text missing a space between the words delete and save.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • The entire concept of teleporters as they previously existed have been removed. It was definitely over-complicated.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for reporting.
  • Player buildings that previously had to be in teleporter range (not counting district centers) now have to be placed within 2 territory hops of a district center.
    • For district centers, the limiter is fog of war, which is plenty given the scouting radius stuff introduced a while back. For everything else this is substantially simpler while getting the same idea across.
  • Fixed an issue where players were able to build various things in territories that belonged to other factions that were not subjugated to them. This had to do with the old teleporting logic. It actually wasn't a bug per se -- it's a long story.
  • In the intel display for races, you can now see who they are subjugated to, if they are.
  • The islands, temperate lakes, and tropic planet map styles have all been deprecated and are no longer part of the game.
    • We will likely reintroduce those some time in the future either in an expansion pack or as post-1.0 content if the game does well. But for now we want to concentrate a larger share of resources into a stronger selection of maps.
  • Fixed an issue where the view behind opened windows was being the "no icon" layout, which was annoying in several ways in terms of causing strange refreshes, etc.
    • Thanks to jerith and ptarth for reporting.
  • Fixed a typo with Advanced Immunization.
    • Thanks to jerith for reporting.
  • The Harvester and Extraction Facilities really were not any different from one another, so the purpose of both has been combined into the Harvester alone.
    • Thanks to Valectar for suggesting.
  • All (well, we think all) of the buildings that are currently pointless are now disabled from being placed or showing up in the tech tree. They'll be reintroduced with new functions in the next 2ish weeks.
    • Note that this now leaves some _techs_ as being pointless, aka they unlock nothing. If a tech shows no bonus of any sort, then it's a pointless thing -- if it's in a cul-de-sac, then for now please just ignore it. Please pardon our sawdust and tarps around here at the moment. ;)

Preliminary Events Stuff

  • A whole lot of the new Event structure (which replaces diplomacy) is now in place.
    • This is PRELIMINARY work, but actually interacting with an event is pretty along the lines of an "unpolished final view" of what we want.
    • The biggest things that are super temporary right now is how events happen (what causes them), and what their benefits are. And there are very few events in general. There are really major changes coming in the next couple of versions, over the next couple of weeks.

Explanation From Chris About What Is Coming Up

The main vision that I have for events is this:

1. Some of them will pop up periodically in the fashion that they do now, in order to keep pressure on you and not just let you endlessly hit the end turn button.

2. Right now that's way too frequent and the only way they pop up, though, so that's annoying.

3. I also intend to have more coming in from other races, both hostile and not, so that you get a real feeling of the world being alive.

4. Plus with a lot of the buildings being oriented to new purposes surrounding events, that will have a big impact on the citybuilding priorities and overall balance there (in hopefully a good way).

5. Plus with combat being more streamlined and tying in better with your event-based goals, that should be fluid and fun rather than something that is a chore. Bringing a sense of threat to the world without a sense of tedium. Right now there's been a sense of lack of threat AND of tedium, neither of which is good.

6. Coming along with that, some of the new monsters that Blue has been doing, plus other new stuff relating to the planet actually being a living entity more than has happened in the past, will again help to tie into the feeling of "there is more going on here than just me."

7. Earlier in this process, actually, comes the new player-driven event generation, motivated from those three new "output" types. Basically letting you spend financial, industrial, or cultural points to discover events at various locations. So that you've got a sense of exploration there, which also lets you control the tempo to some extent, even though you won't know what you're going to uncover with that next event.

And overall, I think that's pretty much events end-to-end structurally. Inside that is the various kinds of data importing and logic that goes with new forms of events. And that's what lets you build your own narrative as you go along, for better or for worse in terms of how your narrative turns out. And that, in turn, is both how you wind up winning the game, and the impetus for playing the citybuilding side well -- AND it's the impetus for having truly unique cities, because so many buildings will be contextual or event-related rather than just being these mechanical systems like the base buildings are. Thus basically addressing the complaint (which I agreed with) that there still was not enough reason to unlock things in a different way on different playthroughs in the tech tree.

At that point, presuming that all those pieces are coming together well, then we polish the heck out of that and fill in the rest of the content (mostly on the events side), and then test and polish the heck out of it even further... and that's 1.0.

So can we tell if events themselves are fun to interact with in the current build, or the next build? Sure, I think so, in a limited sense. Can we tell if the overall game has the sort of flow that is interesting and fun and what I envision above? Not for another week or two. But it's looking very positive so far.

Version 0.904

(Released August 11th, 2015)

  • For some reason the "Incineration" type of power production previously said "Bunnies."
    • Thanks to Enrymion for reporting.
  • Added a new toggle to the graphics tab of the settings window: "Always Default To Native Screen Resolution"
    • If this is checked, the game will use the resolution of your monitor on load, rather than trying to load your previously selected preference.
    • Thanks to jerith for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed the alignment of the end-turn button to fit with the current UI backdrop.
  • Added a search bar to the bottom of the tech tree short lists. If you type anything into that the short list switches to a different mode that displays all (including previously researched) techs where the textbox-text is within the name of the tech or the name of any building unlocked by that tech. Not case sensitive.
    • Thanks to tbrass and Sounds for suggesting.
  • The tech details screen no longer shows "Unlocks Buildings" as a single row at the top, but rather has a single row per building at the bottom.
    • And clicking the name of the building opens the details window for that building, and closing that will show the tech details window again.
  • The tooltip for the sidebar notification for tech unlocks now lists the buildings unlocked by that tech, and notes that you can left-click to pull up the tech details.
    • Thanks to SugeBearX for inspiring this change.
  • Now when you know of a resource on a tile, you cannot build a surface building on top of it that does not gather that resource.
    • Same goes for the AI, except they'll always know the resource is there.
    • If you place a conflicting building on an unknown resource, its construction will be cancelled during interturn via orderly demolition, and the resource will be revealed.
  • Resource production once again goes into a stockpile, rather than just being the amount available each turn.
    • But each resource only has ten units, and once that's been extracted the resource marker disappears.
    • The base extraction rate is 0.05 units per turn, multiplied by whatever bonuses and penalties. The stockpile does not increase (and the remaining amount in the ground does not decrease) until a full unit has been "mined".
    • Any extractor not on a resource will self-destruct during the interturn.
  • The player can no longer build underground mines.
  • The buildings that used to consume resources to provide adjacency bonuses now do neither. For now, they're pointless.
  • All old diplomacy-screen-based mechanics have been removed.
  • Manufacturing points, magazine points, and broadcast studio points have been removed.
  • The Event Log, and its button on the escape menu, is gone.
  • Natural wonders no longer give adjacency bonuses.
  • Market item production has been removed (other means of getting them likely to be added soon)
  • International incidents have been removed (other means of handling hostility in process)
  • Added additional protection against "clicking through" the demoltion building, thus destroying the building under the button at the same instant as entering demolition mode.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman for the report and save.
  • Added an english message for the case when the attack tooltip is telling you that you cannot attack something that's still holographic (warping in).
    • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.
  • Buildings that require a certain number of citizens in certain kinds of housing now "fill" their citizen-based efficiency from the most recently activated/constructed to the longest-ago activated one. This is instead of them all getting the same average efficiency. The total math should work out the same.
    • This is substantially more expensive to compute than the average efficiency, so there may be some slowdown in interturn.
  • Reduced transient ram usage on the tech tree by roughly 95%. It had been causing frequent garbage collection on that screen.
  • Updated the market item word parts data based on community work.
    • Thanks to everyone who contributed to the spreadsheet!
  • Some small performance gains in idle framerate.
  • Added an active version of the shortlist button for when the tech shortlist is enabled.
  • Fixed some variation in the bottom-right screen border position between minimap scales.
    • Thanks to jerith for reporting.
  • Changed the lander upgrade message so that "1 Buildings Until Lander Upgrade" is the more plural-correct "Buildings Until Lander Upgrade: {0}".
    • Thanks to jerith for suggesting.
  • The search toolbox on the tech shortlist can now be seen on 720px tall screens.
  • Fixed several issues that were preventing the textbox from showing properly on the search textbox in the technology shortlist in particular.
  • Fixed an issue with the technology search function returning technologies that are deprecated.
  • Updated the default sharpness and brightness values again, based on closer study by our artists.
  • The game no longer uses race-specific lander graphics. Instead, all-new lander graphics in general are used, with a much more singular "huge town center" vibe to it. These also now use the underlying race-themed roads that all the other player buildings do (except for the first stage of the lander, which still uses a burned-ground tile instead).
  • That cursive-y font that the game has been using in a few places for a long time is now gone, replaced by the same type of font that is used in headers more recently throughout the game.

Top Bar Info Presentation Clarification

  • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring these changes.
    • The beatings will continue until clarity improves.
  • Removed the victory progress icon from the top bar.
  • Moved the bottom bar icons down to match the position of the bottom bar.
  • Shifted the number above the scouting bottom bar button to fit in the slot prepared for it.
  • Added a button to the middle of the bottom bar that brings up the victory progress window.
    • It displays the percent of victory progress just above.
  • Shifted the number above the sonar bottom bar button to fit in the slot prepared for it.
  • Changed the percent-based (and some other) top-bar numbers back to showing literal numbers, but with no + or - signs, and instead showing "surplus", "balanced", or "shortage" above them.
  • Top bar stuff no longer fades out even if you have a huge surplus or whatever.
  • Added "Turns Left" above the science, social progress, and planet rage top bar numbers
  • The estimated bodies-per-turn for the top bar graves indicator now considers data for the last 20 turns and weights the most recent five turns (and to a lesser extent the most recent ten turns) higher.
    • And the tooltip now displays the averages across the last five, ten, and twenty turns as well as the current number of unclaimed bodies in the city.
  • The trash and graves top bar indicators now:
    • If there's unprocessed trash/bodies in the city, shows "Shortage" and the amount of the unclaimed amount.
    • Else, if the current production is being taken care of by the current consumption, it shows the amount of extra space you have for storing that and "Surplus" if there is any, or zero and "Balanced" otherwise.
    • Else it shows the number of turns until your remaining storage capacity will be filled by the current rate of production vs consumption, and "Turns Left".
  • Added a line to the trash tooltip saying how much littered trash is currently throughout the city.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman for inspiring this change.
  • Changed the top bar research indicator to show ??? (and no current research in the tooltip) when there's no target research.
    • Thanks to Sounds and mooncows for reporting.
  • The top left GUI has been redesigned to include more space, and to make the most important elements be on the left side of the screen. The end turn button (and its variants) are also now far more visible.
    • Thanks to kasnavada and iozay for reporting.

Language Research Reworking

  • Thanks to Watashiwa, ptarth, Cinth, kasnavada, and Kizor for inspiring these changes.
  • Language research centers no longer take a target race, but instead research the languages of all surviving AI races that you've met.
    • The language progress from embassies and spy safehouses still goes just to their target race, since that's a secondary effect.
  • Each language now has a multiplier on how fast it is researched.
    • And actual linguistic-research-center progress per language per turn is multiplied by a random number from 0.95 to 1.05.
  • The building details window for a language research center now includes a row for each language you can research, stating the level you have of each and how many turns until the next (or it's at max or if you need tech to progress).
    • And each row has a tooltip giving more details.

Version 0.903

(Released July 31st, 2015)

  • Amended some of the shut-down-reasons to only apply to fully constructed buildings, so if a shallow mine winds up losing its eligible terrain underneath it during construction, it doesn't just mysteriously halt building.
    • Also expanded the tooltip on the "nothing to do" status to describe the possible causes.
    • Thanks to greywolf1991 for the report and save.
  • Added a new overlay: Construction
    • Shows the construction skill your colony can put towards each tile per turn.
    • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.
  • Now if a tile changes to water while city wreckage is on top, the wreckage disappears (not retroactive to old saves).
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting that it was possible to have floating wreckage.
  • Added some extra protections against right-click closing both the building/tech details window and the main tech tree.
    • Thanks to Mick for reporting.
  • Changed the death-type logged for people in buildings when they're destroyed (so not through orderly demolition) to be clearer.
    • Thanks to greywolf1991 for reporting.
  • Now if you do a valid building-placement-click on a surface building in underground view (or vice versa) the first click won't actually place the building, but rather will switch the view.
    • Thanks to Tolc for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed a bug dating back to the caching of the images for tiles; the unharvested resource icons were not visually pulsing properly unless your mouse cursor was near it.
    • Thanks to topper for reporting.
  • Reduced the amount of transient allocation (ram turnover) while just looking at the map, roughly 80% to 90% reduction in heavy gamestates. This should reduce the frequency of garbage collection and thus make the game smoother.
  • Reduced the width of some of the columns on the ledger screen and the incidents screen to make them fit on a 1024-wide resolution.
    • Thanks to Kizor for reporting.
  • You can now build in territories owned by races subjugated to you.
    • Thanks to DrGonzo for suggesting.
  • Added the following key-binds, all default unbound because it wasn't clear where to put six new keys (suggestions on that are welcome) :
    • Next Unclaimed Resource
      • Centers the viewport on the next unclaimed resource you know of in your territory or in an unclaimed territory.
    • Previous Unclaimed Resource
      • Centers the viewport on the previous unclaimed resource you know of in your territory or in an unclaimed territory.
    • Next Destroyed Building
      • Centers the viewport on the next tile with wreckage of one of your buildings that you can rebuild.
    • Previous Destroyed Building
      • Centers the viewport on the previous tile with wreckage of one of your buildings that you can rebuild.
    • Next Threatening Hostile
      • Centers the viewport on the next tile with a hostile building that is in attack range of one of the territories you own (not necessarily any building of yours).
    • Previous Threatening Hostile
      • Centers the viewport on the previous tile with a hostile building that is in attack range of one of the territories you own (not necessarily any building of yours).
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for suggesting.
  • The top bar numbers now switch to displaying thousands (1,235k instead of 1,234,567) past 99,999. Power switches to k after 999,999,999.
    • Thanks to Cinth and ptarth for inspiring this change.
  • During interturn, just before normal healing checks, if the wounded population somehow exceeds the normal population, the "overflow" is automatically healed.
    • So if you load an old save with excess wounded they'll still be there, but it will settle out after the next end-turn.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • The inventory screen resource grid tooltip now includes the bonuses provided by that resource.
    • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.
  • The building details window for resource-using buildings now lists, near the bottom, one "Can Consume" row per resource it can potentially use.
    • Resources you don't have access to are grayed out.
    • Mousing over a row shows a tooltip with the bonuses provided by that resource.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman for suggesting.
  • Burlust attacker buildings, when controlled by the human player, now get roughly 1/10th the crime reduction of a normal police station.
    • Thanks to zebeast45 for suggesting.
  • Burlust police and riot-police buildings now have 25% the normal crime reduction.
    • Thanks to jerith for inspiring this change
  • The default sharpness strengthening is now 1 rather than 5 in the graphics options.
  • In a new game you now pick a leader rather than a race.
    • And the tooltips now list the racial theming modifiers (added new in this version, like the burlust police stuff), leader theming modifiers, the racial attack power multipliers, and the racial free techs (and buildings unlocked thereby).
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman, donblas, EzekielMoerdyk, and gwmngilfen for inspiring this change.
  • The escape menu now shows your leader (and race) and the various race/leader modifiers.

Version 0.902

(Released July 13th, 2015)

  • Removed the rule where non-flying soldiers cannot attack stuff based on surface terrain (rocky, mountain, etc).
    • Thanks to nas1m and Cinth for the reports and save.
  • Added overlays:
    • Natural Wonders
      • Highlights tiles with known natural wonders, grays other tiles.
    • Resources
      • Highlights tiles with known resources. Shows green for resources you control, orange for resources controlled by another race, blue for un-controlled resources, and gray for non-resource tiles.
    • Thanks to zebeast45, Shrugging Khan, kasnavada, Tolc, and nas1m for inspiring these.
  • Fixed a bug where the one-per-faction flag was not considering buildings under construction or shut down.
    • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.
  • Fixed a bug where the cobalt bomb lost its infinite range during the switch to territories.
    • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.
  • Now if market item production can't find a valid effect type for the chosen sub-type, it tries to pick a different sub type. If it runs out of sub types it just doesn't produce the item (which logs an error for the player race, just ignores it for the AI races).
    • In other words, the game should no longer occasionally fuss that Peltians have no sense of humor.
    • Thanks to Cinth, kokonut, and Cyborg for reporting.
  • Amended the player auto-attack logic to make sure it only considers targets that the player can see (explored for surface buildings, knowledge of the building that's there for underground ones)
  • Player-side construction skill in a territory now receives 1/4 the skill in neighboring territories (a neighbor has to have a building that produces at least 1 point of construction skill for you to count for this).
    • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.
  • On Mars maps:
    • There's now a 1% chance each turn per race of one of their underground buildings going poof.
    • There's now a 1% chance each turn that a thoraxian tunnel tile (those are only underground) will go poof.
    • 40% of the atmosphere will always be a new component called "Vacuum"
  • On Europa maps:
    • The The thoraxians can't do their normal tunneling. Can still place other underground buildings like the rest of the races.
    • At least 20% of the atmosphere will always be IceDust.
  • On TropicPlanet maps:
    • At least 10% of the atmosphere will always be WaterVapor
  • Added descriptions for the non-random options to the map-style dropdown on the start menu.
  • Made mapgen try much harder to find a fallback seeding place for the player (even if that means getting smaller-in-buildable-area than usual) to avoid situations where there's just no player spot at all.
    • Thanks to kokonut for reporting a case of this.
  • Made the logic for showing the "Immunities" line for a building more consistent so that if it won't have anything to show there it won't have the line at all. If you see this again in this version or later please give us a save.
    • Thanks to rallythelegions for reporting.
  • The left sidebar pop-out list now has messages like "Click A Building Type To Place" depending on the mode.
    • Thanks to kokonut for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed a bug where the "pollution at location" value was displaying an internal percentage (used for overlay coloring) rather than the actual amount of pollution.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • The "Pollution Total Output" value is now just "Pollution Output" and displays an estimated per-tile amount rather than the total.
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
  • Fixed a bug where dragging the tech-shortlist scrollbar would not prevent x-axis mouse motion from drag-scrolling the tech tree itself.
  • Non-player military buildings now list their stance towards you (attitude for non-rogues, plus hostile/allied/neutral/inactive)
    • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.
  • Fixed a bug where the lander placement preview was only highlighting the center tile, and was displaying "Smog" on it.
    • Thanks to wwwhhattt and Sounds for reporting
  • Replaced wording in building stats about "percent of staff positions filled here", "building employment %", and "staff count" all with simply "Staffing".
    • Thanks to GarathJJ for inspiring this change.
  • Changed the AI rule that prevented some construction within X distance of a building it lost within the last 20 turns to instead just look at whether it's lost a building within that territory in that timeframe.
  • Removed a "only look 20 tiles out" rule on ambient water-cargo-ship pathing, since it was making them get stuck midway on some trips, and just keep going back and forth between two tiles (being unable to path to the destination within the required max distance).
    • This might negatively impact framerate; if so please let us know and we'll try something different with these.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman for the report and save.
  • Attack animations now no longer render while you're in underground view
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug where the end-turn button would light up and respond to mouse-down even when covered by the tile details window.
    • Thanks to wwwhhattt for reporting.
  • Fixed some bugs where the mouse could still interact with the tech tree while the tile details or tech details windows were showing.
    • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.
  • Saucers now no longer keep a race from surrendering under the "if I don't have any non-resource-gathering surface buildings left" rule.
    • And fixed a bug in that rule where it was treating some alien resource gatherers as not resource gatherers.
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan, zebeast45, and Watashiwa for the reports and saves.
  • Most game settings are now only on the local machine, not synced via steam cloud. Some of the innocuous in-game-style ones are still transferred over, and all of the statistics, savegames, achievement progress, and all that still are, but things like graphics settings, sound, controls, etc, etc, are now machine-specific.
    • Given that each machine is most likely going to have different screens, inputs, etc, this definitely keeps things a lot more flexible for people playing on more than one machine.
    • Thanks to jaxxa for suggesting.
  • The OSX build of the game is now Universal (64bit and 32bit) for the first time. It was accidentally only 32bit, previously.

Graphics Options

  • The game has been upgraded to Unity 4.6.7 from Unity 4.2.something. This should fix a few linux bugs, and has a few other performance improvements.
  • Under the hood, we've done a lot of the work for getting the game to be able to scale itself up on larger resolutions, so that you don't have to scale down your resolution to get graphics of the size you want. After many years of wishing for this, finally we have a technique that works -- turns out all that really matters is math. Well, math and all the enhancements we've made to the render pipeline over the years, but still.
    • The textbox control does not scale up its text size when you are editing it, by the way. It does scale up the control itself, but not the text. The textbox itself needs to be replaced at some point in the future.
  • The awesome Colorful is now being used to make things sharper, a bit brighter, and to make it possible for players to be able to adjust brightness, contrast, and sharpness on their own.
    • The difference in quality is actually pretty notable, and you can see a lot more of the details with this on. But the original reason for this was to make it so that we could sharpen things when we're doing that zoomed-in thing with scaling for larger resolutions.
  • Four of the not-really-used options on the game graphics settings screen have now been removed.
  • In their place, there are now options for disabling the sharpness shader, or the brightness/contrast shader, both of which are new in this version.
  • There is now a slider in the Graphics menu that allows you to adjust the new Screen Scale setting. Every time you let up on the mouse cursor, it shows you the result in realtime, which is awesome.
    • As part of making this useful, the game now draws behind the escape menu, settings menu, load and save menus, etc; previously it was just blackness. But being able to see the effects of these changes in realtime is pretty useful.
  • You can now edit the brightness, contrast, sharpness strength, and sharpness clamp for the game using the new shaders. These settings are all in the Graphics tab.
    • Probably some people are going to want to tweak this sooner than later, so having the controls already in there is definitely good.

Version 0.901

(Released June 30th, 2015)

  • Resource gathering buildings (of the players and the AI) no longer capture territories.
    • Originally that was kind of temp-y logic for the AI so that it would naturally capture territories using existing AI before we coded the specific territory-capture AI, which has been in for a while now.
    • It may be that the AIs capture territory too slowly now, but we'll see and adjust as needed. It's definitely less cheesy this way, though, to be sure.
    • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.
  • The highlight for social progress sections in which you still have a point to spend is now a lot more obvious, and also now has a nice-looking gradient to it.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting that it was still hard to see.
  • Added a new KeyBind: Show Tile Coordinates
    • While this is held, each tile has its coordinates drawn on top of it, which is sometimes helpful in cross-referencing with event log reports.
    • Defaults to C.
    • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.
  • Fixed the profile and all-profiles windows being inconsistent in that they didn't close when you pressed escape.
    • Thanks to donblas for reporting.
  • The new-profile textbox now simply prevents text entry past the limit (which is now 30 instead of 20) instead of letting you go past and then fussing in a popup (which was partially overlapped by the textbox) about it.
    • Thanks to zebeast45 for reporting.
  • Now if you left-click and drag on the minimap it continues to move the view to center on the minimap-tile under the cursor.
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
  • The construction complexity of fisheries has dropped from 16000 to 12000, and fishing wharfs from 32000 to 24000.
    • Particularly helpful since you can't easily reduce their construction times.
    • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.
  • Previously, there were two different loading/game-start images depicting a lander coming down to the planet. Now there is a third as well, this one very fiery and orange rather than the blue hues of the other two.
    • Cath had done all three of these as mocks, and we couldn't decide between them and so decided to just have her finish them all when she had a chance. So here they are!
  • Fixed a bug where a recent-ish change completely removed the logic whereby underground monsters could damage buildings.
    • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.
  • Added a toggle-underground-view button to the bottom plate.
    • Thanks to Sounds, jerith, topper, and greywolf1991 for inspiring this.
  • The "NEW!" indicators on a building type now goes away when you enter placement mode for that building type rather than just when you place it.
    • And the time it takes for that to go away anyway has been reduced from 20 to 5.
    • Thanks to mooncows and Tolc for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed a bug where the "maxed" (level 7) and "can't progress" (level 5 without the language tech) messages were switched, leading to much interface confusion.
    • Also rearranged the interturn logic so that all language centers recheck target validity after all have tried to make progress. Before you could have one or more language center retain their target (for just that one extra turn) because centers after them in the processing loop finished the possible research.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman and gwmngilfen for the reports leading to these discoveries.

Version 0.900

(Released June 29th, 2014)

  • The small icons for buildings that are shown in the building/attack menus, and which are shown on the tech tree, have been updated to match the revised graphics for the buildings where relevant (which was 34 buildings).
  • In the bottom left tooltips, it now shows the "middle click or ctrl-click" text way smaller, and always at the very very bottom, to make it less in your way.
  • Corrected an omission in the implementation of the market-item-production rules where quality was being requried as 1.1x the highest quality item produced by that race rather than the highest quality item produced by that race of that type (fiction, nonfiction, etc).
    • Thanks to Valectar for the report and save.
  • Underground monsters no longer stop drawing their main tile when attacking.
  • Underground monster travel animations:
    • Now travel about 1.5x as fast when attacking.
    • Now draw at about 1/3rd scale.
    • Now no longer return after attacking, they just disappear after attacking.
    • And if the monster died in the attack, it does a particle effect on both the target and the origin.
  • Added a rule where the AI players always get a certain base construction skill, just like the human player does (the same amount, actually), to prevent situations where they literally can't build anything despite having both surviving buildings and population.
    • Thanks to zebeast45 for inspiring this change.
  • Added new KeyBind: Hold For Mass Enable/Disable
    • While this is held along with the "Enable Or Disable Building Mode" key, left-clicking a building you own will toggle whether all buildings you own of that type are enabled or disabled.
    • Note: this defaults to LeftShift, and the main enable-or-disable key defaults to X.
    • Thanks to P3X-639 for inspiring this change.
  • The last of the race-specific "roads" for under buildings is now done: the Zenith.
    • Please note that the landers all still use outdated road graphics, but this is largely because we are going to be redoing the lander build-up graphics entirely.
  • Fixed a bug where pop-requiring buildings with the first-free flag were acting as if the first wasn't free once there were two or more operating (there was math for that, but it wasn't all connected up). So now if you have two science labs with no luxury-housed pop they'll each have 50% efficiency, not nearly-zero.
    • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.
  • Added back in the rule of "if race X is subjugated to race Y, race X and Y can no longer be hostile towards each other". Previously that and basically all the old hostility rules had been removed and the definition of war was "on opposite sides of the same international incident".
    • Thanks to zebeast45 for the report and save.
  • The number of crowns generated by resource producers has been absolutely gutted (divided by 14 in the heaviest case).
    • For a while, the crown income here was meant to be an added inducement to capture resources, but those are really supposed to be an end in an of themselves. Meanwhile, as nas1m pointed out, the crowns from these gatherers were trivializing the crown generation from other sources.
    • Thanks to nas1m for supporting.
  • Fixed a number of typos.
    • Thanks to windgen and greywolf1991 for reporting.

Social Progress Screen Revisions

  • Thanks to Sounds, tadrinth, and Enrymion for inspiring these changes.
  • The social progress screen now uses images instead of raw line drawing for the links between nodes.
    • And the window's layout is no longer dependent on actual resolution width, as a necessary precondition for this.
  • The social progress screen now has an underlay with lines showing the boundaries between the three trees.
  • The social progress screen now shows a highlight underlay under the whole tree that you have an unspent point in, rather than using a different or flashing font (or noting the unspent point in text).
  • Fixed a bug where both Improved Clean Power and Improved Combustible Power were occupying the same space on the social progress tree, and thus clicking them would not highlight clean power.
    • Now the spot uses one of the techs for half the races, and the other tech for the other half of the races.
    • Code has also been put in place to prevent other accidental clashes of this sort.
    • Thanks to wwwhhattt and nas1m for reporting.

Version 0.899

(Released June 25th, 2015)

  • Put in a shift that should prevent the screen flickering/freezing on those machines that were having it (we never could duplicate it on Windows 7 or OSX), although this comes at the cost of not being able to throttle down the CPU as much when you do not have the game focused.
    • Thanks to topper and mooncows for reporting.
  • A wide variety of transient-RAM-allocation improvements, some of which may cause all sorts of "fun" bugs if there were typos. Seems okay so far, though.
  • The old style of taking screenshots is back. This style is faster and more efficient and uses the built-in unity stuff, and the only reason we switched away from it was because it was crashing in an older version of the Steam client.
  • The game has been updated so that it now caches a huge amount of what is going on with the main HUD in the game, only updating it when it gets "dirtied" (aka you interact with it or some other trigger means it needs to redraw), or every second or so (there are four areas of the interface, which update on differing standard intervals based on their relative frequency of changes).
    • The amount of transient heap allocation this saves in RAM is absolutely incredible. It shaves it down from sometimes upwards of 30MB or more per second to closer to 1MB per second. This means vastly few "jitters" in the game from the garbage collector running.
  • Fixed a bug where the serialization/deserialization of floating-point numbers in the save files was not using the invariant culture, and thus the saves were not cross-platform compatible (it could manifest as some numbers, like a city's stored trash, reading back as much higher than they actually were before the saves).
    • Note that this does not repair old saves, there's really no clear way to do that, but what you can do is re-save the save on the originating platform (not the target platform) in the new version and it should load just fine wherever after that.
    • Thanks to Tolc for the report and save.
  • Overhauled the "is this race dead?" logic to not be recalculated every frame (which could cause rare oddness by the main thread doing that recalc while the interturn thread is also modifying state) but simply to be stored, and checked once for each race during interturn.
    • Specifically, the rules for race death:
      • The thoraxian race never dies.
      • The human-controlled race can't die before the lander is placed.
      • A race with no non-resource extractor buildings is dead.
      • A dead race has all its remaining population killed and remaining (extractor) buildings destroyed.
    • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring these changes.
  • Put in some extra protections against one form of random nullref we've seen lately.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Put in some extra protections against an infinite-error-loop when exiting to OS.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • The myriad way that tooltips could be created for the bottom left corner of the screen have all been organized into something much more orderly now. It's more efficient in transient RAM creation, in that it only actually constructs tooltips that it will be using. And it has a clearer internal hierarchy as to which tooltips take precedence when the game would normally trigger multiple tooltips.
    • Oh, and it will also pave the way for more complicated tooltips in the future, such as with multiple font sizes and some things like that. That's definitely something we've been wanting to do.
    • That said, this is a Very New bit of code, so likely there will be bugs.
  • The speed at which the attack predictions are made is now vastly faster, removing a lot of that "lampshade" effect. This was very noticeable in the past the lower your framerate was, so until the framerate became more vsynced for us we had not noticed it a ton. Also the calculations of attack damage predictions are way less CPU-intensive now, so the amount of throttling needed is also lower.
  • Fixed the issue in the prior version with a lot of the text and numbers on the tech tree being invisible.
    • This only worked in the past because of how direct draws did their rendering, but now all the game uses the indirect drawing and thus the layer rules were needing to be adjusted to account for that.
    • Thanks to gwmngilfen for reporting.
  • Fixed up the tech shortlist so that it now has a bit better of a border around it, and also fixing the strange bug in the prior version where the shortlist background had a randomly white background until you scrolled the tech tree a bit.

Version 0.898

(Released June 24th, 2015)

  • Extended the rule "if a non-thoraxian/non-yali race has only underground buildings left, have them automatically subjugate themselves" to be "only underground buildings or resource extractors".
  • Made the "we're basically wiped out, surrender to _someone_" subjugations not check various less-important things like "if we're genocidal, never surrender" or "if they'll eat us, never surrender". Otherwise the rules sometimes just conflict and a race is mysteriously never subjugated.
  • Now when the Yali lose their Ocean Palace Throne Room structure they instantly surrender to the race that destroyed it (or to _someone_ if rogues destroyed it or somehow the Yali blew themselves up).
    • Note, this is only checked on the actual destruction of a Yali building, not every turn or whatever.
  • Clicking the crown stockpile top HUD indicator now brings up an accounting report of your crown income/expenditure (going back to the last time you pressed end-turn).
    • You can also reach this on the Reports dropdown at the bottom of the screen.
    • This doesn't go into exhaustive detail, but all transactions are recorded in some way or another. If you think it needs more detail please let us know. It may be something that's going away (diplomacy's going to be overhauled, for example) or it may be something that will make sense to break out further.
    • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.
  • When starting a new game you can now pick "Random" for your race and for the map style.
    • Thanks to iozay and nas1m for suggesting.
  • The "requires X people in Y housing per building" rules no longer prevent construction of those building types if the limits are hit, instead they reduce the effectiveness of those buildings if the limits are exceeded.
    • This "From Low Served Population" multiplier is shown in the tooltip of buildings impacted by it, the placement-preview tooltip for buildings that would be impacted by it (at current population levels), and in the advanced info under Building Effectiveness (and other affected stats) in the building detail window.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.
  • Tooltips for the meals/crops/water/housing intel values for races that don't need them now just say "N/A".
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
  • Added the following sliders to the settings menu:
    • Edge Pan Speed
      • Controls the speed of panning when the mouse cursor is at the edge of the screen.
    • Arrow Pan Speed
      • Controls the speed of panning when the keyboard panning keys (defaulting to arrows) are pressed.
    • Zoom Speed
      • Controls the speed of zooming in and out.
    • Thanks to topper, nas1m, and jerith for suggesting.
  • The upper-right message log now moves down on the main menu to not obscure the quit button.
    • Thanks to jerith and Sounds for inspiring this change.

Usability

  • Now if you left-click the wreckage of a building that's in your build menu, the game will switch to placement mode for that building type (you may not be able to place it due to crown cost or whatever, though).
    • The idea being that this makes it quicker to issue rebuild orders.
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for inspiring this addition.
  • Now if you left-click a known resource that's not being harvested, the game will switch to placement mode for the type of building you'd need to place to gather that resource (if it's in your build menu).
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for inspiring this addition.
  • The delay between starting a mouse drag and it actually starting reduced from 100ms => 30ms, to see if that deals with the current usability issues.
    • Thanks to Enrymion and jerith for inspiring this change.
  • Now when you've unlocked a new building via research in the last 20 turns, and you haven't placed a building of that type, both its button and its parent structure-class button will show a "NEW" icon on them.
    • This may work oddly for old saves for stuff already unlocked in them, but it won't cause problems.
    • Thanks to Hyfrydle for inspiring this change.
  • The sliders on the city management screen are now always shown, but if you don't have the required tech for a slider it won't respond to mouse clicks. The tooltip shows the required tech.
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
  • Pollution Cleaner Strength and crime Reduction now say "Per Tile In Territory" rather than just "Per Tile," which is clearer.
  • On tooltips on the map, there is no longer a separate "building effectiveness" line. Instead, if that is less than 100% -- and only then -- it will show the lower effectiveness as a parenthetical after the name of the building.
  • The "Debug: Show Raw AI Attempts At Construction" toggle is no longer visible on the settings menu, and that setting is now disabled for non-developer copies of the game.

Clarity/Tooltips

  • Now when you mouseover the bracket that shows a building's target resource/race, that building is highlighted.
  • Added tooltip to resources on inventory screen, stating which of your buildings are gathering and/or consuming the resource.
    • Thanks to tbrass for suggesting.
  • Market-item-producing buildings now list the specific types they produce and how much of each type (previously not listed because there was no brief way to list 4 different types from one building, etc, but we'll see how it goes).
    • Thanks to tadrinth for suggesting.
  • The social progress hammer and text on the tech tree node display now has a tooltip explaining that it's showing you what combined social progress level you need to be able to research that tech.
    • Thanks to Sounds and jerith for inspiring this change.
  • Molecular Security Control now no longer removes crime from the buildings in its territory, but instead removes the total amount of crime of those buildings from the city total, which is what actually determines what bad stuff happens. This way you can still see what crime "would" be there for planning purposes.
    • Also, all crime-related deaths and woundings are now prevented within a Molecular Security Control territory (though it may still be possible for the lander to "soak" crime deaths if there's nowhere else to "put" them).
    • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring these changes.
  • The tooltips on language skill level on the city grid and on the select-target-race screen now show your current rate of gaining points towards that language, the number of points until the next level, and the number of turns it will take to reach the next level.
    • Thanks to Hyfrydle for inspiring this change.
  • The tech screen now shows your science per turn near the close button.
    • Thanks to topper for inspiring this change.
  • Added a note to the limestone-cavern-collapse message that "(won't collapse there again)" so you know it's safe to build on now.
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
  • Started working on the new style of the top bar, only getting a bit of a ways on that and partly addressing the graves and trash icons right now. Unfortunately their numbers are probably a bit more confusing in this release than last one, but not by much. The next release will have those much better, knock on wood.

Bugfixes

  • Fixed a bug in the last couple versions where the counter-attack flag was not actually being checked, meaning that a charged cobalt bomb launcher WAS an automated extinction event dispenser...
    • In unrelated news, several Burlust staff members have been sacked.
  • Fixed a bug where the cobalt bomb and extermination/domination victory paths have never been possible because it was counting the thoraxians as needing to be dominated/exterminated, and those things never fully die.
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for the report and save.
  • Fixed a null reference bug that could crop up after an AI race lost its center building, or possibly in other situations where the game was trying to see if the rogues could put something somewhere.
    • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.
  • Fixed a bug where buildings that finished construction were not remembering the turn of that completion, leading to problems like the "don't take insufficient-staffing damage for 5 turns" rule not working.
    • Thanks to greywolf1991 for reporting.
  • The bottom-left tooltips now slide right-wards if they would overlap with the left-sidebar pop-out listboxes (that display the specific attack types when you've picked attack mode, for example).
    • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.
  • Previously the Incidents window wasn't using the same gui pattern as other stuff (it was actually originally copied from a developer-only window); it's now been changed to fit the normal player-facing pattern, including having a close button.
    • Thanks to tbrass for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed a bug where exploring the surface of a tile with an underground building of another race would cause you to "discover" that race.
    • Also made it so that sonar'ing an underground building will do the discovery as it should.
    • Thanks to jerith for the report and save.
  • Fixed a bug where shift-clicking a tech without any current target tech would "assume" the cheapest tech (or possibly another) as the target and then queue the clicked one after it.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • Fixed some bugs with shift-clicking techs where it allowed cutting out mid-queued stuff (which it shouldn't) and didn't allow unqueuing the last-clicked thing (which it should).
    • As a consequence, it's now again possible to unqueue your last target tech by shift-clicking it.
    • Thanks to Sounds for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug where the atmosphere window and some other windows would not close the building details window when they were opened.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug with the poofy fog of war where its suppression of the "if it's not explored, don't draw it" rules for the stuff just on the edge of the fog was not in turn actually preventing the showing of intel on those tiles (incident reports, etc).
    • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.
  • Fixed a bug where the actual "mouse blocked" area of the left "building list" sidebar was much larger to the top and bottom than the actual visual area.
    • Thanks to jerith for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug where the campaign-started date was showing minutes where it should have been showing month.
    • Thanks to jerith for reporting.
  • Added hooks into the victory/loss logic to record the game as a win or loss on the profile.
    • Thanks to nas1m and Kizor for reminding us.
  • Removed the rule where in scenario mode tile placement would happen as long as the left mouse was held down, because it was causing the click to bleed through the tile selection choice (because the choice dropdown disappears as soon as you click it) and the left-click-and-paint behavior was already no longer possible due to the recently added left-click-and-drag-to-pan behavior.
    • Thanks to ptarth and Kizor for reporting.

Graphics

  • Now when you're loading a game it displays a full-screen image and a message that it's loading the game before actually starting the load process, to avoid the hang and/or black screen situation.
    • It also shows something in the background during mapgen for new games.
    • Thanks to ptarth and Cinth for inspiring this change.
  • Several of the large category icons on the left side of the screen have had some small cleanup done on them -- exploration, attack, industrial, residential, and health.
  • The three categories of Social Progress up at the top of the screen (commerce, cultural, and government) now have icons that more clearly represent what they actually are, while still keeping the central hammer symbology.
    • Thanks to Cyborg, jerith, and others for helping to figure out how to best represent these.
  • For the last while, all of the three-tile buildings have been too small to fit in the footprint of the new racially-themed roads (all of which are done but the Zenith). Those now all fit properly.
  • A variety of buildings have been adjusted to have less clutter, added symbols/signs, and more thematic coloring to differentiate them in terms of what group of buildings (military, etc) they go to.
    • ALL of the player buildings have been touched to some degree (except the landers, which are the last things that have not yet been altered at all).
    • Some notable adjustments, however: Scout Station, Ranged Countermeasures, Dense Apartment Housing, Middle Class Eatery, Police Station and Riot Police (the icon on that will need more work), Teleporter Depot, Repair Crew, Broadcast Station, Fine Dining, Spy Safehouse, Warehouse, Guildhall, Disease Control, Recycling Center, Sonar Surveyors, Accelerated Birth Center, Science Lab.
  • A couple of buildings that were previously very temporary-stand-in style have now been actually completed with real graphics: Lumber Mill and Logging Camp.
  • Extraction Facilities and Harvesters now have shadows properly.
  • Teleporter Depots now are drawn as hovering tiles, which makes them look a lot more natural in the terrain, and also has them hovering with a shadow now.
  • Ambient vehicle movement is now no longer drawn in underground-view (not even the sonar scout, since it doesn't fly through the rock any more than the other ones, and because the code doesn't know the difference during render).
    • Thanks to jerith and Cinth for suggesting.

Performance

  • The game previously used a mixture of "direct" and indirect (asynchronous) drawing methods, for a variety of legacy reasons. It now only uses indirect draws, which are more efficient.
  • The game now reports its framerate better, and limits its framerate to around 65fps to avoid excessive RAM heap allocations that can happen with higher-for-no-reason framerates (above 60fps or so).
    • There is still plenty more here we need to do in terms of RAM heap turnover, but this is an excellent start.
  • The game actually is able to FINALLY detect when the window does and does not have focus, and now disables edge scrolling and input and so on while that is happening. No more scrolling off into the middle of nowhere when you alt-tab out -- FINALLY!
    • We presume that this works on all three OSes, but it's a built-in unity thing and we've only tested it on windows so far.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman and many, many others for reporting this.
  • Put in a fix that hopefully will solve the issue of the disappearing terrain while a steam notification has popped up.
    • We've not had a chance to test this, however, so if you could do so in the next version that would be appreciated. We had a similar variant of this problem on windows with the new focus controls stuff, and our suspicion is that one fixes both.
    • Thanks to Valectar for reporting.
  • The game is now able to run at a vastly lowered CPU usage when it's not the active window, thanks to our new ability to detect whether or not the window is active.
    • Thanks to jerith for reporting.
  • During the time when the game is autosaving, previously the game was blipping to black in order to prevent you from corrupting your autosave via editing something during the middle of the savegame.
    • After much finagling with the engine, it now instead draws whatever frame it was previously showing you until it finishes the save. This prevents the jolting out to a black screen, while also keeping it so that you can't corrupt the savegame itself.
    • Thanks to jerith, Cinth, and crazyroosterman for reporting.
  • Put in a couple of fixes that should avoid the "lampshade" update of icons on tiles after an interturn.

Version 0.897

(Released June 18th, 2015)

  • Fixed a bug in the prior version of the game where any buildings that were under construction outside of a territory under your control would not actually make any progress on construction. Yow!
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan, greywolf1991, and zebeast45 for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug in prior versions (since the territories were added) where apparently races could claim territories from one another inappropriately. Like your starting territory, even.
    • There is also some logic in there now that will reclaim said territory for you if the other race doesn't still own it (which was the case in our example savegame).
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for reporting.

Version 0.896

(Released June 18th, 2015)

  • Rogue waves from planet rage now cannot spawn more frequently than every 20 turns for a particular city.
    • But the planet will still be making... plans... during that time. The only thing worse than a race of passive-aggressive telepaths is passive-aggressive geography.
  • Fixed a bug where the "requires X people in Y housing" properties were being multiplied twice by the number of existing buildings of that type, for display purposes. This made the display make it look like it should be much more strict than it was actually being.
    • Thanks to greywolf1991 for the report and save.
  • Added tooltips for the left-sidebar top level buttons.
    • Thanks to iozay and FroBodine for suggesting.
  • The repair mechanic is now per-territory for the player (not the AI).
    • And the repair icon on the top GUI is now gone.
    • But mouseovering a player-owned repair building in a territory will display the same tooltip info (just on a territory-scope, and not showing the lines about total damage or turns-until-repaired if there's no damage).
  • The construction-skill mechanic is now per-territory for the player (not the AI).
    • And the construction skill icon on the top GUI is now gone.
    • Each territory gets a base skill of 2000, so starting in a new territory is possible.
    • Since the AI and the Player now use different mechanics, and other optimizations have happened since then, an old way of having construction skill "accumulate" rather than be calculated-at-need has been removed rather than extended to work one way for the player and one way for the AI.
    • Mouseovering a player-owned construction building in a territory will display the player's total construction skill in that territory.
  • The Embassy and Spy buildings can now only target races that own a territory adjacent to a territory that you own.
  • Fixed a bug in the prior version where the passive-until-aggroed monsters were seeding in the starting territories that the player could choose from.
    • Thanks to Billick for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug since the introduction of territories where nobody could place any underground buildings except the Yali. That definitely made the game... different. This was one of several placement bugs we knew we had, but hadn't had time to fix (though actually we didn't realize the full extent of the badness of this one).
    • Also fixed a related bug where the Thoraxians were not properly sending out their tendrils of tunnels anymore. Now they do again, and it's actually pretty freaking terrifying given they can also capture territory this way, and invade other races' territories with this.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

Battle!

  • Updated the internal MilitaryPlan logic for AIs (and player automated attacks) in the following ways:
    • It will ignore still-holographic enemies in all ways for sure (though it probably already was), to make the best decisions possible.
    • It will treat all enemies that can threaten a district center of the race with the plan as a very higher priority to destroy. Aka, "stay away from my King, you other Chess pieces!"
    • It now has special logic for no aggroing the recently-added passive-until-aggroed logic.
    • In the case of players, it stays a bit extra defensive and prefers to hit offensive military targets before other concerns.
  • Fixed an oversight where Military Command buildings still required certain citizen counts per building in order to be placed.
  • Fixed a longstanding bug where attack-targeting independent rogues of any sort was not showing the targeting reticule and similar properly.
    • Thanks to CricketMask and nas1m for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug where somehow or other monsters were being repaired by... somebody. Not sure exactly the trail of things, but they are no longer repairable, anyhow.
    • Thanks to greywolf1991 for reporting.
  • Made it so that even when buildings are undefended, the underground monsters will take some damage simply from attacking the building. That was always the intent, and that's what the tooltips said would happen, but we didn't quite make that work. ;)
    • Thanks to greywolf1991 for reporting.
  • Fixed some null-exception bugs when firing with the last attacker of a particular type (it would try to predict the results of firing again, come up with null for "best attacker to shoot with next", and then not properly check for that).
    • Thanks to Cinth for the reports and saves.
  • Fixed a bug that was causing military barracks to be nigh-useless in a ton of cases (basically when attacking anything that did not have a large current staff).
    • Firstly, it was not attacking with all the soldiers in the attacking party, but only with a number equal to the number of defenders. So usually that meant far less damage than was supposed to happen to the building (again, unless the building had a large staff).
    • Secondly, it was treating all buildings as if they had at least 1 defender, which was an old design decision but a bad one, and so it was possible for a defending soldier to be killed when nobody was actually home. As well as having that soldier deal a bit of potential damage to the poor attackers.
    • Thanks to kasnavada and ptarth for reporting.

Player Auto-Attacks

  • Now when you end a turn with valid attacks still possible against hostiles, the game runs the normal AI-attack-planning logic for you (only for attack buildings with the counter attack flag, so it's not going to turn a cobalt bomb launcher into an automatic extinction event dispenser) before starting the AI threads up.
    • Thanks to ShruggingKhan for inspiring this change.

Better Power Display/Usage

  • No actions cost power anymore -- that wound up being confusing in the interface for a whole lot of reasons.
    • Demolishing buildings now costs 1000 crowns instead of 100 cr and 2500 pow.
    • Terraforming is now just 5000 cr and not 5000 cr + 5000 pow.
    • The Cobalt Bomb was the last of the player buildings that cost energy to attack. Now it costs 240k cr rather than 100k pow and 100k cr.
    • Toxin screening now costs 300 cr per citizen rather than 500 pow and 200 cr.
    • Buildings no longer cost power to re-enable if you intentionally disabled them. They now cost crowns instead.
  • The top bar now shows the actual power balance now, rather than just "0 POW" when you are in a shortage. There is finally room for that, and this is super useful info.
  • Since player attacks no longer cost energy, it no longer prioritizes the auto-selection of player attackers based on most efficient energy usage when you click an enemy building. Instead it prioritizes it by "least overkill that kills it."
    • Additionally, if it can't kill the target, then it looks at the type that can do the most damage now.
  • Fixed a bug where previously you could terraform or demolish even without the proper amount of crowns, so long as you had the proper amount of power.
    • As you enable or disable buildings, this also updates in realtime, which is super useful during brownouts.
  • When you are holding X to disable buildings, it is now a lot more helpful in giving you the information in that tooltip about which buildings are disabled/enabled using color, and also tells you how much power they use when enabled.
    • If a building has been browned out, but then you intentionally disable it, previously nothing would visually change on the building (ick!). Now it actually switches icons, which is super useful.
  • Fixed a bug where for a while the power cost to re-enable buildings was not actually being applied; now the crown cost to re-enable is actually being applied.

Version 0.895

(Released June 17th, 2015)

  • Removed the AI's forward-building logic and replaced it with something territory-based.
  • Removed the "If Yali have nowhere to expand, sink nearby land" logic since now their expansion logic is territory-based and shouldn't need that rule.
  • Mapgen now seeds passive monsters in the unclaimed territories.
    • Initially these are not aggroed, so the rogue-attack logic just skips them.
    • Also, the AI will not target non-aggroed passive monsters. You can, though.
    • A monster is aggroed if any non-saucer building is placed in its territory that's owned by a race other than rogue, Thoraxian, or Yali.
    • A monster is also aggroed if it takes any damage for any reason. This "waking" damage is reduced to 1/10th what it normally would be.
  • The Molecular Security Control building can now be built one-per-territory, instead of just one for your entire faction.
    • And now its crime-reduction impact is limited to that territory in scope.
  • Fixed a bug in a (probably) recent shift to how the first stage lander's placement preview is done, where the "draw it from the cursor tile, not the main tile" logic was not retained, causing it to look like it would be placed according to the bottom tile instead of the center tile.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • The Boarines now have their full racial base for your cities. It's a very snowy sort of base now, much more dramatic than before. Much more fitting for their feel.
  • Military buildings of the player now cost vastly more energy per turn, but they no longer cost any crowns or energy to do actual attacks EXCEPT for the cobalt bomb launcher.
    • Military buildings of the player and the AI no longer cost AttackRage directly, either.
    • However, attack rage is generated for both players and AIs based on how much damage they deal to the targets they hit -- actual damage, not including overkill.
    • The amount of rage is not based on the building doing the attack anymore, and so the source of the attack doesn't matter. This makes for a lot less mental math on the part of the player, and less conflicting goals on the part of the AIs.
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan, kasnavada, and Cinth for inspiring this change.

More Top HUD Revisions

  • Top hud area adjustments (bottom bar of top area):
    • Atmospheric compatibility has been moved to be in front of temperature, so that those are more sensibly grouped.
    • Science has been moved in front of the social progress stuff.
    • Planet Rage has been moved to this bar, as it fits better here thematically, and it is now inserted directly in front of the atmospheric compatibility, as the first of the atmospheric stuff.
      • Oh, also it has a fearsome new icon that makes it look a lot clearer in terms of what it is. ;)
  • The "Empire Design Issues" have been disabled for now. They were not super visible, got in the way a bit, and the game is better about showing all these things directly on the HUD now, or on buildings themselves.
    • Thanks to Enrymion for helping inspire this change.
  • The "jobs" and "unemployed" concepts have been split out on the top bar -- these really are quite unrelated, and combining them was incredibly confusing.
    • The jobs percentage up at the top now shows what percentage of your jobs are able to be filled, which is great in that you can easily see "I have twice the workers I need" or similar. And the tooltips have been cleaned up, too.
    • The "unemployed and entertained" percentage up at the top shows how much capacity you have for the unemployed, which is a whole other stat and completely separately something to worry with.
      • The tooltips on this are a lot clearer now, too, and give a lot more insight into the whole entertainment/unemployment situation.
    • Thanks to GarathJJ, mooncows, Cinth, and kasnavada for reporting.
  • The repairs and construction icons have been removed from the top bar. Those are going to be more territory-based in a future version, and seeing them in the top bar won't make sense then -- and isn't super useful anymore at this point, anyway, so losing the clutter is good.
  • The top bar items have been thoroughly rearranged so that their order is a bit more sensible -- particularly given the new item up there and the two removed ones.
    • More changes will still be needed to really be ideal, but this is a lot better; we have some interesting ideas coming up that folks will hopefully like, but we won't be able to try them out until next week.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for suggesting.

Version 0.894

(Released June 16th, 2015)

  • Fixed a bug where you could not place district centers (of any sort) in existing territories that you control.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug in prior versions where the AI's auto-terraforming logic around their buildings was allowed to leak into the forbidden lands, neutral mountains and water, and Normal territories not owned by the AI in question. Now it only is within territories owned by the race in question.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reminding us about this.
  • Fixed a possible nullref exception if a building that was your best attacker got destroyed while you were in the process of trying to have it predict the results of your attack.
    • That seems to have been what the nullref was, anyway, and we did fix that possibility.
    • Thanks to Cinth for the report.
  • Fixed a bug since the introduction of territories that was causing some stats to be doubled from a variety of sources, such as power from landers, or housing, etc. Probably from other buildings also.
    • Thanks to kasnavada, TheVampire100, and ptarth for reporting.
  • There are a ton of buildings that used to generate planet rage simply by existing. That is no longer the case on the vast majority of them -- very few generate planet rage simply by existing now.
    • The various buildings that you attack with now have costs in crowns and added planet rage, as well as the pre-existing cost in energy. Fighting costs money in terms of replacing lost hardware, etc, and it makes the planet angry (versus just having buildings for fighting does not).
    • For the AIs, they also now get a lot of rage directed at them -- all except the Thoraxians -- as they fight. The Acutians and the Burlusts get extra rage because the planet doesn't much like them. The Evucks get some extra rage for some of their more-distasteful stuff, too. The Andors, Fenyn, and Peltians get less rage than average since they are more in tune with the planet.
  • When you are hovering over unclaimed territory, it now says what you have to do in order to capture it, since that was intensely unclear before.
    • Thanks to Zebeast46 and FroBodine for reporting.

Revised Early-Game Citybuilding Experience

  • The general idea here is to make it so that the very basics of your citybuilding needs are all available right from the start, and thus there is no competition in the tech tree on getting those super basic things. Beyond that is then up to you.
    • Thanks to Misery and kasnavada for inspiring this idea.
  • The following buildings are now available from the start of the game, and no longer require you to unlock any tech to get them:
    • Dense Apartment Housing.
    • Rural Farms
    • Water Well
    • Cheap Diner (this means that Independent Cooking has also gone away).
    • Wind Turbine
    • Holo Resort (this means that Tactile Holography has also gone away).
    • Hospital (this means that Physician Training is now called Ectogenesis, and costs 300 instead of 50).
    • Police Station (this means that Physician Training is now called Ectogenesis, and costs 300 instead of 50).
    • Cemetery (this means that Civil Service has been replaced by Language Observation).
    • Trash Dump
    • Hazmat (so High Capacity Living is now gone).
  • The Krolin now get Tractor Beams as a free tech, since Tactile Holography is no longer a thing.
  • Thanks to some of the techs no longer being there (both from this version and from 0.890 in general), the tech tree has been horizontally tightened a tad.
  • Fixed a number of techs not having proper icons in the last version or two due to naming snafus.
  • The requirement to place explorer camps on your first turn has now completely gone away. Now that you have a freer reign to build more stuff on turn one -- all the bare essentials -- it now makes you build a single building -- and gives you a snarky helpful tip on how to do that if you click the button -- prior to letting you move on to the next turn.
  • All of the buildings that you have at the start of the game now have descriptions that explain what they are for:
    • Police Station.
    • Your lander.
      • While we were at it, we also added one for the civic center and the new Military Center.
    • Explorer Camps (which downright lied in the prior version due to out of date text).
    • Dense Apartment Housing.
    • Cheap Diner
    • Rural Farms
    • Water Well
    • Cemetery
    • Trash Dump
    • Hazmat
    • Hospitals
    • Holo Resorts already had it, but we added some better highlighting.
    • Thanks to FroBodine for suggesting.

District Centers (And A New Way To Lose!)

  • The coordinated military command is now called the Military Center.
    • Its description has been updated to make it clear that it's a district center.
    • The Military Center is also now made of awesomeness. It doubles the number of offensive attacker uses on every adjacent offensive attacker, and makes all adjacent buildings immune to ranged and sea attacks. Excellent for raiding on a budget! ;)
    • However, it adds quite a bit of planet rage now.
  • There is now a quite-substantial reason to create new district centers when you can: more points of redundancy. If you lose all your district centers, you now lose the game. Previously you had to lose all your population, but now there's a much greater incentive to expand.
    • All of the district centers note this in their descriptions now.

Version 0.893

(Released June 15th, 2015)

  • Previously it was possible for monsters and rogues and saucers to sometimes be "shut down" due to whatever region they were in. Fixed. Now they are always active.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug where if you had attackers of a certain type that were closer to a target in distance, but not adjacent to the target in terms of territories, but you DID have other attackers that were further away in distance that WERE adjacent in territories, the game would fail to let you attack because it would choose the invalid attacker.
    • Thanks to mooncows for reporting.
  • Placing a building in a non-normal terrain type makes it immune to crime. Those folks are out in the true wilderness so to speak, and they're on their best behavior.
    • This helps a lot for things like the fishing boats or shallow mines, etc.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • It is no longer possible (at least it should not be) for spawned saucers or monsters to appear in the forbidden lands area around the map edge.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Fisheries and Fishing Wharfs can now actually be placed in International Waters -- before they were accidentally being limited to just puddles inside normal territories.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Previously you would gain control of territories as soon as you started building a non-district-center building in it. Now it does not grant you that territory until the building has finished constructing (except in the case of district centers).
    • Additionally, if any race longer controls any buildings in a territory that belongs to them, they lose control of that territory.
    • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.
  • Except for the Infinity Vortex, all natural wonders will now be seeded inside Normal terrains. This makes it so that you can actually use them properly!
    • Thanks to mooncows for reporting.

Version 0.892

(Released June 15th, 2015)

  • Fixed a, er, rather glaring oversight when it came to capturing new territories. The player was set up to be able to do that with civic centers and so coordinated military command, but only at a distance from their current city center. You were always meant to be able to capture closer territories, but that logic got put in at the last minute on the player side (it was kept more permissive prior to that for testing purposes), and so we missed the fact that this was impossible to do. Now you'll easily discover you can with military buildings.
    • Thanks to FroBodine for reporting.
  • Fixed a couple more issues with uplifting poetry and the peltians.

Version 0.891

(Released June 15th, 2015)

  • Fixed a spreadsheet error in the prior version that was not letting player properly claim their first territory with Burlust or Boarine landers.
    • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug in the prior version where the default binding for queuing more research was unbound, rather than being properly bound to shift.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Fixed an issue in the prior version where the darkening of territories that are out of range for you to attack with your current building was also darkening clouds, meaning that you could get info on where territory borders were from that.
    • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.
  • Now whenever you get a "you have not explored here yet" message as an error reason for not being able to place a building somewhere, it gives you no other error messages beyond that. Normally it's good to see all the different error messages, and we specifically added that in fact for general cases. But in this case it could be used to explore around in the fog. Oops!
    • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

Version 0.890

(Released June 15th, 2015)

  • A few various mapgen-specific variables, plus a general "landmasses" concept, are no longer retained as data past mapgen, and are no longer part of savegames at all. This makes for substantially smaller savegames (2/3 or 1/2 as large), and vastly faster loading on Huge size maps in particular. You have to save fresh and then load the save from the new version to see the difference in speed, but it's notable.
  • Changed mapgen so that resources will no longer seed adjacent to each other, since it's no longer possible to "claim" adjacent resources.
    • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed a since-pre-alpha bug where the "it's too cold, turn something into snow" logic could target alpine mountains or snow forest... with the result that they were turned into snow.
    • Thanks to Cinth and ptarth for the reports and saves.
  • Your monster pits now also prevent underground monster attacks against your buildings in the pit's attack range.
    • Updated the pit's ingame description (on the details window) to reflect this.
  • Now if you have the tile details window open and you ctrl/middle click one of the left sidebar building entries, it will switch the tile details window to that new type.
    • Note: this doesn't allow clicking an actual tile on the map while the details window is open; mouse handling for the map needs to be disabled while that's open, and generally it blocks a lot of the tiles anyway.
    • Works similarly for the tech details window on the tech tree.
    • And also closes the tech details window if you open the tile details window, and vice versa. Otherwise strange overlapping can happen on the tech tree display while you're clicking around.
    • Thanks to SugeBearX, Enrymion, topper, kasnavada, and mooncows for inspiring these changes.
  • Fixed a bug where the quality of in-progress market items produced by the player would sometimes never go up at all.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman for the report and save.
  • Fixed a bug where embassies and spy safehouses could not be targeted against races whose languages you had max knowledge of.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman and kasnavada for the reports and saves.
  • Added a new keybind for "End Turn", defaulting to respond to either "Return" or "Spacebar".
    • Removed the end-turn functionality from the general "confirm" keybind.
    • Thanks to topper, kasnavada, and ptarth for inspiring this change.
  • The tooltip on tech tree nodes now includes a note saying “Free Skylaxian racial bonus tech” (or whatever race you're playing) for the free techs.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for suggesting.
  • The tech short list is now sorted from lowest cost to highest cost.
    • Thanks to topper for suggesting.
  • Put in some error handling that should prevent any issues with dismantling an old world from loading a new world. That was some sort of random freak thing that could happen if you were loading and unloading a lot of worlds previously.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Fixed an issue with loading savegames where sometimes it could fail to show an error message properly and instead just sit there with a black screen because of the minimap trying to update based off of missing data.
  • It is no longer possible to place buildings within the top 2 tiles of the upper map edge, because otherwise they hang under the map edge and get cut off strangely.
    • This won't fix existing savegames with buildings being cut off in this way, of course.
    • Thanks to Elijah for reporting.
  • From a long time back, we had the concept of multiple map planes, for purposes of being able to do cutscenes and tutorials that included playback of prefab scenes. It's now clear that we're never going to use that (sigh -- we just don't need it, so it's frustrating to have waste the effort, but so it goes), and so that has all been stripped out. It cuts down on the time to save and load games quite a bit, and also cuts down on the filesize for savegames.
  • All of the player-controlled races are going to have small accents on their roads to make it a bit clearer which race you are playing as. Nothing too dramatic at all, because that gets visually overwhelming and clashes with the overall view of the city. So these bits are meant to be so slight that you don't even see them at all in thumbnails, they just fade right out. But they're enough of something that you get a cool bit of ambiance when you're looking at them more zoomed in.
    • So far, the Boarines now have some bits of ice on their roads, making them the first of the 8 playable races to get this. We're planning on probably doing something a bit more dramatic here with this particular one, while still keeping it from getting distracting to the eye.
    • Now the Fenyn have their full set, with a lot of green grass and so forth.
    • Now the Peltians also have their full set, with really backwater-looking dirt/mud roads.
    • And the Burlusts, with muted magma-like roads on a dark base.
    • And the futuristic teal-lighting-edged Skylaxian roads.
    • And the regal-looking Evuck roads.
    • And the dirty, depressing, gray Krolin roads.
  • Fixed an issue with the Zenith Biolab graphics where it had some transparency of a sort that could cause issues with other tiles bleeding through it in improper ways.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • Housing buildings no longer factor the city's occupancy/capacity ratio for that type of housing into the display of their efficiency.
    • It still has the same effect on their social progress production, this just means a lot fewer pie chart icons all over your residential sections.
  • The "fresh outbreak of disease can infect at most 10% or 100 pop, whichever is less" rule has been extended to apply to any infection (whether or not you already have the disease active) caused by another race. Notably, the Evucks.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for the report and save.
  • Military buildings now list their attack/interception type on the same line as the attack/interception power.
    • Thanks to Enrymion and nas1m for suggesting.
  • Fixed some bugs where it was possible for an under-construction or shut-down building to provide adjacency bonuses.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for reporting.
  • Reworked planet-rage to not be a "value for this turn" thing, but rather a total that accumulates until it hits a point where the planet launches a wave, then it drops back down, etc.
    • Can now be negative-per-turn (though the total never goes below zero).
    • The top-bar HUD entry for planet rage now shows the number of turns until the next wave, rather than the raw total.
  • Fixed a null exception that could happen if you had a non-targeted spy safehouse and a panopticon.
    • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.
  • When a building takes damage, or right at the end of the interturn for player buildings (which have all sorts of icons that might need updating), the game now flags all those tiles as dirty and needing an immediate refresh. The alternative is that they don't get updated until the mouse comes near them, or until the regular "it's been a while so let's update you just in case" pass comes past them.
    • This "it's been a while so let's update you just in case" pass can make it look like a "lampshade refresh" or a "scanline moving down the world" in terms of buildings getting updated sequentially and their stats updating. Please let us know when you see these -- they aren't hardware problems, they are just cases where state changed and we didn't flag that part of the cache as dirty.
    • Thanks to ptarth and jerith for reporting.
  • New type of shader blending that allows us to do some pretty cool things with color addition and highlights based on simple diffuse colors applied to vertices.
  • Put in a couple of checks that should hopefully prevent a rare crash bug that can happen when trying to target a building that disappears in a puff of death.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for reporting.
  • When placing your lander, it no longer shows that blue overlay all over the place.
    • Thanks to topper, kasnavada, and Sounds for suggesting.
  • When you are viewing the underground, you can now see all the tiles that are water even in areas that you have not sonared -- so long as you have explored the surface.
  • There are now unique underground building image frames for all 12 of the types of races that can have underground buildings (aka not the two flying-only types).
    • This helps you to quickly identify which races own a building by even more than the graphics of the building image itself. And it gives a bit of flair to underground buildings that you build yourself, since those now have race-specific borders based on your own faction.
  • The various underground frames, water, fog, etc, have all been combined into one much more efficient dictionary. This also prevents that first big lag that was always present the first time you flipped into the underground view in the past.
  • Updated the smog and fog images a bit to be more efficient in terms of RAM use and loading speed in particular, but it may also help a bit in terms of render speed as well.
  • Fixed a longstanding bug where max population was not actually limited by water or crops, but just total meal production capacity (ignoring water and crops).
    • Thanks to GarathJJ and jerith for reporting.
  • Keeping the interface consistent between attacking and placing buildings or terraforming/destroying/etc, the game no longer automatically takes you out of placement mode after you place a building, or out of terraforming mode after you terraform one tile, etc.
    • Previously you had to hold down the shift key to make those repeated actions, but that was something a lot of people missed. That shift key holding is very familiar in RTS games, but this aspect of the game has more of a SimCity feel to it, and SimCity lets you stay in the placement mode like this now does.
    • Getting out of placement mode or demolish mode or whatever is as simple as a right-click, so that's a lot easier to do (in terms of hand movements and stress on the hands) than it was to hold shift and stay in placement mode previously.
    • And of course this was already how combat worked, so now everything is more consistent that way.
  • Fixed a bug where particle effects that were spawned on threads other than the main thread could cause index out of range exceptions or nullref exceptions during combat in particular.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • The overlay for pollution no longer automatically comes up when you are placing something that pollutes. That's information of dubious quality in the form that it was previously given anyhow, and really made the screen confusing.
  • The various overlays now show you a cleaner view in terms of the pattern on them, but now also show the text for what the heck their overlay is showing. In some cases it's showing which ones are police protection and which are crime added, etc.
    • On the smog and pollution ones, it also has a little arrow indicator to show you what direction the wind will be moving in.
    • Thanks to ptarth, Sounds

Districts Away, Territories In

  • The entire concept of "districts" has been removed from the game.
  • Instead, there are now pre-existing territories on the map, ala Risk, which you capture. This gives you visual demarcations on the map very easily where you can tell where boundaries are without having to have a bunch of overlays, etc. There are a bunch of other benefits as well, which will be enumerated a bit further on. Suffice it to say, this feels a lot better in a whole lot of ways. There's a forum topic discussing some more specifics at the moment.
  • AIs now are seeded within a single starting territory at the start of the game, except for those that have territory as a leader goal (which varies from leader to leader within races). Those races get an extra secondary territory.
  • Rather than terraforming an area around their buildings during mapgen, the AIs now get their entire starting territory filled in with their terraformed terrain. This both looks cool and makes for a more interesting way of handling starting atmospheric mix.
  • At the start of the game, after mapgen, the AIs now are substantially more built up than in the past (except Neinzul, Yali, and Spire, which were already okay).
    • The selection of extra buildings that they have, and in exactly what quantities, is randomly pulled from an appropriate pool.
  • When you start the game, there is now a wider area visible to you (it varies just how wide based on the specific location you are coming in). Basically you will typically start near the intersection of several territories, and it shows you the extent is what is in each of them. Typically it's two or three territories, but depending on how many come together in a small area you might get lucky and see more.
    • Based on this information, you can see a bit about the resources that are around, some bits of the shape of the terrain, and some hints as to where there might be neighbors.
    • Exactly how much space is revealed to you and how you land is something that might get shifted around some in the future. Normally you're not allowed to place a building across territory lines, but we've thought about making it so that the lander can do so -- whether that would lead to territories combining (useful in one sense, dangerous in another), or the dominant territory expanding and thus shrinking another territory, we're not sure. That's more of a polish question for after this has been tested more, so we'll stop letting that distract us. ;)
  • The Coordinated Military Command is now considered a district center. It will be further differentiated later, but basically the idea is that it's more of a "military district" whereas the civic center is more of a civil district.
  • Ranged pollution cleaners and police no longer have a range, instead they just clean/de-crime each tile in their territory.
  • Because of so many stats that have changed over the course of this version, there were a bunch of adjacency bonuses that no longer made any sense -- police range, ranges for attacks, etc, etc. The resources and wonders that used that sort of thing all have new functions applied to them instead.
    • For a lot of the wonders, a much-requested addition of something that cuts down pollution emission on adjacent buildings (as opposed to only cleaning up what gets generated) has been added.
  • The density of resources that are seeded is now very different, and more based around territories.

Attack Ranges And Related

  • Interceptors no longer have a range, instead providing coverage to anything within their territory.
  • Attacker buildings no longer have a range, instead having a coverage of their territory and all adjacent territories.
    • The Cobalt still has infinite range.
    • Boats and ground troops will still try to pathfind to their targets, but that path length is no longer a restriction on them, and the path is just used for animation (and if it would be too long for CPU cost it just cuts it short anyway)
  • When you are in placement mode for a building with an attack or an interception range, it no longer shows those eye-ripping overlays that it used to. ;) Those were always temporary until we figured out something better, and now we have.
    • Now that all of this is territory-based, it simply darkens all the territories that are not protected by the interceptor you are placing, or which are not threatened by the attacker you are placing.
    • The same works for the hovers for specific buildings that have already been placed when you use those keybinds.

Map Size

  • The map sizes have dropped substantially in terms of the number of tiles they contain. Overall it's about half what it previously was.
    • Specific side length shifts (remember, these are six-sided):
      • Tiny: 36 -> 28
      • Small: 46 ->34
      • Medium: 56 -> 40
      • Standard: 66 -> 46
      • Large: 71 -> 52
      • Huge: 76 -> 60
    • Why this change? Well, there was frankly a lot of "dead space" in the map previously. The huge maps had 17,000 tiles. In the new model, they have 10,000 tiles. That's still a TON. Given the scale of the citybuilding even on the largest side of things, that was just way too much empty space if the player was going to actually need to bump into any AIs.
    • That also made for territories, in the new system, that were just so massive that there was no incentive to quickly pick up new ones.
    • Not only that, this is something that made for visual problems because when you zoom out all the way to try to get a view of one of these huge maps, the buildings become impossible to distinguish. The land can be told apart, but there's so much empty space land all over the place and then buildings just hard to see. Either that or there are people spamming buildings like crazy into giant unsightly blobs. It creates problems either way, because players should be able to feel like they are "building big" without having to place 60 residential buildings all in one blob. That doesn't look good, and isn't fun. Also, if you're going to have a city of 100k people, it feels like a sacrifice should have to be made... by one of your neighbors...
    • Also also, performance is an ongoing concern with the really massive maps. We've been optimizing the game like crazy, but the fact is when you have to do 17000 of something (ideally) 60+ times per second, it is an arduous process for even nice hardware. This was going to be an ongoing challenge that simply couldn't be dealt with in a way that was going to make anyone happy. And given it wasn't ideal for gameplay in the first place, that's a double loss there.
    • This may well be a controversial choice, and in terms of people who want to have the feeling of having a huge map with lots of room and nobody to bother them, this is definitely a blow. For those folks we'll probably need an option to turn off some of the AIs. But frankly, having the ability to just kind of hang out by yourself for hundreds of turns without interacting with AIs is not desirable. Short of the AI being aggressive toward you and sending over saucers, there was absolutely no incentive on almost any map for you to HAVE to take someone else's land. That definitely doesn't feel right. There should be pressure on your end to expand as well, and conflict arising from the fact that you probably have to take it from someone if you want to have it, or split your city in ways that might be dangerous if you want to be fully peaceable. On maps that were just so darn large, that wasn't possible before.

Placement Rule Updates (And Related)

  • Explorer camps can now only be placed within the same territory that your lander is in, but there is no longer a "distance from the lander" restriction.
    • Thus you are likely to be able to place fewer camps, but it does depend on the size of the starting district you choose.
  • That "being cut off from your city" message on buildings is now something that only happens when they are outside of districts controlled by you and not the sort that is allowed to do that.
  • There is no longer any form of maximum district count for players.
    • Instead "district centers" simply have to be placed at least 3+ territories apart from one another.
    • All of the tech tree techs relating to the old district count limits have gone away.
  • The AIs still have the same form of rate-limiter as before on how many buildings they can construct (so you can slow the AI by taking out their construction buildings for instance), but for you there is no longer any rate limiter on how many buildings you can construct at once. If you have the money, then go for it.
    • This solves a lot of irritation, particularly on having to wait for something else to finish so that you can then come back and do more of something else. Explorer Camps come to mind the most of all.
  • When most mines get placed on rocky ground, it now flattens that into rocky rubble.
  • You should no longer be seeing the poofs of buildings being placed underground by the AI when you're not supposed to.
  • You can no longer place any non-flying buildings on mountains directly (it looked quite odd). This mainly effects shallow mines and molecular refineries.
  • The Molecular Refinery has been removed from the game, as it no longer fits with the desired model for the shallow mines.
  • "Shallow Mines" are again called Shallow Mines, rather than just Mines. This is opposed to Deep Mines. This is a lot less confusing, and in the new model for mining it is less of a strange thing.
  • There are "Neutral Mountain" territories that you now get the rich-mining bonus for when you're building shallow mines on any of their tiles.
  • You can no longer build fishing stuff on the surface above the Yali buildings.
  • Seaports now provide a small amount of teleporter range, which is extremely useful for getting to distant parts of the map via water.
    • We'll let you figure out the specifics here, but it should become apparent as you play in the new system. This actually gets back to a goal of ours from LONG ago, which is very nice.
  • The gathering/usage brackets (blue and red respectively) now only show up on the right-hand side of buildings, and thus the restriction from the past version on not being able to put bracket buildings next to one another has been removed. This fixes a number of otherwise impossible-to-use adjacency bonuses, and actually makes things a tad more orderly in general.
    • Note: the reason this wasn't simply done before is that, prior to being sure that the territory stuff was going to work out, the plan was that there were going to be some cases where you had one icon in the left bracket of a building, and another in the right. Now that is able to be bypassed thanks to territory adjacencies, and the new (planned, not here yet) system is cleaner anyhow on a number of levels.
  • Player terraforming, and auto-terraforming, now is only able to happen in player territories. However, there are no longer any restrictions about needing to be near buildings or other bits of terraformed land or anything like that.
  • The AI's placement logic rules are mostly in place, although some of the stuff with AIs building in neutral water does not seem to be functioning correctly with them just yet. They seem to be building outwards super heavily in an invalid way.

Top Bar HUD Overhaul

  • Thanks to jerith, ptarth, iozay, Sounds, mooncows, Billick, kasnavada, tbrass, Mick, Elijah, YoukaiCountry, GarathJJ, SugeBearX, and others for inspiring these changes.
  • The Jobs, Housing, Meals, Crops, and Water sections:
    • Now display as a percent of how much you have relative to how much you need for your planned (current + disabled + under construction) jobs/population.
      • If your current population is larger than your planned population (in terms of jobs, etc), then the percentages on the top bar use that instead.
    • Have reworked logic for whether they show up grayed-out, white, or red.
    • Have totally reworked tooltips noting how much is disabled and under construction and various other things.
    • Can now be clicked to bring up a "ledger" window showing the buildings impacting the relevant number(s).
  • The Repairs section now also has a click-for-ledger behavior.
  • The Trash and Graves sections now display the number of turns until you're expected to run out of dumps/graves, or "---" if you're not having a net filling at all, or "CAP!" if you're already at cap and still producing more than is consumed.
    • And if they're <= 5 turns to cap, or capped, they flash red.
    • The graves count against an estimated number of new bodies to expect next turn, based on recent turns (note that this recent turn data isn't in old saves, so it can take a bit for this to catch up there).
  • The Max Population tooltip now lists the individual limiting factors (housing, meals, crops, water) and which of them are actually holding the number down.

Version 0.877

(Released June 8th, 2015)

  • The city grid can now be sorted by clicking the column headers.
    • It allows multiple sorts (the most recent click takes precendence, then the one before that, etc) and you can click the most recently clicked one to toggle it between ascending and descending.
    • Thanks to TheVampire100, Sounds, and SugeBearX for suggesting.
  • Previously meal production would consume water for uneaten meals (leaving water-requiring buildings in a pickle); now it won't consume more water than you have people to feed.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug where x+clicking the sub-tile of a disabled multi-tile building wouldn't work (it could be disabled that way, but not enabled).
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • Edge-scrolling is now suppressed while the left mouse button is held, so that using left-click-and-drag doesn't conflict with it if the drag happens to take the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen.
    • Thanks to huw for reporting.
  • Now the racial "free" techs just say "FREE" for their cost on the tech tree nodes, rather than 0.
    • Thanks to GarathJJ and ptarth for suggesting.
  • Fixed an issue with the clouds flickering when you scroll.
    • Thanks to tadrinth for reporting.
  • Added a fix to the way scouting and the fog of war is handled, to prevent some tiles from being completely visible but still "unscouted," so things like pollution wouldn't show up and the mouse cursor wouldn't work over them, etc.
    • It also prevents your scouts from seemingly "exploring places you've already scouted," when really they were exploring somewhere "new."
    • Basically what was happening is that, since the fog of war only draws for tiles that are 2+ away from explored tiles (in order to make it look much more organic and smoother, with large fog blobs), it was possible to have cases cases where a tile was unexplored, but not within range of one of those tiles that is 2+ away from explored terrain, so it would not have any fog over it.
      • So they were only 1 or 2 away from explored tiles, for instance, and they thus drew no fog. But they were still counted as unexplored, because they were. Yet no fog was drawn near them at all, because they were not ALSO within range of something that was 2+ tiles away from explored.
    • After loading a savegame, and after the explored status of tiles have changed (in 200ms gaps at least), the game now back-floods from the tiles that draw fog into the tiles that are within range of it that are unexplored and yet closer to the explored area (and thus not drawing fog themselves). It then looks at the list of tiles that meet that criteria but which did not get caught in the flood, and marks those as explored since they were the ones that were falling under the category of this issue.
    • Visually speaking, when it comes to the actual act of scouting, nothing is changed. But now there is definite correspondence to everything that "looked scouted" and things that actually ARE scouted.
    • This was a tricky thing to implement in an efficient way, but even on Huge maps, on Chris's computer doing the back-fill flood takes between 1 and 3 ms to process. Since that can happen at most frequently every 200ms, and only after tiles have been scouted (or revealed in this fashion -- because that can cause a cascade of passes of tiles revealed in older savegames), the impact on performance is extremely negligible.
      • Thanks to GarathJJ, ptarth, and possibly some others for reporting.
  • Put in a change to a long-running thing where it was possible to have text strings that were apparently tens of thousands of lines long for some reason and thus causing the SpriteText class to barf out error messages about its vertices arrays being out of bounds. Now if a string is more than 10k words long, it crops it to 10k words before trying to draw it. There's no way a valid string should ever be that wrong, so whatever the heck is going on should hopefully stop. Maybe whatever the root cause is of the overly-long strings will actually become apparent!
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Fixed a super longrunning issue, probably dating back to when we first ported to unity (but at least back to Valley 2), where during load it would smear a lot of extra text together in an overly-long buffer during load. The reason was that it was updating the text buffer but only clearing it during render, and especially if you were tabbed out it could go many frames without rendering, and thus the buffer would just get insanely larger and larger.
    • If you ever saw the "Steamworks Enabled!" message like 10 times on the left of your screen right when you hit the main menu, then that's what that was. So that was the cause of the overly-long text that would then error out.
    • Thanks to Cinth for helping us discover this.
  • Updated the savanna graphics a bit to make them blend in a bit better saturation-wise.
  • The costs per social level are now different between government, commerce, and cultural.
    • Before they'd come pretty hard and fast, and around the same time from all the groups, which was a bit annoying. Some of these are also more valuable than others in terms of what trees you might need to complete, so the goal is to make the costs go up a lot on the less-central ones and then make their benefits also go up a lot.
    • All of the government level costs have been doubled until you get to the last few, which are still more expensive.
    • For the most part, the commerce level costs have been multiplied by 1.5x, but in the very last levels on these they are actually now even more expensive than the government ones.
  • No matter what, your social progress gains in any given category can no longer be lower than 2 per turn, This makes it so that you're not having 999 as the number of turns until your next level in it on the early turns.
    • Thanks to Sounds, jerith, and kasnavada for reporting.
  • The number of turns that AI saucers are holographic is now based on the difficulty level. Previously it was always 5. Now it is:
    • Easy: 5
    • Normal: 3
    • Hard: 2
    • Harder: 1
    • Nightmare: 0
    • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed a bug where the attack notifications for rogue attacks were not being aggregated.
    • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.
  • The building-status icons on the map previously only referred to the current building (if any) or the terrain (if no building). Now the CombatResult status icons (someone shot me with a laser, etc) refer to the building (if present), or to the remembered pre-wrecked type (if no building, and set), or to the terrain (if no building or pre-wrecked type).
    • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.
  • Now when you're targeting with a cobalt bomb (or other AOE weapon) on something that can actually be shot at, the game highlights the area that will be affected. After all, only you can prevent forest fires. By vaporizing the entire forest in a single blast.
    • Thanks to Kizor for suggesting.
  • The "wounded" top hud entry's tooltip now includes a line saying how many wounded were healed since last turn.
    • This will just say 0 for old saves, but will update after the next end-turn.
  • Fixed an issue with how the damage from monsters was being calculated against targets. Basically it was doing a HUGE amount of fighting if there were a ton of defenders there, and none if there were no defenders there. Now it's more even in terms of the damage it does regardless of the number of defenders, and the defenders are more to do with available casualties, etc.
    • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.
  • Super Capacitor Shields have been removed from the game. They were almost never used in general, and added complexity at next to no benefit; they just weren't very in tune with how combat has been evolving, etc. Their actual building structure will be repurposed for somethign else later.
  • Changed how adjacency bonuses work for multi-tile buildings:
    • Previously only the main tile was checked for bonuses, so if a sub-tile of a trash dump was touching a chem plant, the dump didn't get the plant's bonus. Now it checks for adjacency bonuses from all the dump's tiles.
    • Previously a multi-tile building could get bonuses from other tiles of the same building, so for example the trash dump's main tile would get two 1.3x bonuses due to the two sub-tiles.
    • Note that it's now possible for a multi-tile building to get a bonus from another building more than once, if more than one of the multi-tile building's tiles touch it.
    • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring these changes.
  • Players can now demolish constructed civic centers if that's not their last civic-center/lander.
  • Fixed a death-spiral-related oversight where the crime-reducing buildings were reducing less crime when they have less staff. Now they have full effectiveness even with no staff, but they take damage each turn when they have low staff (that was already the case).
    • Thanks to kasnavada for reporting.

Version 0.876

(Released June 6th, 2015)

  • Fixed a recent bug where the "doesn't have the resource to consume" shut down reason was applying to under-construction buildings and thus preventing construction.
    • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.
  • Fixed the disease-sloth math so that when it says (for example) "0.93x" for the disease's sloth, that means that the disease's maximum effect (if everyone is infected) is a 7% reduction in production of the affected things, rather than something like a 93% reduction.
    • Thanks to GarathJJ and ptarth for the reports and saves.
  • Now if you have Demolish mode active when you end a turn, it's automatically cleared so you don't accidentally wreck something next turn.
    • Thanks to Sounds for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed an issue from the prior version where buildings other than linguistics centers, but that also generated linguistics points, and that were targeting a race would stop targeting a race when the linguistics amount maxed out.
  • Fixed a bug where civic centers transitioning from under-construction (when they had a valid district) to fully constructed would lose their district assignment.
    • This doesn't fix existing "orphan" civic centers in old saves, sorry.
    • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save
  • Fixed an issue in prior versions where, after 6 districts were created, they would start automatically removing the later ones. Old code -- oops!
    • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save
  • The chance of accidents in cities with citizen count below 1000 is now 0 in all cases.
    • Under 5000 citizens, the chance of accidents is scaled a bit slower from what it normally would be, too.
    • This prevents random wounded citizens early in the game, and the confusion that can go with that.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for reporting.
  • The lander now heals a small number of citizens per turn, so if there are just a couple of wounded citizens you'll wind up with that solving itself in a small city. That makes hospitals less required for a super-small city where there is a wounded person or two and annoyance just from that minor case, not something larger.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.
  • Some race-specific lander properties:
    • The skylaxian landers all now heal 2x as many citizens as the others.
    • The Fenyn pollution cleaner range is now 4 instead of 3.
    • The birth rate on the Peltian landers is now 2x what the others get. They also produce 2x as much food, water, and meals from their lander.
    • The power generated by the Zenith landers is now 2x what the others get.
    • The interception attack power of the Burlust landers is now 3x what the others get.
    • The Evucks now produce commercial and military inventions from their lander, and philosophy as well. The amounts increase steadily with each lander upgrade for them. They already had a lot more health than other landers of other races.
    • The Krolin now produce 3x as much Government SP from their lander.
    • The Boarines now have only 2/3 as much housing in their lander, and 1/3 as much entertainment, but they have 6x more repair capability off their lander than average, plus an extra 500 construction skill per lander level.
  • Put in a change that no longer has Unity "not run the game in the background" when it is out of focus in fullscreen mode. This was our only game to do that, and the white boxes issue is possibly related to this happening. If anyone can confirm if they can still make the white boxes textures appear, that would be awesome -- and hopefully that doesn't repro anymore. Thanks!
  • Fixed a rather serious bug in how the wounded at location percentage multiplier was being calculated in the last version, and thus what it was doing to your percent efficiency at a building.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for reporting.
  • There were previously a variety of stats that would only show on buildings if you held down the Ctrl key. That is no longer the case -- stats either show or don't show.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for suggesting.
  • On your tooltips for buildings, adjacency bonuses now show slightly better, not requiring quite so much height.
  • Pollution on power, waste, resources, and terraforming buildings no longer contributes to crime on the overall city.
    • Aka, if you put your nasty power-generation polluters way out of range of other parts of your city, you won't have any uptick in crime from them at all.
    • Thanks to Cinth and ptarth for inspiring this change.
  • In the stats for buildings, when they are ImmuneToRangedAndSeaAttacks, they will not also show the SeaAttackResistance stat if that gets added, because the former is inclusive of the latter anyway.
  • Put in some code that will now complain when the game tries to assign crime to buildings there it's just not possible to have crime (aka no one is there, or the building is supposed to be immune because of a flag on it).
  • Fixed a couple of bugs with crime where crime could happen on buildings where that simply was not supposed to happen. Explorer camps, etc, etc.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for a report that led to this discovery.
  • Some buildings are immune to having anyone locally wounded by pollution, or having crime caused at them by pollution, or having any crime at all on them. Now that's actually shown on their placement mode tooltip, and in their tile details window. Before it was invisible!
    • Thanks to kasnavada for a report that led to this discovery.
  • All of the spire units previously had that ability where their laser shots disable the target for one turn. Now none of them have that, as it was just overwhelming and confusing as well.
    • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring that change.
  • Fixed an issue with the cobalt bomb where part of its sound was missing.
    • Thanks to Kizor and Cinth for reporting.
  • Bombers in general, including the cobalt bomber, can now attack flying targets and hovering saucers.
    • Thanks to Kizor for suggesting.
  • Also fixed a bug where ranged attacks in general could not hit flying targets. So the Neinzul and Spire were both completely unable to shoot at one another, for instance.
    • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.
  • Fixed a number of things with how wounded people were being allocated to buildings, and in general staff allocation in particular for low-population cities (but really just in general). No more phantom people popping in and out, people wounding themselves locally but not in the global count, people being wounded for no reason (phantom pains, we'll call them) that disappear despite no hospitals or whatnot, and so on.
    • This makes the early staffing-up look way more sane, in essence.
  • Changed the timing of when citizen healing happens during the interturn so that it is after any citizens would have been wounded. Thus if you have a low enough number of woundings compared to your hospitals, you can run without anyone actually being wounded during the turn itself.

Version 0.875

(Released June 6th, 2015)

  • In the prior version, it was letting you research all the way to the maximum language skill with races even without Computational Psychosemantics. Fixed.
    • Additionally, in the prior version once you maxed out your language skill with a race then it would go absolutely bonkers in the game and stop a bunch of stuff from working properly.
    • Now it properly handles both of these cases, gives you a center-screen message about you being maxed out, and deselects that race on the linguistics buildings that were targeting them so that those buildings show up as having nothing to do (handy so you notice them better).
    • Please note that it doesn't yet tell you anything about races that are invalid to select for these reasons in the dropdown of selecting these races in the linguistics screen. That is in the process of being redone, so it will be added when the new format is in there. It's on our list, anyway. :)
    • Thanks to Cinth and ptarth for reporting AND doing the really heavy lifting of even figuring out what was going so bonkers -- that's above and beyond!
  • The massive pollution amounts from the prior version of the game on power generation have been cut in half. We'll see how this does.
    • Thanks to Cinth and ptarth for inspiring this change.
  • Now any building that needs those "brackets" to display what resource they're producing/consuming or what race they're targeting cannot be built next to another such building, to prevent the visual overlap (and, coming up, mouse-interaction overlap) of those brackets.
  • The icons in those brackets now have building-specific tooltips saying whether it's producing a resource, consuming a resource, or targeting a race, and saying which resource/race.
  • Clicking those brackets (for resource-consuming or race-targeting buildings; not resource-producing ones) now brings up a screen for selecting the target resource/race.
    • The dropdowns that used to be on the building details window for this purpose have been removed, and instead there's just a button that takes you to the selection screen.
  • Thoraxian Monster Pits are now a general Thoraxian military building, not an independent rogue type.

Version 0.874

(Released June 5th, 2015)

  • Fixed a bug since the introduction of the holographic-phase of a saucer's spawn where the AI would never consider those saucers eligible to fire (saucers spawned in saves before that version were fine).
    • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.
  • Now when saucers have nothing to shoot at, and are too far away from eligible targets for their normal movement logic, they just warp out.
    • Thanks to ptarth and others for inspiring this change.
  • Added an additional check to market item creation to prevent the actual creation if no eligible market-item-effect-type could be found. It will also show an error message in this case so we can learn whether or not this is actually happening.
    • This should be the last way that new quality-zero market items can be created. Already-existing quality-zero market items from previous saves will still be there, since stripping them out would mess with other parts of the schema that might reference them.
    • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.
  • Now if a resource-using building loses access to a supply of that resource, instead of clearing the targeting of that resource it goes into a new shut-down mode.
    • It will also start in that shut-down mode (the tooltip for the shut-down icon mentions this), so that it doesn't immediately start giving the bonus before the resources have actually been consumed during end-turn.
    • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change
  • Now the market item percent completion display on the inventory screen factors in minimum quality, such that if the quality is at a lower "completion percent" than the construction, the quality percent is shown. Otherwise you'd see crazy things like 900% complete, etc.
    • Thanks to ptarth and crazyroosterman for reporting.
  • Added the "ignore next mouse-up" behavior to the close buttons on some other windows, notably the buildings window. This should prevent accidental building placement/demolishing when a valid target happens to be right under the close button.
    • Thanks to Mick, mooncows, and others for reporting.
  • A ton of buildings (all except the multi-tile ones) now have been "de-cluttered." There is still more to do here, and some of them now feel too empty, but it's a big step forward!
  • Fixed a null reference bug that could occur when animating a rural farms tile being destroyed by an attack (by an underground monster, at least).
    • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.
  • A the last two new 8-minute atmospheric music tracks to the game. There is one more full musical suite yet to come.
  • Fixed an issue with the Evuck Council Chambers not having a type for its power production.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.
  • Updated the tooltips for building effectiveness to break out the percent of staff you have there and the wounded percentage as two totally different things.
    • Before it could look like you had fully-staffed buildings with nobody working, but actually you had every one of them also wounded.
    • Also, now when you have wounded citizens working at a building, the minimum effectiveness of that building is 1%, rather than dropping all the way to 0.
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for reporting.
  • Turn limits have been removed from the game. That's been planned for quite a while, and it also removes a couple of interface issues with the top bar, etc.
    • Thanks to ptarth and Cinth for various related reports.
  • Fixed a graphical issue where being in a power shortage caused a warning to overlap the turns count.
    • Thanks to ptarth and nas1m for reporting.

Power Generation And Consumption

  • Fixed a pretty heinous design issue where buildings that were only partly staffed only cost some of their power requirement.
    • That sounds fair, really, though, right? I mean, for other negative things like pollution production and trash production, we can do that and it's great.
    • Well... the problem comes in with rolling blackouts and death cycles and so forth. In a lot of scenarios it becomes utterly impossible to know what your real power requirements are, and you wind up getting into death spirals on occasion from vital services shutting on and off in rolling brownouts caused by vast underpowering caused in turn by your power draw constantly fluctuating while your power production remains constant.
    • It may be less "fair" in some ways to have your buildings always pull full power even if they are at low efficiency, but it's actually a lot simpler to understand -- and your buildings ought to be running at full efficiency most of the time in a healthy city, anyway.
    • Note that disabled buildings won't draw power -- those that are disabled for any reason other than brownout, that is -- so of course you can still do emergency power management that way. But the difference there is that you're not prey to those unintentional cycles of doom.
    • Please do note that this is going to break a lot of existing savegames in terms of putting them into immediate brownout.
    • Thanks to ptarth and Cyborg for reports that led to this discovery.
  • A variety of changes (detailed below) to when you get various power production technologies and how much they cost. This is particularly relevant in light of the other changes to fix power costs when staffing is low.
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
  • Oil Drilling is now an extremely cheap tech, and available right from social level 0, rather than requiring social level 2.
    • Oil Power Plants also now individually put out 3x more power and 3x more pollution.
    • The Biomass Power Plant now puts out vastly more power, and a lot more pollution, but at a better ratio than oil power.
    • Both of these also now cost a lot more crowns.
    • Efficient Incineration now costs a little more than a quarter than what it used to, so you can get Biomass Power Plants and Crematoriums much earlier more easily.
  • The Nuclear Power Plant is now amazing, but costs a ton more, puts out more pollution (but at the best ratio yet of the non-solar/wind options), and now costs a LOT more science and social level to unlock.
    • Liquid Lead Cooling (its tech prereq) now comes after Efficient Materials Recovery rather than flight control.
    • The changes to this make it WAY easier to handle late-game things like the space victory or artificial volcanoes without spamming tons of power plants.
  • Geothermal Power Plants are now available at social level 4 rather than 6, and they produce a ton more power than before, and at a bit better power to pollution ratio compared to biomass.
  • The Waste To Energy power plant now produces the same amount of power as a biomass power plant, but at a higher initial construction cost and only very slightly less pollution output.
    • However, it has the side benefit of consuming trash. It now consumes 4x more trash than it did in previous versions.
    • Plasmafication, which unlocks this, is also now available from social level 7 on instead of 9, and costs about 2/3 as much as it used to.

Linguistics Changes

  • Thanks to kasnavada and nas1m for inspiring these changes.
  • The Linguistics window is gone. So is all concept of you having a global "target language" or "target language level".
  • Linguistic Research Centers now take a target race.
  • Linguistic Research Centers, Spy Safehouses, and Embassies now generate language research points towards the language of the race they're pointed at.
  • The city grid now has a column for "language skill" showing the current level of knowledge for that language. The tooltip shows the "language" part out of 5, and the "manipulation" part out of 2 (levels 6 and 7), and also the translation-sample "proverb" that used to show on the linguistics screen.

Version 0.873

(Released June 4th, 2015)

  • A new 8-minute atmospheric music track has been added to the game. This one is string-based -- cool edgy strings in there to start it off (some tremolo strings underneath some sustained strings), and it ends with some more ambiance and a harp playing the lead part. The idea here is that this, like the piano ambiance track, creates some separation from the more intense melody-driven musical suites. There is another musical suite still in the works as well, but these ambient tracks do a great job of setting tone and atmosphere while giving you a break from music that's completely driving.
  • Fixed a few bugs from the prior version's not updating other logic dependent on the player having InteriorBallistics, leading to them not being able to scout unless they both had scouting stations AND InteriorBallistics.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for the report and save.

Version 0.872

(Released June 4th, 2015)

  • Fixed a null exception in the computation of the DistrictBuildingCounts property for civic centers under construction.
    • Note: there's apparently a bug whereby a new civic center can fail to get assigned to a new district when placed, which is what leads to the nullref. If you see that happen with a civic center you place in this next version, please let us know.
    • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.
  • Fixed a bug where the vivisection room's bonus was not displayed properly in the building details window, leading to errors and really weird text.
    • Thanks to MayhemMike and crazyroosterman for the reports and saves
  • Made the mouse handling system much more aggressive about blocking tile-mouseover, to prevent edge cases like the left-sidebar buttons not blocking mouse interaction with the underlying map when it "wraps" up from the bottom on 720px-high displays, etc.
    • Notably, this prevents the issue where you click on Demolish to select it and BOOM. What can we say? The demolition crews are all-Burlust.
    • Thanks to crazyroosterman, Shrugging Khan, and Kizor for reporting.
  • Explorer camps can now be placed within air-vehicle range of your lander, rather than within ground-soldier range of your lander.
    • This also prevents the confusing listing of "too far from your lander" in the reasons you can't place an explorer camp on a water or mountain tile that's within air vehicle range of your lander. It was correct, in that your explorers couldn't get out there, but...
    • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.
  • The main tooltip for wreckage tiles now shows what building used to be on them.
    • Note: wreckage from old saves won't show this, as it wasn't remembering this back then. But newly exploded buildings will show this. Sooo... go explode things?
    • Thanks to ptarth and jerith for suggesting.
  • Toxin screening now no longer prevents the first-ever batch of that toxin infections you experience. But after that any further infections will be caught by screening.
    • Thanks to Kizor and ptarth for inspiring this change.
  • Made the top line of the atmospheric-compatibility-top-hud-element's tooltip use the same round-down math as the hud element itself, to avoid situations where the element says 24% and the tooltip says 25%, etc.
    • Thanks to GarathJJ and windgen for reporting.
  • If you're not in attack mode, and you have attack buildings, left clicking the building of another race will put you into attack mode (with no attack building type selected, yet).
    • If you're already in attack mode, but don't have a specific attack type selected, the game will search through the available types of attack, preferring:
      • Can I damage the target at all?
      • Can I damage the target without being intercepted?
      • Can I kill the target?
      • Can I kill the target using the least amount of energy?
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan and Sounds for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed a bug where the end-turn-cue data wasn't being cleared when a game was closed (for loading or starting another, for example). Leading to some load-orders resulting in you being stuck with the game demanding you place more explorer camps when you couldn't, etc.
    • Thanks to Cinth and jerith for reporting.
  • Linguistics generation changes.
    • Spy Safehouses now generate 20 linguistics points (will be with the race they are targeting, soon).
    • Molecular Refineries no longer generate any linguistics points.
    • Embassies now generate 40 linguistics points (will be with the race they are targeting, soon).
    • Thanks to kasnavada for suggesting changes along these lines.
  • Extraction Facilities and Harvesters can now be placed on land or water tiles. (oops that they could not before).
    • Thanks to ptarth and tbrass for reporting.
  • Civic Centers and Coordinated Military Command buildings are now immune to limestone collapse. (oops that they were not before)
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • Fisheries and Teleporter Depots are now immune to crime.
    • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.
  • Changes to prevent crime death spirals:
    • The effect from litter and unclaimed bodies on crime is now 10x lower than they were before, to help prevent death spirals from them.
    • The chance of death from crime is now 1/3rd what it previously was.
    • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.
  • Races choose to join incidents based on a variety of factors. Previously it was way too likely for them to want to join, however. Now they are 1/10th as likely to join an incident in progress. We'll see how this plays out, if that's enough of a reduction.
    • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.
  • The player buildings are now separated from their underlying "roads," which will soon be race-specific. We are working on de-cluttering the player buildings and making their functions more apparent as well, but this process is only just starting. About 26 of them are part-way through that process, and the underlying roads are just a very plain base right now. It's may temporarily look slightly worse before it looks the best that it has yet, but it's coming along quite well already.
  • Fixed an issue in the prior version where various buildings had their highlights offset during placement mode, hover-over, etc, etc.
    • Thanks to nas1m, Cinth, mooncows, and ptarth for reporting.
  • The player and alien buildings have also now been compressed down into smaller (and fewer) dictionaries, which reduces RAM usage yet again (with no added compression or anything), improves the game load time slightly, and improves the framerate slightly.
  • A new 10-minute atmospheric music track has been added to the game. This one has a lot of nature sounds in it, as well as a very calm and quiet sort of piano piece. The idea here is that this creates some separation from the more intense melody-driven suites.
  • The basic panning speed for the WASD keys has been doubled.
    • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.
  • Fixed several bugs preventing auto-scouting from working properly in some cases. Notably:
    • Ceasing to scout eligible tiles, sometimes because it was hung up trying to scout the very edge of the world.
    • Scouting the same tile over and over again, or nearly so, making it look like only one scout is sent out.
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan and Cinth for the reports and saves.
  • Fixed a bug where the basic way of saying "do this for all fully-constructed buildings owned by this race" was not doing anything to exclude under-construction buildings from the same logic. Kind of surprising things were working as well as they were before. May be some significant behavior shifts from this fix.
    • But notably this does fix the "immediately get space-win when all space center buildings are placed" bug.
    • Thanks to Kizor for the report and save.
  • Added some more general "if hud blocking windows are open, don't allow mouse events on the map" logic. Prevents placing of buildings while looking at the temperature window, for example.
    • Also added some more general "if left-clicking a window close button, ignore the next left mouseup event". Prevents placing a building by clicking the diplomacy window close button when it just happened to be over a valid spot, for example.
    • Thanks to MayhemMike for reporting.
  • Fixed an issue introduced a week or so ago that could make text go absolutely batshot insane sometimes, which would particularly manifest on the disease listing window.
    • Thanks to Cinth, crazyroosterman, nas1m, and Kizor for reporting.

More Tech Tree Changes/Additions

  • Aaaack this must have been so confusing for people: Fixed a bug where middle-clicking buildings in the tech tree was not working in recent versions.
    • Thanks to tadrinth, Magus-k, Shrugging Khan, and ptarth for reporting.
  • The Fishery is now unlocked via Biology rather than Commercial Shipbuilding.
    • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.
  • Thief Recruitment is no longer on the tech tree, since the Thieves Guild does nothing now.
  • Hydroponics has also been cut, as it was just not useful enough and definitely in the way.
  • Neo-Historism as a tech has gone away, and is now replaced by Luxury Construction. Basically the same idea, but a new icon and name. And a lot more costly now.
  • Abstract Reasoning is a new tech, and is what unlocks the Philosopharium. Having this separated from luxury housing (these both came from Neo-Historism before) allows us to make luxury housing more expensive and philosophy less so.
  • The Civic Center and Teleporter Depot now are unlocked via a new Colonization tech, which is separate from Formalized Diplomacy. This separates out the functions of expanding your empire versus talking to other empires, which really are two very different matters.
    • This is now a top-level option on the far left, and very inexpensive.
    • Wars of Aggression is now a direct descendant of this.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.
  • The Sonar tech is now called Scouting, and is also now a direct descendant of Colonization, and is much less expensive.
    • This now unlocks both sonar scouts and regular scouts, rather than regular scouts being under interior ballistics.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.
  • Wars Of Aggression is also now a direct descendant of Colonization, but retains its prior cost and so forth.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.
  • A ton of other changes have been made to the first part of the tech tree to get it better organized and better let you find the ways to expand outwards as well as those things you need to make a basic city in general.
    • Thanks to kasnavada for inspiring this change.
  • Okay, a bunch of other changes to the tech tree, getting too bothersome to note them all.
  • There are now 10 different techs called "+1 district" at various places around the tech tree. They all cost a flat 500 science, no matter what tech came before them.
    • The previous way of getting more techs from government social progress levels remains, but this is yet another way. This had actually been intended from near the start of the shift to the new districting method, but we hadn't had time to add them until now.

Version 0.871

(Released June 3rd, 2015)

  • The in-game Recent Changes link has been updated to point to the new release notes page.
  • The construction complexity added by forest and jungles is now vastly less.
    • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.
  • The disease number on the top HUD now shows the highest infection count of any disease in your city, rather than the sum of all infection counts, to avoid confusion.
    • Thanks to nas1m and jerith for inspiring this change.
  • Fixed a bug in the last version where diseases often couldn't cure at all.
  • The disease tooltip now includes the number of cured and newly-infected of each disease since the last turn.
    • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring this change.
  • Added columns to the city grid:
    • Number of saucers attacking this city
    • Number of saucers owned by this city
    • Total attack power of all air attackers
    • ditto ranged
    • ditto sea
    • ditto ground
    • Thanks to Hyfrydle for inspiring this change.
  • Tweaked some sprite batching code to hopefully have a more happy medium between performance and RAM use. Honestly it's not a direct tradeoff, because actually the higher-RAM approach costs some performance in some other ways.
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for reporting.
  • Now pressing escape or right-clicking while having both a build menu and a building-details window open at the same time will consistently close the details window, and not the build menu. Pressing again will then close the build menu.
    • Thanks to jerith and ptarth for suggesting.
  • Now buildings are immune to understaffing damage for ~5 turns after their construction.
    • Thanks to jerith, Cinth, and ptarth for inspiring this change
  • Now when placing a district, it marks the tiles you'd "gain" (in the sense of being theoretically able to build on them).
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for suggesting.
  • Mousing over the race icon of another race in city grid now shows the various bits of intel that used to show up on the diplomacy window "intel reports" tab.
  • Now when a spy safehouse is targeting another race, every turn it hurts their attitude towards you by the same amount as an embassy would help it.
  • Now each market item won't be created until its quality reaches at least 1.1x (for the player) or 1.33x (for an AI race) the quality of the highest quality item previously produced by that race.
  • The hex-shaped-ish building efficiency display bar has now gone away. It only fit around buildings that were not drawn over the underlying terrain (otherwise it looked badly offset), and the buildings in front of these display bars could obscure them, too. Which was intentional for visual purposes, but still a problem to some degree.
    • Now there is a circular icon that shows up on the building in the row with all the other status icons (when this needs to show). Additionally, like all other status icons, this now has a tooltip which explains what the heck it even means! Even better than that, it shows the details of WHY the efficiency is what it is in this particular exact case. Low staffing, pollution, whatever.
    • Thanks to Misery for inspiring these changes.
  • Shopping Malls now entertain 600 citizens rather than the 200 they entertained in past versions.
    • Office Buildings no longer entertain 200 citizens (that was an oops).
    • Thanks to tadrinth, jerith, Cinth, and ptarth for reporting.
  • The music for the game is now properly hooked up so that it actually plays, except for the race-specific music, which will only play under circumstances which don't exist yet (but will soon).
    • Thanks to lots of players for reminding about this... a lot. ;)
  • Fixed a bug on 768px high screens where the demolish icon could be hanging down off the screen.
    • Thanks to nas1m and Kizor for reporting.
  • Molecular Refineries can now be placed on mountains properly.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • The game has now had a lot of its sprite dictionaries compacted in terms of how many wasted buffer pixels they have. A bit tricky on some of these, but this leads to some better RAM usage as well as a slight framerate improvement.
  • When multi-tile buildings are placed, it now makes you place them so that their entire footprint is within your district, thus avoiding them getting shut down if you place them in the southeast corners of your districts.
    • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.
  • Coordinated Military Command buildings have completely lost their old functionality.
    • Now they let you place military buildings within 6 of them even outside of normal district boundaries.
    • Advanced Military Leadership, which unlocks these, has switched places with Crowd Control and is now unlockable vastly sooner. It's also now called Wars Of Aggression.
    • Thanks to zebeast45 for suggesting.
  • Tech tree changes to make the tree less crunched together:
    • Landscape Grading now comes after Plasmafication, mainly to get it out of the way of the earlier part of the tech tree and not make that bit so overwhelming.
    • Brokerage Licensing is now after Mass Communication, again just to get it out of the way visually on the early tech tree.
    • Gene Manipulation now comes after Plasmafication, to make some room on its part of the tech tree.
    • Brewing now comes after mass communication in order to thin out the left side of the tech tree yet a bit more.
    • Large Profile Stealth Frames now comes after Budget Committees, which Chris finds amusing. Not sure if you also noticed his joke with Creative Writing being the prereq for Budget Committees.
    • Forestry now comes after Weapons Production.
    • Commercial Fishing now comes after Sonar.
    • And then a variety of other things have been shifted just spatially near themselves.
    • All of these changes also help to avoid the illusion from the last version that the tech tree is teeny or missing when you first start out.
    • The gameplay impact of all these changes is extremely minimal, but it feels a lot better early on in as well as once there are a ton of techs unlocked. It presents you with no more ultra-high-level social-level-requirement techs right from the start cluttering up your view, too, which is also good. And in general the techs are more organized with the higher-value stuff to the right, even though the cul-de-sac nature of it has not been diminished.
    • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring these changes.

First Diplomatic Carnage

  • Diplomacy is getting a complete makeover, and this is the first salvo in that.
  • The entire concept of Trust has gone away. Attitude is enough.
    • Everything that previously used trust in some way now uses attitude.
  • The entire concept of gathering intel as it used to exist is gone. That's going to work differently coming up.
  • Getting other races to do certain things for you is now gone:
    • Reverse Wind (this was too powerful, sort of, and also too confusing when used).
    • Set Attack Bounty On Race (international incidents made this obsolete).
    • All of the stealing and spying stuff that other races would do for you (this was of super dubious value to begin with).
  • You now always know who the leader of the other races are as soon as you meet them.
  • The concept of thieves and stealing as it existed before is now gone.

Spies, Intel, and The Panopticon

  • City Grid visibility:
    • Now if you haven't met a race, you don't see their city here.
    • Even if you can see a city here, by default you can only see the race icon, race name, and population.
      • But if you had a spy safehouse targeting that race at the end of your last turn, all the other info for that race will show.
    • Added a "Status" column that will show either "No Intel" or the race's attitude towards you (nothing shows for your own race) with a tooltip containing the race's leader's name and numeric attitude.
  • Panopticon updates.
    • From the in-game description:
      • Shows you all the intel about races that you would normally get from Spy Safehouses, but without any negative consequences from finding out this information (no attitude loss).
      • This is also a requirement for achieving an espionage domination against another faction. While the panopticon is active, all of the spy safehouses that you have will gather between 1 and 4 military and pride (gossip, personal stuff about leaders, etc) points of intel each turn.
      • The more military intel points you have against a race, the better you will fight against them, which is useful in general. But once you reach 1000 intel points in either the military or pride category, your espionage domination of that race will be complete.

MapGen

  • Two new terrain types have been added: grass with trees, and savanna. The former is just sprinkled around in regular grass, and the latter shows up a bunch in the tropical zone.
  • On Terrestrial maps, the way that the zones are calculated is now a lot better, and you wind up with larger poles and not so huge of a tropical zone. You also now have breaks between the zones that are more natural and randomized, rather than being these strange uniform straight lines.
  • On all maps (that previously had this problem), there is no longer such a huge amount of forest and/or jungle on them.
    • Thanks to Shrugging Khan for reporting.
  • Okay, let's put it this way then: pretty much the entire seeding of the Terrestrial map is completely different now. It's way more interesting, and you get way more terrain variety from what we already had, and so on.
  • You no longer seed smack dab in the middle of the map anymore, which in itself makes things a lot more interesting.
  • Temperate Lakes no longer have icecaps.
  • Temperate lakes actually has... well, proper lakes.
  • The way that all the maps look now is actually pretty darn different. Europa looks very much better now, too.
  • Fixed a bug where in some cases a Tiny map would fail to properly generate.
    • Thanks to Kizor for reporting.

Prior Beta Notes

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

Stars Beyond Reach Beta Release Notes

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