The Last Federation:Post-1.0 Release Notes

Version 1.610

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

Version 1.609 (Orbital Hunters)

(Released October 24th, 2014)

• AFA members, infected population, and personnel transports are now properly cleared when a planet changes hands from one owner to another.
  • Thanks to Valguris for reporting.

• Put in checks to make sure that the total AFA never exceed the total adult population on a planet, and so that the total infected never exceed the total population on a planet.
  • Thanks to Valguris for reporting.

• Betrayal-replaced or Obscura-replaced races no longer hold skylaxian elections or andor elections if they are those races.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Fixed the intro text for the Peltians to no longer say that you get 1 voting proxy for every 1 influence. It's been 1 proxy per 10 influence for a long time for balance reasons, but that one bit of text was missed in the updates.
  • Thanks to dummiesday for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with Create Strong Federation where it was claiming that you had to have strong relations with the Thoraxians, when really it meant the Acutians.
  • Thanks to Mick for reporting.

• Fixed a few issues where the Betrayal-replaced or Obscura-replaced races could get aliens on their planets improperly, such as having Boarine Regents, etc. This then of course led to things like those regents dying of old age.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The recently-added Orbital Bombing dispatch now costs more, and is less effective, proportional to the size of the planet's dedicated defense armadas. It costs still more, and is still less effective, against Obscura-held planets.
  • Thanks to nas1m, Mr Redshirt, and Histidine for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed a bug in the math for Consume Lasers effect where consuming fewer than roughly 100 shots actually reduced your attack power, rather than each such absorbed hit increasing it by 1%.
  • Thanks to Dapple for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the "Create Federation With Other Race" deal would show up red even though it was valid for some races.
  • Thanks to Valguris for the report and save.

• The Evuck Resentmnet penalty that makes each contract cost an extra amount of credits is now applied at the very end of the credit cost computation rather than relatively early on, as it was being overshadowed there.
  • Thanks to Valguris for inspiring this change.

• Now when an attack fleet is in range of both a target planet/outpost and another hostile planet/outpost it will only be considered as attacking the target, rather than both.
  • Thanks to Valguris for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where Evuck Resentment was applying to contracts other than political deals despite its description to the contrary.
  • Thanks to Valguris for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where a combat's Obscura side would display the wrong icon in the bottom-left corner.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where a player-deployed ship's tooltip would say "Obscura" instead of the correct designation.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

• Previously, the Obscura or the Hydral races would get rage momentum if they were replacing the Boarines. Fixed.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The Evucks, Hydrals, and Obscura are now immune to all diseases.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Previously, you could outsource your outposts to yourself in Betrayal mode, or to the Obscura in Invasion mode. Fixed.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• "Hold Off Overwhelming Attack" is no longer an option on your own planets in Betrayal mode. The "Directly Defend Against Invader Armadas" is identical to it, and the superior option. The former was only available in certain circumstances, but when it was there it was the inferior thing. It is designed for use on the planets of other races.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The Thoraxian's mega-building that spawned Thoraxian Hunter fleets have been removed. Instead, if you have <= -500 influence with the Thoraxians they'll try to spawn those hunter fleets from their emergency reserves roughly every 30 months.
  • Further, the hunter fleets no longer prioritize killing pirate bases. Instead they just come after you.
  • None of these spawn in Betrayal or Invasion mode.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring these changes.

• All outposts in the game are now assigned unique names, so that you can actually tell one apart from the next. That's been a need for a long time, although really it's mainly come into focus now that betrayal mode is a thing.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting, and thanks to deadone and culturekills for the names.

• The ownership of outposts and planets is now shown in text a bit differently -- more consistently, more briefly, and more places.
  • This helps a lot when figuring out what you are giving orders for, among other things.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• The "Docked At" section on the armada management screen is gone, and the mission section has moved to the left. The formatting of the rows has been changed around a lot to in general aid legibility.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Fixed two typos where "the" was repeated twice.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Version 1.608

(Released October 11th, 2014)

• When done on your own planets (i.e. betrayal mode) the RCI-increasing dispatches for econ, environmental, and medical now spend resources (Perovskite, Molybdenum, and Cesium respectively) each day.
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the planet-destroyed whiteout was fading with sim-time rather than real-time (and thus not fading at all while the game is paused, which it often would be after such an event).
  • Thanks to FortunaDraken and Valguris for reporting.

• Added a support-ground-defense friendly action, very similar to the one that supports a ground invasion, but instead gives positive influence and halves the casualties the invaders inflict instead of doubling it (allowing it to be effective against Peltian "invasion" as well).

• Fixed a bug where the replacement of an overriding combat-side race (like Obscura) for the name/icon/etc of the parent node's owner was basically applying to every conceivable reference to that race (during the combat) rather than just those which are specific to the combat.
  • Thanks to WBAD and steelwing for the reports and save.

• Put in code to prevent parasites/leeches from capturing civilian goodies.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Put in one more check on the Hive Queen logic; hopefully that solves the strange issue that some people are having.

• Fixed an issue with some text for the UIS referring to the SAP.
  • Thanks to dummiesday for reporting.

Version 1.607

(Released October 10th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug from the prior version where all the planets were getting hive queens repeatedly, and thus spamming messages about hive queen mood shifts.
  • Thanks to SNAFU, steelwing, and Misery for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where sometimes the Obscura or Hydral races woulds say some stuff about hive queens.
  • Thanks to Kaziglu_Bey for reporting.

Economic Tuning

• The credit rewards from contracts and quests are now 70% what they were in the prior version.
  • This does not affect the rewards from fighting assisins or thoraxian hunters.

• In the prior version, the combat rewards were reduced to 1/10th their prior value. They are now 1/8th, instead.

• Dispatches that were boosted in the prior build are now 70% as effective as they were in the prior version.

• Buying "general Hydral tech" is now twice as costly as before.
  • Buying a weapon or other specific sort of hydral tech is now 1.5x as costly as before.

• Buying goons is now 2x more expensive.

• Clients will now sponsor property development, science research, and outpost development regardless of how long it is going to take.
  • This makes it so that scientists and construction workers are not _required_ in order to do the more time-consuming dispatches here anymore.

Version 1.606 (Credit Bombardment)

(Released October 9th, 2014)

• Added a new Hostile Action dispatch: Orbital Bombing.
  • Basically this has the effect of one of the old Orbital Bomber's shots each solar day.
  • Thanks to nas1m and Histidine for inspiring this addition.

• The orbital bombers that can be deployed in combat no longer fire their bomb-weapon at the planet, but instead fire it at enemy ships. It basically acts as a mini-nuke in terms of damage and aoe (but no environmental damage to the planet, etc). The AI will also no longer bumrush player-controlled orbital bombers.
  • Thanks to nas1m and Histidine for inspiring this change.

• The "Hydral Ship Storage Hangar" capturable now grants orbital bombers instead of squadrons.
  • Thanks to FortunaDraken for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the cost of Andor truce brokering could get so insane as to wrap around into negative numbers.
  • Thanks to damium for reporting.

• If the combat requires eradicating all enemy ships, the minimap will now expand to display blips for them all.
  • Thanks to dummiesday for inspiring this change.

• Removed the logic whereby civilian ships would flee below 60% health, since generally they're objective-related if they're present at all, and fleeing objectives can be very inconvenient.
  • Thanks to Valguris for the report and save.

• The mouseover tooltip for the ground forces figures under each planet on the metamap now includes a line for the power of the Planetary Ground Defense Forces.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Changed the Stop Bio-Terrorist Plot quest to give positive influence with the client rather than negative. The latter was actually (apparently) intentional, but looked terribly confusing to the player with the current descriptions and so forth.
  • Thanks to Drak and Magos Mechanicus for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the several quest types with "requires a race with a planet with a certain RCI less than" (or greater than) requirements were actually requiring the absence of such a planet rather than the presence. This led to, for example, the bio-terrorist quest being given for races that didn't really have any problems with public order (and being unavailable for races with a planet with public order < -80).
  • Thanks to Thasero for the report bringing this to our attention.

• Now when the game tells you "This planet cannot have any trends right now" it will now be more specific about the cause.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the Huge Tax Breaks deal wasn't checking for trend-blockers or duplicate-trending.
  • Thanks to Misery for the report and save.

• Moved Prisoner Exchange and such deals to Friendly Actions since they were always available even when the outer political category was not (due to low influence) and this created a very confusing interface situation.
  • The Burlust versions are still political deals since they're specifically associated with individual warlords, and are now subject to the category influence requirements to avoid the earlier confusion.
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter for inspiring this change.

• Player shots no longer destroy mass driver shots.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

• Fixed the description for the Wolf Predator and Sharpshooter referring to the old rules of only firing when the player fires.

• Fixed a bug where the federation-window's mouseover explanation of why a deal isn't available was listing attitude-too-low reasons twice.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where you could get an "Opposed Us In War" influence penalty against a race for defending an outpost/planet from pirates of that race.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

• Now when a planet is captured, all its local defense armadas (if any remain) are removed from the game rather than switching to the conquering side.
  • This is also the case with emergency reserve squadrons.
  • Thanks to SNAFU for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the prediction of the damage-relations dispatch claimed that it would increase rather than decrease the relevant attitude scores. The actual execution was correctly reducing relations.
  • Thanks to Warpstorm for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the space-outpost-development action was available from player-controlled outposts.
  • Thanks to Manxome for reporting.

• Fixed some bugs where peltian voting proxy gain was not being listed in the results of various actions (generally speaking, the gain was still taking place).
  • Thanks to Drak and Manxome for the report and save.

• The Property Development action's building-type selection dropdown now lists the number of each type of building currently present in parentheses.
  • Thanks to Crazyross for inspiring this change.

Credit Balance

• The amount of credit that you gain from ship kills is now 1/10th of the rate that it previously was.
  • Thanks to GC13, Drak, Ragwortshire, topper, Histidine, Acenoid, and Eternaly_Lost for helping inspire this change.

• The following dispatches now give more credit than they used to:
  • 12x more:
    • RCI boosts for planets.
    • Harvest space junk (for anyone).
    • Expand usable land area (for another player).
    • Tactical Support for resistance fighters.
    • Support for ground invasion.
  • 6x more:
    • Mine uncolonized moon (for another player).
    • Property development (for another player).
    • Cooperative research.
  • 3x more:
    • Cooperative space outpost development.
    • Assist with armada construction.
  • Thanks to GC13, Drak, Ragwortshire, topper, Histidine, Acenoid, and Eternaly_Lost for helping inspire these changes.

• Delivering spacefaring tech now gives you a credit reward that is 4x higher than before.
  • Thanks to GC13, Drak, Ragwortshire, topper, Histidine, Acenoid, and Eternaly_Lost for helping inspire these changes.

• Destroying a pirate base gives you a credit reward that is 5x higher.
  • Thanks to GC13, Drak, Ragwortshire, topper, Histidine, Acenoid, and Eternaly_Lost for helping inspire these changes.

• Successfully fighting off assassins or Thoraxian Hunters now gives you a 10x higher reward than before. Rather than being annoying, these should be "yay money... if I live!"
  • Thanks to GC13, Drak, Ragwortshire, topper, Histidine, Acenoid, and Eternaly_Lost for helping inspire these changes.

• Quests are now a lot more valuable in credit rewards:
  • "Steal stuff from the Obscura" now pays 40x what it previously did.
  • None of the other quests really gave any intrinsic credit reward before, although you would get credit for killing enemy ships. Now they give you a varyingly large reward depending on the quest in question.
  • Thanks to GC13, Drak, Ragwortshire, topper, Histidine, Acenoid, and Eternaly_Lost for helping inspire these changes.

• What exactly do the above mean, net effect, for players?
  • Well, first of all, combat is no longer so lucrative, of course. It was really a very solid way to get waaay too much money very quickly later in the game, while not really getting as much in the early game. It also encouraged grinding, to an extent.
  • Some of the less-useful-to-you-directly dispatches are now some of the things that pay the most.
    • For instance, the most lucrative jobs of all, dispatch-wise, are now harvesting space junk and expanding the usable land area.
      • Both of those are a finite resource, though. The races may beat you to the punch on these, and they might not need one or the other for very long or at all, in general.
      • That makes one of the best early-game credit-earners now to find the planets with the most unusuable land area, and then suck up the resources there.
  • Some of the things that do benefit you, but which really were very single-focus before (such as the positive RCI dispatches or support for ground invasions) now pay you a much more substantial reward in credits.
  • It's also much easier to be a war profiteer by helping the takeover of planets.
  • Property development and research are now a lot more valuable in credits, whereas they were really quite low-value in the past. This gives secondary incentives for that sort of thing, which is definitely important if you want to play peaceably.
  • Some of the other dispatches already either gave decent rewards, or are something that could be farmed endlessly with no real point except credit gains, so are things that don't have as much of a payment boost.
  • Thanks to GC13, Drak, Ragwortshire, topper, Histidine, Acenoid, and Eternaly_Lost for helping inspire these changes.

Version 1.605 (Disease And Order)

(Released October 8th, 2014)

• Fixed a typo in the text that made it look like the manufacturing rate was being multiplied by a very low number when the economic RCI was slightly positive. In reality, that very low number is being ADDED to the overall system-wide RCI.
  • This showed up properly on all the tooltips for the manufacturing rates themselves, and in the manufacturing rate itself. However, in the tooltip for the effects of the economic RCI, it was saying multiplied instead of added.
  • Thanks to nas1m and Valguris for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the construction multiplier could literally turn negative if the situation was bad enough on a planet. Now it is capped at a 0.001 multiplier.
  • Thanks to Valguris for reporting.

• Fixed an error that would happen whenever you tried to view the population tab of a race that was using an action that affected the death rate.
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter and Valguris for reporting a rare error that this hopefully prevents.

• Positive public order no longer helps the death rate on a planet go down. The negative public order values still help the death rate go up, though.

• Acutians and Andors are no longer able to have the Housing Boom events apply to themselves.

• Fixed an issue in the last couple of versions where robotic races had natural birth rates when they were not supposed to.
  • Thanks to SNAFU for reporting.

• The way that the deaths from disease are calculated is now completely different. It's now a lot more harsh, and the deaths grow exponentially as the rate of infection on a planet goes up.
  • What's more, in the last few versions of the game the death rate was accidentally being DECREASED by diseases, so that's also been fixed.
  • Thanks to Valguris for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where at least in some cases the Hive Queen would not respawn at all after being killed on a Thoraxian world.
  • Thanks to damium and genrtul for reporting.

• In Betrayal mode, the armada cap upgrades now show up in their own category at the very bottom of the tech list, rather than crowding up the Space Power section at the top of the list.

• In both Invasion and Betrayal modes, the following techs are now absent: Temporal Mechanics, Time Travel, and God Mote.
  • Thanks to WBAD for inspiring this change.

• The quest "Steal Cure From Obscura Hideout" has been renamed to "Steal Temporary Cure From Obscura Hideout" in order to make it clear that the cure is temporary.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• The "Steal Temporary Cure From Obscura Hideout" previously just wiped out the disease on the planets of the race with the disease, curing everyone instantly. However, it had no protections for the disease immediately coming right back, which of course seemed really odd if it happened to happen.
  • Now races get 7 years (7/9ths of an hour of relative time) of protection after this sort of temporary cure.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• The Gigacannon now uses a new damage type called "Giga," rather than using the "Piercing" damage type. This doesn't affect the properties of the shot at all, except that it is no longer able to be dodged by "Dodges Piercing" ships.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting the confusion this caused with Obscura ships with the Dodges Piercing attribute.

• If an event or any other circumstances are preventing you from actually affecting the RCI or attitude of your client during help/harm RCI/attitude dispatches, then the other benefits of the dispatch (influence, credits, whatever) are also foregone.
  • Thanks to timfortress for suggesting.

• Aid local law enforcement is now not included on player planets in Betrayal mode, because their public order can never go up or down anyway (mindless robots).
  • Thanks to Fleet Unity for reporting.

• Hurler damage has been reduced to 1/10th their prior value.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• "Create Federation For Safety" and "Create Strong Federation" now both require that all the members actually be properly valid for joining the federation (aka, not in any other alliances, not at war with the federation, etc).
  • Thanks to Valguris for reporting.

• When you are doing quests against the Obscura or the raiding of Hydral technology labs, it now shows the proper icons and names for the faction you are fighting.
  • Thanks to nas1m and DrFranknfurter for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where you could rescue pilots during the auto-resolve of the Obscura raid quests.

• Fixed an issue where some non-hydral defensive goodies that were belonging to the hydral faction in steal hydral tech missions could still let off pilots.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• In Betrayal mode, the planet closest to you now starts out spacefaring, and all of the other planets are shifted forward in terms of the queue of how long it takes them to become spacefaring.
  • This gives you an immediate potential enemy, which is important for pacing.
  • This also fixes an issue with the deliver spacefaring missions where if there was no other spacefaring race but you, you'd get a lot of strangeness and have to autoresolve to win.
  • Thanks to magitekmaster for inspiring these changes.

• The "harm RCI" dispatches now cost an extremely tiny amount of credits (1-2 per month), rather than gaining you any credit.
  • Thanks to nas1m and steelwing for suggesting.

Version 1.604 (A Dangerous Surplus)

(Released October 3rd, 2014)

• Fixed an exception that would be thrown when you opened the population section of the planet details on a robotic race's planet (Hydral being included as robotic, since the minions are robotic even though the Hydral is not).
  • Thanks to SNAFU for reporting.

• The "get first invading fleet" logic used for determining when you can do help-against-invading-armadas and such actions now uses the same more-general logic to find attackers as the later updates to the npc-combat system. This should avoid situations where a planet is under attack and there's no defense action available to you.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the "races won't attack player outposts if influence is above X" logic was inverted, allowing allies to attack (and sometimes forbidding enemies to do so).
  • Thanks to Warpstorm and FortunaDraken for the report and save.

• A new "special actions" internal category for races has now been added. Previously there were just military and civic, and those two remain, but the special category works different from the other two.
  • The special actions category has no particular cap on how many actions the race can be doing in it at once, unlike the other two categories. However, the race can't arbitrarily choose to do special actions -- it has to have some sort of special circumstances trigger the special actions.
  • The positive thing about this category is that it lets us have the races react to certain kinds of special circumstances without blocking or being blocked by their main military or civic actions.

• The Quarantine and Antivirus actions are now in the special actions slot, which makes alien races a lot more reactive to diseases on their planets.
  • However, these now come at a different cost: while they are working on suppressing the disease via these means, their birth rate is multiplied x0.3, and their science rate is multiplied by 0.75. They're basically diverting resources.

• Breeding Frenzy and Self Assembly Program were not working 100% right in how they boosted the birth rates (turns out they never have been although they still did work -- just not quite the right math). They also now show up in the list of things improving the birth rate on the solar map, etc.

• Fixed a bug where the freighter-distress-call quest could generate the first AI side (the freighters) as a pirate side, thus making other involved sides hostile to it when that would not normally be the case.
  • Note that if you have an old save actually IN such a combat, it won't remove the pirate flag from the freighter side, but it will prevent the bug in future cases of this quest.
  • Thanks to Valguris for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the CollaborateOnSelfImprovement image was missing.
  • Thanks to Kizor for reporting.

• Fixed an exception that would happen in the prior version when you tried to expand the usable land area via dispatch.
  • Thanks to Znookey and Fleet Unity for reporting.

• Withdrawing via the non-permadeath mechanic (that is, being "killed" but escaping because you didn't have permadeath on) no longer counts as "player withdrawal" when being checked as a victory condition (like in the defend-yourself-from-assassins missions), but still counts when being checked as a defeat condition.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• The RCI value of 0 now counts as good, rather than bad. It was always supposed to -- this was an oversight!
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter for suggesting.

• Search-for-hydral-tech actions:
  • Now allowed from planets and outposts owned by you.
  • The general concept of "in the ice belt" has been broadened significantly to avoid situations where a planet was visually in the belt but it wasn't counting for the purpose of the tech mission eligibility.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring these changes.

• Player outposts can no longer get events (like asteroid damage, etc) since those don't really do anything to player-controlled outposts anyway.
  • Thanks to Kizor, Manxome, and FortunaDraken for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a visual bug where hydral sentinels would not actually draw their body shape when in motion.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Operation Horn has had a serious nerf to bring it into the realm of sanity. It now spawns 2 force rams rather than 12, and the power of those rams is now 20% of what the power previously was. These things are beastly.
  • Thanks to Misery and timfortress for suggesting.

• Fixed a text bug where CV_NoUnlockableSpecialAbilitiesLeftOfType was showing an error rather than its actual text.
  • Thanks to Manxome for reporting.

• Fixed outdated text on the hire scientist goons action that was saying you couldn't get the time lower than 5 months, when in fact you can now get it all the way down to 1 month.
  • Thanks to Manxome for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the destruction of The Mire that referenced The Ark instead.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Fixed a wide variety of typos and grammatical issues.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for reporting.

• Changed how tech-research is tracked internally to fix a problem where the intra-alliance-tech-sharing checks were basically devouring the CPU whole in some very-late-game scenarios.
  • Thanks to Acenoid for the report and save.

• Previously we missed updating the graphics for the gravity lance turret. Fixed!
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

The Utility Of Planetary Resources, And Mining Efficacy

• Previously, when races had no buildings that they could construct with a resource, and there were technologies that could be used to unlock more buildings, they could use resource expenditures to unlock those technologies.
  • This was not too exciting, however, and seemed odd a lot of times. That mechanic has been removed, and replaced with a new "surplus resource" system that gives the resources more meaning than ever.
  • Thanks to Warpstorm for inspiring this change.

• There are 6 new "surplus resource" actions that races can take in the "special actions" internal queue, under certain circumstances:
  • Surplus Molybdenum: Bioengineering/Food Boost
    • Thanks to incredibly high unused stockpiles of Molybdenum on {RelatedNode}, the {ActingRace} government has been able to institute a temporary bioengineering program that doubles their birth rate throughout the solar system. This will draw down the {RelatedNode} stores of Molybdenum by 4,000 per month, however.
  • Surplus Cesium: Medical Miracles
    • Thanks to incredibly high unused stockpiles of Cesium on {RelatedNode}, the {ActingRace} government has been able to institute a temporary medical program that halves their death rate throughout the solar system. This also increases the medical RCI on {RelatedNode} by +3 per month. This will draw down the {RelatedNode} stores of Cesium by 4,000 per month, however.
  • Surplus Xenotime: Manufacturing Overdrive
    • Thanks to incredibly high unused stockpiles of Xenotime on {RelatedNode}, the {ActingRace} government has been able to institute a temporary manufacturing boom that doubles their manufacturing rate throughout the solar system. This will draw down the {RelatedNode} stores of Xenotime by 4,000 per month, however.
  • Surplus Perovskite: Enhanced Research
    • Thanks to incredibly high unused stockpiles of Perovskite on {RelatedNode}, the {ActingRace} government has been able to institute a temporary research program that doubles their science rate throughout the solar system. This will draw down the {RelatedNode} stores of Perovskite by 4,000 per month, however.
  • Surplus Terbium: Supercharged Space Power
    • Thanks to incredibly high unused stockpiles of Terbium on {RelatedNode}, the {ActingRace} government has been able to institute a temporary military program that improves their space power by 1.5x throughout the solar system. This will draw down the {RelatedNode} stores of Terbium by 4,000 per month, however.
  • Surplus Uranium: Explosive Ground Firepower
    • Thanks to incredibly high unused stockpiles of Uranium on {RelatedNode}, the {ActingRace} government has been able to institute a temporary military program that improves their ground power by 2x throughout the solar system. This will draw down the {RelatedNode} stores of Uranium by 4,000 per month, however.

• The surplus resource actions kick in at the time that the older "technology acquired through research expenditure" techs used to.
  • Aka, only when there is an absolute ton of that resource sitting around on a planet, and no buildings to spend it on. So they don't start happening with any frequency until quite late in the game.
  • However, starting when the race has built up at least 40,000 of the resource on a planet, there is now a very small chance each month that they will start the process (the chance is 1 in 1000 per resource per month).

• Previously, all races were able to mine resources at the same rate, with the only differences coming from how many moons they had colonized and how many mining-related buildings they had constructed.
  • This led to a lot of boring "we all get to the same place at the same time" situations, particularly early in the game when the race was not neccessarily having any mining-related buildings or colonized moons yet.
  • Now there is an inbuilt mining speed multiplier for each race:
    • Acutian: 1.5
    • Andor: 0.5
    • Boarine: 4
    • Burlust: 0.9
    • Evuck: 0.75
    • Peltian: 1.2
    • Thoraxian: 3
    • Skylaxian: 0.6
    • Hydral: 1
    • Obscura: 1
  • Thanks to Warpstorm for inspiring this change.

• Purely as a strategy note, all these changes and additions relating to the resources means that setting up moons and trade routes is now easier for some races and harder than others.
  • But beyond that, it also gives another BIG bonus to trade routes, in that it will allow more frequent use of these sorts of special abilities on the part of races. Suddenly a trade route between a friend and an enemy to make them like one another has a potential extra danger to YOU now...

Version 1.603 (Life, Death, And Irreconcilable Hatred)

(Released October 2md, 2014)

• Fixed a bug where the "Hold Off Overwhelming Attack" scenario hadn't been updated for the possibility of multiple defending races, and was making them hostile to you (and the planet owner). Now if they would naturally be friendly to the planet owner they'll also be friendly to you (and hostile to the attackers).
  • Thanks to Manxome for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where defense missions that substituted the player side for the defending side (when the player owned the planet/node) would not automatically make sides attacking the node hostile to the node owner (i.e. the player).
  • Thanks to Misery for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the federation window would check several contracts as if the first race were both sides of a potential deal, leading to some deals being incorrectly redded out, etc.
  • Thanks to Manxome for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug in the newer (and default) summary-mode display of influence changes in the post-combat window, where it would add some entries more than once, making it claim a bigger change than actually occurred.
  • Thanks to Manxome for the report and save.

• Now if the Acutians own no planets, the Andor roboticist deals are redded out.
  • Thanks to giftgruen for pointing out the exploits that are possible otherwise.

• The Andor boost-trade deal now requires a target planet with a non-boosted route, rather than just requiring a target planet with any route.
  • Thanks to Manxome for suggesting.

• Now when a planet changes owners it clears its in-progress work on armada construction/improvement and buildings.
  • Thanks to Kaziglu_Bey for inspiring this change.

• The Hire Saboteurs action's building-selection dropdown now lists the number of each building present, and the action now also has a numeric dropdown where you can choose to sabotage multiple buildings of the same type in the same action (though it will take that much more time, etc).
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle, Acenoid, and SuperCactus for inspiring this change.

• Now when the game would list your gaining a special ability, but there's none left to give, it won't show that line at all instead of showing part of the line.
  • Thanks to Manxome for the report.

• Now when there are no longer any eligible new special abilities, the game will stop generating new hydral signals.
  • Thanks to Manxome for inspiring this changes.

• During dispatch missions for yourself, particularly in betrayal mode, it now is careful never to note that you are gaining influence with yourself (you are not).
  • Thanks to Kaziglu_Bey for reporting.

• The RCI dispatches no longer let you keep going after the RCI is either higher than 2000 (if you are trying to improve it) or lower than -2000 (if you are trying to lower it).
  • You'd basically just be farming for credits at that point, and they'd have no incentive to want to pay you when things are already that good.
  • Thanks to paeniteoazrael for inspiring this change.

• The "war with alliance" attitude drops now only apply if the alliance in question is attacking the race in question. If the race is unilaterally attacking the other alliance and not being attacked back, their attitude will not drop.
  • Right now this does not differentiate between who started a war if both sides are attacking each other; aka, if the Burlusts initiate war with the federation constantly, and the federation responds by attacking burlust planets or outposts, the burlusts will still hate the federation more. But if the burlusts do attacks on the federation, and the federation defends itself without attacking burlust planets in return, then this attitude drop does not come into play for the burlusts. This applies to all races, not just the burlusts, of course.
  • Thanks to Silverfire and Manxome for suggeting.

• The Obscura Wing, Angle, and Razor all now have armored hulls again.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• In Betrayal mode, when doing a mission which spawns spy probes against you, it won't spawn any from the betrayal-controlled race (which is listed as the Hydral).
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter and Bob_of_Mage for inspiring this change.

• Made the "fleets attacking a node will be hostile to its owners in combat" rule take effect after pretty much all other allegiance rules to avoid situations where defending an outpost of yours (for instance) could lead to some of the attacking forces being allied to you.
  • Thanks to Misery for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the player-provoked tech-gift deal would be recorded as if the gift came from the player rather than from the client race.
  • This won't fix notifications from older saves, as the recording has already been made, but will cause future such notifications to be correct.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

• All of the race-specific range modifiers have been removed from the Pirate Ravens, and their range has been lowered some.
  • Thanks to Valguris for reporting the previous problems.

• Fixed a bug where the Thoraxian Protectorate would still remain if only the Thoraxians remained in it (all the other races being dead that had been members of it).
  • Thanks to Tayrtahn for reporting.

Notes To Self

• Added a "Player Notes" button to the bottom of the advisor screen, which opens a large multi-line textbox that you can put whatever you want into, and the contents will be remembered across save/load.
  • Thanks to AATLEMIDRM for inspiring this changes.

The Points Of No Return

• Fixed a couple of issues with attitudes and influence where if players played for insanely long periods of time in a single game, doing lots of dispatch missions, they could actually cause the relationship with a race to roll over from positive to negative from an overflow.
  • In our example case, the solar map relative time was 68 hours, or 614 years of solar map time, which is -- ahem -- quite a bit longer than we ever really anticipated a single game going.
  • Anyway, the situation is now handled so that the rollover is impossible for both influence and attitudes, AND so that the total amount of influence or attitude from any one source can no longer be more than 10,000. That one has some positive balance ramifications in general in super-long games.
  • Thanks to Eternaly_Lost for the report and save.

• If you ever have -1000 or lower influence with a race, you can never again gain influence with that race.
  • Thanks to paeniteoazrael for inspiring this change.

• If a race ever has -1000 or lower attitude toward another race, their attitude toward the other race can never improve.
  • Thanks to paeniteoazrael for inspiring this change.

• If the attitude dispatches ever hit a point where both races have irreconcilable differences with one another, then you can no longer continue those dispatches.
  • This is basically past the point where they will listen to you.
  • Thanks to paeniteoazrael for inspiring this change.

• If the attitude dispatches ever hit a point where both races are maxed out on the particular source of love or hate (that is 10,000 total for that factor), then the dispatch becomes impossible after that point.
  • Thanks to paeniteoazrael for inspiring this change.

• If one race hates another to an irreconcilable degree, and the other race does not yet return that sentiment, then the second race's attitude will rapidly drop until their feelings are also irreconcilable.
  • At this point the relationship was already doomed, but it needs to be mutual rather than unilateral in order to avoid certain strange edge cases that theoretically could develop (aka Pride and Prejudice Syndrome between Burlusts and Evucks).

Births And Deaths

• Fixed a bug where the death rate multiplier was not showing up on technologies that were affecting it (generally reducing it).

• The birth and death rate multipliers on buildings and techs now APPEAR to be the same as they once were, but they are now actually more effective because of the way the internal math has been adjusted. There was previously an invisible multiplier dampening their effectiveness from what was shown, and that is no longer the case.

• The way that the birth and death rate multipliers are calculated has been redone so that the negative effects are applied later in the process, resulting in a much more appropriate end result in many cases.
  • This makes it so that if an event halves the birth rate for a planet for a while, for instance, it will still properly affect even a race with crazy high birth multipliers applied by buildings, etc. It also greatly increases the strength of the mire, diseases, and other negative effects.
  • Safeguards have also been put in place to prevent runaway-positive birth or death rates from rolling over into the negative range.
  • Thanks to Bob_of_Mage and nas1m for reporting.

• Previously, races with no death rate (robotic races) would only stop gaining new population during times of internal war; they wouldn't actually lose population.
  • The way that the death rates work during internal war has been changed around substantially,

• The way that death rates work has been redone enormously. It's now far better at handling the bad public order for robotic races, for one. But it also has all the various improvements that have been applied to the birth rates.

• A number of math mistakes have been fixed in the prior birth and death rate calculations in terms of what the RCI effects were.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• In the planetary details screen, you can now hover over the birth and death rates to see breakdowns of why they are what they are.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• The Peltian Super Breeder has been toned way down, because it was just maxing out the population multiplier way too fast. It's still very powerful, but not so nuts now.
  • Thanks to Bob_of_Mage for reporting.

• The Burlust War Incubators now give a 1.6x boost to birth rate rather than a 4x boost.

• The effect of medical and public order rci on planetary birth/death rates has been increased substantially.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• On the racial power grid, the total population column now shows up with an orange-ish red color for any races that are currently (on average) losing population at the moment.
  • Note that these races may actually see their population rise due to random fluctuations based on the range of their respective birth and death rates. What this number represents is the median birth and death rates compared with one another.
  • Additionally, in the tooltip for the Total Pop column, it now shows the current median population growth for each race as an actual number. This is a great way to get a sense of the overall growth or stagnation of the race.

• On the tooltips for the population icon on each planet in the solar map view, it now shows the current median population growth for each race as an actual number. This is a great way to get a sense of the overall growth or stagnation of the owner race of that planet (actual growth may include minorities).

• Previously there were some things in place preventing the net population growth rate from going very negative on its own, which was likely a source of consternation to a number of folks since this wasn't reflected in the actual birth/death rate ratios.
  • This rule was added a very long time ago, and really is not appropriate on a lot of levels. It has been removed. This may have some... unexpected results... when it comes to population dynamics in the early game in particular.
  • Thanks to Valguris for reporting.

• Races previously would just do breeding frenzies, self-assembly programs, and cloning programs somewhat at random. They now heavily weight the decisions for these based on the lowest planetary median population growth rate they have.
  • Basically if they already have a very strong population growth, they won't bother with these, instead spending their time elsewhere. But if they are bleeding populace, then they will try to do this increasingly frantically.
  • This lets races react to their own negative population rates by actually doing something about it, versus the old silly artificial caps we had before. This of course comes at the opportunity cost of them not being able to do other actions.

• The logic for triggering piteous plight and piratical exodus have both been updated to use newer births/deaths logic.

Manufacturing And Compatibility / RCI

• The boosts to local manufacturing based on the economy versus the local racial compatibility have now been broken out into separate numbers rather than one combined one (because the combined one led to really crazy-looking results).
  • Thanks to nas1m, Warpstorm, timfortress, and Histidine for reporting.

• The racial compatibility with a planet no longer has any effect on armada construction speeds, but still affects local construction rate for buildings.

• The public order RCI value for planets no longer affects armadas, but now instead affects local construction rates for buildings.

• The economy RCI value for planets no longer has an effect on just that local planet.

• Each planet with a positive or negative economic RCI now gives a small additive boost or penalty to system-wide manufacturing for that race.

• Each planet with a positive medical RCI now gives a small additive boost to system-wide science for that race.

• Having a negative public order RCI on planets now reduces the ground combat effectiveness solar-system-wide for that race. The effect is more pronounced for non-warlike races (aka, the Burlusts get penalized less).

Version 1.602

(Released September 30th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug that was causing betrayal mode savegames from certain versions of the game to not be able to be loaded properly.
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

• Fixed a few issues relating to The Fuzz:
  • Previously it was possible for the event Vaccine Discovered to happen for it, even though it has no cure.
  • Previously it was possible to try to help research a blank vaccine for the fuzz.
  • Previously it was possible for some races to unlock a blank tech and pretend they got a vaccine for the fuzz from that.
  • The Thoraxians will no longer request you go on a quest to get them a cure for the fuzz, since there isn't one.
  • Thanks to Kizor and FortunaDraken for reporting.

• The Andors will no longer choose to send in assistance to races that are presently attacking them, or to the obscura, or to the hydrals in betrayal mode.
  • Thanks to timfortress for reporting.

• The Andor parliament is no longer willing to help the Obscura or the hydrals in betrayal mode with the following deals:
  • Distribute environmental boosters, financial aid, medical technicians, or entertainment packages.
  • Thanks to timfortress for reporting.

Version 1.601 Double-Wide

(Released September 29th, 2014)

• Put in a possible fix to a parsing issue with bullet patterns on unsupported linux distros. This may help, not sure, although again this is only a problem on unsupported distros so far as we can tell.
  • Thanks to art-solopov for reporting.

• The Obscura Disc has had its damaged toned down a bit again, to keep its front "lawnmower" attack from being TOO effective at its job. It also now only tries to be within range 2000 of its target, rather than range 1200, which should help players get "on the road" with it more easily.

• The Pirate Raven flagship is now only able to hit targets that are Unique scale or larger (aka Unique or Boss), which means that they will pretty much single out the player flagship and ignore everything else. This should prevent the issues with trying to hunt them down and find them... because they'll find you...
  • Thanks to FortunaDraken and Valguris for inspiring this change.

• The "Directly Defend Against Invader Armadas" action no longer requires that the planet have a dedicated defense armada (friendly armadas that happen to be close enough to be involved have never counted for this). If it lacks one, it will launch some emergency reserve squadrons to fill the role.
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter for the report and save.

• Removed an old rule that "Defend Against Invading Armadas" and some other actions would not let you intervene against allied forces, because it sometimes resulted in the player being unable to intervene in a conflict at all.
  • Thanks to Manxome for the report and save.

• In the solar map, if the game is 1440px wide or more, then it now shows the Basic and Detailed Info panels side by side so that you don't have to click back and forth between them.
  • Thanks to jaxxa for suggesting.

• Fixed a variety of issues that could be caused by orphan alien data remaining on planets/outposts after they were captured by a different race. This would cause things like the government screen not to open, etc.
  • Thanks to Manxome, FortunaDraken, and nas1m for reporting.

Betrayal Mode

• Fixed a bug where giving an order on the Armada Management screen (betrayal-mode-only) would not cause that armada to disengage from any scheduled combat, thus being "stuck". Giving an order will now cause them to stop any scheduled attacks on other nodes.
  • Note: if you have an old save with an armada stuck in this way, it won't automatically correct it until you give another order, and the disengage logic has a chance to fire.
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter, giftgruen, and nas1m for reporting.

• Fixed some bugs where the possible-orders-dropdown on the Armada Management screen were mislabeled (saying you'd attack a friendly planet, defend a hostile one, or just saying "in transit" for all of them if the selected armada wasn't docked).
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The Armada Management window's listing of defend/attack orders now lists the owning race after the name of the planet/node being attacked.
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter and FortunaDraken for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue where the game was trying to pull resources from your local docked planet to improve your armadas or create new ones, rather than using your central stores.
  • Thanks to nas1m for the report and save.

Invasion Mode

• In Invasion mode, the Obscura are not shown in the computer adviser in the "top 3 non-allied powers," since they are always going to be at the top and they aren't recommended for interactions like other races anyway.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where if the Obscura had first taken over the Peltians, they would constantly be trying to learn firebombs.
  • Thanks to Bob_of_Mage for reporting.

Bosses

• The Obscura Mite and Obscura Mothership are now both in place, and boy did Misery do an absolutely fantastic job on these. These are new “Boss” scale ships, with new rules that only one Boss ship can scale in a given battle.
  • The Burlust Warlord Longship is also now considered a boss ship.
  • As an added incentive for actually facing bosses and persevering against bosses in battles, there is now a 0.1 added amount to your ship multiplier for each boss that you kill.
  • This means that now all of the ships for the expansion are now in place! Although there are still some inevitable tunings coming.

Version 1.600 (Tsar Bomba)

(Released September 26th, 2014)

• Fixed an oversight where parasites and leeches could reclaim ships that were flagships, centerpieces, outposts, and the like. This would cause problems such as non-destroyable pirate outposts if you captured them (though auto-resolve could still get you out of that jam).
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for reporting.

• The autoresolve weighting for some of the unusual ships (outposts, hydral tech, defensive goodies, etc) has been improved so that those battles should now do a better job of having appropriate autoresolve costs.

• The Pirate Raven flagships have gotten a complete redesign.
  • The now move WAY faster, turn very well, and have some strafing time to them.
  • Their shields are substantially weaker.
  • They fire a new pattern of 7 shots rather than 5, with the central 5 being tighter and the outer 2 being very wide.
  • Their new shots are fired more frequently and do more damage.
  • They make an effort to park themselves in pretty close range to their attack target, basically pulling up alongside it and hammering away. So you don't wind up having to go chase them forever.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed a bug where in cases where you had a 30% chance of getting a bribe item, it would say "Acquired 30 bribe item" if you got nothing. Oops.
  • Thanks to timfortress and Manxome for reporting.

• Previously, when Boarine Regents died from old age, they were referred to as "his" instead of "her."
  • Thanks to FortunaDraken for reporting.

• The "Resources and Trade Routes" section of the sidebar now has much more detailed data on trade routes:
  • The existing lines telling you how many incoming/outgoing routes that planet has involving a particular resource now have tooltips listing all the routes included in the sum.
  • At the end of the section it now has one line for each trading-partner planet saying how many routes the sidebar planet has with that partner, and those lines have tooltips list all the routes in question.
  • Thanks to Manxome for inspiring this change.

• The prediction/result line for Broker Trade Route saying what resources will be traded now mentions the number of trade routes already existing between the two planets.
  • Thanks to Manxome for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the steal-from-obscura quests would not pit you against obscura ships.
  • Note that if you have a save from the middle of combat that this fix won't apply to that specific combat, just any generated later on.
  • Thanks to nas1m and DrFranknfurter for the reports and saves.

• Fixed a bug where Electrify Shields, Polarity Corruption, Sabotage Firing Ports, and probably some other abilities whose sole effect was to apply a new combat-wide effect, did not actually cost ammo to use.
  • Thanks to Yoservor and timfortress for reporting.

• Now the learn-from-race method of tech research does not apply prereqs that require the race to have a planet with a specific circumstance (80% of equilibrium-pop filled up, etc).
  • Thanks to giftgruen for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the help-research-vaccine contract would produce notifications as if you'd researched it for the (previous) owner of the outsourced outpost rather than the actual client race. The vaccine was already being granted to the correct race.
  • Thanks to FortunaDraken for the report and save.

• Added a note to the dispatch progress window for ground-invasion-support actions that you're doubling enemy casualties.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Previously there was no added benefit to having more than one bombing resistant building -- just whatever the highest one was would take effect. Now these are additive rather than multiplicative, like a lot of the other stats.

• Fixed some visual flicker that was happening in recent versions of the game with the ship flybys in the background on the main menu and behind certain subscreens.

• The game now automatically removes techs from races that have them and are no longer allowed to, when loading existing savegames.

• The rate of pirate power creep now varies by strategic difficulty. It is also a little bit higher on normal strategic difficulty, because it was pretty darn tame before.

General Technology/Building Balance Updates

• It's been a general comment for a while that the bonuses from the buildings and technologies can be troublesome given their multiplicative nature. You could get into situations where there were absolutely insane numbers of multipliers being over-applied (Crystal Cities, etc) that would lead to absurd combat multipliers for AI vs AI combat, etc.
  • Since we're in the middle of a bunch of balance work in general, now seemed like as good as time as any to address this. Apologies for the brief disorder that is going to result from this in terms of balance.

Science Revisions

• The entire premise of how the science skill progression happens is now different (due to it being additive it had to be changed a lot). There are a lot of really good things here.

• First of all, each race now has a starting technical skill which is much higher than before (depending on the race), and which is a big range.
  • Net effect: This makes it so that the starting state of races actually can vary quite a lot in terms of who is how skilled. The Skylaxians are always going to be the most skilled, but by how much? And the Thoraxians may or may not actually be more skilled than the Burlusts, for instance. Some of the races that are kind of close to one another will vary in starting technical prowess by game.

• All of the technologies that previously multiplied your technical prowess now add to it instead. This lets them add larger amounts, so that there is a larger jump per technology, which is good.
  • However, there is also a new "innate technical prowess" for each race that gets multiplied times all of the technologies that are learned. This makes it so that the Skylaxians learning tech A is more beneficial to them than the Peltians learning the same tech.
  • Net effect: Individual technologies matter more, and in a linear fashion. However, a lot of technologies still won't let a non-scientific race truly catch up to a highly-technical one.

• Science Outposts now give a flat amount of boost, not a multiplier. The boost is a substantial one, for lower-tech races in particular, so having these is suddenly a lot more valuable.
  • The techs that improve science outpost output also now add onto these, rather than multiplying them. These additions are NOT affected by the race-specific technical prowess, so for a low-tech race it is great to have these bonuses and then a lot of science labs.
  • Net effect: This gives the lower-tech races a way to even themselves out with the higher-tech races, but only if they can hold the science labs. This also gives you an extremely direct way of helping those lower-tech races without just gifting them techs.

• The Ark and destroyed planets now give a (quite large) fixed amount of tech skill that is added onto the other stuff. So even a really low-tech race that has The Ark in one game is going to unusually be a powerhouse, at least for a while.
  • Net effect: This is another one of those excellent things that helps to make each game more unique. It's what it was always intended, but it was not as effective before.

• When a race is not yet spacefaring, they now get only an addition of half of their starting technical skill added thanks to "extra budget." Previously it was just doubling their entire science output, but with the new early-game science numbers that would have been insane.
  • Net effect: This continues to give some benefit to races that are late to become spacefaring, in exchange for their not being able to build up armadas. However it is less of a benefit, and varies much more heavily based on the innate skill of the race (since it no longer takes into account techs that they have).

• The Mire still just gives its race a flat 66% reduction in all science skill, so this is really a gut-punch to that race until they can get rid of it. This is now applied after ALL other bonuses.
  • Net effect: Here again, this really helps to provide variety between each game. If a high-tech race gets saddled with The Mire, then they may really struggle to an unusual degree, rather than having their usual technological edge.

• Outsourcing science outposts to other races now just gives them whatever the usual outpost benefit would be. So this is just a trade of taking your own science boost from that outpost and handing it to them.
  • Net effect: This is simpler to understand, and more direct. It's also no longer dependent on the underlying skill of the other race.

TLDR: Science is far more balanced now. You don't really have to do much different in terms of your strategy if you are a casual player. If you are an advanced player, however, science labs in particular now have more meaning. And all players will see more science-related variance between games now.

Shipbuilding/Manufacturing Revisions

• The balance on the manufacturing and shipbuilding mechanics has been completely reworked to be additive rather than multiplicative, just like the other stuff.
  • As part of this, there is now a larger spread and more of a progression in terms of overall shipbuilding speeds. The spread starts very small, but gets faster over time, anyway.
  • With a lot of these changes, the penalty for being late into space is arguably both worse and less: worse because it will take you a longer time to build up your own fleets, and less because others won't have built up as much prior to that, and some shipbuilding speed improvements may be arriving around that time.

• The Space Elevator technology now takes 200 months rather than 80, and cannot be researched prior to year 9.
  • This improves shipbuilding speeds, but keeps it pushed back some so that all the AIs don't just climb all over this immediately.

• Nanonmetallurgy now takes 90 months rather than 80, and cannot be researched prior to year 18.

• Photon Mechanics now requires that the race have any 10 technologies before they can get it.

• Optical Computers now takes 160 months rather than 80.

• Four new technologies have been added to the tech tree: Welding Drones, Industrial Tractor Beams, Safer Fuel Transport, and Prefab Ship Parts.
  • All of these are for faster ship construction speeds, and provide new options for tech research at various points in the game lifecycle.
  • Overall some of these are low-yield high-cost early-availability options that can nonetheless make for a substantial difference in the ship construction speeds that various races have based on what techs they choose. Having more of a spread on this in the tech tree allows for more variety in how games themselves play out.

• The underlying concept of manufacturing speeds and ship construction speeds has been really pushed together quite a bit more now than it previously was.
  • Previously the manufacturing rate was what was centrally shown, while the ship construction rates were really buried and not easy to see. This was crazy confusing and would often let you have problems with some part of the solar system without realizing it.
  • Now the central manufacturing rate is a combination of what used to be manufacturing rate and per-planet ship construction speeds, and this gives you a great insight into how fast races can build things.
  • THAT said, there is still a per-planet component based on localized events, RCI values, dispatch missions, and similar. These are much smaller in scope, however.
  • Diseases on one planet now affect the entire race's central manufacturing rate accordingly, which is vastly more clear in terms of the effect a diseases is having.
  • Additionally, planetary buffs or penalties on one planet regarding manufacturing are now bubbled up solar-system-wide, too.

• The "Space Military Speed" and "Construction Boost" sections of the tech tree have been combined into one "Manufacturing" section, since these functions are now blended together.

• The Matter Compression tech now has a prerequisites of Nonlinear Mathematics, rather than being available right from the start. This is now something that also benefits shipbuilding speed, since the outpost construction speed stuff has been wrapped in with this.

• The Matter Transmission tech now cannot be researched until 4 hours in, and requires 600 solar months rather than 300. This is the only other tech that had to change from a previous purpose of outpost construction to the new general-purpose construction that includes ships.

• The Ark no longer gives quite so high a manufacturing boost to the race that holds it, and The Mire no longer gives such a penalty to the one that holds it. More subtle effects here are plenty to upend the system from game to game.

Ground Combat Revisions

• On the racial power grid, the Ground Power column tooltips now actually show the ground combat multiplier for the race (which was never actually visible before), and then also show the breakdown of how it was calculated.

• On the info screens for planets, there is now a Local Ground Combat Multiplier entry under the Population section, which lets you see not only what the actual multiplier is locally (which is very important and was never shown before), but also (in the tooltip) how it was calculated.

• The way that ground combat multipliers are calculated are now completely different from before, as (once again) these are now additive rather than multiplicative.
  • The races all now have a "starting ground combat skill" that is a fixed thing per type of race (it's not randomly rolled per game), and then they have a "ground combat learning skill" that acts as a multiplier against techs that race learns.
  • When it comes to the Burlusts, they both have a high starting ground combat strength and a very powerful learning multiplier, which makes them start strong and then grow even stronger.
  • Others, like the Peltians, start weak and aren't very good at using weapons in the first place, so they just stay weak on the ground no matter what happens, pretty much.
  • The Thoraxians don't have any notable learning skill bonus (it doesn't even show, because it's just 1x), but because of how strong they start out, and how their bodies evolve over the course of the game (gaining thicker carapaces, better claws, etc), they wind up outpacing even the Burlusts.

• One of the chief effects of this revised balance, however, is that the end-game numbers are substantially different than they once were. For instance:
  • When upgraded with a lot of techs and buildings, the Peltians can provide more of a threat than they used to, when it comes to ground power -- even though they are still very weak. Before they were basically paper-thin and would blow over in the wind. Now they are made of balsa wood, so to speak.
  • The Burlusts, on the other end of the spectrum, don't get such massively overpowered ground power just for being alive. They would hit points in the late game where they could have 10 trillion troops with a total ground power of 9 billion (which is craaazy high). Now with those same 10 trillion troops, their ground power is instead 1.3 billion.
    • That said, if the Burlusts wind up getting a lot of ground-related military tech, like the Graviton Gun and so forth, then they can be every bit as powerful as before. Arming these guys with weaponry of that sort causes them to shoot into the stratosphere power-wise.

• The Burlust War Incubators are now a more substantial source of power for the Burlusts. These are the thing that kick in that they start building when not part of the federation but when the federation exists.

• The Mind Reading Psionics, and Teleportation techs are no longer able to be learned by the Burlusts or Peltians. Neither race has the mental acuity for these particular techs.
  • These techs are also now vaaastly more expensive than they previously were (on the order of 3x more months to research). So these are a much bigger investment for a race to make, but they provide benefits to both public order and to ground strength. It provides a way to partially work around the brute force of the burlusts by using the power of the mind instead.

• The net effect of all these changes is definitely a more nuanced progression of combat strengths.
  • The Burlusts and the Thoraxians start out a bit more horrifying than before, in keeping with how they should.
  • If the Burlusts are denied getting much tech, the other races can kinda-sorta keep up with them, and eventually surpass them, really. On the other hand, if they get weapons, it's like... I don't even know the analogy. Sharks with frickin lasers?
  • The Thoraxians, meanwhile, will just evolve over time no matter what. So the longer you leave them alone, the more horrifying they become, in sudden bursts of evolution ever 9ish years or so. If they start getting a bunch of techs on TOP of that, then it's like sharks with frickin nukes.
  • The Peltians and Andors are still worthless in a fight, but with the right techs they can actually be more useful than they used to be, relatively speaking.
  • The Boarines are actually more of a presence now even when their rage momentum isn't kicked in, which is fitting for their race.
  • The Evucks and the Skylaxians aren't exactly the best soldiers, but they aren't superbad either. However, if they learn enough techs, especially the mind-powered ones like teleportation, then suddenly they can be surprisingly powerful based on techs alone.
  • The Acutians remain kind of a workhorse race when it comes to combat. They start out as very powerful robots (though not on the level of power of the Burlusts or Thoraxians), and through tech research they can steadily grow in that power. They're unlikely to be the best, but they'll never be near the bottom, either.

Military Outpost Revisions, And Revisions To AI Logic About Outposts

• Military outposts no longer produce armadas. Previously they acted as a second source of armadas, to go along with planets.
  • This was abstract and very dependent on time -- holding a military outpost for a little while would give no benefit, because an armada might not have time to form, etc.
  • This was also something that had no benefit for the player, either in the regular mode or in the betrayal mode, which never felt right.
  • All in all this becomes a way to prop up even the Peltians and similar, although the benefits to the less-skilled military races are somewhat lesser than the benefits to the more-skilled military races.

• The way that the various racial AIs weight what kinds of outposts they want, how badly and in what numbers, has been shifted around to take into account all of the other balance changes.
  • Basically the Thoraxians no longer really care about outposts too much, for instance, because it is in their better interests to be aggressive in other ways.
  • Meanwhile, for the Skylaxians and similar, they can get a MAJOR benefit from having military outposts now, so having those is a big deal for them.
  • The Peltians in particular become absolutely desperate to build a bunch of these now, making them more of a credible threat -- IF they can hold on to those outposts.

Space Combat Power Revisions

• The 60 "mark upgrade" technologies that were previously in the game have been removed. These were all based around giving upgrades to only specific size classes of ships, which was really confusing and not something that could be centrally displayed to the player on the racial power grid.
  • This did have the benefit of letting the player upgrade their own flagship's power independently of some of the other techs, but there are simpler ways to handle that which can be centrally shown and more easily understood by players.

• Previously there were two tech research lines for each race, one for the mark-level ship upgrades and another for normal research. This was to make sure that none of the races got too far behind in terms of the progression of power relative to the player, but it did mean that races might completely neglect their own progression of power relative to one another, which was a separate issue.
  • Now the secondary tech research line is instead focused on the main kind of ship space power increases, which achieves something close to the same effect, but also helps balances races versus one another in terms of their focus on the space race.

• Burlust Turmoil and Boarine Rage Momentum is now calculated more directly into their space combat strength modifiers -- this has a visual effect in the racial power grid and so forth, and in a few cases also a balance effect.

• The way that the hull, shield, and attack boosts for in combat are calculated is a bit more internalized and not something it tries to show to the player anymore. It does give a general description that "overall stuff for the player is to the hull, and stuff to the enemies is to the weapons," but that's it.
  • Instead, the focus is on that single Ship Mult number, which encompasses everything from attack, hulls, shields, auto-resolve, and so forth. Everything is related to that number, extremely linearly, so that's really the only thing that matters. This is good, because it is plenty informative and way way way easier to understand.

• For the first time, on the racial power grid it now shows you the breakdown (in tooltips) of why the ship multiplier and pirate multipliers are what they are. It even shows you the amount of pirate power creep (which has never been visible before), as well as the amount of pirate power creep per month.
  • You can also, for the first time ever, see the gains that you are getting to your central ship mult from the abilities and weapons that you have unlocked for yourself.

• The boosts from the player abilities and weapons, since they are now more visible, are now also more substantial. This provides a new way to gain more power for your ship that is blind to what the abilities specifically are (just based on what kind of ability it is).

• The method for calculating the base ship mult for each race, and then the increases over time, is now a lot more nuanced than it ever was before, too. Previously all races were just treated the same, and it was a matter of purely who got what techs first.
  • Now there is a concept of starting space combat skill for each race, although it does not vary remotely so widely as the starting ground combat skill does.
  • There is also now a concept of learning skill for space combat, just as with the ground combat, so some races get more of a benefit out of technologies than others.

New And Altered Technologies To Support The Above

• Note that of course a number of new and removed and altered technologies have already been mentioned in specific sections above, as those relate very specifically to the section in question. These further technology changes are ones that don't fit neatly into one category, but which are related to the overall switch from multiplicative to additive.

• All techs that would take more than 149 months to research, or which improve ship combat strength, are now barred until year 1. This means that none of them auto-unlock right at the start of the game, and it thus also means that you can't ever come into a situation where the enemy is ridiculously stronger than you, to your surprise.
  • Actually, the way things are structured now, you wind up being stronger than your enemies by a fair bit right at the start of the game.

• Two new techs have been split out of Basic Sub Atomic Theory and Advanced Sub Atomic Theory, which just have the weapons component of that.
  • This makes them take longer to research, and it doesn't block up the main science research chain, and it lets the AI target science and ship upgrades independently (that part's hard to explain).
  • Also, with the various split techs, it makes it vastly easier for you, too, to find stuff that improves a specific kind of stat. Rather than a science upgrade being hidden in a combat-labeled tech, the two are split and you wind up seeing both in their proper sections.

• Mind Reading no longer gives a ground combat boost.
  • A new Anticipatory Combat tech is now a sub-tech of Mind Reading, and the combat boost has been moved there.
  • Mind Reading can be unlocked right from the start, and has had its cost reduced a tad.

• Psionics can now be unlocked from year 9 onwards instead of year 18, and costs a bit less in terms of months to research.
  • The scientific boost portion of this has been split off into a new Psionic Research sub-technology, and the science boost has been moved there.
  • Psionics itself has been moved to the ground combat category, since that's now all it directly provides.

• Teleportation has now been moved to the planetary improvement category, and has had its ground combat component split out into a new sub-tech called Battle Teleport Training.
  • These have been dropped to year 18 as available, rather than year 27.

• The following changes have been made in order to add more variety to the techs that races have in the early game:
  • FasterSateliteCommunications no longer available until year 3.
  • Photon Mechanics not available until year 12.
  • Automated Personal Vehicles can be unlocked right from the start, but costs 3x as many months to research.
  • Ecologial Engineering can be unlocked right from the start, but costs 3x as many months to research.
  • Industrial Automation can be unlocked right from the start, but costs 3x as many months to research.
  • Nanometallurgy can be unlocked right from the start, but costs 1.5x as many months to research.
  • Nano Tubes can be unlocked right from the start, but costs 1.5x as many months to research.
  • Gene Splicing can be unlocked right from the start, but costs 10x as many months to research.

• When it comes to the starting techs granted to races, they are no longer at all related to a specific category of interest for that race. Instead it's just a random scattershot of stuff, which provides more interesting starting points.
  • After the initial technology grant, of course, races still proceed based on specific agendas.

• Some new very-basic early game techs have been added in order to provide some more choices for the early AI, and some more ways for races to squeak out every last bit of efficiency in an area if they wish to do so.
  • New low-quality science boost tech: Fiber Optics.
  • New low-quality ground combat boost tech: Combat Optics.
  • New low-quality science boost tech: Improved Textbooks.
  • New low-quality manufacturing boost tech: Improved Trade Schools.

• Added 4 new higher-level techs for races to get more science multipliers later in the game:
  • Optical Computer Clusters, Genius Incubators, Mental Augmentations, and Quantum Computer Implants.

• Added 2 new higher-level techs for races to get more science lab multipliers later in the game:
  • Improved Laboratories and Super Laboratories.

• Bombing Upgrades have been split out into a third tech research line, beside the space combat upgrades and the regular research lines.
  • This creates a lot less competition for scarce research time, and makes it so that the space combat upgrades start sooner (not getting mixed up with the bombing ones).

Seeing Race Actions In Observer Mode

• In observer mode, the place where you would normally see the federation progress window, or the armada management window or whatever, now instead has a new Observe Race Acts window. This lets you get visibility into normally-hidden parts of what the racial AIs are doing, namely what actions they are currently undertaking (as opposed to seeing the notifications of those only when they are finished), as well as the technologies that they are currently researching.
  • This is a tool that we used internally for AI testing and balance testing, but now it's been cleaned up and is part of observer mode so that you can see more of what is going on, too, when you're not an active participant.
  • In the actual game, this stuff is hidden because it's essentially the equivalent of the "fog of war" where you can't read the enemy's every action and thought.

Invasion Mode Updates

• In the prior version, the Obscura were about 3x above average in terms of the speed of their orbital bombardment. Now they are half as fast as the average.

• The birth rate for the obscura has been dramatically toned down from the prior version.

• The planetary compatibility for the obscura is now considered 1.0 rather than 3.0.

• The ship construction speed of the obscura, and the construction speed of the obscura, now grows more slowly.

• The ground combat strength of the hydral servitor robots, and the ground combat strength of the obscura, are now set more distinctly for their races.

• The starting power of the Obscura space strength now starts out almost 10x lower, but it grows vastly faster now than it used to. So there's a definite building of threat from these guys that wasn't there in the same way previously.

• Added a rule where if the obscura are holding an outpost at the beginning of a month, they destroy that outpost and release any armadas they had defending it to AttackFleet duty.

• There is now a proper ending scene for when you lose invasion mode.

• The rate of Obscura power creep varies by strategic difficulty. This can get absolutely insane if you play on Nightmare, where you had better win within a few years if you are to win at all.

Betrayal Mode Updates

• Added a hostile action for placing an attack beacon on a planet.
  • When:
    • A beacon is present on a planet not owned by you.
    • That planet has no defending armadas (of that race or an ally).
    • Your ground forces on the planet are not stronger than the opposition.
  • Then, for each of your planets that has 11m or more ground troops, it sends 1m ground troops to the beacon planet.
  • Thanks to ozforce and Shadow hornet for inspiring this change.

• There is now a proper ending scene for when you lose betrayal mode.

Version 1.502 (Obscura Relicui)

(Released September 23rd, 2014)

• The build/reduce relations dispatches are now half as effective as they were in the last couple of releases (and thus twice as effective as they were prior to that). Just a process to figure out the exact balance on those!
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for suggesting.

• There are some new restrictions on the positive and negative dispatch missions (clearly stated in the game):
  • Nothing you say can make the Burlusts or Thoraxians like the Andors or Peltians any better.
  • Nothing you say can make the Evucks like another race better if the Evuck attitude toward that race is already -100 or lower.
  • Nothing you say can make the Andors, Peltians, or Skylaxians like each other less.
  • Nothing you say can make the Acutians, Burlusts, or Thoraxians like each other less when the client race already has an attitude of 100 or higher.
  • These items are thematically appropriate, and help to accentuate the differences between the races even further.

• The game no longer allows you to do the help-them-build-armadas dispatch when the race is at its armada cap (and thus wouldn't make any progress anyway).
  • Thanks to Eternaly_Lost for the report and save bringing this to our attention.

• Bomb shelters no longer mention any added resistance for buildings, since they don't provide any.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where some of the loss conditions from the standard federation-formation mode could unintentionally kick in during betrayal or invasion mode.
  • Thanks to FortunaDraken and Kaziglu_Bey for reporting.

• The "Obscura Hideout" quests relating to RCI were buggy in terms of the results they were giving you. Forget how they worked before. They now:
  • 1. Give you a maximum of +1000 to that RCI value, or whatever the difference is between the current RCI and -500 (so if the race is at -700, it will give them +200).
  • 2. It will never give less than 50 RCI total.
  • These also now require that the planet targets have a maximum RCI of -700, rather than -500, making these a tad more rare.
  • Thanks to Misery, FortunaDraken, nas1m, and DrFranknfurter for reporting.

• The various RCI-related Obscura hideout quests are all now related to one another in terms of not popping up constantly. When one appears, the others will cool it for a while. Versus it being strictly by individual RCI value type.
  • Thanks to Misery, FortunaDraken, nas1m, and DrFranknfurter for inspiring this change.

• When a new hydral signal appears, it no longer does so under the Obscura or Hydral factions. This was just a visual thing, but it was making it seem like you might not be able to actually go find the tech.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The "Broker Trade Route" contract's planet-selection dropdown now shows all planets that are even theoretically possible candidates, but reds out those which are not actually valid, and displays why they are not valid in tooltips on the dropdown items.
  • Thanks to Manxome, A Distraction, and Bob of Mage for suggesting.

• Put in some null reference checking to prevent errors from happening in rare circumstances on the new expansion quests.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Fights with the Obscura are now far better balanced in terms of still being insanely tough but not just "hi, you die now immediately" hard:
  • Normally only 12 flagships can be visible in a fight at one time, and excess ones "warp in" to the battle as a battle progresses. Previously, the Obscura stuff was just using this same logic. However, now the Obscura ships are handled separately from the normal flagships, and they have a max count of 4 visible per battle at once. This makes it so that you still have a ton to face if you want to try wiping out an entire armada (good luck with that), but the screen isn't literally solid bullets.
  • Additionally, Obscura ships now will always have to spawn at least 600px away from all other ships, so that they don't wind up stacked on top of one another so tightly at the start.
  • And finally, your ship will always start at least 2000px away from any Obscura ships, so the chances of you taking immediate fire on the very first turn are now quite low.
  • Thanks to FortunaDraken and nas1m for inspiring these changes.

Betrayal Mode Balance/Fixes

• The base power of newly-created betrayal-mode player armadas is now 10 rather than 1, which is what the tooltips were saying it should be.
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter for reporting.

• Previously you could help "Hold Off Overwhelming Attacks" by fighting your own armadas in betrayal mode. Fixed!
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter for reporting.

• You now have your own independent base technical prowess, which is the highest of all the races.

• You now have your own independent starting construction multipliers, rather than taking on the one of the race you destroyed.

• Your planetary compatibility is now considered 1.0 for every planet, since you've just got servitor robots there, not real citizens. Before it was taking on the one of the race you destroyed.

• Fixed a crash bug when clicking your race's icon in the race relations window in Betrayal mode.
  • Thanks to FortunaDraken for reporting.

Invasion Mode Balance/Fixes

• The Obscura no longer research technologies at all, or appear in the tech progress screen.
  • This is both thematically appropriate, and makes sense for balance.
  • Thanks to FortunaDraken and nas1m for suggesting.

• The Obscura Stingray ship is now available in the game with its new bullet pattern!

• The Obscura Disc's "The Road" pattern has been adjusted a bit so as to not be quite so tough as before.
  • The Disc's movement speed has also been reduced to 1/3 of its previous value so that you can actually get in the road and follow it properly without it constantly getting away from you.

• The monthly rate at which the Obscura get stronger has been doubled from its previous values to make up for them not getting any techs. The months growth rate is still extremely small.

• The Obscura no longer have any interest in building outposts.

• The Obscura no longer have any technical prowess, since they don't use that sort of technology.

• The Obscura now have their own independent starting construction multipliers, rather than taking on the one of the race they destroyed.
  • Since these do not grow via techs anymore, these also creep up over time along with their ship power.

• The Obscura planetary compatibility is now considered 3.0 for every planet, since they are such a mysterious force. Before it was taking on the one of the race they destroyed.

• The Obscura ships on the solar map now actually have a proper hue color for their race, rather than using the color of their host race.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The racial AI traits for the Obscura are now much more unique to them and not taking on the underlying traits of the race they killed, so they will tend to be more warlike by far.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The Obscura are no longer allowed to have pirate bases, as that can cause unintended hilarity.
  • Note that any existing savegames with such bases may still see such hilarity until those obscura bases are destroyed.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• While the Obscura control a planet, they completely destroy all of its buildings and resource stores.

• The Obscura no longer have to build transports; those now "come with" their citizenry. We'll let you use your imagination as to what exactly that means, but it's not good. ;)

• Previously, the Obscura race was accidentally handicapped from making proper military attacks in invasion mode, so they were crazy defensive. They are now the scourge that they were supposed to be. This was an oversight in recent code, sorry about that. A fresh Invasion mode game will play out VERY differently from an Invasion mode game started in the prior versions. It may frankly be impossible, we'll see; if they need their stats tuned back, we can certainly do that.

Version 1.501

(Released September 22nd, 2014)

• Fixed a bug where pirates would apply "must I be friendly to this node?" logic when actually about to attack, but would not apply it when picking something to fly to. This could lead to a big pile of pirate fleets around one of your outposts, but not actually attacking the outpost (because it had been too recently defended successfully, etc).
  • Thanks to Eternaly_Lost for the report and save leading to this discovery.

• Fixed a bug in invasion mode and betrayal mode where some chatter lines about becoming spacefaring would come for the race the obscura or the hydral killed.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Left-clicking an Obscura-controlled planet now brings up the hostile actions rather than the friendly actions screen.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Previously, any time the Obscura were mentioned, it was having the host race's color used. Now the Obscura have their own color. This also happened with the names for the Obscura and Hydral in those modes.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The Obscura and the Hydral no longer log chatter entries. The Obscura are far too scary for that!

• Attitude and influence entries relating to the Obscura are no longer logged.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• In the race relations bar graph in invasion mode, it now shows a unique graphic for the obscura, rather than the race they took over.

• In invasion mode, the hostile actions tutorial no longer pops up on the obscura planet. That one is pretty clear-cut in that mode!
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Previously, the opening tutorial message in Invasion mode was the same as the one from the form-a-federation mode, and that was obviously inappropriate.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Previously, autoresolve in invasion mode was claiming to grant you Obscura pilots. Fixed.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Put in a fix for a null reference exception that could happen in the new armada management window in some cases.
  • Thanks to DrFranknfurter for reporting.

• The Obscura no longer do assassination missions.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Version 1.500

(Released September 22nd, 2014)

• First version with the expansion live! And some internal updates to prep for that.

Version 1.044

(Released September 21st, 2014)

• A revised bit of chase logic has been introduced that lets us have some of the bullet-pattern-based ships chase you from further away, but only try to fire when at a certain range, or vice-versa.

• The new Combat Practice screen now is much more sanitized in the list of ships that it shows you to allow you to fight. Previously it was including ships that only could ever belong to the player (there's no point in practicing against those), things like freighters that aren't really combatants, powerups that are only for the player's side, and so on.

Version 1.043

(Released September 20th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug where angle_rand did not function properly in the Bullets xml files.
  • This fixes the behavior of the Flagship Model T, which previously always had the same angle on its looping shots.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

Combat Practice At The Black Market!

• Added a new "Combat Practice" option to the black market, which now allows you to play mock battles vs whatever ships you choose.
  • This is useful for a lot of reasons if you're looking to just get better at combat in a no-consequences environment, but it's particularly useful if you're playing on high difficulties and encountering the crazy new ships from the upcoming expansion.
  • Thanks to zharmad and Misery for suggesting.

Version 1.042 (The Need For Speed)

(Released September 19th, 2014)

• Put in a fix that should fix certain shots blipping in and out in some circumstances.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• During auto-resolving of battles, when you have to withdraw right before death as part of that it now gives you more of a time penalty. This way you can't just spam attacks against a race repeatedly.

• Previously when you used auto-resolve on a battle while having to withdraw after a certain point in the auto-resolve, it would actually do more damage to the enemy side in terms of base power reduction than it said it would. Fixed.

• The speed of bullets fired by the player have been doubled, to make that feel more fun rather than frustrating. And more in keeping with other SHMUPs.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for inspiring that change.

• The intro story for the main gameplay mode is now a little more descriptive, making it clear how your race were dictators and how your race was wiped out.

• The colonize moon action now explains about how this can open opportunities for trade.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for suggesting.

• The explanation for brokering trade routes now explains what the requirements are for two planets to be able to trade.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for suggesting.

• The improve/harm relations options are now 3x as effective as before, and about 1/4th the cost they previously were.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for inspiring this change.

• The improve relations dispatch now explains quite a bit about better ways to improve relations. That makes this kind of a one-stop tutorial bit right in the middle of the option, and this option is no longer so bad, anyway.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for inspiring this change.

• The RCI-related dispatches are no longer expense dispatches, but instead are paid ones. They just don't pay very much anymore. This is a lot more fun.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for inspiring this change.

• The armada assistance dispatch is also a paid dispatch rather than expense one again. You gain less influence with them over this, however.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee for inspiring this change.

Version 1.041

(September 17th, 2014)

• Fixed a missing localization entry relating to the planetary raw resources tutorial.

Version 1.040

(Released September 16th, 2014)

• Some additions relating to bullet patterns.

Version 1.039 (Eat Hot Lead!)

(Released September 16th, 2014)

• A major new addition to the render pipeline has been created, and is now in use not only here but also in Spectral Empire (and coming up for AI War). This new systems does highly-efficient sprite batching, which makes the framerates absolutely skyrocket when there is a lot of stuff on the screen at once (shots, etc). Previously on machines that would chug if there were thousands of shots onscreen at once (for instance), those now render incredibly efficiently.
  • On high-end cards this can literally increase your framerate by several hundred fps if you have vsync off.

Version 1.038

(Released September 16th, 2014)

• Added "Drop Off Expatriates" and "Drop Off Resistance Fighters" actions (friendly and hostile, respectively). Each takes a whole 100 captured pilots of the selected race, but it's something to do with them when there's that many.
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring these.

• Some fixes to the Bullet patterns stuff.

• And a lot of things for the upcoming expansion, as in all the recent versions. Thanks for your patience on the rest of things in the meantime!

Version 1.037

(Released September 12th, 2014)

• Efficiency improvements in a few parts of the rendering chain have been ported over from the recent updates to AI War.

• The bullets.xml now supports variables that are defined in a new bulletvars.xml.

Version 1.036

(Released September 11th, 2014)

• Some additions relating to bullet patterns.

Version 1.035

(Released September 10th, 2014)

• This one actually doesn't have any features for the main game; there are some things for the expansion work that is currently going on behind the scenes.

Version 1.034

(Released September 9th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug where any race that started constructing an Ultimate building would stop very soon after due to it seeing the under-construction one as a violation of the unique-clause.

• Fixed an additional bug which prevented the Boarines from ever starting their Ultimate building.

• Fixed a rare array-index-out-of-bounds unhandled exception in armada reassignment logic.

• Fixed a bug where the Core Cooler and Virtual Reality Center buildings descriptions didn't actually tell you what they do.
  • Thanks to Drak, GC13, and Poulpe for reporting.

• Some slight rendering performance improvements shifted over from AI War.

Version 1.033 Honor Thy Word, Puppets!

(Released August 25th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug where a number of contracts would misreport (at least in prediction, possibly in results) the attitude consequences between two races. The right change was happening, just a UI thing.
  • Thanks to topper for the report and save.

• Now when a planetary building is destroyed, it continues to count against "max of this building type allowed on this planet" for a year, preventing instantaneous reconstruction of, for example, a sabotaged ion cannon when the planet was full of ion cannons.
  • Thanks to Kanamura for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the new-game process could give the player techs without the prereqs for those techs.
  • Thanks to Kizor for reporting.

• Now every month if a race (or the player) has techs but not the prereqs for whatever reason, it automatically gets those prereqs.
  • Thanks to Kizor for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where truces were only being forced by the code for 30 months instead the claimed 3 years (60 months).
  • Thanks to Kizor for the report and save.

• Race fleets now must be friendly towards other race outposts and planets (not necessarily fleets), even if it's a raiding fleet, unless the two races are at war. This is to avoid confusion from "raiders" attacking outposts, etc despite no state of war existing.
  • Thanks to Kizor for inspiring this change.

Version 1.032 Hotfix

(Released August 22nd, 2014)

• Fixed a bug where saving and loading a game could cause your credits to be zeroed out.
  • Thanks to Kizor for the report and save.

Version 1.031 (Tonight We Dine On Turret Soup)

(Released August 19th, 2014.)

• The art has been completely redone for all of the turrets, the emergency response hangar, the laser pod, the mega lance, the missile shield, the scattershot, and the spy probe.
  • Huge thanks to I-KP for coming up with the original style, and then for Phil Chabot for doing the new art, and Blue for lighting them all.

• There were a couple of reports of credit being zeroed out after doing contracts at random points. Apologies for this. One possible source of this has been "fixed" (though we're not 100% positive that code was even bad), but please let us know if you see this again in 1.031 or higher.
  • Thanks to Dragi and Kizor for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the Golems being invisible-ish (just a flaming outline) since the upgrade to the main ship art a couple of months ago. Sorry we missed this for so long!
  • Thanks to Poulpe and NickAragua for reporting.

Version 1.030 (Birth Control)

(Released August 15th, 2014)

• Fixed an _extreme_ inefficiency in the "mature stage-9 children" routine, that was causing it to basically do far more work than was reasonable when the number of stage 9 children was very high. This was so inefficient that it was causing minor slowdowns all the time, for one, but when the peltians started a cloning program it could cause the game to stop responding and literally seem frozen (if you left it long enough it would come back, but that could be several minutes of the game seeming frozen first).
  • Basically the problem was that it was assuming much smaller birth rates than the peltian cloning process would result in, and so it was doing things in very fine increments in order to be very realistic as much as possible. Now it detects when the numbers are higher and adjusts its coarseness to suit, scaling down the coarseness as the number shrinks.
  • Thanks to Colamäleon for the report and save.

• In general put a per-month cap on the cloning program speed so that races with absurdly high birth rate ratios would not have runaway population growth on these activities.
  • Specifically, in one example this shrinks the cloning progress per month from being north of 123 million for the peltians, to instead being 300 (Not million. Just 300.).
  • Thanks to Colamäleon for the report and save.

• Put in better caps on the birth rates on planets to prevent insane runaway amounts of population in stupidly short amounts of time (mainly Peltians, here).

• Previously there was a bug where you could not sell or gift raw resources unless you had at least 800 of that resource, rather than 100 like the interface implied. Fixed this so that it now lets you properly sell as long as you have at least 100.
  • Thanks to screamingpalm for reporting.

Version 1.029 Hotfix

(Released July 30th, 2014)

• Fixed an _extreme_ inefficiency in the "kill population on a planet" routine, that was causing it to basically do far more work than was reasonable when the number of population members was very high. This was so inefficient that it was causing various late-game slowdowns, for one, but also in the late game it could cause the game to stop responding and literally seem frozen (if you left it long enough it would come back, but that could be several minutes of the game seeming frozen first).
  • Basically the problem was that it was assuming smaller numbers of population than some games were getting, and so it was doing things in very fine increments in order to be very realistic as much as possible. Now it detects when the numbers are higher and adjusts its coarseness to suit, scaling down the coarseness as the number shrinks. In the example savegame that we had, this shrinks a loop that was executing about 260 MILLION iterations down to about 2000 iterations instead.
  • Thanks to SpaceWorm for the report and the savegame that let us reproduce this.

Version 1.028 Hotfix

(Released July 17th, 2014)

• The property development dispatch credit income has gone up even further, to being about 3x what it was in the prior version (which was itself about 10x what it was the version before that).
  • Thanks to Poulpe for suggesting.

• Put in a fix that prevents scientist defection and attack detention facility missions from throwing a red error message when you do them against allies.
  • Thanks to SpaceWorm for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the betrayal-mode techs were showing up outside of betrayal mode.
  • Thanks to Poulpe and jonathansfox for reporting.

Version 1.027 (Dispatched And Funded)

(Released July 1st, 2014)

• Fixed some VERY old logic that was causing races to consider themselves at max armada cap if no other races had at least 1/5th as many armadas as them. In most cases this did not matter too much, but it did cause two things:
  • Overly-powerful races would stop their roll of doom in terms of building more armadas, but now they have no qualms about such (budgets aside, which are a totally other thing and much more appropriate since those are AI rather than an artificial cap).
  • There was an edge case, previously, where if all races had 0 armadas, then none could build any!
  • Thanks to Poulpe for reporting.

• When a race is unable to improve or create armadas for whatever reason at a planet, they now reallocate their planetary budget accordingly.

• The Green Revolution and Reinvestment Period racial actions no longer halt all armada construction and improvement, but rather just halve it. Completely halting it is absolutely egregiously brutal, along with being confusing.
  • Thanks to Silverfire for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where a couple of "Betrayal Mode" technologies from the expansion were showing up, but disabled, in the prior version.
  • Thanks to Poulpe for reporting.

• Fixed a visual glitch in the prior version where the new Predators were showing up incorrectly because their sprite dictionary had been changed in size.
  • Thanks to Poulpe for reporting.

• Made some improvements to how the "mode" glows show up, to make them a little more clear. Allies are now yellow rather than blue, to avoid confusion with shields. Still more work needed here, though.

• Fixed some formatting issues with after-contract attitude and influence result changes, as well as an outright incorrect number in part of the attitude line.

• Fixed an error in the prior version where non-steamworks versions of the game were getting a black screen. Yikes, so sorry about that!
  • Thanks to NickAragua and Fleet Unity for reporting.

New And Revised Dispatches

• Developing your own personal outposts as the black market no longer gains you any credits, since you are doing this work for yourself.
  • Thanks to Warpstorm for suggesting.

• The Property Development dispatch now earns you considerably more credit per day.

• The RCI dispatches on planets now no longer require that the planet have a negative RCI value. This lets you have a lot more control in terms of improving those values even when they are already somewhat positive.

• Fixed an issue with the RCI dispatches where the enemy races of the race you were helping cared WAY too much about your helping the client race.

• The amount of visual space for the Dispatch Data panel has been increased such that the text for dispatches should always now actually fit properly on there!
  • Thanks to topper for reporting.

• For organization purposes, dispatches are now split into three visual groups: Paid, Personal, and Expense.
  • Personal dispatches gain you no credit or influence, but have some other benefit that you particularly want.
  • Paid dispatches work in the traditional way, gaining you influence and credit, plus whatever other benefits.
  • Expense dispatches are new, and tend to cost you credit, while either gaining or losing you influence and giving you whatever other benefits.

• Fixed a display bug with "eternal" dispatches that was showing your monthly predicted influence gains as instead being what you would gain in a day (aka, it was showing the value as 20x lower than it really was, making it look like a REALLY bad deal when it was not).

• The four "boost RCI" dispatches have been converted over to being expense dispatches rather than paid dispatches:
  • Rather than gaining you some credit, they now cost you a LOT of credit.
  • They are now, however, also 10x most effective. Meaning that in something approximating a year you can improve an RCI value on a planet around +175 for about 16,000 credit.
  • Why this shift? Well, players want more control over the RCI, and these dispatches seemingly granted it to them... but at a glacial pace. The problem with them was that we didn't want these dispatches to be too overpowered, so we made them super slow, but that also made them frustrating.
    • The solution, then, is to make them vastly more effective, but also to give them a more substantial cost other than just a solar-map-time cost. That way you see quick and immediate results that give you more of a feeling of power (and more than just a feeling, actual power), while at the same time not making these game-breakingly powerful. It should be a lot more useful and fun for everyone.

• As a counterpoint to the four "boost RCI" dispatches, there are now four "harm RCI" dispatches. These work exactly like the boost ones, except in reverse.

• The "Assist With Armada Construction" dispatch is also now an Expense Dispatch, and thus costs you credit rather than gaining it for you.
  • It also is vastly faster than before: 20x speed boost rather than 3x, and a faster influence gain, too.
  • It also now shows you the progress on the current armada and squadron right in the dispatch data, because otherwise that was pretty invisible and it was hard to tell you were accomplishing anything at all (since armadas often immediately head out somewhere else after being created).
  • This transforms this dispatch into a more semi-short-term activity for you that is of strategic importance but also some cost, rather than being an ultra-long-term thing that you do kind of to pass the time while having some benefit.

• The Improve Race Relations and Damage Race Relations dispatches have been updated substantially:
  • There are no longer rules about the ranges of attitude the races must have toward one another in order for you to use these actions (previously it was very constrained).
  • This is now an expense dispatch, and quite an expensive one.
  • This is now 10x more effective than before, so that you get done faster.
  • The prediction of what will change monthly in terms of attitudes between the races is now correct. Before it was under-predicting it by a lot.

Version 1.026 (Brace For Options!)

(Released June 30th, 2014)

• Races are now far more intentional about assigning at least one defensive armada to each of their planets, even if it means pulling them from other duties.
  • Thanks to timfortress for inspiring this change.

• Every day that any armada is docked at a military outpost owned by the armada owner, the base power of the armada increases very slightly over time.
  • Similarly, when docked at an owned planet or an owned outpost of a different kind, then that base power now goes up at a rate that ist 4x slower than at a military outpost.

• In the racial power grid, races that can never have pirates (Andors and Thoraxians) no longer show a Pirate Ship Mult entry in that column.

• Fixed a longstanding issue where it was still displaying the "welcome to the race's political screens for the first time" and "welcome to the friendly/hostile actions screens for the first time" messages even if you had tutorials turned off.

• Fixed a bug with trade routes where the resource being subtracted from each side was instead being, sigh, added.

• In the space defenses section of the details of each planet or outpost, it now shows the power of each armada to the left rather than to the right, so that there is enough room to actually read it.

• Fixed a bug where a lot of the ship unlocks were not happening in recent versions (definitely the flagships, possibly more than that).
  • Thanks to nas1m and zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed an issue that could cause crashes in recent versions of the game.
  • Thanks to asdfssen for reporting.

• Fixed a crash bug that could happen when starting certain missions in some circumstances. Existing savegames should be automatically repaired by this fix.
  • Thanks to Poulpe and samnainocard for reporting.

• The ground combat multiplier of the evuck crystal cities has dropped from 10 to 1.3. The prior value was INSANE.

• The bombing resistance multipliers of evuck crystal cities have been dropped to 1.4x instead of 10x, and for the Thoraxian Deep Tunnels it is now 2.5x instead of 25x.

• The ground combat multipliers of most of the technologies have been reduced, to give more of an advantage back to races with more implicit fighting skill.

• There is now a max cap of 999 on the ground combat multiplier at any location.
  • However, in cases with extremely large populations (say a Burlust planet with 2+ trillion citizens), you can still get ground military strengths into the quadrillions in some cases. Previously the game would wrap around to negative numbers inappropriately, but now it has support for showing quadrillions appropriately.
    • Bear in mind that this isn't meant to be a commonplace scenario, and any race with quadrillions of ground power either needs a planetcracker sent their way or they are basically the winners.

• There is now an advanced start option that allows you to skip the intro story.
  • Thanks to CricketMask for suggesting.

• Steam achievements are FINALLY working on Linux! Thanks everyone for their patience on this one. We are now using Steamworks.NET, which does a much better job at letting us do a lot of things that are cross-platform with the steam library.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER and jonasan for reporting.

• Fixed a bug with the trifecta of superiority where when it was dissolving it was marking some data improperly and thus repeating its dissolution message constantly.
  • Thanks to Progenitus, Poulpe, and greenmars for reporting.

Adjustments And Options For RCI (Round 1)

• The RCI impact of diseases is now 1/10th the current value that it has been.

• There is a new option in the advanced start screen: Disable RCI Trends
  • This tends to make things easier by creating few sources of circumstantial shifts to deal with. The slow overall trends of RCI on planets is disabled, but otherwise RCI is not touched.

• There is a new option in the advanced start screen: Disable RCI Completely
  • This makes for a quite simpler game in a lot of respects, by removing the RCI values from being a factor at all. This does not always mean an EASIER game, it just means simpler.

• • Thanks to many players for inspiring this first round of RCI changes, including ptarth, nas1m, Misery, and many others.

Options For Extra Dangerous Hostile Alliances

• Added a new advanced start option: Extra Dangerous Alliances
  • Members of hostile alliances will never leave their alliance due to low attitude toward other members of their alliance. According to some players, this is the "real" way to play, but be warned that it is very challenging.
  • Thanks to MaskityMask for suggesting.

• Fear Empires now never dissolve until the race is dead -- they no longer disappear when the race only has one planet level.
  • Thanks to MaskityMask for suggesting.

• The Thoraxian Protectorate no longer ever disappears unless the Thoraxians themselves are taken out; removal of the other races does not matter.
  • Thanks to MaskityMask for suggesting.

Ship Graphics

• The graphics for pretty much all of the ships have been redone by the masterful I-KP from our community, with further lighting edits from our own artist Blue. The look is vastly superior to what it was before!

• All of the shielded ships (pretty much just flagships) now have their own individualized shield graphics rather than having one generic ovular shield. This looks way nicer and also makes the shapes of the ships a lot clearer.

Version 1.025 (Hotfix)

(Released June 6th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug that was reporting the wrong amount of time (vastly too much) having elapsed during a dispatch in the dispatch results screen, and which was also causing property development and tech research to proceed 20x too fast.
  • Thanks to Thasero, Silverfire, and TheDarkMaster for reporting.

• All of the direct ways of interacting with the Boarines regarding federation matters (everything from creating a federation to joining one to even pacifying AFA demonstrators) was not available, and has never been. Ah... whoops indeed. These are now available under International Relations for the Boarines.
  • Thanks to nas1m and TheDarkMaster for reporting.

• The options to get the Thoraxians to directly join the Federation were also not available, but are also now in the International Relations section for their queens. Note that there has intentionally never been a way to directly get them to form the federation by asking them.
  • Thanks to nas1m and TheDarkMaster for reporting.

• The "Create Strong Federation" option that the Burlusts have now works with the Acutians and Boarines instead of the Acutians and Thoraxians. This also now has some other text corrected, showing properly that all three races get added, not that that the Burlusts and one of the others gets added.

• The Thoraxians are now completely unwilling to form the federation in any fashion, which was thematically the intent from the early design stages, but not really borne out in the final design. They still have options for joining existing federations (and now those properly show up, as noted above), and the options for "create the federation with another race" at other race political screens now show that the Thoraxians will never take part in the initial formation.
  • Previously you could not directly get the Thoraxians to create the federation by visiting them, but you could get them to take part in it by visiting someone else, which was confusing.
  • Thanks to nas1m and TheDarkMaster for reporting the confusion here.

• Fixed an issue with the "Create Federation With Other Race" screen where it was not properly showing the reasons for an option not being available.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version where the game was complaining about some expansion files not existing when you first started it up if you don't have the (not yet available) expansion installed. This was harmless, but annoying for sure.
  • Thanks to Poulpe for reporting.

Version 1.024 (Disease Resistance)

(Released June 5th, 2014)

• Fixed a bug where the planetary overlay wouldn't show attacking ground troops if the planet had no defending armadas.
  • Thanks to Histidine for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the prediction for Property Development actions would always say you were saving 0 months through goons even when it was > 0.
  • Thanks to Drak for the report where we noticed this.

• The game will now track partial scientist/construction-worker goons, if the circumstances would only spend "part" of one.
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring this change.

• Dispatch results (rewards and progress) are now counted on a daily basis, rather than a monthly one.
  • Thanks to Drak for the suggestion.

• Now when races research ship upgrades they do so separately from their "normal" research, rather than instead of it. Otherwise they get really bogged down on those upgrades.
  • Thanks to Thasero for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the "Free Return Of Prisoners" option basically couldn't work at all (due to not letting you pick a quantity to give).
  • Also made it give ~0.33 influence per prisoner returned, rather than 1 per 3 prisoners returned, such that it now works if you have less than 3 to return, etc.
  • Thanks to NickAragua and Poulpe for the report and saves.

• Amended the general "actions where you select a race don't allow dead races" rule to make an exception for the sell-prisoners action.
  • Thanks to NickAragua for inspiring this change.

• Disease effects that increase with the % of population infected now have that factor capped at what it would be at 10%, to reduce the chance of uncontrollable devastation.

• Put in some check code that should prevent a rare null reference exception.
  • Thanks to Chloe ‎‎‎‎for reporting.

• Attacking the local AFA has been an easy way to farm too many credits for way too long. It now gives a more sane number of credits (a 2x normal multiplier instead of 4x).
  • Thanks to a variety of players for suggesting, including Histidine bringing it up most recently.

Version 1.023 (Uprisings)

(Released May 28th, 2014)

• The minimum duration that a research dispatch can be reduced to by goons has been reduced from 5 => 1.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Dispatches no longer have a dropdown for selecting the number of months to spend, they just run until cancelled or until they reach their natural conclusion (if any).
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring this change.

• An error was accidentally giving the auto-resolve combat power boosts from the player having more special abilities unlocked to the AI players (all of them) rather than to the player (sigh). Fixed.

• Some potential performance improvements to the way that ground combat number are calculated have been made. Particularly in the face of some of the new additions, namely buildings on specific planets that can improve ground combat prowess elsewhere in the solar system for a race.

• Down in the bottom of the main solar map interface, it now tells you how many races are still living, and for the other stats (spacefaring, etc) it now excludes any dead races (which before it was confusingly including).

• Doing prisoner exchanges with races, or releasing prisoners, now only requires -1000 influence with them.

• Fixed an issue where a number of ships would not draw their damage masks correctly when in motion. Mainly hydral tech, and then
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

Federation Formation Balance Changes

• The mutual attitude required for races to form the federation is now only 100, rather than 300.
  • However, the mutual attitude required for the Skylaxians, Acutians, or Andors to invite other races into the federation remains 300.
  • Thanks to Histidine, nas1m, and others for inspiring this change.

• The Andor and Skylaxian credit costs to bring other races into the Federation are now far lower (10x lower for Skylaxians, 2x lower for Andors).
  • Thanks to Zulgaines, Drak, GC13, Progenitus, Poulpe, worldstone, Ragwortshire, and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• The cost of getting races to directly join an existing federation has dropped 10x, but they now must have at least 100 average mutual attitude to and from the existing federation races.
  • Though actually the cost for Peltians has tripled.
  • ALL of the Acutian industries now have an option for joining an existing federation, although the costs vary by industry still.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines, Drak, GC13, Progenitus, Poulpe, worldstone, Ragwortshire, and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Previously, the Burlust option for Pressure To Join Federation was showing up when the federation did not exist yet. Fixed.

• The various "desperation" ways of getting a race to join the federation now require 0 mutual attitude between the races in question, and cost substantially less credit.
  • Also, all of the Acutian industries now allow you to do these.

• Previously, the influence requirements for pressuring races to join the federation due to desperation were erroneously high.

• All of the races except for the Thoraxians and Burlusts now have a new way of joining the federation: Join Federation When Militarily Supreme.
  • If this race has at least 10,000 effective space power, and 10x higher effective space power than any other race, then they will be willing to enter the federation on much easier terms than usual.
  • The idea here, thematically, is that they are willing to join because they think they can then exert a controlling interest in the federation.
  • Game-mechanics-wise, the idea is that this encourages a form of brinkmanship with the non-super-warlike races, where you either weaken federation races or else strength a non-federation race in order to get them in this way.
  • It also can create fortuitous "oh hey, practically free race into the federation!" situations, which is of course welcome when it does (rarely) happen.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines, Drak, GC13, Progenitus, Poulpe, worldstone, Ragwortshire, and nas1m for inspiring this change.

Improvements To AI Reactions To Federation Formation

• While the federation controls at least half the solar system (there are 4 or fewer non-federation planets left), then any non-warlike non-federation races will no longer consider each other valid targets for attacking.
  • Warlike races are the Burlusts and the Thoraxians. So they will still war with each other and anyone else, and anyone else will war with them.
  • But what this means is even if the Peltians and the Evucks hate one another, once the Federation gets too strong the Peltians and Evucks will stop attacking each other if they are not in the federation, and will instead focus their attention on the federation or on defending themselves, whichever is more prudent.
  • This is different from them outright forming an alliance, because it doesn't make it so that you have to kill some of them to get them out of it.
  • Races that are part of different alliances will even follow these rules, so long as neither is in the federation.
  • Basically, it keeps the usual infighting from helping you snowball in the late game; your races are now working together, and the opposition realizes that they have to do the same. Except for the too-aggressive ones, the Burlusts and Thoraxians.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines, Drak, GC13, Progenitus, Poulpe, worldstone, Ragwortshire, and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• The order in which you induct races into the federation is no longer so simple. NON-federation races will all respond by building one "scared of federation" building on each of their planets, per federation planet.
  • Aka, if there are 3 federation planets, and the Acutians have two planets, then the Acutians will build 3 Acutian War Factories on each of their two planets.
  • These new "scared of federation" buildings provide both a counterpoint to the federation's growing power, and an incentive.
    • On the one hand, obvioulsy it makes it harder to just obliterate these races militarily as the federation gets stronger.
    • However, if you can get these races to join the federation, then they will bring their existing stock of these buildings with them, thus making the federation even stronger. So by, for instance, waiting for a non-federation race to get suitably freaked out and built up, and then inviting them into the federation, you can make the federation extra strong. But by doing that, you risk them using that power to harm the federation in the meantime.
    • For all of these buildings, if the race in question loses their planet, then their last act is destroying these buildings so that nobody else can use them.
  • These are the buildings:
    • Acutian War Factory
      • 1.5x ship construction speed multiplier at local planet, 1.3x universal ground combat multiplier.
    • Andor Assembly Line
      • 1.2x ship construction speed multiplier at local planet, 3x citzen assembly rate at local planet.
    • Boarine Foundry
      • 1.1x ship construction speed multiplier at local planet, 1.4x universal armada power and in-combat ship attack multipliers.
    • Burlust War Incubator
      • 4x local birth rate, 1.2x universal ground combat multiplier, 1.2x universal armada power and in-combat ship attack multipliers.
    • Evuck Crystal City
      • 10x local ground combat multiplier, and 10x local protection from orbital bombing.
    • Peltian Super Breeder
      • 50x local birth rate (holy cow), 1.1x ship construction speed multiplier at local planet, 1.1x local ground combat multiplier.
    • Thoraxian Deep Tunnels
      • 1.1x local ground combat multiplier, and 25x local protection from orbital bombing
    • Skylaxian Armory
      • 1.7x universal ground combat multiplier, 1.4x universal armada power and in-combat ship attack multipliers.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines, Drak, GC13, Progenitus, Poulpe, worldstone, Ragwortshire, and nas1m for inspiring this change.

Solar Map Balance

• The speed of bombing has been slowed down substantially, as it was previously way out of control.
  • However, the bombing speed also now varies by race. Acutians are 1.3x faster than most races, and Peltians are 10x faster than other races.

• The speed of ground combat was previously vastly too slow, and has now been increased. This makes the Thoraxians way more dangerous, incidentally. It also makes ground combat a lot more relevant compared to simple bombing, which was always the goal.

• Non-warlike races, neither of which are in the federation or a fear empire, will temporarily not attack one another while a fear empire exists.

• The various orbital bombardment options were previously unlocking for all races pretty much as soon as they became available (on purpose), but this mechanic was confusing and in some respects unbalancing. Change this to no longer happen.
  • Thanks to Warpstorm, UnfriendlyBG, timfortress, Drak, and nas1m for reporting.

• The various orbital bombardment options are now completely barred from the honorable races, since they don't actually do any bombing.
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

Techs

• The following technologies now have additional races that can use them that could not before:
  • More Compact Living Quarters: Thoraxians
  • Mind Reading: Thoraxians
  • Psionics: Thoraxians
  • Teleportation: Thoraxians
  • Personal Shields: Andor, Peltian, and Thoraxians
  • Bio Machinery: Peltian and Thoraxians
  • Graviton Gun: Andors and Peltians
  • Meson and Gluon Computers: Andors and Acutians
  • Mark VII ships: Thoraxians
  • Thanks to UnfriendlyBG and others for inspiring this change.

• Personal shields no longer have any prerequisite techs, but they now aren't available until 18 years in.
  • Teleportation also is no longer available until 27 years in.
  • Psionics are no longer available until 18 years in.
  • Mind Reading is no longer available until 9 years in.
  • Quantum Computers are no longer available until 9 years in.
  • Quantum Power is no longer available until 15 years in.
  • Gluon Computers are no longer available until 30 years in.
  • Meson Computers are no longer available until 24 years in.

Thoraxian Evolution

• The Thoraxians now evolve with time, automatically gaining new ground combat advantages on something that approximates once every hour.
  • There are 8 in all: Thicker Carapaces, Stronger Mandibles, Longer Tarsal Claws, Larger Pronotum, Spined Patella, Longer Fangs, Envenomated Chelicera, and Tertiary Pedipalps.
  • Thanks to UnfriendlyBG for inspiring this change.

• The base Thoraxian ground power has been dropped from 24 to 12, making them only 50% stronger than the Burlusts at the start of the game. However, as the Thoraxians evolve (using that new mechanic from this release), that gap widens.

• The underground tunnels of the Thoraxians now provide a 4x local ground combat multiplier, making planets that ever had them on it harder to take.

New Bullet System, New Ship Shot Behaviors

• Created a completely new bullet management system which relies on external xml files to script complex bullet patterns in the context of the game. This doesn't replace the existing system for bullets, but it is something new that we are able to use for specific weapons when we wish to.

• Added 5 new kinds of shot graphics, so that you can visually distinguish the kinds of shots that move in patterns as opposed to those that follow more conventional rules.

• Rather than using homing missiles, the Flagship Model T now uses a new "energy loop" weapon that is based on the new pattern logic.

• Rather than homing missiles, the flagship model X now has an x-shaped pattern of concussive shots that are dumbfired in front of it.

• The game now supports various ship models being phased out of use after a certain number of years. The Flagship Model X is now phased out after 20 years.

• A new Flagship Model X2 is now phased in after 18 years, and uses a much more intensive version of the X cross weapon.

Ability To Design Bullet Patterns

• If you're feeling inclined to mod any of the bullet patterns for existing ships that use the new style of shots, you can do so by altering the xml in RuntimeData/Configuration/Bullets.xml.
  • Note that as we update the game, Bullets.xml will be overwritten, so permanent mods of this sort are going to be about impossible to maintain. However, if you design cool bullet patterns that you want to share with us, we can take those and potentially assign them either to new ships or otherwise integrate them into the game. We have plenty of fun making our own patterns, but this is a chance for community involvement that we always love.

• Note that to make testing your patterns easier, you can hit Ctrl+F4 while you are in the game and it will automatically reload the xml file. That way any new bullets that are spawned after that point will use the updated logic (existing bullets will continue doing whatever they were previously doing).

Bribe Item Adjustments

• Given the rarity and the price of certain bribe items, they now have adjusted (upwards) effectiveness with more races.

• A new and mysterious "Kitchen" bribe item has been added to the game. It is highly lusted-after by all races. If you don't know what this is about, it's an in-joke from the forums.

• Previously, there was simply a very low sell price for all bribe items, and a buy price that was also the same for all bribe items. Now the prices vary by the bribe item (both sell and buy). Most bribe items have a sell value that is half of their buy value, but some have a much higher or lower resale value.
  • This makes it cheaper to acquire certain lower-value bribe items, and more expensive to acquire the higher-value ones. But more than that, it also pretty much across the board makes the selling of them far more worthwhile, making bribe items a really useful source of credit if you are not actually using them for bribe purposes.

• In your inventory and in the buy/sell bribe items window, bribe items are now displayed in alphabetical order, making them much easier to navigate.

• When buying and selling bribe items, it now shows the prices in parentheses behind the items to buy or sell, and reds out any items that you cannot afford to buy.

• The buying of bribe items has been split into 7 different actions, one focused on each race. This way it can sort by the effectiveness for that race and then the price, and show the effectiveness right in the dropdown item for that action, so that finding good bribes for races is incredibly simpler than before.

Version 1.022 (What Lies Beneath)

(Released May 23rd, 2014)

• Added a rule where members of the same alliance won't go hostile to each other in combat solely due to one having a low attitude towards the other. They'll be at least neutral.
  • They may be hostile to each other if something about the scenario itself demands it.
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring this change.

• Added a rule where certain alliances (SAP, etc) can not be formed between races that have ever taken a planet from one another.
  • Thanks to Warpstorm and jonasan for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the rci-explanation-tooltip logic for the effect of Econ on aramda-construction-rate and building-construction-rate was assuming a "compatibility" impact instead of the actual "quarter-compatibiltiy" (a reduced effect, relatively) logic used in the real math.
  • Thanks to UnfriendlyBG for the report.

• Fixed a bug where if the Skylaxians were invading a planet owned by its original owner, and that planet was flipped via invasion, then the Skylaxians would then ensure it was turned over to its rightful owners... the guys currently owning it. Now that honorable-rule won't fire if the original owners are the current owners.
  • Thanks to The Fuzz for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug in the last version where mouseovering the defender figures of a planet's overlay could cause the enemy ground power to tick up really fast (didn't change the sim, really, was just incrementing that display value at the wrong time).
  • Thanks to SNAFU and Drak for reporting.

• Previously, if you did the first mission with gifting tech to the first race, then you'd start with 8 extra techs as compared to when you did not. Now you start with those techs either way, and it's just a question of whether or not you grant them to the first race.
  • Thanks to Ragwortshire and timfortress for suggesting.

• When you first start a new game, the intro story now plays even if you have the tutorials turned off, unless you have observer mode on.

• The hull types that have been unlocked for races no longer factor into their general ship power, or their pirate ship power. This mechanic was... iffy at best. It's not something that mattered much now, but it was something that was going to get increasingly unpleasant as time went on.

• The randomized stats for ships for each race are no longer "baked" into savegames. Instead it now bakes in just a random seed for each race, and then reconstructs the randomization each time the savegame is loaded. Why does this matter? Because when we rebalance a ship that has randomized stats, it will now properly affect older savegames, which is highly desirable.

• The ship power values shown on the racial power grid now properly include all factors, including the burlust turmoil and boarine rage momentum.

• The power of pirates now creeps up very slightly each month that passes. Old savegames are automatically adjusted to put them into the proper range.

• The number of months that cooperative construction of outposts cost is now twice as much as it previously was.
  • For lone construction of outposts, the extra time required is now 6x higher than with a government, rather than just double.
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring these changes.

• The amount of resources you gain from freighter distress calls has been quartered.
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring this change.

Version 1.021 (Of Armadas And Outposts)

(Released May 21st, 2014)

• Now in Flagship Customization you can choose to disable certain abilities completely, so that they will not swap-in randomly mid-combat when other abilities are exhausted.
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where various Andor "other race" actions actually let you pick the Andors as the target.
  • Thanks to timfortress for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the CloakingField didn't have the RangeIsStrict flag set, so the visual display of its range was generally larger than the actual range it would affect.
  • Buffed the actual range from 800 to 1000, as 800 is probably a bit small for that.
  • Thanks to Ragwortshire for the report.

• Fixed a localization missing error in the prior version: LowDamageMultiplier_Flak.

• You no longer start so close to the orbital science labs in quests or capture technology missions, which makes them harder.
  • Thanks to nas1m and Prokofiev for reporting.

• Defending against splinter factions now only ever happens in high orbit, so that there are no civilian buildings that the pirates might accidentally destroy.
  • Thanks to Drak and Ragwortshire for reporting.

• The attacker tooltips that mention bombardment and ground combat now also mention when an attacker is deliberately refraining from those actions (Skylaxians and Andors don't bomb, and Andors don't invade). Also uses an alternate string for Peltian invader "ground combat".

• The splinter faction attack event no longer does silent damage to the power of local armadas, but instead spawns (or enlarges) a pirate fleet attacking the planet, that then follows normal rules.
  • Thanks to windgen, Ragwortshire, zharmad, and timfortress for inspiring this change.

• The defend-against-splinter-faction-attack action now:
  • No longer requires the presence of planet defense ships.
  • Is now just you vs the splinter factions (with some orbital turretry on your side as usual).
  • Thanks to windgen, GC13, and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Fixed another batch of several dozen typos.
  • Thanks to windgen, nas1m, LaGrange, and zebramatt for reporting.

• The third-party influence penalties for stealing techs from a race have been dropped dramatically.
  • Thanks to topper, nas1m, and Drak for suggesting.

Armadas-On-Solar-Map AI Updates

• Now armadas in fleets of a race or a formal ally in docking range of a planet/outpost, despite not actually being in the planet/outpost's list of defense armadas, will count as defending that planet/outpost (and be displayed as orbiting it, as long as they're there).

• Races will now sometimes send fleets to help defend the planets of their formal allies.

• The Defending-Armada-Count and Defending-Armada-Power figures on the under-the-planet solar map overlay now include a breakdown of who exactly that count and power is coming from, similar to the attacker breakdowns on the enemy figures.

• Thanks to a variety of players for inspiring this addition, including KnownUnknown, lifehole, Elijah, I-KP, Conductorbosh, GreyTalon, NickAragua, topper, runetrantor, GC13, and zharmad.

Armadas-In-Tactical-Combat Updates

• Previously, when it came to main-government armadas to get involved in opposing you in quests, the rules were that it would just take an entire armada, and potentially move it from a really critical location to somewhere really stupid. And potentially give you 18+ flagships to chew through (ugh).
  • Now the armada-getting for quests is a lot more nuanced:
    • Firstly, it tries to pull PART of an armada that is sized appropriately to the quest. But it also tries not to empty out any planetary armadas too thoroughly.
    • Secondly, if it can't find anything above, it no longer just gives up. Instead, it tries to pull emergency reserves together into an armada with the base power level that is being requested by the quest.
    • Thirdly, if THAT doesn't work, then creates an armada on the fly for the quest, but charges the highest-economy planet of that race 1/4 the base power level of the armada in economy points.
  • Note that case 3 is pretty unlikely in most games, but in situations where a quest came up and then a race really got smashed to the brink, then it will come up. In those cases the quest now still is able to function without the race just getting "free armadas" (there should be a cost to everything).
  • Some of the problems with armadas just being too crazy in quests came about because of recent shifts to make armadas fewer in number but larger in scope; that had an adverse effect on quests (auto-resolve could work around it, but still).
  • This also solves a number of things with quests being canceled early -- not bugs at all, but situations that were nonideal and a confusing to players.
  • Thanks to Misery, windgen, Ragwortshire, and CricketMask for reporting.

• Fixed up some code that was leading to excessive numbers of flagships in various combat situations on high difficulties (Misery in particular).
  • Thanks to Misery and Ragwortshire for reporting.

Outpost Updates

• The destroying of military outposts and capturing of civilian outposts no longer requires you to kill all the guarding armadas first, as that was kind of a pain in the rear.
  • Note that the option for attacking the defenders is still there, in case you want to clear out the armadas without capturing the place (which is a possibility). The description for the related actions has been updated to be clear on that.
  • Thanks to windgen and Histidine for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where when you were capturing science or manufacturing outposts, often it would have the wrong type in the actual mission (this was really just a cosmetic thing, but still confusing/annoying).
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle, orzelek, windgen, Kalpa, nas1m, Drak, and Poulpe for reporting.

• When you are attacking a military outpost, it now has 3-5 segments rather than just 1.

• When you are attacking a pirate base, it now has 3-5 enclosures rather than just 3.

• When you are capturing a civilian outpost, it now has 2-4 enclosures rather than just 1.

• Relating to cooperative space outpost construction:
  • If you have previously stolen outposts from this race, their minimum required influence for cooperating with you on building a new one goes up by the amount of influence you lost via the past thefts.
  • Also, the minimum influnce for this action is now 25 rather than -25.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring these changes.

New And Updated Dispatches

• The Black Market now has a new dispatch for "Personal Space Outpost Development." This takes twice as much time, but lets you make an outpost for yourself with no restrictions on month sponsorships and no resource costs. Of course, you also gain no influence or Credit while you're doing this...
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• A new personal technology research dispatch has been added at the black market.
  • This does not give you any credit or influence reward, and takes 2x as long, but you can do it on any tech that is valid for you regardless of what is going on with other races.

• The research tech dispatch has been split into two parts: Cooperatively Research Tech and Learn Tech From Race.
  • The former works as it always has, although now it excludes any techs that the race already knows,
  • The latter does not give you any credit or influence reward, but also costs 1/3 the usual time, and also has no restriction on how many months the race is willing to "sponsor," (since they don't really care).
  • The latter also requires a variable amount of influence depending on which race you want to learn from:
    • Acutian: 50
    • Andor: -25
    • Boarine: 50
    • Burlust: 0
    • Evuck: 200
    • Peltian: 0
    • Thoraxian: 200
    • Skylaxian: 0

More Convenient Goon Hiring

• For the sake of convenience, you can now hire goons outside of the black market screen (it notes them as being imported from there, so the mechanic is the same, this is just a VERY handy interface thing):
  • On any planet's assist locals screen, you can now hire construction workers or scientists, saving you valuable time.
  • On any outpost that you own, you can now hire security goons. This isn't as vitally useful, but is still cool.
  • Thanks to several players for suggesting something along these lines a while back, but unfortunately we can't find where those suggestions were made!

Version 1.020 Piratical Influx

(Released May 19th, 2014)

• Fixed a quite rare index out of bounds exception that was introduced into combat last Friday, and which would happen in certain cases when shots that pass through debris hit debris.
  • Thanks to windgen, domday, and samnainocard for reporting.

• When you first load a savegame, the little ship icons around planets now show up in better positions rather than starting all in one glob and then expanding.

• When you are fast forwarding, particularly in observer mode, the computer voiceovers could get incredibly backed up, since it plays them sequentially. Now -- in general, fast-forwarding or not -- it clears out ones that are older than a solar month. This makes some of the computer voice things not play even during the main game, certainly, but it also keeps her from just constantly chattering if a lot of things happen in succession.

• Some more internal changes have been made to make sure certain key voice clips override others.

• The chatter scroll queue could get incredibly out of date when you were fast forwarding, and basically would never catch up despite decongesting the less-important scroll items. Fixed.
  • Thanks to topper, zespri, and GC13 for reporting.

• Ultra Fast Forward now always lets a frame be drawn whenever:
  • The Month has changed (it used to do this during dispatches, but not Observer's UFF).
  • It's been 250 or more milliseconds since the last frame was drawn.
  • Overall this doesn't really slow down UFF much, and it makes it feel a lot less laggy for intense gamestates.
  • However, if you are in observer mode, then it uses 3 months and 500ms instead, since the UFF is way faster there and thus the above logic was in fact slowing that down.

• Now when you mouseover an RCI value (either the under-the-planet overlay on the map itself, or in the planetary sidebar, or in the planetary details window) it will include a listing of the specific effects of that RCI value.
  • Some effects were omitted from this as too niche to make sense here (relating to the eligibility of specific events or quests, etc), so if there's something you suspect is going on but isn't being shown, please let us know.
  • Thanks to GC13, conductorbosh, Histidine, nas1m, Soar, CygnusX1, DarkenMe, Greenicetealeaf, Poulpe, lifehole, and others for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where right-clicking the deal category buttons in the politics window (like "Trade Deals", "Federation Deals", etc) would first close the politics screen and then open the screen showing the details of that category. Now it will just close the politics screen.
  • Thanks to pepboy for the report.

• Spreadshot changes and fixes:
  • Fixed an issue where multi-shot salvos from things like the spreadshot could actually split their shots between multiple targets (whoops), thus causing really odd patterns of shots.
  • Spreadshots now have a much tighter fan into which they fire, making them much more likely to hit huge amounts of stuff in a cloud of ships.
  • The spreadshot (player) and scattershot (AI) weapons are now considered "Flak" weapon types, not Ballistic. Flak is a new weapon type. The wall turret and Model T wall weapons also now use this type.
  • Armored Hulls now also have 85% resistance to Flak DMG, same as Ballistic.
  • The following ships now have "flak vulnerability," which makes them take 200% damage from flak shots:
  • Interceptors of all sorts, Hypersonic Pods, Monitors of all sorts, Predators, Pirate Snipers, spy probes, and velociter flagships. Additionally, the velociter flagships no longer have armored hulls.
  • Thanks to Misery, timfortress, and Drak for either directly suggesting or inspiring these various changes.

• When the "Deliver Spacefaring Tech" mission type is predicting what kind of influence changes will happen, previously it was assuming that you alerted no other races (the best case), which could lead to a rather nasty surprise for new players. Now it assumes the worst case (that you alert ALL the other races), and so if you wind up alerting fewer then it is a pleasant surprise.
  • Thanks to windgen for suggesting.

Performance Improvements

• Added a number of really substantial low-level math performance improvements that affect all sorts of parts of the simulation, including the outer simulation during large battles or when there are lots of ships flying around, and battles when there are lots of ships and shots, and so forth.

• When there is fighting on the solar map and you are fast-forwarding, things now proceed faster.

• On the solar map, in our test cases these were leading to a cumulative 12% average gain under very heavy load on super fast forward.

Pirate Bases

• With Piratical Exodus no longer being something that is so neverending (since sometime last week), the presence of pirate bases in the solar system has dropped hugely. A variety of new mechanics have thus been put in place to reintroduce them in different ways.
  • Thanks to zharmad and GC13 for getting us to look into this.

• When a race captures a planet from another race, if the race that lost the planet is able to have pirates, then:
  • If there are <= 2 pirate bases, then a new one gets added.
  • Otherwise if there are <= 6 pirate bases, then there is a 20% chance of a new one getting added.

• When an outpost belonging to a piratical race is destroyed, then:
  • If there are <= 4 pirate bases, there is a 50% chance of a new one getting added.
  • Otherwise if there are <= 10 pirate bases, there is a 10% chance of a new one getting added.
  • Otherwise there is a 2% chance of a new one getting added.

• Influence toward you no longer shifts while you are in observer mode. That could cause interesting effects that are not really desirable.

• Previously, there was a limit of 10 pirate bases in the solar system. That limit is now 100.

• Previously, when a piratical race lost its last planet, then 1 pirate base would be formed for each 3 outposts that were insta-scrapped at that time. Now, instead, 1 pirate base is created for sure for those kinds of races, plus a 50% chance of a pirate base for each insta-scrapped outpost.

• Previously, when a new race became spacefaring they would add a new pirate base if there were fewer than 2 in the solar system at the time. Now they will only add a pirate base when becoming spacefaring if your influence with them is less than 0 (and it does not matter how many existing pirate bases there are).

• If any federation planet ever has 500m+ AFA insurgents plus demonstrators, then 500m of the populace will leave the planet (also reducing the AFA numbers, which is helpful in other ways) and form five pirate bases. Yikes.

• If the RCI value of any planet is lower than -2500, then 100m of the populace will leave to form a new pirate base, and the RCI value in question will improve by 100.
  • Public Order is one exception -- when this happens, 300m population leaves and forms 3 pirate bases.
  • For all of these, there must be more than 100m population per pirate base for them to actually form, naturally.

• The threshold for when pirate empires form is now substantially higher on all difficulty levels, as in general more pirate bases will exist now.

• When a pirate empire forms, the number of pirate bases currently existing now immediately doubles.

• Whenever a new pirate base is created via one of the 13 methods that new pirate bases are now created, there is now a log entry warning you of the new base. Previously it was just a silent thing that ticked up.

Version 1.019 (Solar Wind)

(Released May 14th, 2014)

• The trick of starting a mission and then reloading and trying again if you didn't like how it looked should no longer work. The seed remains fixed for a solar month now, so if you want to try that you have to spend a month of solar time.

• When you start a new observer mode game, it no longer does the intro story.

• When you are in observer mode or have tutorials off, it no longer shows you the politics introduction screens for races, or the "first time visiting the friendly actions or hostile actions" screens.
  • Thanks to Darloth and topper for suggesting.

• We haven't used this in ages, but there was previously a way to do a "balance export" that would compare ships to one another. This hasn't been relevant since the days when this was an RTS, so that's now been removed.

• Combat Practice was another thing that we still had in place for us as the developers, but which we no longer have been using since the game has evolved -- we simply need to see things in context for them to be testable in any meaningful form, so combat practice is essentially useless. That has also been excised from the code.

• In most cases where the "effective power level" of armadas are shown in tooltips, the "base power level" is also now shown. That was something that was really lacking before, in terms of being able to tell the size of the force versus the quality of it. It doesn't make much difference in terms of casual use, but for the developers and advanced players it is good to be able to see.

• The current rage momentum is now shown (and explained) in the boarine political screen.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• Put in some sanity checks into the auto-resolve logic so that you can't lose more influence via ship kills during auto-resolve than you would have during regular combat, and so that you can't gain more Credit than you would have during combat.
  • Thanks to jenya for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where, for the player's row of the Racial Power Grid screen, the outpost column's mouseover was assuming that player owned outposts were owned by None, instead of checking for the IsPlayerOwned flag. So now it will actually list the player's outposts there.

• The dropdown for Research Technology now indicates which options are already known to the client (and thus you'd just be getting a copy yourself, not really helping the client much).
  • Thanks to GC13, BobTheJanitor, Kalpa, and Drak for inspiring this change.

Solar Map Balance And AI

• The solar map AI has seen some notable upgrades so that it won't declare attacks that it can't follow through on, and so that it will also shift the priorities of its overall navy depending on circumstances (full attack when attacking and not threatened, half-attack when threatened and attacking, and then various peaceful options when not doing either of the above).
  • Previously these naval priorities were set at the start of the game, and would occasionally change due to circumstances, but not well enough.
  • Thanks to windgen and Ragwortshire for suggesting.

• Boarines that are in the federation are now still able to build up rage momentum, unlike in the prior build.
  • However, those in non-federation alliances now still build it up twice as fast.
  • Additionally, if they are in the federation and not currently building rage momentum, their current rage momentum falls twice as fast as usual.

• The max cap on rage momentum is now 8x rather than 3x. Let's let these guys be lethal.

• The "Someone Else Will Kill Us All" attitude type has been split to be per-race (so it's clear who each race is worried about).
  • There is also now a cap so that attitude can't be raised by more than 200 in a single game for each of these attitude categories.
  • The monthly amount of gain for this also now varies by difficulty:
    • Easy: 2
    • Normal: 1 (prior value for all diffs)
    • Hard: 0.5
    • Harder: 0.25
    • Nightmare: 0.05
  • Note that the negative influence with the race they are afraid of goes down by 1 per month on all difficulties; this is appropriate in terms of getting the AI to react to the threat.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines, timfortress, and others for suggesting.

• Rather than having a minimum ground power of 40 billion in order to trigger "will kill us all" logic, 4 trillion is now required.
  • On the space power front, it requires 500 billion instead of 50 billion.
  • For ground power, in addition to this, the ground power has to be 12x larger than all the other ground powers combined, rather than 4x (the alternate existing rule about space power being 4x larger than all the others remains the same).
  • Thanks to Meneth for inspiring these changes.

• For the racial spreading-type actions, races that they are spreading to now must have at least 10 attitude toward the spreader in order to listen to them.
  • The Thoraxian one doesn't apply for this.
  • Thanks to timfortress for suggesting.

• The Burlusts only now spread hate agaisnt races they have <= -50 attitude towards, and the Andors now only spread love for races they have >= 50 attitude towards.
  • Thanks to timfortress for suggesting.

• The way that the attacks of opportunity are decided-upon is now different. All races are now eligible for doing them, but they have very different opinions on when they will do them (overall leading to fewer of these):
  • Acutians: attitude no higher than -25, must outnumber enemy by 4x
  • Andors: attitude no higher than -500, must outnumber enemy by 5x
  • Boarines: attitude no higher than -100, must outnumber enemy by 4x
  • Burlusts: attitude no higher than 100, must outnumber enemy by 2x
  • Evucks: attitude no higher than 50, must outnumber enemy by 4x
  • Peltians: attitude no higher than -200, must outnumber enemy by 4x
  • Thoraxians: attitude no higher than 200, must outnumber enemy by 2x
  • Skylaxians: attitude no higher than -100, must outnumber enemy by 2x
  • For reference, the old numbers were pretty much -25 and 2x in all cases, except there was some odd logic in there that also let it happen even more frequently than that.
  • Other factors also effect this, however:
    • A race in a fear empire with less than 0 attitude threshold goes up to 0, and one higher than 0 gets multiplier by 1.5.
    • A race in the federation with greater than 0 attitude threshold gets divided by 4.
    • Depending on the current state of the race, their attitude threshold rises or falls as follows:
      • Uneasy Truce: -100
      • Truce: -300
      • Warlike: +100
      • Internal War: -200
  • Thanks to Ragwortshire and Drak for reporting the previous issues.

• Previously, when an outpost or a destroyed planet was captured, it gave messages as if a whole planet had changed hands.
  • Now it has "Captured/Lost Ruins" and "Captured/Lost Outpost" instead, and doesn't play the scary noise.
  • Additionally, there were some cases where it was even saying that planets had been lost and captured when armadas were being destroyed (???), and those no longer happen.
  • Thanks to Ragwortshire and SNAFU for reporting.

• Now when a planet is forcibly taken via ground-invasion or bombed-so-bad-we-can-just-land-some-ship-crews-to-take-over, it no longer necessarily goes to the race that landed the "last hit" but instead:
  • If there's an honorable race on the ground, and the planet originally belonged to someone else, and the honorable race has a mutual attitude of >= 0 with that someone else, the original owner gets the planet back.
  • Else, if the planet originally belonged to someone else, and that race still has troops or resistance fighters on the planet, the original owner gets the planet back.
  • Else, the planet goes to the strongest attacker (rather than necessarily the one that landed the last hit).

• Certain alliances (Solar Axis Pact, Thoraxian Protectorate, Union of Independent States) will no longer accept (via initial formation or expansion) races that have recently been at war with any of its members.
  • Thanks to Warpstorm and jonasan for inspiring this change.

• Put in some prevention code to make sure that races in the same alliance won't accidentally land ground troops on one another's planets.
  • Additionally, if any ground troops or resistance fighters find themselves on an allied planet, they will become expatriates instead of fighting.
  • Thanks to SNAFU for reporting.

• In the prior version, because of the way that the ground combat was rewritten, peltians were landing their personnel pods safely when attacking an enemy, rather than crash-landing them recklessly. Now they have returned to their suicidal ways.

• In the prior version, because of the way the ground combat was rewritten, the rules about space forces being able to set up a perimeter to block incoming enemy forces had to be set aside. However, we didn't then re-implement them (whoops), which led to troops being able to land on any planet that was under attack by enemy armadas. So here are the new rules:
  • If the defender has fewer than 50 base defensive armada power, then the aggressor can land troops.
  • If the aggressors against that planet have a combined 50x effective space power compared to the defender troops at that planet, then the aggressors can all land troops.
  • Previously, each armada of the aggressors could only support 1m ground troops at a time. Now each armada can support 10m ground troops. This helps to make up for the lowered armada counts and the reinstated blocking of the defending space forces.
  • Thanks to SNAFU for reporting.

Goodbye, Flotillas!

• Previously there was a concept of "flotillas," which were kind of a midpoint between the power of an armada and the count of armadas. This was something that has become increasingly outdated, and in some cases messes with our math and our ability to make autoresolve and regular combat each make sense with one another.
  • This was also something that was needlessly complex for players to try to understand -- experienced or new players, it doesn't matter -- and that the interface never particularly bubbled up in a helpful manner.
  • Related to this, there's a ton of rebalancing of how many flagships show up when and where, and the starting base power levels of new armadas at planets and at newly-spacefaring planets, and so on. In general the idea was to keep the same intent, although there were some cases where logic was kind of old and rusty and has been spruced up some.

• Previously, the "I have the largest military" chatter line was basing its comparison on total flotilla counts, which had... well, little to do with much of anything. Old code. So you could see some surprising results with someone underpowered claiming to be the best. Now it is based around the effective power of the armadas, as you would expect.

• The various graph windows now remember what dropdown selection you were last on until you close the program.

• The armada graphs no longer has the flotillas graph (naturally), but now instead has a base power graph in addition to the effective power graph.

• The budgetary logic for races to decide when to improve their armadas was basing things around flotillas, which again didn't really make a whole lot of sense. Old code. Now they look at effective power instead.

Events, Events, Events

• Thanks to ptarth, timfortress, Warpstorm, and Drak for getting us started on this epic quest with regard to events. Still more need to be updated to be as awesome as they can be, but in the meantime this is a very solid improvement in variety, interest, balance, and so on.

• Widespread Flooding:
  • The negative environmental effect per month is now heavier, but the population deaths are now 1% instead of 5%.

• The RCI shifts from the following types of events are now a bit heavier:
  • Housing Boom
  • Repair Parts Shortage
  • General Rise In Suicide Rate
  • Mass Riots
  • Mass Brawls

• Slightly slowed down the population deaths from Increased Volcanic Activity.

• The following 17 events are no longer instantaneous, but now play out over time:
  • Nuclear Plant Accident
  • Farmers Mass Suicide
  • Peltian Farmers Mass Suicide
  • Wildfires
  • Small Creature Begins To Over Reproduce
  • Sea Level Dropping
  • Plantlife Is Surging
  • Disappearing Rainforest
  • Global Warming
  • Global Cooling
  • Typhoon
  • New Dangerous Hallucinogenic Drug Craze
  • Mass Insanity Hits The Planet
  • Resource Motherlode Found
  • Drug Research Gone Bad Kills Millions
  • Drug Research Breakthrough
  • Coup
  • Why does this matter? Well, three reasons, really.
    • First of all, the effects of these are gradual over months, rather than sharp with huge whiplash. This gives you time to plan around whatever is happening, rather than being instantly slapped in the face with it.
    • Secondly, this actually makes the events stay visible on the solar map longer, so that you actually notice that they are happening thanks to the little icons on the planets in question.
    • Thirdly, this actually affects the balance of the game, because once one event ends, then an event slot opens up and another one can come in sooner. Depending on your difficulty level there are more or fewer event slots and cooldowns associated with them, but in any case this keeps things from cycling too fast.
  • Lastly, it goes to say that all of the above have been rebalanced since they are now monthly rather than instant. Feedback on how these feel is welcome.

• Significant Medical Breakthrough now temporarily halts all deaths on the planet as well as its other effects.

• Resource Motherlode Found now gives all sorts of random resources each month rather than one lump of one resource, and it also gives much more in terms of resources than before.

• Sea Level Dropping now has an added negative effect ONLY for Boarine worlds where it kills a part of their populace as well as harming the environment RCI.

• The Small Creature Begins To Over Reproduce event has been updated to have added effects: The economy and the environmental scores drop gradually -- except if this is an Acutian-owned planet, in which case they harvest the creatures for an economic gain. If this is a Peltian world, then this also causes deaths in their populace due to interference with their farms.

• Plantlife Is Surging now has some Peltian-specific effects.

• Disappearing Rainforest now has some non-robotic effects.

• Global Warming and Global Cooling have been revised a bit, but generally have the same effect.

• New Dangerous Hallucinogenic Drug Craze has been tweaked to effect both medical and public order, rather than just public order like before (though before it said medical). It's also now more interesting in its effects since the event is over time now.

• Mass Hysteria now also affects the shipbuilding ability of planets affected by it.

• Military Production Slow Down now quarters shipbuilding rather than halving it. It also can no longer hit Thoraxians.

• Splinter Factions Attacking now has an added 10% chance of a random building being destroyed each month during its time.

• Citizens Turn Against Soldiers now works completely differently, and is quite severe. It also now way less likely, as noted before. It's also no longer valid for Burlusts.

• Coups can no longer happen on Andor or Evuck planets, and are a lot more severe in their effects, as well as a lot less likely.

• Workers Turn Against The Queen now only happens in really dire medical situations, but then becomes a lot more likely. And the effects of it are far more harsh now, including actually killing the local hive queen.

• Soldier Infighting Brawl now only happens in really dire medical situations, but then becomes a lot more likely. And the effects of it are far more harsh now, including often killing off warlords.

• Planet Becomes Recognized As Tourism Hot Spot can no longer happen on Burlust or Thoraxian planets, and now has a cooler effect relating to attitude gains with other non-Burlust non-Thoraxian races that the tourism race is not at war with.

• Nuclear Plant Accident is now more severe, but also now more rare. Rare with these events generally means that the RCI has to be quite bad for it to happen at all, and then once it is the chance still is something that starts lowish and then grows from there.

• Biological Weapon Test Gone Wrong no longer affects the Skylaxians or the Peltians.

• The descriptions of most events have been rewritten to be clearer as to what is actually happening, in numeric terms.

• The criteria for triggering a lot of events have been reevaluated in light of all the changes that have happened since they were originally designed (which have been substantial). Suffice it to say, they'll be more interesting now in terms of when they strike, and more sensible. This includes:
  • Military Production Slowdown
  • Soldiers Strike
  • Splinter Factions Attacking (this is now WAY less likely unless your public order on a planet is very bad; and thus the severity of this event is really quite appropriate).
  • Citizens Turn Against Soldiers
  • Coup
  • Workers Turn Against The Queen
  • Soldier Infighting Brawl
  • Planet Becomes Recognized As Tourism Hot Spot
  • Nuclear Plant Accident
  • Biological Weapon Test Gone Wrong

• The passification gas technology is now only available after 45 solar years into the game, and takes longer to research. It also now only halves the chance of getting the events that are related to it, rather than eliminating them entirely.

• Meat Vats no longer prevent plague of locusts.

Version 1.018 (Treasure Trove)

(Released May 18th, 2014)

• Fixed a missing localization for TechSortGroup_None.
  • Thanks to Drak for reporting.

• Fixed an an issue in your inventory where things that increase your construction speed were claiming to improve your per-outpost manufacturing rate rather than your baseline construction speed.

• Fixed an issue with bonuses from science outposts and manufacturing outposts not giving their proper underlying bonuses per outpost. Basically a big part of this was that if you did not have any "boosts outposts" techs for science it would do nothing, and it in general would do nothing for manufacturing outposts.
  • Thanks to nas1m and Silverfire for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with Property Development where it was calculating your adjusted inflated rewards based solely on your skill and not factoring in how long the underlying project should be taking. That led to cases where if you had a sufficiently high manufacturing skill, small buildings would give you the same rewards as large ones.

• Fixed the same issue with helping to construct outposts for races, and researching techs.

• Previously, the Boarine rage momentum was uncapped and could just get to ridiculous values. Now it is capped at 2.

• Boarines in the federation no longer gain rage momentum, and those in alliances outside of the federation now gain it twice as fast.

• Races that are dead no longer show up at all under the listing of races that you can select as targets of an action or deal (previously they showed up as red with a message about them being dead, but in this case it makes more sense just to skip those entries all together).

• The armada caps for all the various races have been lowered, as just a general part of the balancing of things to the revised construction speeds. This makes your kills of armadas each have more impact, too, which is good.

• The baseline construction proficiency of the Thoraxians has been lowered.

• The technical prowess of the Burlusts has been dropped to very low numbers, making them a more extreme version of themselves. This doesn't affect existing savegames.

• When a single race is incredibly overpowered against the entire rest of the solar system (having at least 4x the combined ground or space power of all other races), then all the other races become increasingly bonded against their common foe, and antagonistic against that foe.

• Fixed a display issue in the prior version where the attitudes and the influences would show up with their shifts wrong after a mission/deal was concluded. Please let us know if you see any more of this, though!
  • Thanks to wwwhhattt and timfortress for reporting.

Racial Lifespan And Life Cycle Balance

• Previously, children were born one month and then matured the next month. This was some old logic from November that we never got around to thinking about again, turns out. Now there is a 9-month cycle for children to mature, except for Thoraxians, which do it twice as fast. And of course the robotic races, which have no children, and are just manufactured as adults.
  • This provides a much more realistic-feeling population, as well as making it so that there is more of a delay from a boom in the birth rate, which has positive balance implications.
  • And as a side note, yes, a "solar month" is not equivalent to a month on earth, nor is a solar day equivalent to that sort of timescale here. The correlation between a solar year in this solar system and an earth year is never made particularly clear, but you can safely assume it's at least 15-20x longer than an earth year (as Drak pointed out, for example, a Jupiter year is 14 earth years, and a Neptune year is 165 earth years, etc). Given that these are normalized "solar years" for all of the planets in four zones of a solar system, picking something in the relatively quick-orbiting habitable zone would be arbitrary by solar standards.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting the births delay, as that was something we wanted to do for the balance purposes.

• The equilibrium population density for Thoraxians has been changed from 2 to 120.
  • For Burlusts, the density has dropped from 50 to 20.
  • For Peltians, the density has increased from 20 to 60.
  • For Skylaxians, the density has increased from 40 to 52.
  • For Acutians, the density has increased from 80 to 90.
  • For Andors, the density has increased from 10 to 40.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• The birth rate min/max for Andors has increased from 35-44 to 55-64.
  • The death rate for Evucks has dropped from 20-25 to 5-10, and their birth rate has dropped from 30-35 to 20-25.
  • The Peltian birth rate has increased from 10-15 to 80-100, and their death rate has increase from 1-2 to 30-50.
  • The Thoraxian birth rate has increased from 5-7 to 12-18, and their death rate has increased from 0-2 to 5-10.
  • The Skylaxian birth rate has increased from 10-20 to 10-28.
  • The Burlust birth rate has increased from 15-25 to 20-50, and their death rate has increased from 6-8 to 10-35.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Only 70% of the Thoraxian populace is now designated as soldiers in general, as the rest need to take care of general labor. This makes them different from the Burlusts in that their populations can get huge, but their lethal killing machine members of society only ever get so plentiful.

Three New Groups Of Political Deals

• Under the General Agenda for the Andors, there is now a "Stop Attacking Other Race" option. Previously there was actually no way to do this for the Andors, unlike all other races. Kind of funny considering the nature of the Andors, really.
  • Thanks to worldstone, Drak, timfortress, Ajnin, and GC13 for reporting.

• Added two very powerful new diplomatic options with every race: Laud Other Race and Denounce Other Race.
  • These let them basically spread the good (or bad) word about a target of your choosing to any races that have at least 0 attitude toward your client race. This costs you influence with the client (and a particularly hefty amount of disillusionment if the race adores you), but it's a very powerful way to create a circle of friends. Or turn a group of amicable races against someone you hate. You know, whatever floats your boat.
  • Why add this right now? Well, what with the attitude buildings getting a bit of a "nerf" (really a fix to an underlying piece of logic, but some people take it as a nerf) in the prior build, this is yet another good tool for being able to manage race relations.

Ground Invasion And Resistance Fighter Upgrades

• The Ground Invasion and Resistance Fighter mechanics have been redesigned and largely combined:
  • Now instead of, each day, an attacking armada sending one unit of troops down to the planet and then recovering them after the fighting, it transports one unit of troops down to the surface (up to a maximum equal to the number of attacking normal armadas of that race), and those ground troops stay there until death, victory, or truce. You can see the quantity of Invading Ground Troops of each race on a planet exactly as you can see the number of Resistance Fighters, Prisoners, Refugees, etc.
  • Resistance Fighters now use the normal ground combat math rather than the pre-alpha-design math they were using previously, and effectively fight alongside any invading ground troops of that race (if present).
  • The attacker "ground power" figure on the shown-under-the-planet overlay now includes the same breakdown-of-attacking-forces as the attacker armada and space-power figures.
  • Ground forces are now listed (separately) in that breakdown. If it's entirely composed of resistance fighters it uses that name instead.
  • And resistance fighters now show up in the ground-power figure, so if a planet is otherwise at peace (thus having no space-attacker figures) but has an active guerilla war going on, you'll still see that purple "gun" icon for the attacker-ground-power figure and can mouseover it for details on how that's going.

• Fixed up the rate of personnel transport production to not be dependent on race construction rates, or races being warlike or actively attacking another race. It now obeys the actual budgeting properly. However, it also has a slow falloff effect past around 40m transports, to keep things from getting too nuts.

• The ground power for races now includes the strength of civilian combatants, whereas previously it only included soldiers. Civilians are incredibly weak by comparison to soldiers (1/10th the regular power), but they do factor in when the population is large enough, in particular.

• People fighting on their home planet now get a 4x boost to their attacking prowess against enemies invading. People defending a planet that they control but which was not originally theirs now get a 2x multiplier. Home field advantage does matter!

Yet More Detail Info

• If a race is at their sustainable armada cap, then the details for their planets now show that rather than showing whatever percentage complete it would otherwise show.

• If some sort of action or similar is blocking armada production at a planet, the details on that planet now show what is going on.

• Added a new "Construction Quality" section to the local details for planets. This shows the armada construction multiplier and the building construction multiplier at the location, along with a breakdown of exactly why the multiplier is what it is. This can help with figuring out why something is abnormally low or high (diseases, bonuses from events, whatever), and thus can tell you what you can do about it.

• When you are in the racial power grid and you hover over one of the manufacturing column entries, you can now see exactly where all the various components of the manufacturing power are coming from. Here again this lets you see what is going on and why, and thus figure out what you can do about it.

• Hovering over the science column entries in the racial power grid now shows you exactly why the race has that science multiplier, again so that you can do something about it if you wish, as well as in general seeing what is leading to the results in question.

• In the racial power grid, hovering over the ground power now tells you the actual number of ground troops, as well as having the proper tooltip explaining what ground power is.

• In the racial power grid, hovering over the total population now tells you the breakdown of military, children, and civilian populace, and includes the total number of personnel transports.

Armada Construction Balance

• Fixed an issue where diseases or extraordinarily poor economic conditions on a planet could absolutely zero out armada construction and improvement at that planet. Now it still hurts production immensely, but not so completely.
  • Thanks to GC13 for reporting.

• Adjustments to the armada construction speed stuff:
  • Races are now smarter about allocating more of their budget to armada production when they have no armadas at a planet.
  • The amount of bonus to shipbuilding speeds from high public order, and from holding manufacturing outposts, is now lower.
  • The amount of bonus to shipbuilding speeds from space elevators and the various techs is now lower.
  • The innate racial shipbuilding speed differences are now lower.
  • The overall baseline speed of armada construction and improvement is now a lot higher, so races are less dependent on crazy-high bonuses in order to have a reasonable rate of production. This avoids having insane spreads in armada production rates where one race produces basically nothing.
  • Thanks to Zulgaines for the report and savegame that inspired these changes.

Manufacturing Balance

• Fixed an issue with bonuses from manufacturing outposts being insanely too high and thus causing a variety of issues (among them crazy rewards to players).
  • Thanks to Drak for reporting.

• Adjusted the math on manufacturing outposts so that each one held beyond the first gives diminishing returns.

• Fixed an issue where having multiple unlocked techs that boost construction speed was only applying the last one researched.

• Fixed an issue where the Acutian industry buildings were all costing 18 months to build, rather than values appropriate to their benefit.

• Fixed an issue where resource mines and processing plants cost the AI _no time_ to build, leading to huge influxes of resources if they decided to build them, and in addition they were also costing players way too little time to construct.

• Fixed an issue where the baseline cost of all of the attitude buildings was 18 months (the default) rather than 40.

Science Balance

• Science outposts now have a diminishing return per outpost held.

• There was previously a pretty serious bug where having science outposts actually _decreased_ the science proficiency of races, rather than increasing them. Fixed.

• The baseline technical prowess of the Evucks and the Skylaxians is no longer so large. This will not affect existing savegames, as those numbers get baked in.
  • The idea here is to make the individual techs more meaningful by not having such an insane spread from the start.

• Fixed a bug where the science boosts from buildings were never actually applied to races.

The Ark And The Mire

• Added two new unique buildings that only seed at the start of the game, on different random planets, and which then get destroyed if the planet they are on is captured:
  • The Ark is an awesome boost, making that planet unusually powerful.
  • The Mire is really not helpful at all to have, making that planet unusually weak.
  • This is yet another source of randomization on top of general racial compatibilities and attributes, etc. This lets us retain some races being notably stronger than others (which has really been emphasized in this new version) without all games playing out the same.

Version 1.017 Back From A Long Quest

(Released May 12th, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• You no longer get paid in credits for dispatch-mission months saved by goons (but you still get the extra influence).
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring this change.

• Destroyed planets no longer boost resource gathering efforts of the races which control them; instead they provide +100% boosts to science and manufacturing (basically like a super science outpost and super manufacturing outpost rolled into one, as each of those gives +50% to its respective category).
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Added a rule where a race's normal navy fleets will never attack another race's trade fleet if that fleet is headed to one of the first race's planets.
  • Thanks to Drak for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a display bug where the Broker Truce deal would still try to predict consequences despite not having any available options for the second dropdown (thus making it look like it would make a truce where the Hydral was one of the races).
  • Thanks to Drak for the report.

• Fixed a bug where doing local assistance dispatches would report that you'd lost influence with the _client_ for "Aided Enemy Planets"; it was putting the negative influence in the right place already, but now it also correctly names which race it was actually lost with.
  • Thanks to windgen, Histidine, wyvern83, neviem, GC13, Zulgaines, Sacarathe, and L4m3ness for reporting.

• The Acutian politics screen now follows the Andor pattern in that it lists ALL possible Acutian industries (the active three, followed by all the rest, each set sorted by industry value on that planet), with the inactive ones redded out. So you can't do business with the "out of power" industries but you can investigate whether you even want to do business with them.
  • Thanks to L4m3ness and wyvern83 for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where some of the recently-added ways that could cause the federation to initially form (join-from-desolate-economy when it's the first race to join, etc) were not actually setting the HasFederationFormed flag, and thus the game wasn't checking for the collapse or victory of the federation, so you'd never actually win, etc.
  • The game will now also repair old saves where that flag is not set but any living races are in the fed.
  • Thanks to Progenitus for the report and save.

• Harvest Space Junk's bonus to armada construction now functions the same way (just more intensely) as Assist With Armada Construction. Previously it was working (providing a bonus monthly) but generally not as well as the other one, so it looked like it wasn't working at all.
  • Thanks to GC13 for inspiring this change.

• Improved combat performance in cases where there are tons of shots and tons of debris objects (asteroids, ice chunks, space junk) at the same time. In the main test case the during-turn framerate went from about 15 fps to about 25 fps, so it's at least a good step.
  • Thanks to nas1m, Kahuna, and Zulgaines for the reports and save.

• All planets now run the "reevaluate budget" logic immediately after the game is first generated, so that they don't appear to have 0% for all budget categories until the first month is done.
  • Old saves from the first month in a game will still have 0% for those, but it won't really hurt anything.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where achievements data on "which contracts have been started, how many times?" and "which contracts have been won, how many times?" was not being persisted across save/load, which interfered with achievements like "win 4 burlust duels").
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for the report and save.

• The Harvest Space Junk action now limits the number-of-months dropdown according to the actual amount of junk available.
  • Thanks to windgen for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug where science/worker goon effectiveness was being multiplied by your science multiplier.
  • Since the overall number of months needed to research the tech was already factoring in science bonuses... yea. The magnified effect allowed researching very high-end techs in a not-very-many-months even early in the game.
  • Thanks to Ragwortshire for the report.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where the get-science-multiplier and get-manufacturing-multiplier logic were expecting player-owned outposts to have an Owner type of None, rather than checking the IsPlayerOwned flag for that.
  • This meant that science outposts and manufacturing outposts owned by the player did not contribute to shortening the time of research/construction dispatches.
  • It also meant that those player-owned outposts continued to contribute to the multipliers of the races which previously owned them (unless outsourced or gifted to another race).
  • Thanks to Drak for the report.

• Added a rule where starting a property-development that you'd previously abandoned (on that planet) or a space-outpost-development dispatch that you'd previously abandoned (for that race) will now assume that the necessary planetary mineral resources are still "on site" rather than (as bureaucracy would normally cause) lost to the wind as soon as the project stalls.
  • Thanks to Drak and GC13 for inspiring this change.

• It is no longer possible to gift an outpost to a race that has no planets.
  • Thanks to timfortress for inspiring this chagne.

• RCI-improving dispatch influence-lost-with-enemies-of-client from 1 per month => 0.05 per month. The 1 had been intentional back before the benefit was changed to 0.2 per month.
  • Thanks to Ragwortshire for the suggestion.

• The Property Development dispatch can no longer be used to construct Attitude buildings of which the client actively disapproves.
  • Thanks to Warpstorm, topper, and others for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the mechanic used for automatically unlocking Low Drag Casings and related technology when its minimum year was passed was actually _logging_ as if it had researched whatever the race was currently trying to research. The proper tech was unlocked (and the other one wasn't), but it looked very confusing to see so many simultaneous scientific breakthroughs on different techs, etc.
  • Thanks to L4m3ness and topper for reporting.

• The various orbital bombardment techs no longer have any prerequisites, so that they no longer wind up auto-granting a bunch of prerequisites to their races when they are auto-learned, alongside the above fix.

• The viewport-clamping that prevents the user from scrolling off into the middle of empty space on the metamap is now a little looser on the right side to account for the common use of the planetary sidebar.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug where planet surrender/lost logging messages were being logged under the race color of the attacker (though it was saying the right race did the capturing and losing, etc).
  • Thanks to L4m3ness for the report.

• Now when a race loses its last planet all its fleets (other than pirates, assassins, and AFA) are immediately removed from the game. Previously they would stick around and lash out but since so much logic in the game excludes "dead" races (ones with no planets) that wasn't working well at all and led to strange bugs.
  • Thanks to L4m3ness for inspiring this change.

New Hostile Dispatch Mission Type

• Added a new hostile dispatch: Tactical Support For Ground Invasion
  • Description:
    • COMPUTER REPORT: There's nothing quite like an Orbital Kinetic Strike. Except, of course, getting PAID to do Oribtal Kinetic Strikes. Your Hydral technology enables you to make highly effective tactical strikes on ground forces in situations where lesser vessels couldn't handle the heat. The forces currently invading this planet would dearly love to have your assistance, which could double their own effectiveness.
  • Only available when the planet is under attack and has had an actual ground invasion battle in the last half-month or so.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for the suggestion.

Improvements To Betrayal From Within The Federation

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Whenever you take some sort of action that would cause a federation race to feel betrayed, it now highlights that in a much more meaningful and clear manner. It shows you how much betrayal they will feel, and at what threshold they will leave, and how betrayed they already feel. That information was previously only available in the federation progress screen, really.

Quest Improvements

• In the prior build of the game, quests for spacefaring races were not showing up. Sorry about that!

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

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

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

• Fixed an issue where quest descriptions could get "stale" in terms of the attitude and influence references in there, because it would calculate those as part of the initial description and then not update them as time passed.

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

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

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

Six New Quests!

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

• Two new quests, one for a joint mission of races to bomb a hated enemy, and the other a joint mission for races to land ground troops as resistance fighters on the planet of a hated enemy.
  • These not only weaken the target planet, but they also really make the joint races that work together like one another a lot better (but at the cost of the target liking them all worse).
  • So this has a potentially big military impact, as well as quite a notable way to increase a lot of attidues at once. Though you do kind of have to have a scapegoat to do it.

Auto-Resolve Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

Attitude/Influence Improvements

• There are now far more steps on the naming scale of attitudes and influences (7 negative and positive instead of 3 negative and positive), to help make the progression more clear to players and avoid throwing off new players in terms of thinking that something was irreconcilable when it was not really.
  • Thanks to Sacarathe for suggesting.

• Put in some changes to fix a bug where influence, attitude, and RCI values could fall through to "neutral" as a default because of the switch to floating-point numbers not registering them properly in any range if they were very specific values.
  • Thanks to Histidine, GC13, conductorbosh, Solanix, SuperCactus, and Aswin for reporting.

• A major internal shift of how the attitude changes get bubbled up to the surface has been implemented. It basically now gives you the summary of what the relationship changes between two races are on a single line, including the complete range change and the starting and ending values and diffs for both, which is not something that was really don't before, or in cases where it kind of was, it still wasn't collated as well.
  • Players have been asking for a better view of this sort of thing in the contract-results screen for a while, but with the latest quests having dozens of attitude adjustments, this was something where the need for this was just blindingly obvious in order for it to be usable in the slightest.

• The same sort of combination of influence entries is now done as is done for the attitude entries.

• Added two new settings options:
  • Show Detailed Influence Entries
    • Are you a bit crazy? Well, okay, here's an option for you. Rather than just summarizing the influence changes that happen from each action you take or deal that you make, this breaks it out into every bit by category. The information by category can always be seen under the relationship summaries anyhow, but for purposes of results reporting most people likely find this option overkill.
  • Show Detailed Attitude Entries
    • Are you a bit crazy? Well, okay, here's an option for you. Rather than just summarizing the attitude changes that happen from each action you take or deal that you make, this breaks it out into every bit by category. The information by category can always be seen under the relationship summaries anyhow, but for purposes of results reporting most people likely find this option overkill.
  • Notably, these two options are just making things work the way they used to prior to this release.

Version 1.016 (Finish Him!)

(Released May 7th, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clarity Of Where Techs Came From

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

Solar Map Balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three New Racial Actions

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

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

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

Auto-Resolve Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spy Probe Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Player Weapon Balance

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

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

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

Version 1.015 (Nuanced Bloodshed)

(Released May 6th, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solar Map Balance

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

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

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

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

• Pirate fleets will now never attack other pirate fleets.

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

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

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

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

Planetary Summary/Details Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Race Actions On The Solar Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Version 1.014 (Hotfix)

(Released May 5th, 2014)

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

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

Version 1.013 (Love, Hate, And Challenge)

(Released May 5th, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clarity Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solar Map Performance Improvements

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

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

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

Solar Map Balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harder Strategic Difficulty Levels

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

New Race Actions On The Solar Map

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

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

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

Version 1.012 (War And Spies)

(Released May 2nd, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key "Player Power" On The Solar Map Improvements

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

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

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

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

Five New Evuck Political Deals

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

Better Clarity And General Logic On Wars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quest-Related Improvements

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

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

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

Diplomats

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

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

Version 1.011 (Hotfix)

(Released May 1st, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Version 1.010 (Pacing And RCI)

(Released May 1st, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pacing Of The Solar Map

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

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

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

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

Improvements To The Speed Of RCI Fluctuations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Version 1.009 (Merging Beta Branch With Official)

(Released May 30th, 2014)

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

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

Solar Map NPC vs NPC Battle Improvements

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

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

Typos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Version 1.008 (Hotfix)

(Released April 29th, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released April 29th, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attitude Manipulation Adjustments

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

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

Solar Map Balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auto-Resolve Cleanup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Version 1.006 Beta - Besieging And Federating

(Released April 28th, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better Federation Creation Management

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

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

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

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

Nah, No Federation Points

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

Increased Requirements For Baseline Federation Creation / Joining

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

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

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

Non-Spacefaring Reactions To Federation Formation

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

New Political Deals For Convincing Races To Join The Federation

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

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

New Buildings For Affecting Race Attitudes Over Time

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

NPC Fleet vs NPC Fleet Autoresolve Combat Overhaul

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

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

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

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

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

Version 1.005 Beta - Holy Smokes It's Big

(Released April 25th, 2014)

Combat Balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auto-Resolve Option For Battles

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

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

Big Revisions To Widely-Disliked Mission Types

Heavily Revised "Clean Up AFA" Missions

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

"Smuggle In Resistance Fighter" Overhaul

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Deliver Spacefaring Technology" Overhaul

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

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

• Spy drones now warp out when alerted.

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

• Turrets are no longer seeded in these.

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

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

Solar Map Balance / Fixes / Etc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solar Map Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

Federation Points

• Thanks to Boo and galdor123 for inspiring these changes.

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

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

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

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

Other Really Major Items

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

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

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

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

Version 1.004 (x64 Linux Build)

(Released April 23rd, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Version 1.003 Permadeath Becomes Optional

(Released April 22nd, 2014)

Solar Map Balance / Updates / Fixes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clarity / Tutorials

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

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

Burlust Turmoil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combat Balance / Updates / Fixes

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

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

New Enemy Flagship And Rebalanced Velociter

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

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

Docking Improvements / Exploit Fixes

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

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

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

Permadeath Is Now Optional

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

Version 1.002 (Tech Acquisitions And Planetary Attacks)

(Released April 21st, 2014)

Balance Updates And Fixes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planetary Attack Balance and Fixes

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

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

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

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

Technology Acquisition Improvements

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

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

GUI Enhancements

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

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

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

Misc Fixes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Version 1.001 - Bugfixes, Large Screen Resolution Support

(Released April 19th, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous Release Notes

The Last Federation Alpha Release Notes