Stars Beyond Reach Beta Release Notes

Version 0.811

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

• Monster Pits no longer have to be placed next to foreign cities.

• Put in a couple of early-out checks that make the calculation of valid spots for building placement a bit faster.

• Fixed up some logic that was overly aggressive in re-checking the validity of buildings under construction.
  • This was both causing slowness, and it was also causing some AI buildings to get destroyed at strange times.
  • It also was the cause of the Military Command and Molecular Security Control self-destructing themselves the turn after you placed them.
  • Thanks to ptarth and tbrass for reporting parts of this.

• When the game is running in fullscreen mode and you alt-tab out of it, it no longer will keep running in the background.
  • If this game had networking, that would cause network failures when playing multiplayer. As it is, since this is a single-player-only game, this prevents a flood of messages from being written to the unity log and thus can prevent out of memory exceptions that can happen if you leave it in this state for long enough.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug preventing any attack action by or against a building not owned by any race (i.e. the independent rogues/monsters).
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for the report and save.

• A variety of rules for the underground AI have been put into place.
  • They are no longer allowed to build underground buildings under terrain that is not either terraformed as their kind of land, or a surface building of their own. This will keep a lot of things more orderly in general, and it also prevents the AI from just building back up insanely when you're attacking them and trying to beat them back.
  • They are also now properly barred from constructing buildings under things that drill into the earth -- any sort of resource gatherer, really. This just makes good thematic sense, and it also helps to keep the cities constrained somewhat -- in a good way.
  • They also no longer are allowed to build under mountains or rocky ground, which can be a useful way to hide from the Thoraxians now, actually.

• Fixed a bug where the various work-land options (terraform, clear land, etc) would not actually enforce the requirement to have enough crowns and power.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ, pumpkin, and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• Fixed a bug where the tech tree shortlist would not always show the top item.
  • One side effect is that the shortlist could look empty when there was still one unresearched node out in the tree itself.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• The tile details window now shows info on the resource on that tile, if any.
  • Thanks to topper for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the work-land listbox was not filtering out terraforming if you didn't have the tech for it.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• The notifications sidebar now only blocks mouseclicks from interacting with the underlying world if the mouse is actually over one of the notification buttons (i.e. when it shows a tooltip).
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Amended the display-range-of-building-being-placed code to not try to highlight every single tile on the map when placing the thought conditioning device (which has an infinite range). It was more of a CPU conditioning device before.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• A ton of stuff has been switched over into large dictionaries rather than being separate files.
  • These are also broken out by layer they are used in, for maximum efficiency, unlike before. This absolutely decimates the number of draw calls it takes to render the game.
  • This also makes loading the images vastly faster (it's more noticeable if you're on a non-SSD hard drive), and uses less RAM.

• There are now two different visual looks for city wreckage -- one for when the building was destroyed in combat, and the other for when it was simply bulldozed by the owner.

• There are now individual graphics for the lander for each player race. These are a blend of the graphics of the player cities in general, and the flavor of the races when the AI has them.
  • Later these will have some more individualized stats, but for now it helps make it abundantly clear what race you are playing as.

• Fixed a bug where the tooltip on political agreements would show the "from" race's name for both the "from" and "to" race, even though it got the different colors right.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the general-offers and superpower-offer windows did not block mouse interaction with the underlying diplomacy window.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The ceasefire offers window now includes entries for ineligible races (unless that race is the one being talked to, or dead) with the ineligibility reason.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

Version 0.810

(Released April 30th, 2015)

• Put in proper texture compression on loading, cutting the game's RAM usage by well over 1GB once you've been playing for a little while in particular. This does make image loading take slightly longer, but the difference is marginal and you may actually get a better framerate out of it as well.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman in particular, and also ptarth, for leading us to notice the issue!

Version 0.809

(Released April 30th, 2015)

• Fixed a bug where toxin screening would prevent the "has this race experienced this disease?" flag from being set, thus preventing vaccine research.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• The notification sidebar and the reports/etc listboxes are now more consistently hidden by sim-suppressing windows like save-game.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for reporting.

• The birth rate icon is now more visible on low-contrast monitors.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• A variety of more GUI refinements.

• Fixed a bug from recent versions where city buildings could be counted twice for things like housing-provided.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• Mapgen for temperate lakes maps now no longer considers the whole map's land as one huge landmass but as several subsections; it still looks the same but is much easier to seed AI races on.
  • Also, it now no longer declines to seed more races than landmasses on any map type: if somehow it runs out of landmasses it will double-up if necessary.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman and tbrass for reporting.

• Changed the design of the Islands map type to be compatible with the initial-building-area needs of the player and the AI races. Generally larger islands, less forest, etc.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman, ptarth, tbrass, and Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where some old event log entries could hit a localization error because they were trying to show social progress category "None". Now it will just say None. Please let us know if you see this in any new game.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the last couple of versions in the game where the viewport display on the minimap was not lining up correctly because its masking images were out of sync with the revised minimap frame visuals.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where if you made an optimize-retail deal with the Acutians and then their trust/attitude towards you went very sour then the impact of the deal would actually apply a strong negative multiplier to your retail-outlets' crown production and thus totally lay waste to your economy... wait, that's a bug?
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• The Fenyn Absorption Facility can no longer be placed on water. That was an oversight and looks strange. The Fenyn-as-AIs are now simply unable to gather water resources (some of the AI races can, others can't).
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Previously the lander would generate its pollution-removal from the bottom tile since that's actually where the game sees its "main" tile (for draw-order purposes, notably). The center tile was used for some UI-only purposes but otherwise ignored. Since it looks strange to not have the pollution-removal come from the center that center tile distinction is no longer UI-only and is used for this, we'll see if it works out.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where several things were considering under-construction buildings when they shouldn't have been (notably, the number of buildings needed to upgrade the lander).
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the evucks "charge time" to use their infection power was basically just one turn. Let us know if it's still too fast with the correct threshold.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the space-win only required having the space structures, not actually finishing and charging them.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Previously, the larger your cities got, the more of a toll crime and a few other factors would take on your inter-turn time. Specifically, ptarth had a case that was taking more than 18 seconds between turns even on a very nice computer.
  • We've greatly optimized deaths from crime, wounds from crime, wounds from accidents, and body cremation so that it's nowhere remotely so CPU-intensive anymore. It takes a few tens of milliseconds instead of tens of seconds.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The Zenith have been completely rebalanced as an AI race.
  • Previously they were halfway between the Spire and Neinzul, where 1 building = 1 citizen, and the rest of the races, where citizens live in buildings. This caused various problems on a number of levels.
  • Thematically, the Zenith citizens are actually not the Zenith themselves, but rather those little service organisms that look after the Zenith. The Zenith are the buildings, but they aren't what does the work in the city, and so aren't what is tracked as population. Previously we were trying to have it both ways, and that wasn't really working out.
  • Anyway, so the Zenith now track population like the bulk of the rest of the races, and handle staffing that way also. They still don't have to worry about food, water, or meals, though.
  • We were already going to do this anyway, but thanks to ptarth for one save that definitely reinforced the need to do this.

• Fixed an issue where the max population of the spire and the neinzul was set as higher than their building count even though they are each a 1 population = 1 building race.

• Adjusted the birth rates on a LOT of the alien races when they are in the hands of the AI so that they actually have a reasonable chance of growth in population.
  • We couldn't really test this super well prior to the city grid being added, which you might recall was after beta started and during the midst of a bunch of other stuff, so now we're figuring out those things fresh.

• Fixed an issue where the AI was trying to build resource gathering producers in a bunch of random places for no real reason, of course failing, and wasting a bunch of CPU time doing so.

Version 0.808

(Released April 29th, 2015)

• Fixed a bug in the past couple of versions (since the first performance update) that was leading to certain stats from multi-tile buildings like the lander to be multiplied by how many tiles were in that building. So for instance, the lander's construction skill was multiplied by 7, making it so that you could build a whopping 14 buildings at the first turn.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.

• The building status and a couple of other status lines on buildings no longer show "(when complete)" on their properties when they are under construction, since those particular things are actually true even prior to them being complete.

• Explorer Camps and Remote Engineering Brigades no longer have their building times affected by terrain.
  • Thanks to tbrass and ptarth for reporting.

• The extra turns to build in general on forests and rocky ground is VASTLY less than it once was.
  • Thanks to tbrass and ptarth for inspiring this change.

• When underlying terrain is making a building take longer to construct than usual, it now shows text explaining what the normal turns would be and what the actual turns are, and why that's happening.
  • Thanks to tbrass and ptarth for reporting.

• Previously, under construction buildings could cause deaths based on entertainment provided in them when they were not yet open to the public but were destroyed. And additionally, AI buildings that were destroyed would cause crown lossage based on AI Store even when the building was still under construction. Both fixed.

• When you are planning to place a new civic center, it now properly shows the predicted turns it will take based on its own construction skill (what will be the basis of the new city), and not based on your skill at your prior city.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Added key bind "Show Incident Log", defaulting to I.
  • While this is held, the tile mouseover tooltip will show that tile's incident log (if any) instead of most of the normal info.

• Added the blocks-viewport-movement (and underground toggling) flag to most of the windows in the game, only leaving out some dev-only windows and the few windows that are actually supposed to show as part of the normal HUD. If we missed one let us know.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

• Fixed the click-handling rectangles of the diplomacy and inventory tab buttons to be the same height as the others.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa, ptarth, Dominus Arbitrationis, and others for reporting.

• Pressing escape while the building-details window is open will now simply close that window rather than also opening the escape menu.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

• Fixed several issues with the predicted power consumption and net power in the city power tooltip.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Now when placing the initial lander it highlights the footprint that will actually be occupied (if the placement is valid).
  • Thanks to windgen and mrhanman for suggesting.

• When you are placing the lander, it no longer shows any of the overlays for crime prevention or whatnot.

• Changed the rule for sea interception from "interceptor must be in range of the tile the attacker will fire from" to "interceptor must be in range of the tile being attacked".
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed the linguistics progress logic to carry over progress when going up a level.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• AIs are now more aggressive about wanting to build enough housing, food, and water to have room for population expansion.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• There are now warnings in the tooltips for the Debug options in the extras menus, that note that possible crashes can result from using them during general gameplay.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for inspiring this change.

• There is now a new debug option in the extras menu called "Show Raw AI Attempts At Construction."
  • This helps us troubleshoot some of the AI activities, such as right now the AIs being unable to do... well, much of anything it turns out. Some sort of glitch in the recent versions, related to performance improvements.

• Previously, the AI built its buildings outwards in pretty predictable fashions even when it could build further away from itself. Now it uses a more randomized approach that keeps efficiency while building much more interesting AI cities.

• Fixed a bug where the "Is this adjacent to a friendly building?" logic was only looking at neighboring tiles, not at the surface of the same tile (in the underground case).
  • Thanks to TheVampire100, ptarth, and tbrass for the reports and saves.

• Fixed cities not rebuilding rollups when loading a game, which was making the AI basically helpless in the last two versions if you loaded a savegame.

Version 0.807

(Released April 28th, 2015)

• A variety of parts of the GUI have seen visual polish to better match the recently-revised HUD.

• Fixed a bug in the last two versions or so where I accidentally deleted cheap diners from actually... producing any meals. Gah!
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and ptarth for reporting.

• A lot of math has been updated with the "number of building defenders" at each building for both players and the AI races.
  • One of those is that under construction buildings now have an extra batch of guards, actually. And in general there are at least 5 defenders when at all possible now, but not insanely high amounts ever.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• All guard posts now require 20 staff rather than 5.

• For all buildings that have ground attack or defense, the peltians (in the hands of the AI or the player) now use 4x the normal number of troops to somewhat make up for the fact that they are only 10% as strong as other races. Have fun with all those corpses!
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where hovering over the buttons on the left was still highlighting the hexes behind them -- doubly problematic when you were in placement mode, since it would give you "can't place here" messages based on the tile behind the button, which was really super unhelpful.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where when the building details window is open, you could still highlight buildings behind it and click them and such.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ for reporting.

Version 0.806

(Released April 28th, 2015)

• Shortened the interturn processing times. In the heaviest test cases the reduction is about 85%.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• Reduced the per-frame UI computation workload to roughly 1/3rd or 1/4th of what it used to be in intense gamestates.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• When building on certain types of terrain, such as forests for example, it now takes longer to do than it normally would.

• The Terraforming options for removing forests and clearing rocky ground are now gone. You can just build directly on top of them now, and it simply takes longer to construct.

• Since the switch to the new interface (or around that time anyway), the game has not been properly showing you the reasons why you can't construct a given building on top of a certain location. That's kind of important info!
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Various changes relating to resources have been made:
  • Resources are no longer stockpiled by anyone, but instead disappear at the end of each turn like food and such do.
    • This removes the "optimum" strategy of toggling on and off resource users constantly to keep your stockpiles up when you're not actively using the resource bonus.
  • Each resource producer now only produces 2 of that resource rather than 1000, except for the basement ones, which produce 1 instead of 600.
  • Each resource consumer now only consumes 1 of that resource rather than 800. This makes things a lot cleaner.
  • The destruction of AI buildings with AIStore on them now destroys crowns from them, rather than resources.
  • Stealing from AIs now gets you crowns, not resources.

• Trade of resources with the AIs probably is really undervalued right now, I haven't had a chance to look.
  • Also, the AIs aren't currently using the passive bonuses of their own resources like they should be yet; I didn't have time to put that in, but will shortly.

Version 0.805

(Released April 28th, 2015)

• The property "Holo Pods" has been renamed to "Citizens Entertained" so that it can be used more broadly. The functionality is the same, and the HoloResort is still called that.

• Now the City Park entertains 8 citizens, adding to its general crime prevention. It also has some light pollution scrubbing capability on itself like the terraformed land does, making it a useful thing to have for yet another reason.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting the entertainment here, and that in general parks need more of a purpose.

• Fixed a bug that was probably causing at least some of the adjacency bonuses from natural wonders to not work.

• Lager Houses now provide a boost to adjacent air offensive and defensive capabilities, making them something much more attractive to actually use.

• Fighting Arenas now provide some entertainment as well (for 100 citizens), and also provide a boost to adjacent guard towers and barracks. Here again making them something actually useful!

• In the prior version, the power consumption, crown consumption, and trash production was absolutely crazy thanks to an error that should have made them go down with staffing being lower than 100%, but instead made it rise as staffing went up. Holy smokes!
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 and ptarth for reporting.

• The frame for the minimap has been completely redone (although it's similar) to match the style of the new GUI.

Version 0.804

(Released April 27th, 2015)

• Previously, for mapgen purposes other than standard, it was using the side length of the hexagon of the map to calculate its size. Now it uses the area of the respective hexagons, which is a lot more accurate.

• Nine more of the underground buildings now have their art. Only seven left to go!

• The game previously had a total of 34 resource types that you could discover in the world. Despite our originally expectations, this just really felt too slim to us. We have now added another 46 resource types, for a total of 80 types.
  • 10 resources (one from each usage type) are removed from the each campaign. That was already the case previously, and with 34 resources that might have been what helped make it feel too slim. Anyhow, no more Panda Ants everywhere.

• The seeding logic for the resources has been overhauled rather thoroughly in order to account for the larger number of resources and the desire to have many fewer of most of them (in fact just one or two instances of many of them).

• The amount of planetary rage generated by various things has been considerably rebalanced. Pretty much all of the multipliers have been substantially altered, and the multiplier for the total number of tiles used has gone away.
  • The multiplier about power use was indeed previously supposed to be based on the amount of net power you had left over after power usage, not on your gross power production, but that was quite confusing to say the least and has now been changed to just use gross power.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• A bit of caching for the GUI tooltips for planet rage to make them not tank the framerate so heavily.

• Cryo Pods and the concept of cryogenic freezing has been removed from the game.
  • This was something that sounded good on paper a long time ago, but even prior to beta it was a mechanic that was making Chris really uncomfortable. It was the sort of thing that was needed to balance out a secondary problem (to do with staffing and population growth), but it was a very inelegant solution.
  • Thanks to ptarth, Misery, GarathJJ, mrhanman, Watashiwa, and Hyfrydle for inspiring these changes.

• Your maximum population is no longer restrained by staffing availability in any way. This was confusing previously, and needlessly complex. As well as causing a few other issues -- for instance, the problems surrounding staffing and crime from unemployment were what made cryo pods a necessity in the first place.
  • Now the only requirements for your max population are housing and meals, period. This does mean that your population can easily grow into the realms where you start getting crime from unemployment, so...
  • Thanks to ptarth, Misery, GarathJJ, mrhanman, Watashiwa, and Hyfrydle for inspiring these changes.

• What was previously the Cryo Sleep building has been redesigned into a new Holo Resort facility instead. This is unlocked via Architectural Aestheticism rather than Emergency Medicine, so this is much easier to get early. Your lander also has some holo pods in it to start out with, too.
  • Anyhow, the purpose of the Holo Resort is that it entertains up to 400 unemployed citizens. So long as you have enough holo pods for each unemployed citizen, you get no crime from them. This accomplishes what the cryo pods were originally trying to do, but in a much more elegant way.
  • Basically it allows you to freely birth an excess of citizens -- which is highly desirable to do by the way -- but not have unemployment be a constant problem.
  • This also frees you from the need to constantly be shutting on and off buildings that use staff when you take some mild to moderate citizenry losses, because that was both annoying and fiddly. If you take a devastating blow to your city, then sure you'll still want to power down some buildings. Or if you take repeated midsize blows, then too. And that's fine, because it's not happening all the time.
  • Thanks to ptarth, Misery, GarathJJ, mrhanman, Watashiwa, and Hyfrydle for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed an issue with the text relating to the requirements for citizens being in spacious+luxury or in luxury housing, where it was reporting the opposite message for each, and with negative numbers usually.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ, pizzatiger, mrhanman, and Hyfrydle for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the text relating to the requirements for certain amounts of citizens in certain types of housing where it was always saying the base number (eg 100) rather than the actual number that it needed for the number of buildings currently in the city (eg 200 to place the third building).
  • Thanks to GarathJJ, pizzatiger, mrhanman, and Hyfrydle for reporting.

• The amount of trash produced by buildings now goes down proportional to how staffed they are.
  • Same for pollution cleaner strength and crime reduction strength.
  • And the medical stuff, including births.
  • And pollution output.
  • And crown and power and water per-turn consumption.
  • And planet rage.
  • And market item production rates.
  • And vaccine research, and debt points generated.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting -- boy there were a number of oversights here!

• Cheap diners are now run by robots, and thus require 0 staff. They also now only provide 600 meals instead of 800, and give off no social progress or crime at all.
  • The idea here is that this breaks the death spiral that can happen with staffing issues based on needing food but being unable to produce it because you need citizens who need food. ;)
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Notification icons now appear on the right-hand sidebar whenever you discover a new natural wonder.

• Civic Centers now provide housing for 100, rather than 25. They also now only require 25 staff, rather than 100.
  • They also now provide 9000 power rather than 3000, and now 10 births per turn rather than 0, and they have 50 of the new holopods. These things make getting a new city established way easier even if you don't do things in an ideal order.
  • Note that this also sidesteps the issue of the minimum "max population" being 100 and there being too little minimum food or housing for that to actually make sense.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The amount of crime that comes off of your littered trash is now vaaastly lower, particularly in the very early game. Or more specifically, when populations in a given city are very low.

• Natural wonders no longer show a "building effectiveness percent," since that was definitely meaningless.

• A small note on natural wonders now points out that their bonuses are in fact adjacency bonuses.

• The bonuses that natural wonders have been cut from 4 to 2 and are no longer linked to resources in any way. They also now have their own spreadsheet for importing.

• Fixed a bug where the adjacency bonuses from natural wonders were not functioning at all.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The last of the underground buildings now have their graphics, making it so that all 119 of the underground buildings are fully complete visually!

• The lager house now also has 50 holo pods in it, providing some entertainment as well as food.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

Version 0.803

(Released April 24th, 2015)

• Previously, scout stations were tied to the Flight Control tech, but in 0.801 (or something like that), this was shifted to Interior Ballistics instead. However, the interface for using the scout stations, and the scout stations actually doing anything, was still checking Flight Control, so in the last two versions you had to have BOTH Interior Ballistics and Flight Control unlocked in order to actually have any scouts. Whoops! Fixed.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for reporting.

• When cemeteries or junkyards are destroyed, their bodies or trash is now let loose on the city rather than just disappearing into nothingness.
  • This actually makes those buildings something worth protecting, like your power generation and other aspects, rather than something you can just happily let get destroyed. It also stops an exploit where you could keep building cemeteries in range of enemy guns and have them gun them down repeatedly while you lose more and more bodies (yay you) from your city.

• The staff requirements for Disease Control Center has been dropped from 400 to 100.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

• Initial disease infection amounts (as a percentage of your population) are now generally much lower than they were before, particularly when you are contracting diseases through ground combat fighting.
  • That said, the infection percent from Evucks is now actually higher -- slightly.
  • This emphasizes just how nasty it is from the Evucks, and beyond that it's not remotely such a terrible thing to have happen to you out of the blue.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for suggesting.

• Some adjustments to crime severities at higher populations:
  • The amount of crime per unit of littered trash is no longer so increasingly dire as your population goes up. It does get worse, but not so incredibly bad.
  • The amount of crime per shut down building is really REALLY toned down.
  • The progression of crime from unclaimed bodies also is now a lot less severe.
  • The crime for unemployment has a lower threshold now, as well as scaling lower.
  • The crime for hungry citizens was absolutely off the charts nuts after you passed 4200 citizens in particular. It's now a lot more reasonable all the way through.
  • Same deal for homeless.
  • Thanks to topper for helping inspire these changes by jumping on the grenade there.

• The ability to hike up your tax rate to gain more income was just incredibly overpowered. This has been shifted to being additive when it's an increase in tax, and remains multiplicative when it's a decrease in tax. This makes for vastly more reasonable tax amounts.
  • The same has also been applied to the research rate and the power rate, for the same reasons. I wasn't sure if the crime control and hazmat rates really needed this; if it seems so, then please let me know.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• You can now only have one stock exchange per each 8000 citizens, not every 1000 citizens. Otherwise it was way too easy to just spam these with low citizen counts.
  • Similarly, for the fighting arena it's now up to one for every 5000 instead of every 1000.
  • And for banks it is now one for every 600 instead of one for every 200.
  • For shopping malls, it's one for every 1000 instead of one for every 500.
  • History Museum and OperaHouse are now 1200 instead of 400.
  • Note that this does kneecap your ability to just spam the commercial sector (which is the idea), but you can make early money by supplying a lot of food, and in general this encourages a push toward capturing resources, which are a substantial source of income.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• All of the market item effects are now additive rather than multiplicative, so that they don't go so nuts in terms of causing mass inflation of your values when you have just a few of them.
  • Note that the social progress and tech things are still multiplicative, because they are meant to be more powerful, though.
  • In turn, the way that the market item effects are applied is now based on one of 15 different "learning skills" for each type of race. In other words, Acutians get more out of crown-generation market items than peltians do. That racial differentiation was why I had it as multiplicative in the first place, but now it's additive with a racial multiplier against the additive component.
  • It is possible that some of the market item effects may be pathetically useless to you at this point; it's hard to say. If you see anything that seems off, please do let us know!
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

Version 0.802

(Released April 24th, 2015)

• The missing icons for attacks and linguistics regarding the Peltians are now created.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for reporting.

• When you lose buildings to ice melt, limestone cavern collapse, or flooding, there are now icons for that rather than just the little text notification.

• The remaining evuck and peltian underground buildings now have proper graphics.
  • So that's 5 more done, and 15 left to do!

• The map icon images have been put into better dictionaries that lead to more efficiency when drawing them.

• The smog and radiation overlay images have been put into better dictionaries that lead to more efficiency when drawing them.

• Gave the underground building images the better-dictionary treatment.

• Fixed an enormous inefficiency in how the game world borders were being drawn (how many draw calls they would require, etc).

• Increased the max number of sprites per batch from 1200 to 4000. This should lead to better performance on really large maps and in particular on older GPUs, but we'll see.

• A variety of parts of the hud now have the new better sprite dictionary treatment.

• Fixed a _huge_ performance issue with drawing the hex overlays over tiles, where it wasn't previously batching them at all.

• The game should now properly prevent players and the AIs from placing buildings on top of natural wonders. If you do see the "Ack!" message again, please do let us know, though. And a savegame is helpful.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for reporting.

• When you first discover a new race, there is now a notification on your sidebar and a big center-screen popup. It's rather important, after all...
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for suggesting.

• Ten more natural wonders have been added, bringing the total up to 34. Just a couple of days ago it was only 9 total! We're done adding these for a while, and all the new ones beyond the first 9 don't have their true functionality assigned to them yet.

Version 0.801

(Released April 23rd, 2015)

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where the current overlay was not showing up properly highlighted in its menu.

• The city management window how has a button for each type of building in the city (except the city centers, which cannot be toggled on/off) and double clicking one will try to turn all buildings of that type in that city off (if any are on) or on (if not).
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• The groundwater studies tech has been removed, and biology now unlocks the water well directly.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Flight Control is now a prerequisite for lander records recovery and aquifer survey and landscape grading, and has been moved around so that there's not that huge horizontal gap in that one part of the early tech tree.

• Toxin Screening deaths were not previously being logged correctly and were throwing an error to let us know about that. Fixed.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Added budget-management city management sliders for crime control and hazmat effectiveness/cost.

• Fixed an issue with natural wonder seeding where a couple of them were not actually seeding in all cases.

• Previously there were 9 natural wonders. Now there are 15 new ones (so 24 in all), and there will be quite a few more before too long.
  • The idea here is that, yes, this makes exploration more interesting. But also these have nontrivial strategic value, meaning that they provide good medium-term benefits for both you and the AIs.
  • A number of the natural wonders do not yet have proper definitions for their bonuses, though. That's coming!

• Fixed a bug that has existed since before the start of the beta, where the tops of the natural wonders were getting cut off. Looked mighty strange!

• The data for the resources has been pulled out into a separate excel file instead of being baked into the game, and it's now easier for us to balance and possible for players to tune or mod as well.

• The outer world border has been cleaned up so that it no longer has the jagged edges like before. Nice having an actual artist fix that up rather than Chris just winging it. ;)

• The images for a lot of the tile overlays have been adjusted so that you can tell them apart better. Useful in particular for experienced players so that they don't have to look at the bottom of the screen to see which overlay is active when they are placing a new building.

• Fixed a bug where buildings under construction were still showing up as possible attackers, and thus could prevent already-constructed buildings from actually attacking until these finished.
  • Thanks to ptarth, TheVampire100, and crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with a white background around the Mind Control tech.

• Fixed a bug where when the tech tree shortlist is open, it was making it so that you could not see the furthest-right tech.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where some of your own buildings could show up as "targets" that nonetheless you could not really attack.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for the save that showed this.

• Holding down the shift key now lets you see your combined attack range of all your buildings in your current "attack with this building type" mode.

• You can now hold down the R key to see the attack range of any single military building (friend or foe).

• Holding down Z now lets you see the range of any interceptor building that you hover over.
  • Holding down Ctrl plus Z now lets you see the range of all interceptor buildings of that same interception category in the city of the building you are hovering over (so all ground interceptors in that city, etc).

• New key, also mapped to Z: See "Other" Range Of Hovered Building
  • If you hover over certain specialty buildings (Embassies, Thieves' Guilds, Spy Safehouses, International Banks, etc) with this key held down, you can see their working ranges. These buildings require a target that is within their operational range, and this lets you see that operational range.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Previously embassies and spies had to target city center buildings, which was just really very confusing (never noted on the GUI, and rather hard to note), and potentially problematic in practice given that AI cities might be too large for you to do this.
  • They now can target any building in an AI city.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The range of all the "targets another city" buildings have been reduced from 20 to 10.
  • This makes it so that you have to get closer to your intended target, which was always the goal anyway.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a couple of things in data definitions that was preventing some of the AIs from building in desired patterns. You'll see... quite a difference in the Thoraxians, for instance, with their tunnel entrances. Finally acting the way they were always intended to!

• Adjusted some things in the data definitions for player buildings to avoid confusion with players not being able to build their main buildings next to things like their resource extractors of various sorts. This may need further updating later, but for now this seems like the simplest way to be clear to players (and strategically it makes sense to me, too).
  • Thanks to pizzatiger for reporting.

• Enemy resource extractors are no longer valid targets for diplomacy, spy, or whatever targeting.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Civic Centers can now be placed anywhere within personnel transport range, or next to an existing destroyed city even if it is not in personnel transport range.
  • They cannot, however, be placed next to a building from another city.
  • This greatly simplifies the method for creating new cities, which was previously really confusing.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Hyfrydle for reporting.

• When you are in placement mode for a building that uses the "other targeting, it now shows you a preview of its range while you are placing it.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• When you are in placement mode for a building that has an attack range, it now shows you a preview of where it's range will be while you are attacking it.
  • When you are placing a building with interception capabilities, the same thing also now happens.

• During the mode where you are selecting another city to target from a building, the game now shows your range for targeting (pretty important), and also shows you which tiles are actually clickable via having an icon on them (also pretty important...).
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The overall attack ranges have been shrunk a bit for buildings, to encourage closer combat. It's not a big shift in the main, but for a few AI buildings the shift is from an insanely high number to something more reasonable in particular. Some, like the spire, should no longer dominate their area so fully (if the spire hated you and you were at all near them, goodbye you, previously).

• Drastically fixed up how the crime for crimes of opportunity and pollution scale up as city populations get very large. The scaling factor was previously very far off, which wasn't apparent back when disease was killing us really fast anyway.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The crime number at the top of the screen is now a lot more useful, because it looks at the total net crime on each tile, not the overall crime prevention potential versus the overall crime (because not all crime prevention potential is realized, since it falls outside of tiles which would have crime, anyway). Bottom line, this actually shows your real value now, not a giant negative number that doesn't make much difference to you.

• Fixed an issue where none of the Language Skill Up icons were ever being found properly because it was looking in the wrong directory.
  • The Peltian ones are legitimately missing for attacked by and missing, but that's a different matter.
  • Also fixed a related localization missing error.

• Fixed a bug where the Krolin data definitions accidentally had their soldier type unlinked sometime recently, and thus their ground troops could not properly attack!
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the temperature change mechanics could cause natural wonders to get overwritten. Oops! That's fixed, and additionally the game will now complain if a natural wonder is ever overwritten by any process during the game, so that we can fix that also.

Version 0.800

(Released April 21st, 2015)

• The new HUD is now in place -- hoo boy was that a massive undertaking, taking us a whole lot longer than we expected. Finally done now, though! And we should be able to get releases out daily during the week again, which is good.

• Fixed sea robin definition saying it was gathered on land by fisheries instead of gathered on water by fisheries.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• There are now hotkeys that allow you to toggle between your cities quickly (home and end).

• The remaining Thoraxian, Andor, Acutian, Boarine, and Burlust underground buildings now have actual graphics. Still 20 underground buildings to go.

• Previously, the max number of simultaneous buildings you could ever achieve in a city was capped at 7. This would lead to confusion if you scrapped engineers after getting above that level (more engineers still made your constructions faster, just not more at once in those cases).
  • Now it's capped at 40, instead.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The appearance of the small icons for buildings in the tech tree has been adjusted to be a little clearer, larger, and more attractive. This also is the same thing to be used on the new hud.

• The items in the build menus are now actually sorted in a way that makes sense, heh.

• The Cities Grid screen is now in place.

• On screen resolutions narrower than 1680 pixels, previously the tech tree shortlist would overlap the tech tree scrollbar and the tabs inappropriately. Fixed.

• The overlays now show better proper-english names, and also have tooltips explaining what they are actually doing!

• Fixed that bug where both the reports and overlays windows could be visible at the same time.
  • Thanks to mrhanman and mllange for reporting.

• The requirements for social progress level ups is now vastly higher, bringing better balance to it so that you aren't going through social levels every turn after a little while.
  • Thanks to Misery for reminding us of this.

• Cemetaries now have 5000 graves each, rather than 500. Originally I wanted to keep these small so that you'd really _feel_ your deaths in the city, but this was just too small.

Disease Balance And General Improvements

• Added Quarantine toggle to city management window
  • Quarters birth rate.
  • Reduces infection rate and new-births-with-disease by 10% per turn the quarantine has been running against that disease.
  • Each turn, cures 1 person of each disease per turn the quarantine has been running against that disease.
  • If the quarantine is turned off, the internal counter for each disease's quarantine drops by 2 per turn until back to zero.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for inspiring this change.

• Added Genetic Screening toggle to city management window
  • Halves birth rate.
  • No new births will have genetic diseases.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for inspiring this change.

• Added Toxin Screening toggle to city management window
  • Each population unit that would be infected with a toxic disease instead costs the city 500 power and the race 200 crowns.
  • If the resources are not available, the population unit is killed.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for inspiring this change.

• The infectiousness and mortality rates from diseases are now a lot less extreme, and getting one with high mortality and high infectiousness is now not such a possibility.

• Sloth from diseases no longer causes trash and pollution production to go up. That was what was leading to the immediate death spirals with lots of the diseases.
  • Instead it now is a reducer for crown, science, linguistics, social progress, and resource production.

• The diseases button now actually works, and pops up a description of what the heck each disease actually does, and what its stats mean, etc.
  • Thanks to GarathJJ, mllange, and mrhanman for reminding us about this (it was one of those TBD things I warned the redshirts about, but it's super important).

• Hospitals and similar now work on curing infected citizens as well as healing wounded ones. This helps a bit in the fight against disease, mainly against diseases with low or no mortality. Quarantine and vaccination is still by far the best.

• Once a race has ever started working on a vaccine for a disease, they now continue working on that until they find a cure -- even if there are no current infections.

• You can now actually see your progress on vaccines! It's shown under the new diseases popup.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for reporting.

Version 0.772

(Released April 15th, 2015)

• The starting languages that you know are now a lot higher in a variety of areas, making diplomacy actually possible with some races closer from the start (though not always the races you want, of course).
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• The radius revealed by the lander at the start of the game is now 7 tiles rather than 5, which means that no matter where you place it you should be able to get explorer camps on all sides of it comfortably.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Fixed the bug from version 0.771 where you could not place explorer camps unless the shift key was held down.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle, mrhanman, ptarth, and crazyroosterman for reporting.

Version 0.771

(Released April 15th, 2015)

• The recent changes button now properly points here.

• The default profile name is now "Benevolent Dictator" instead of Hydral.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

• Savegame size has been reduced to about 2/3 its prior amount (and is now much faster to save and load, too) thanks to some shifts with what is being saved about specific layers on each tile.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Savegames have been shrunk a further 10% or so by adjusting some of what is recalculated upon savegame load with regard to tiles themselves.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Another bit of savings on savegame size in particular in savegames that are very high up in turn counts, by culling the number of event log entries from more than 100 turns ago.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• Ground soldiers can now always target underground buildings in range that they have sonar data on.

• Fixed a bug where combat damage wasn't being applied to undergound buildings.

• Boats, Missiles/Lasers, and Torpedoes can now directly target any underground buildings that are not under another building.

• Resource adjacency bonuses (natural wonder and from resource-usage buildings) are now actually shown!

• Previously, resources on the surface would only be revealed if you got your buildings close enough to them -- not just if you scouted their area. That was a super bad idea, as it led to the impression that there were not many resources around. Note that underground resources still require you to sonar survey them.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• Placement of explorer camps is only required for the first two turns now. After that it's completely optional.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for inspiring this change.

• Flying buildings now will show up properly under the fog of war, rather than over.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• The game no longer gives you a localization error the first time you go to start a new campaign.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was letting you place explorer camps waaaaay away from your lander, but not showing the little "building valid to be placed here" icons, hence us not noticing it before.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed the visual offset issue on the social progress screen when the resolution was not 720px high.
  • Thanks to mrhanman and tbrass for reporting.

• The trash production values on each building have been majorly revamped, because some of them were accidentally producing waaaay more than intended. This was then causing a crime death spiral.
  • Thanks to ptarth and others for reporting.

• The amount of crime at each building from crimes of opportunity, from inherent in the business, and from pollution (for extra-sensitive buildings, anyway) is now vastly shrunk at the start of the game, and gradually grows to become the full amount at population 10,000 and up.
  • This way you aren't so hosed if you don't know to put police stations near to a stock exchange early on. Instead you'll discover that gradually and have time to react.
  • Thanks to tbrass for reporting.