Stars Beyond Reach Beta Phase 3 Release Notes

Version 0.912

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

• Fixed a localization issue relating to brownouts.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Previously there was a 0.3x to 1.5x multiplier on international ability speeds. That has been removed, because it made it a lot harder to plan.

• The amount of scaling from the EXP level on international abilities is now much smaller than before.

• Previously the Krolin had a 4x boost to the dump bodies speed, which was insanely huge. That bonus is now 1.5x.
  • Overall the range of boosts to abilities based on racial aptitudes is something that is much more reined in. Otherwise you can just get an insane number of things constantly happening, and often happening again before the effects of the last thing even finished.

• Fixed a recurring harmless GetSpeechPartFor error message when it was looking for speech parts that were empty and then (of course) not finding them.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• In afflictions on the buildings of other races, their text is now properly prefixed with their own race name and color to show who is speaking, as well as going through the translation garbler.

• Now when you switch into placement mode for a type of building and that building is underground while you're viewing the surface (or vice versa), it will switch you to the other view.
  • Thanks to gnosis for the suggestion.

• Changed the player repair logic to work on territories adjacent to the player's city, not just territories owned by that city, to cover cases where the city doesn't own the territories where its buildings are located.
  • Thanks to Taikei no Yuurei and gnosis for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where destroying the last building of the owner race in a territory would not actually release it from their control if somebody else had a building there (for instance, a scout station you'd previously put there).
  • Thanks to gnosis and Cinth for reporting.

• Added a rule where if your city has zero population, its birth rate is clamped to zero regardless of anything else.
  • This allows the "if the player has no population left, they lose the game" end condition to fire properly.
  • Thanks to rjblackwolf for inspiring this change.

• The non-persisting effects of an event are now logged to that tile for that turn, and disappear during interturn.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Added costs for the Dump Trash, Dump Bodies, and Commando Raid international abilities.
  • On the details window, etc, Next to the ability name (and progress, if any), it lists the cost.
  • If the costs cannot be met, the ability doesn't happen.
  • When the ability happens, the cost is deducted.
  • Dump Trash costs 1000 trash (littered and/or stored) per dump.
  • Dump Bodies costs 5 bodies (unclaimed and/or buried) per dump.
  • Commando Raid costs 0 to 5 staff from that building per attack (have to have at least 5 to do the ability).
  • Thanks to gnosis and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Interior borders on your own territory (but not territories of anyone else) now show up with dashed lines to make it clearer where your territory ends.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• There are no longer "natural wonder discovered" messages that pop up, as they are not particularly useful generally speaking.

• The right-hand notifications sidebar is now more visible.

Version 0.911

(Released September 28th, 2015)

• Now when one race attacks another during acts 1-3, and it doesn't involve rogues, and it doesn't involve any hostile saucers, and it involves a territory not owned by the initiator, and the initiator actually does damage to something, then the planet will spawn an underground monster in the initiator's city during the next interturn.

• All the bottom bar icons now have tooltips, and they consistently show up next to the mouse cursor rather than in the bottom-right corner.

• The International Relations screen has had its right column removed, and instead of having 7 boxes in the left column and 7 in the middle column it now has 5, 4, and 5.
  • If you're at war with a race, that race's block now just says "WAR".
  • The victory percentages have been removed (both on the interface, and in the mechanics)
  • The number above the relations button will show the number of races you're at war with.

• The Events button no longer goes to the International Relations screen but rather a new Events window, which is basically just the right column that screen used to have, and just the All Events tab.
  • The number above the button shows the number that used to show on the All Events tab.

• The Effects button no longer goes to the International Relations screen but rather a new Effects window, which is basically just the right column that screen used to have, and just the Effects tab.
  • The number above the button shows the number that used to show on the Effects tab.

• Put in yet, yet, yet more logic to try to constrain the notifications right-sidebar to be below the top HUD and above the bottom HUD.

• Fixed a bug where none of the sliders for the city management screen have been working since budget committees were removed.
  • Thanks to gnosis and crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Twenty-five more icons are now in place for the various event notices. Still 19 left on our backlog to get the art done for, out of the overall 162 (at present) defined icons for events.

• The tooltips were saying that the default settings for the sharpness clamp and the brightness were some other value than their actual defaults. We changed the defaults but not the tooltips a while in the past after looking at things in detail with our artists.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• The cost of repairs has been dropped to 1/5th its prior value. It seems to have been hitting a lot harder than intended. Having a cost is good, but not one that is so darn unpleasantly high.
  • Thanks to Taikei no Yuurei and others for inspiring this change.

• New disease infections should actually be on a sensible amount of population now; previously there were some math errors that made it so that they could hit way more population than intended.
  • Thanks to Taikei no Yuurei for reporing.

• The infectiousness of diseases was previously being floored to always infect around 10 citizens no matter what, which was a problem in that it made things spread overly virulently when populations were low. At high populations this wouldn't be something even noticed, but at a low population it could make a disease way more powerful than it was supposed to be.
  • Thanks to Taikei no Yuurei for reporting.

• All diseases now have a minimum mortality of 1%, and a minimum infectiousness of 2%. Anything with 0% of either of those values will tend to die out way too fast or never burn out.
  • Thanks to Taikei no Yuurei for inspiring this change.

• The AI now cannot build on or adjacent to territories owned by the player during Act 1.
  • Thanks to zebeast45, ptarth, and gnosis for inspiring this change.

• Now when a territory is claimed post-mapgen, it doesn't change the name of the territory. The player is still asked to name the territory, but the suggestion is no longer a changed name.
  • Except the territory claimed by the lander; there the player is given a changed name as the suggestion.

• Entering attack-consideration mode by double-clicking an attack building now selects that building's territory as the first territory for the battle.

• Fixed a bug in the rogue wave logic where it didn't check for a particular way the data said "don't put this on land"

• Fixed yet another the-shortlist-textbox-broke-the-tech-tree bug, this time it was the "left-click-and-drag => scroll tech tree" functionality, because the key-bind on the left mouse button for that didn't have the even-with-a-textbox-visible flag.
  • Thanks to wwwhhattt for reporting.

• The Enable/Disable button on the Tile Details window has been made about half as tall, and moved to be just to the right of the show advanced info toggle.

• Field study camps now note any bonuses they grant against monsters on their details window.

• Fixed a bug where turbo-hammering the enter key or spacebar could lead to the AI logic being run multiple times before the actual interturn logic itself, slowing things down.

• Fixed a bug where the left-click-to-close-overlay-listbox logic was not actually fully clearing the listbox mode, so it would close and then immediately re-open.

• Previously there was a "trash per worker" value that was being set on races, and which was causing lots of extra trash for some races (like the Krolin). This was separate from the racial theming, so for the Krolin in particular this hit extra hard.
  • Based on this, the trash production should now be more normalized for the races in general, although still high if you're actually seeing in advance that it will be high (via the racial theming info).
  • Thanks to ptarth, gnosis, Taikei no Yuurei, and zebeast45 for reporting.

• The build time for hazmat stations has been cut in half.
  • Thanks to zebeast45 for suggesting.

• The description of thermal strip mines was correct in the prior versions, but was definitely unclear on the difference between mountains and neutral mountain ranges. It should hopefully be a lot more clear now.
  • Thanks to Taikei no Yuurei and Cinth for reporting.

• The following changes have been made to small shops versus commercial offices:
  • Small ships:
    • HP 400 to 220.
    • Militia attack power down to 4 from 8.
    • EXP per turn from 20 to 5.
  • Commercial offices:
    • HP 220 to 400.
    • Crowns per turn from 300 to 800.
    • Construction cost from 4800 to 7000.
    • EXP per turn from 15 to 10.
    • Pollution from 10 to 7.
    • Crime protection need from 150 to 35.
    • Now produces 1 science per turn.
  • Thanks to Taikei no Yuurei, P3X-639, gnosis, and Cinth for reporting that Commercial Offices were inferior to small shops. This was an oversight based on changing the two of them independently before v3 and just not noticing. Regardless of their buffs and whatnot in later acts, they should seem sensibly related in act 1, heh.

• Prepared Meals are now called Restaurant Seating, because this is far less confusing.
  • Side note: there are still some unrelated bad references to "meals" that used to exist in v1 and v2 of the game, but those will be cleaned up as we get a chance.
  • Thanks to gnosis, Peons, Cinth, and Taikei no Yuurei for reporting.

• There has long been a "chicken and egg" problem with buildings having their stats go down when they are not staffed by enough people.
  • You can get into death spirals on services and similar pretty fast.
    • And in addition to that, you can also have a nightmare actually doing capacity planning if certain needs are fluctuating based on staffing.
    • All in all it can wind up feeling very punitive and very numbers-crunchy in a not-good way on the player end.
  • THAT said, the way we've had it in v3 so far where staffing only affects the EXP generation and nothing else is definitely not too good either.
    • That takes away a lot of the incentive for building staff in the first place, and removes most of the penalty for wounded citizens, etc. So a significant portion of the game then winds up having no teeth.
  • Overall there is a concept of "building effectiveness," and already the case is that only some stats are affected by this. That building effectiveness is affected by things like events (for good or ill), adjacency boosts, and so on.
  • Taking that idea and just applying something parallel-but-separate, the effectiveness based on staffing percent (and less for wounded staffers) now applies to the following properties:
    • Offensive attack power (but NOT militia or defender attack power), crown production, market item creation speed, local event frequency, science and linguistic research, international ability speed, resource gathering speed, EXP gains (as before), construction skill, repair points, vaccine research speed.
    • All of those things are things that are important, but none of them play into the self-governing ebb and flow of services and needs and so forth. Instead it's all stuff that is related to options that the player or AI can take, which is really much more as it should be. You want to optimize so that you can do things, but your city itself doesn't death spiral if you don't touch it while it's not optimized (at least not for this reason, heh).
  • Thanks to Peons, gnosis, Taikei no Yuurei, and ptarth for reporting.

• Trash produced by buildings is now reduced when the building has fewer staff or less efficiency than full.
  • This is not the case for other kinds of needs, power consumption, etc, because those things are all in a web of balance rather than something that just counts up over time like trash is.

• Rebalanced the "stupidity queues" such that implant malfunctions don't become this constant thing later in the game.
  • Thanks to gnosis for reporting.

• Improved the wording of "There must be none of these in the world" to be "You cannot have"
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the development status stuff in the bottom-right showed on various pre-game screens, not just the main menu.

• Fixed a bug where the checkboxes on the advanced start menu had no mouse rectangle (or, rather, one with negative width and height) and thus no mouse interaction.
  • Thanks to dfinlay for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the logic intended to unlock act 2 techs needed-for-act-1-objective was unable to do so because of logic added elsewhere to prevent the research of later-act techs in act 1.
  • Thanks to gnosis, Peons, nas1m, and crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Fixed a null exception that could happen because some combat pathfinding was trying to go on the very edge of the map (it can now no longer try to do so).
  • Also fixed a bug where the game wasn't remembering which tiles were on the edge.
  • Thanks to dfinlay, Taikei no Yuurei, and crazyroosterman for the reports and saves.

• Fixed an array-index-out-of-bounds exception from some recently added multiplier-up-scale stuff being off-by-one on the bounds check.
  • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.

• The invisible logging of GetSpeechPartFor errors is no longer invisible (there's no general fix to these, each has to be looked at to see if the logic asking for it was wrong, or if there's missing content that needs to be filled in).
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• There is now a certain amount of free capacity in terms of graves and trash storage at each city that makes it so that you don't immediately have problems with those right at the start of Act I.
  • The specific values will later vary by difficulty, but right now are 2k and 100k respectively.

• The pollution no longer goes up based on the number of polluters in a territory, unlike recent versions. That turned out to be a bad idea, and probably the cause of more than a little confusion.

• Pollution is no longer increased by excess trash or dead bodies.
  • Right now and trash and dead bodies have no negative effect on you at all, so enjoy that temporary luxury. ;)

Version 0.910

(Released September 24th, 2015)

• The game now actually explains what EXP and levels do in tooltips on those stats, AND it explains how the starting levels on them are increased, and by extension how market items work.
  • Thanks to kasnavada for reminding us of this oversight.

• The precondition/goal suffixes no longer say "current: x, target: y" at the end of them. Now it just tells you what the current value is, because the actual other text already told you the target (and in a few cases it was telling you the wrong target anyhow).
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Fixed a "Unlogged death from source: None" message that was showing up from event-based deaths.

• Fixed an issue where the amount of littered trash was not properly being shown in the top bar for problems, thus making it look like a teeny problem when really it was huuuuge.
  • Thanks to nas1m and ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a Missing Localization:Reports_Inventory error.
  • Thanks to Aklyon and ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a variety of formatting errors on the monster events on the map, as well as making the formatting of a lot of on-map events/afflictions clearer.
  • Thanks to Cinth and ptarth for reporting.

• Changed the logic for getting a textual summary of a persisting event effect to just saving the result string from when the generating command was executed, rather than trying to recompute the string whenever it was requested.
  • This was causing fatal errors because the string formats had been changed last night to include references to the race affected and the execute logic had been updated to provide those extra format parameters, but the persisting-effect case had not been thus updated.
  • Thanks to Cinth and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• Fixed a bug where the logic for parsing out command and precondition parameters did not actually assign the results of parsing an enum value (like a building type), leading to things like "you must have 5 rural farms" saying "you must have 5 (blank)", and those commands/preconditions thus not actually functioning since they just referred to the None building type.
  • Old saves with these should probably just be discarded as they won't work if these preconditions were for finishing out an Act, etc, and we can't update the data of events in old saves due to how it's stored with the save rather than linked up with the current spreadsheet state on load.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa and ptarth for the reports and saves.

• The building details window now repopulates when it detects that the turn has changed since it last populated.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for suggesting.

• During building placement mode, the building construction number and health bar is never obscured by the building you're trying to place, or by the little green building placement icon.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

• You can now click on the service shortage icons on the top bar and have it show a version of the services window that is just for the service in question.
  • Thanks to Vinco for suggesting.

• The notifications sidebar no longer blinks on and off between turns.

• When new notifications are added to the sidebar, it does a little halo sort of effect around them to draw your eye. Different types of additions have different colors for making you notice more or less.
  • This was what we had in mind instead of the large obtrusive center-screen messages that we used to use. Those were TOO distracting.

• Fixed up a number of images not showing up for the tile types on the tile type details page.
  • Thanks to Watashiwa for reporting.

Balance

• The costs of fire and police and parks have been adjusted downwards substantially. On the flip side, the costs of the higher-tier housing has gone up.
  • Thanks to kasnavada for suggesting.

• The service needs on hazmat have gone down dramatically, and the rest of the waste category stuff. Same with the hospital. It's just a lot clearer this way.
  • Thanks to nas1m for and kasnavada for inspiring this change.

• Planet worship is no longer something your Fenyn need until act 3, when the shrine actually becomes available.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Fixed a number of issues where the effectiveness of buildings was really being over-applied when above 1.
  • In a few cases it should not have been applied at all (negative things like needs or trash production going up when efficiency is better, oops).
  • In other cases it was too unbalanced to have that be applied (EXP gains -- that was really not balanced around that).
  • And in other cases it does need to be applied when above 1, but it needs to tone things down a bit (like the bonuses to market item production, crown production, and power production -- from resources, etc).
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Scout stations now use about half as much power; it was excessive before.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where Small Shops were not producing any crowns!! They now produce 400, and shopping malls produce 600 rather than 1200.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this discovery.

Pollution

• Chemical plants now provide a territory-wide buff to hazmat, making them an excellent combo rather than a required service.
  • Thanks to nas1m for and kasnavada for inspiring this change.

• Hazmat strength is now over 3x what it previously was.
  • Thanks to nas1m for and kasnavada and ptarth for reporting.

• The amount of extra pollution that gets output from buildings in a territory based on littered trash and dead bodies is now scaled down linearly for buildings with a base output less than 100.
  • Thanks to nas1m and ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The more polluters you stack in one territory, the more of a (very small) multiplier they now get on themselves.
  • This helps to combat the ultra-strong hazmat squads now. Basically you eventually do need to build up your hazmat more, but it's not something that you have to build so much of in the early game.
  • So far balance on this feels pretty natural, but we shall see.

Prior Beta Notes

It's unusual that we'd split a beta period into THREE sets of release notes, but this has gone on far longer than expected. In particular after the last release in the prior release notes, it's a whole new game. So it was time to start with a fresh release notes page, too.

Stars Beyond Reach Beta Phase 2 Release Notes