Stars Beyond Reach Beta Phase 3 Release Notes

Version 0.919

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

• Fixed an issue where the quality of the underground tiles and the building icons in the game were showing up with a very cruddy quality.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where whenever you selected a building to actually build, the listboxes on the left would jump back up to the top annoyingly.
  • Thanks to darkarchon, gnosis, and Cinth for reporting.

Version 0.918 (Warn Me, Please!)

(Released October 5th, 2015)

• The game now has four acts instead of five: the ideas from acts four and five are being combined into one, rather than having an artificial delimiter in between them. It's a lot more natural this way.

• Fixed some longstanding bugs in staff allocation that could leave some buildings not-fully-staffed even when you had enough people.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the report and save.

• Now on the act-transitions where the AI races pick international abilities to fear/desire, they only pick abilities that you have unlocked a source of, or can unlock a source of during the new act.

• Now the first time you mouseover an AI territory while in placement mode for a field study camp, it will pop up a tutorial message about AI-held natural wonders.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where some building services were showing up as warnings when actually they were problems.

• The act is now shown on the top toolbar.

• The warnings icon, when shown on the top toolbar, now has a "warnings" text above it rather than "problems."

• Fixed a number of issues with the second bar where it was not showing warnings on certain services on the outside when it was on the inner grid.

• Fixed up some strangeness with how the needed pollution was being calculated in the prior version.

• The game now gives you proper warnings for when you are toying with trouble with your power capacity versus your power generation.
  • You shouldn't need to see your power all the time, but this should now give you a fair heads up when you are in the realm of needing to think about it versus sometimes getting surprised. If our math is off on this some, then please just let us know.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

Version 0.917 (Hello Interface Clarity)

(Released October 5th, 2015)

• Fixed a bug where whenever you would click, the left sidebar's listbox would blink out of existence and then back.

• Fixed an issue where a number of "player buildings that do X" were not properly ordered alphabetically.

• If you are not in any sort of mode where right-click gets caught in order to exit you out of the mode, then the game now uses right-click open up the tile details window like middle-click or ctrl+click does.
  • Thanks to NullDragon for suggesting.

• Because of the recent increases to staffing needs, the amount of trash being produced skyrocketed. It is now modified to be 1/10th its previous values across the board.
  • Thanks to Rythe for reporting.

• Different international abilities are now targeted a bit more sensibly in the types of enemy buildings they will hit.

• Fixed an issue where the AngerOutlet image was missing.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the build menu was not going away when you went into battles or into battle consideration mode.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the dotted blue lines in the various grids showing up inconsistently and distractingly.
  • Thanks to Rythe for reporting.

• The inventory has been adjusted to be substantially more legible and not so over-tall on a per-row basis.
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where flying saucers always warped out when checked (they used to check for an active international incident, but since those were removed from the game...).
  • Now they never warp out before act 4.
  • And even then will only warp out if they're not in attack range (same territory or adjacent) of a non-ally.
  • Thanks to bobsky, gia, and others for inspiring this change.

• AIs/planet can no longer launch offensive saucer/monster groups before act 3.
  • And before act 3 the AIs can no longer launch defensive saucer groups unless they have <= 3 territories or it's in defense of their home territory.
  • Thanks to bobsky, gia, and others for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the "races cannot claim a territory adjacent to the player in act 1" logic wasn't being applied to all cases.
  • Thanks to ptarth and nas1m for reporting.

• The services with lists of buildings-that-can-help on the services window now show those lists on the problem tooltips elsewhere.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the string for discover-all-races conditions showed a zero instead of the number of living races.
  • Thanks to Smithgift for reporting.

• There is now an Industrial Espionage international ability that commercial offices have.

• Holo Resorts now have a Holo Tourism international ability that they can use against other races (which view it as a positive thing even though it might distract them a bit).

"Building Services Planning" Window

• Added a new "Building Services Planning" window, which clicking on the services leaf/warning now brings you to.
  • It and the existing services window have buttons for going to each other.
  • It has one row for "global" and one row for each territory you own.
  • It has one column for each service that can go in the service window.
  • The cells are red for errors (actual shortages, compared with what's under construction), orange for warnings (potential near-term shortages), white for ok, and gray for "no need, no provision".
    • With tooltips on the cells for more info, where those fields had tooltips previously.
  • Thanks to gnosis, gia, and Rythe for inspiring this.

• The problem bar errors icon can now be split into an errors icon and a warnings icon if both are present.

All-New Bottom Left HUD

• The entire bottom and left parts of the hud have now been combined into one new bottom-left area.
  • The new approach is way prettier (although the graphics are still temporary there except for some of the icons), and it's much easier to find what you want.
  • This also includes a new way of finding buildings, which is by function or by simple alphabetical name, as well as some sub-groupings by specific purposes. Far, far less hunting around for things.

Version 0.916 (Money-Grubbing Citizens)

(Released October 3rd, 2015)

• Fixed a bug where resources that increased services provided instead increased need, and those that reduced need instead reduced provided. Eep!
  • Thanks to Rythe, ptarth, and Cinth for reporting.

• 10 more decorations for the savanna have been added in order to make those feel more varied, since again those are one of the most common "big swathes of empty area" terrains otherwise.

• The amount of building services needed at buildings was previously tied pretty directly to the amount of staff that the building needed. This was great at one point, but when the staffing needs increased in the last version that got very out of kilter.
  • Now the staffing levels are separate from this, and the building service needs are back to their previous levels.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The various sea buildings are now immune to limestone collapse, because that was really odd.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• When you start the game and it requires techs from a later act to be unlocked in order for you to get a specific building, it now just unlocks the tech in question, not their prerequisites also.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions where all of the techs in the tree were showing as fully lit up if their act was unlocked, rather than just the ones that were directly able to be researched without any prerequisites.

• When the game has given you a tech early, but not its prerequisite grandparents or great-grandparents or whatever, previously it would just allow you to research that tech based on the parents being researched. Now the entire tree back to the last "grandparents of whatever order" that have no parents must all be researched.

• Added "Unemployed Overage" to the things that can show up on problems bar / services screen.

• Moved Housing, Food, Water, and Power off the top bar (where they were always shown) to the problems bar where they are only show when they are problems (also added to the services screen).

• The overlays and settings buttons have been moved up to the very top bar (just up some pixels in their current location) instead of being in their own little hang-down that was unique to them.

• Fixed all of the mislabeled event icons from the spreadsheets that were being imported.
  • Thanks to Cinth and ptarth for reporting.

• Hundreds of new rows from the service shortages definitions have now been integrated into the game.

• The science icon is now once again shown on the top bar (been a while since that last was true), and thanks to all the added room we now have up there it actually shows the full name of the tech, too.

• The cost of excess unemployed citizens has shifted to a progressive cost structure.
  • The first 2k over cost you 5 per citizen.
  • Then next 2k cost you 8 per.
  • Then next 2k cost you 12 per.
  • Then next 2k cost you 17 per.
  • Then next 2k cost you 22 per.
  • Anything above that (10k total) costs you 30 per.
  • Previously it was just a flat 20 per. That was more than a bit on the steep side when you were just slightly over, and then way too cheap if you were hugely over.

• The expenditures from your prior turn were not previously being recorded in your income properly.
  • They were not showing up in your tooltip over the currency, nor were they showing up in your number over the crown balance.
  • However, it was showing properly on the accounting report, and these other things now use that data.

• There is now a "cost per citizen" that goes up progressively as you gain more citizens.
  • The first 1k citizens cost you 1 crown per citizen.
  • The next 1.5k are 2 per.
  • The next 2.5k are 3 per.
  • The next 2.5k are 4 per.
  • The next 2.5k are 5 per.
  • Next 10k are 6 per.
  • Next 10k are 7 per.
  • Next 10k are 8 per.
  • Next 10k are 9 per.
  • Next 10k are 10 per.
  • Next 20k are 11 per.
  • Next 25k are 12 per.
  • Next 50k are 13 per.
  • Next 75k are 14 per.
  • Next 75k are 16 per.
  • Next 250k are 20 per.
  • Next 250k are 26 per.
  • Next 250k are 34 per.
  • Anything above a million is 44 per.
  • Does this rate eventually get pretty extortionate? Sure. But presumably by the time you have citizenry that large, you have some majorly upgraded buildings, and you're thus pumping out a lot more than the baseline crowns. The balance on this in the very late game may or may not be good, but thus far loading up existing savegames in the early to early-middle game it looks a bit lightweight in terms of cost. Which is probably for the best, all told, but we'll see.
  • This is likely not to be the only shift needed, but it's a good start to this: https://arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=17653
  • Thanks to Peons, ptarth, Cinth, and gnosis for reporting and discussing.

Version 0.915 (Happy Air, Happy Wallet)

(Released October 2nd, 2015)

• Updated the services window's logic for the Trash, Bodies, and Pollution "pseudo services" to have something for the other columns, where applicable.

• "Very Poor Commerce" that Peltians and so forth have now is only a 0.6x multiplier rather than 0.1x. Same thing with industry output for the Fenyn.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The income of all the restaurants had not been properly reduced in the prior version to match the other crown producers. Fixed.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• The amount of income directly generated by fishing wharves has been cut further, because with the multipliers those things are just plain old cash cows still.

• All sources of crowns except the lander itself have had their income levels increased by 3x.
  • It may need to go further, but we'll take it one thing at a time for now.
  • Thanks to ptarth and Cinth for suggesting.

• The various bonuses and penalties to logging, mining, and fishing based on terrain types are now more skewed negative.

• Pollution no longer causes brownout-like effects on buildings in territories. Pollution is just far too much in flux and too capricious for this to be viable.
  • Now pollution instead has a much smaller effect in general unless it gets really really bad. You have a reduction in crowns and science and a few other things generated in a territory, basically.
  • So if you want to have a non-primary territory that is a smog-hole, then by all means you can. You can even intentionally generate a ton of smog that drifts over to sensitive races like the Fenyn, and down their productivity indirectly by that.
  • Generally speaking you're advised to keep your main territories where you're doing your main business pretty smog-clear, but it's not some dire problem like trash or dead bodies anymore.
  • Thanks to ptarth and gnosis for inspiring these changes.

Version 0.914 (The Diseased, The Unemployed, And The Balanced)

(Released October 2nd, 2015)

• The Thoraxians no longer claim territories with their tunnel entrances or tunnel hubs. This was really letting them take over the map.

• Underground buildings that are not district centers are no longer able to hang on to territories for their owner even if they are primarily military in function.
  • If you still see this, please do let us know!

• 19 more event icons are now complete. That's all of them!

• The Andors now have their own set of terrain types for the first time.

• Given how common grass is on most of the maps, and how barren it can be, there are another 11 little "decoration" images that now go in there, and help to make it more unique.

• Burlusts no longer cause desert to spread around themselves, and Andors no longer cause forests to spread around themselves, and the Fenyn now cause their own terraformed terrain to appear around themselves (like the thoraxians do) rather than jungles.

• Fixed a bug where the recently-added "invisible until act" and "invisible after act" fields for international abilities were reversed in meaning, leading to the default values of 0 and 10 causing all such abilities to never appear.
  • Thanks to gnosis for reporting.

• Changed the "unclaimed bodies cause brownouts" logic to check against the number of unclaimed bodies after the last cremation/burial cycle (only happens during interturn), rather than the precise current number (which may be all over the place, especially for the mid-battle brownout checks that happen after each action).
  • Thanks to gnosis for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the city/territory/building multipliers to building service/need from event persisting effects were never cleared before recomputation, causing them to re-multiply across multi-turn effects, and for the last multiplier to remain in place after the last persisting effect went away.
  • If you load an old save with this problem it won't go away immediately, but it will clear out across the next interturn.
  • Thanks to Peons and gnosis for the report and saves.

• Fixed a bug where the show-advanced toggle on the building details window would not give the math on building service provision/need.

• Fixed another bug in computing resource multipliers where it was specifically going one past the array of multipliers, causing an array index out of range exception.
  • Thanks to Cinth for the reports and saves.

• The game now specifically only gives you at most three territories to choose from for your lander (previously it could be more than that).
  • It also won't prevent landing in those due to the size of the territory (that should already be a certain minimum size due to logic for picking the territories)
  • Thanks to rjblackwolf for reporting.

• When showing tooltips/details-window info on a building type, rather than an actual building, it now factors in the minimum level for that building based on your market items.
  • Thanks to nas1m and gnosis for suggesting.

• Reactivated the Is-Under-Construction-Prediction logic when showing the details-window info on a building under construction, so the stats actually show up.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Now when you produce a market item during the interturn, a right-sidebar notification is logged telling you that item's name and what building type it's for.
  • If multiple market items are produced in one interturn, it just gives you one notification telling you about all of them, to avoid the spam that otherwise happens.

• Now when a race is immune to an international ability of yours, that checkbox no longer shows up on the stance-setting screen, and mousing over the cell shows a tooltip about it being immune/uninterested.
  • There's similar handling for negative abilities vs races you're formally allied with.

• Your max population is now limited to your number of jobs plus your extra citizen capacity.
  • Your extra citizen capacity is 100 + the total extra citizen capacity from your buildings.
    • Lager Houses give you 5.
    • City parks give you 2.
    • Holo Resorts give you 20.
  • This capacity, and whether it is currently limiting your max population, is in the max pop tooltip along with the other limitations.
  • If you somehow have more people than this limit allows (for instance, if you just lost a lot of buildings that provide this capacity), the people won't die like when housing/food/water is exceeded, but they will cost you 20 crowns per turn.

• Now if an one of your international abilities is only available from buildings that you have not unlocked and that cannot normally be unlocked until a later act, they are not shown on the stance screen.

• Now the info on the racial relations tooltips about what a race fears, desires, or who they want to genocide is initially shown as "Unknown" (if there's anything to know).
  • But you can use the Spy For Fears And Desires ability to discover these things, for a price.

• Now that all the event icons are in place, the game will fuss at us if it's missing an icon -- meaning that something on the spreadsheet had an incorrect definition.

• The amount of building needs increase based on higher levels of buildings is now lower than the rate of increase of the services provided by a substantial margin. So over time, your services-providers gain an advantage over the service-consumers, which is useful as a way to weather later-game events and building destruction in combat, etc.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring this change.

• Some of the building service provided and needed amounts were pretty extreme for some of the races. Like 10x from the Krolin for shopping and medical provided, for instance.
  • That's something that really wrecks balance in a way we're not keen on. These numbers have been made substantially less extreme, while still keeping to the same spirit of things.
  • In fact the whole "bonus to service provided based on your race" multiplier has been taken away, because that just got confusing in general. There were also already bonuses or penalties to how much a race needs of a service, so we just adjusted those instead where needed.
  • Overall this balance feels more consistent while still having some racial uniqueness. The main racial uniqueness in regards to services are the races-specific services that pop up in later acts, anyway.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Commercial Offices no longer require computing power (that was an oops that it got left in).

• Fixed a localization error on food debuffs from events.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• On the tile details window, the description text is no longer crammed up against the scrollbar.

• On the tile details window, the buildings that it is possible for philosophariums, etc, to upgrade are now all shown in the list.

• A number of buildings no longer have possible upgrades to their minimum level by market item types.
  • This helps to focus the upgrades where they are actually needed.

• The descriptions for the various market-item-type-creators now explain what they do and why you want them. This is a huge improvement in clarity, because previously you would pretty much have no idea!

• Coastal defense now costs almost twice as much in science to unlock.

• The three disease-warding buildings have been moved forward from act 4 to act 1 instead. This lets you actually defend against diseases in a timely fashion. This was coming way too late, previously.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• In act 1, you now cannot be struck by diseases of severity greater than 10 (that's most of them).
  • In act 2, it's 20 as the cap.
  • In act 3, 50 is the cap.
  • After that, be ready for anything.
  • This keeps you from getting hit with deadly plagues early in the game, while still letting you potentially deal with some milder diseases that you now should have the tools to fight off. But it keeps the potential of mega-outbreaks later on in particular. And for those players who don't take proper notice of the early diseases and prepare themselves at least some, the results could be catastrophic.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

Massive Crown Generation Rebalance

• Civic Centers no longer generate crowns. That was just a bridge too far, evidently.
  • Also, the amount of extra crowns generated by your lander as you claim new territories has dropped dramatically: it now goes up by 250 per tier rather than 500. So it maxes out at 2000 instead of 3500.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Repair crews and construction crews also no longer generate crowns. Thematically these are cost centers, not profit centers.

• The amount of crowns generated on a building per staff at the building has been seriously re-evaluated.
  • We thought about moving to a services-provided model, and might still do that if it turns out we have to, but it looks so far like the two ideas are equivalent: you need citizens and all the services that go with them in order to staff a building to make money. And that's easier to keep track of.
  • The problem previously seems to have been that it was possible for a given citizen to add disproportionate amounts of money to the overall income of your empire for their efforts in some cases. In the case of small shops, for instance, those were generating 33 crowns per citizen! That's crazy when a lot of other buildings generate less than 1 crown per citizen.
  • Therefore, the following changes have been made in a first-pass balance attempt to get things evened out:
    • Small shops:
      • Now cost 1/2 the amount to create and 1/2 the construction complexity.
      • Previously generated 400 crowns off the work of 12 staff, but now generate 150 crowns off the work of 45.
    • Shopping Malls:
      • Now have 1/2 the construction complexity.
      • Previously generated 1600 crowns off the work of 110 staff, but now generate 1600 crowns off the work of 400.
      • This is a very slightly worse deal than small shops, but the amount of land area it takes up is VASTLY lower, and the power efficiency is also better.
    • Stock exchanges still generate 14 crowns per citizen, but they are now limited to one per territory. Seems a good tradeoff with them in particular.
    • Commercial Offices:
      • Previously generated 800 crowns off the work of 80 staff, but now generate 800 crowns off the work of 300.
      • Yes this makes them worse than small shops in some respects -- in terms of crowns generated per citizen -- but they are vastly more effective in terms of crowns generated per tile. Also they will have an international ability that is useful that small shops do not have.
    • The various resource gatherers now all require much less staff, giving them an exciting 5 crowns per staff generated. But you can't place these just anywhere you want, and if they get destroyed after the resource under them is gone, you can't rebuild them.
    • The bonus from fisheries to fishing wharves is now 1.2x instead of 1.5x.
    • The Greed Race Theming Type now only provides 1.25x instead of 1.5x.
    • The boost to crown production from buildings gaining higher experience levels is now smaller.
    • The fishery now generates 1/5th as many crowns as before.
    • Fighting arenas now require 136 staff for 612 income rather than 82 for 1400 income.
    • Opera Houses now require 80 staff for 360 income rather than 56 for 400 income.
    • History Museums now require 16 staff for 72 income rather than 30 for 200 income.
    • Solar collectors now generate only 1/25th of the crowns they previously did (1 and 2 respectively). That's next to nothing, but it comes free in terms of staffing, so don't knock it. ;)
    • Seaports now generate some income directly (2 crowns per staffer), whereas previously they generated none.
    • Thermal strip mines now generate 900 crowns with 214 staff, rather than 600 with 54.
    • Lumber Mills now generate only 100 crowns with 46 staff, rather than 400 crowns with that same staff.
    • Logging camps now generate only 95 crowns with 38 rather than 200 with that same staff.
    • Factories now generate 2200 crowns with 600 staff rther than 900 crowns with 175 staff.
    • Chemical plants now generate 110 crowns with their 48 staff, rather than nothing with the same staff.
    • Fuel mixing tanks now generate 138 crowns with their 64 staff, rather than nothing with the same staff.
    • Philosophariums now generate 40 crowns with 40 staff rather than 0 with 140 staff.
    • Philosophariums now generate 40 crowns with 40 staff rather than 0 with 140 staff.
    • Broadcast Stations now generate 92 crowns with 57 staff rather than 0 with the 140 staff.
    • Literati Societies now generate 60 crowns with 30 staff rather than 0 with the 100 staff.
    • Computing Facilities now generate 45 crowns with their 32 staff, rather than nothing with the same staff.
    • Banks now generate 400 crowns with their 38 staff, rather than 1000 with the same staff.
      • This is still a crazy good deal, but they are now limited to 1 per territory.
      • Their construction cost has also dropped from 12.5k to 8.5k.
  • Thanks to ptarth, Peons, and crazyroosterman for reporting.

Version 0.913 (Hotfix)

(Released October 1st, 2015)

• The lander now provides 3000 free pollution cleaning for the territory it is in, and the cost of the hazmat buildings has been cut in half.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the scrollbar showing up under the left sidebar box all the time in the last version.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• City parks no longer generate trash (oops).
  • Thanks to gnosis for reporting.

• Removed all of those new building per-territory caps from the prior version.
  • Thanks to Peons and ptarth for suggesting.

• Cut the construction complexity of prisons down to about a third of their prior value.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where pollution shutdowns were happening even when the pollution count in a territory was supposedly fine. It was using different math for the two checks (interface and disabling) by accident.
  • Thanks to Peons for reporting.

Version 0.912 (Act II, Pollution, Blueshirts V2)

(Released October 1st, 2014)

• 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 and ptarth 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.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where buildings were not gaining EXP.
  • Thanks to nas1m, Peons, ptarth, and zebeast45 for reporting.

• Litter and unclaimed bodies now have a function again; they work rather like power brownouts, shutting off buildings at random with junk piling up if you don't have sufficient capacity.

• Now if you enter attack-consideration mode before act 4, it pops up a one-time warning from the planet.

• The International Relations window now has a button in the bottom center that you can click to open a new "Key Messages" screen which has records of tutorial-esque messages (currently that's only the Act introduction and the planet's warning about attacking).

• Act 2 now has objectives:
  • Discover all races.
  • Examine X natural wonders, where X varies from 4 to 75% of the world's total, depending on circumstances.

• Fixed a bug where the HasItemCount and HasSubItemCount preconditions were never being satisfied.
  • Thanks to Peons for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where the HasSubItemCount precondition did not inherit HasItemCount's place in the "is this met?" logic, and thus was never actually checked, just assumed to be true.
  • Thanks to Cinth for the report and save.

• Changed the BuildingsPerOther precondition to always require at least one building of that type, even if you have no other buildings.
  • This prevents an act-completion goal using only this from automatically completing instantly; though it's probably better to not have this be a sole precondition for an Act 1 objective anyway.
  • Thanks to ptarth and rjblackwolf for reporting.

• All techs from the next act are now visible on the tech tree, just grayed out.
  • Thanks to darkarchon and Taikei no Yuurei for inspiring this change.

• The art for 11 more event icons is now complete. Only 9 left to go!

• The display of the population now has the max number showing in the little space above it, with a percentile there.
  • This way it doesn't bleed over into the power display when you hit 5 digits of population, and it's quicker to see what your population percentage is.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Pollution can no longer directly kill population.

• Pollution Cleaner Strength Per Tile has again become Pollution Cleaner Strength, and its effect is spread across the territory. The strength of the hazmat was increased from 300 => 12000 to hopefully keep pace with this.
  • Since this makes the concept of "net pollution" basically meaningless (with generation happening per-tile, and cleaning happening across the territory in a non-predictable distribution), the net-pollution overlays have been removed. Add in the wind-drift of previously generated pollution, and the net numbers don't mean much at all.
  • For every 1000 units of pollution in a territory, one building in it will randomly brownout.
  • Thanks to Taikei no Yuurei, gnosis, ptarth, Cinth, and nas1m for inspiring these changes.

• At the beginning of Act 3, genocidal races will pick another living, non-player, non-thoraxian, non-spire race as their target.
  • If that target is ever destroyed after that point, and the genocidal race is still undecided on alliance, the genocidal race will permanently ally with you.
  • Their target is noted on their tooltip in the international relations screen.

• Added expatriate housing shortage, prison cell shortage, and neural implants needing repairs to the list of things checked for the top HUD's "problem bar" and the building services screen.
  • Also, these now actually have negative-consequences events that get triggered by them, unlike previously (an oversight).

• A ton of buildings now have per-territory construction count limits. These limits are not set in stone in terms of what the final numbers will be, but they seem to be a pretty good first guess.
  • The overall idea here is that basically any given territory "can only support" a certain amount of a type of building. Which seems pretty reasonable in a lot of thematic respects.
  • Functionally speaking, this still gives you a lot of latitude in how you construct things -- or at least that is the idea -- but it prevents the excesses of spamming certain things in a single territory at least.
    • The rationale there partly being that, okay, if you want to spam stuff in that volume you can do it, but you're going to need to control an increasing amount of territory to do so. You can't just build 30 small shops in your first territory and call it a day. The means of increasing your cap is readily available (capture more territories), but it's not completely trivial and it has some downsides (more to defend, need new infrastructure in each one, etc).
    • Lastly, this also does help to create a drive to expand without making individual territories bloody small. You might feel like you really want more hospitals or whatever, so you really want to expand. But at the same time you're able to do plenty of other things in your territory without feeling like in general you're strapped into a tiny box.

Version 0.911 (Act I Polish)

(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 (Now With Fewer Bugs)

(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