This month’s alpha release comes with a lot of useful changes to the user interface. It’s now a lot easies to understand what influences the resource production on a local and on a global level and to identify the biggest emission sources. In addition we added a new competition mode that introduces victory points to the gameplay.

Competition Mode

In the competition mode your goal is no longer to be the first to reach a defined population. Instead you have to earn victory points. As the following screenshot shows there are different ways to receive these points.

This allows you to use different strategies to win the game. You can try to maximize your population or you can try to maximize your money and buy points from the merchant. For the future we plan to add additional ways to earn points.

Reworked Menu

All game modes (Campaign, Free Play and Competition) are now available from the main menu. To load or continue a game you have to choose the game mode first – this especially helps to keep the load menu clear.

Emission Statistics

By clicking the global emissions display on the top right you get some details on the emission sources. Currently this is hard to understand and even a bit buggy. So Jens did a redesign of it that makes it a lot simpler and easier to understand. Have a look at the screenshot below.

On the first level it displays the current compensation of global emissions and the emissions caused by every player. You can drill down each of them to find out what type of building causes the most emissions. In the example my coal power plants cause 120 of 398 emissions which is more than a quarter.

Resource Statistics

Finally we had to rebuild the complete resource statistics, because they just didn’t work (and feel) right. There was simply too much numbers that made it almost impossible to understand what goes on. For example the following screenshot shows the food statistics – how much food is produced by your buildings and how much is consumed.

Production Details

The different things that influence the production amount of a building are now presented more clearly. The base production including upgrades is displayed blue. Bonus production (by ground types and influencing neighbor buildings) is displayed green and a decrease, for example by pollution, is displayed red.

That’s pretty much it. Packed with some bugfixes to the Bora mission all changes are now available through the early access version.