Dear Colony Managers,
prepare yourselves to build some beautiful ocean districts for your people! In addition there are loads of detail improvements that give the overall playability a huge boost! Mostly based on testing and your highly appreciated feedback. Special thanks to Johannes for improving our german translation!
TL;DR
- Display info icons during colony placement
- Trade discounts and surcharges
- Ocean district
- UI improvements for research, colony shares and workshop
- List of gameplay improvements
- New rendering system for buildings and world objects
Colony Placement
Placing a new colony or frontier building now displays icons on the surrounding fields. The represent the quality of the area by highlighting deserts, fields with high fertility, fossil or rare resources and more.
Trade Discounts
The price of resources and items always depends on who you are trading with. Space merchants and tech traders will charge a fee that makes buying more expensive and selling less lucrative. Natives and midras on the other side don’t know a lot about space market prices and often sell stuff very cheap.
Other colonists, finally, link their pricing to your diplomatic relation. This means it can be very powerful to have a good relation towards another company.
Ocean District
This new district is now made available in the Lorian mission.
The ocean district can be built on coast fields and the open sea. Districts have to be linked to others who connect with the shore.
Microplastic collectors clean the seas and recover goods by filtering floating plastic, other waste and impurities from the water.
Ocean thermal energy conversion uses the temperature difference between cooler deep sea and warmer surface water to meet part of the energy demand.
UI Improvements
Research
- Only display elements of buildings that are already available (the buildings don’t have to be licensed, though)
- Highlight research options by improved category: energy, food, goods, income, emissions
Colony Share Trading
- Take-over of a city no longer needs at least 50% of shares
- Clearly display the player’s stake in another colony
- Tooltip with transaction fee and expected dividend
Workshop
- Unite different item categories in single panel with scroll bars
Other UI Stuff
- Added “mission failed” dialog to competitions
- Highlight when an opposing faction is almost winning the competition
- “Back” buttons in game are now called “resume game” to make it more clear
- Infrastructure buildings now have gray icons
Gameplay
- In competition and free play other factions will no longer wait until you have placed your first city center
- Forests and other plants regrow much faster now after being harvested or burning
- Nitroskirlid-pumpkins grow bigger in most areas now
- Increased number of default tech licenses in competition and free play
Graphics & Tech
We have completely rewritten our rendering system for buildings and other world objects:
- Improved render performance
- Much nicer animations
- More powerful particle effects