Another month is over and Alpha 22 is ready for you. In short:
- Emission levy to balance global pollution
- New take over rules
- New preview images in tech menu
- Harvesting forests and mining rocks earns goods
- Cold temperatures reduce the harvest of your farms
- Changed savegame directory structure
- Porting to MonoGame prepared
- Bugfixes and balancing …
Emission Levy
The emission levy (as shown in the image above) is a new rule introduced to add some fairness to the aspect of global pollution. Once the climate balance of the planet falls into negative, the companies with high emissions have to pay charges to the companies whose emissions are below the average. A good incentive to reduce emissions.
New Take Over Rules
The last alpha version 21 introduced to possibility to take over opponent cities by buying 50% or more of their taxes. We have collected your feedback and added our own ideas to further refine this.
The value of a colony itself is now much higher to make sure freshly build colonies are worth more than 5-10% shares. Additionally we changed the rules for watchtowers (!):
- A watchtower that has no connection to a colony center will be lost. This can happen when (A) an opponent takes over a colony or (B) a connecting watchtower is destroyed.
- Watchtowers that have no owner and are adjacent to your colony can now be taken over by paying some money.
This makes the whole process of taking over opponent colonies a bit more interesting and challenging.
New Preview in Tech Menu
All buildings and their upgrades have received new preview images that are show when hovering them in the tech menu.
Harvesting Forests & Mining Rocks
With the new version you no longer earn money when harvesting forests. Instead you receive goods every tick until you cancel the harvest process or the forest is uprooted.
This is also the case for rocks. Mining them now also gives you goods that can be used by your population.
Important: Harvesting forests with the chainsaw tool and blasting rocks will give you only a part of the goods and you will need a storage to keep them, because everything is earned at once.
Influences of Temperature
The temperature of a planet field is shown at the bottom left of the screen in the field info panel. Farms and some forest types are affected by cold temperatures. The following screenshots shows an industrial farm that was build on a field with a temperature of -8°C. This extremely reduces the amount of food produced, as shown in the message panel.
Changes to Savegame Directory Structure
We have simplified the directory structure of savegames (left old, right new). When you start the new released version of Imagine Earth everything should be changed automatically. However, it’s always possible that something goes wrong. If savegames are missing please check the directory structure and write a support request to support@imagineearth.info.
MonoGame Portation
Imagine Earth has been developed using Microsoft XNA – an easy game framework that is no longer in active development. Luckily members of the XNA community started to develop MonoGame which now can be used as an open source replacement. This makes it a lot easier for us to find bugs and enhance the performance of Imagine Earth (e.g. by using DirectX 11). In addition it enables us to port Imagine Earth to other platforms, though this is not something we plan to do at the moment.
Long story short: During the last weeks a lot of time went into porting Imagine Earth to MonoGame – especially sounds and music. Since a new technology might also introduce new bugs we will start a public test in the next days. Stay tuned if you are interested in helping us to make sure everything runs smooth.