Greetings Space Colonists,

we hope you are all well and ready? We have the next update ready for you! While summarizing the new features and changes to the interface, world, and game mechanics, I realized that #65 is probably the most comprehensive update in Imagine Earth’s Early Access history, and will remain so as Imagine Earth comes out in a month and a half as version 1.0 and exits Early Access!

Good Bye Early Access

Who would have thought that, to myself these words seem quite unreal and strange after almost seven years of EA. First of all, thank you for your interest and support over all these years! You have made the continuous independent development of this unusual global building and economic strategy game with environmental and climate simulation possible.

Price Increase

Of course, as we approach the final release of the game, it’s worth mentioning that we’ll be ending the Early Access discount for backers and early birds in a week after update #65. The price of the game will increase to $24.99/€ But this has been thought of for years and is quite common and will not happen before Thursday 4/23/21. Those who grab it by then will save themselves the 25 % increase in the full price. But we’re convinced that after 7 years of 1-2 month updates Imagine Earth has reached a quality, depth and maturity we can be proud of and which justifies a new price. Nevertheless, of course we understand the following question:

What Else is There to Come?

But as you might have guessed, it doesn’t end there. This update boasts an almost endless list of fixes and tweaks, but since the last update we’ve been working on quite a few other innovations besides the ironing. The final release will include a brand-new feature, the World Congress, which forces the various corporations to the negotiating table, where they must work together to negotiate measures against climate and environmental destruction. As a game mechanic, this strengthens the interaction between the corporations and also the already established diplomacy system, since the negotiations have a direct impact on international relations.

Final Release Features

The World Congress

The World Congress is in the making and will be ready for release End of May, it is where the amount of redistribution between sustainable and exploitative corporations will take place in the future. The congress will also be a democratic body in which all factions have voting rights corresponding to their share of a planets population. In the future, taxes on resources and trade will also be decided there, the revenues of which will flow into a World Fund from which important investments can be made. In addition, this body with global authority can also decide on penalties for corporations that have sabotaged or harmed others.

Emissions Trade

We remain committed to delivering an authentic environmental simulation with Imagine Earth. To do this, we have recently revolutionized the emission trade that exists in the game. For this update, we have simply reduced the redistribution, because the previous solution made farming unprofitable. As a result, the game has regulated away the climate problem by making all corporations go bankrupt due to overly high flat fees. For the final release version there will be a new system for trading emission rights, only the share of the world population decides how much greenhouse gases a faction may blow into the air.

Content of This Update

UI Optimizations

• The influence of buildings and other effects they had in a certain radius are now visualized with dashed outer borders instead of colored field markers.
• If one of the groups has not landed yet, it has been shown as failed / eliminated in the Victory Panel so far.
• Show loading animation enlarged and in the center of the screen.
• When you change the game speed, the game fades in time display.
• In the final screen of a failed mission, the title and menu ring were missing.
• Correction: The button for landing permission button activates the placement of City Center again.
• If you now open the research panel or the technology menu, you will receive clear introductory texts that explain the playful function of the interface.
• Navigation panel: Show own cities – No. Cities of other factions: Show names only when hovering.
• Icons of other factions and units are displayed permanently again.
• Quick actions overlay smileys to show quality of life from now on.
• There were just too many smileys over cities trying to visualize the quality of life of balanced districts.
• Unit Uplink: Ads were not centered over them.
• Previously her already 20% field pollution prevented the construction ring from opening on this field.
• Faction and trade panel was re-centered.
• Tool ring closed again for traders when clicked from further outside.
• Fixed 11 different graphic problems on the UI.

World and Balancing

• Towers and research districts now clearly indicate with a bright light if they have active laser or pulse cannons installed for defense.
• Contamination icons are more important than inefficiency icons.
• Repair icons are more important than inefficiency icons. Also so you can see the rebuild tool in case of destruction.
• Strange deductions were displayed in the ring menu for districts with optimal quality of life.
• There is now only a maximum of 3 Xrathul, Assimilators or Pirates at the same time.
• Assimilators now also attackable with fire, but this has only weak effect.
• Prevent the opposing factions from spamming the player with diplomatic messages and alliance offers.
• Warehouses and towers needed a revamp of the method that dynamically lets you drive out of the ground when upgrades are made.
• The same, broken method had prevented missiles from neatly riding up from the silo in the Space Port when they were finished building. Which made them virtually invisible to players, making mission completion visually difficult.
• If you had taken over a faction, a city, so far this collected the victory point for it.
• The mood of the city is now saved.
• Fire particle effect was reduced from 9×2 to 4 emitters. In addition, it now looks visually reduced so that you can still see something on the planet below.
• When jumping to a custom city, do not open the tool ring.
• Damn, all planets had ring?! How long has that been the case?
• Field marker recolored the colors of the other markers every time.
• Oceanic water surface was too crinkly.
• Underwater objects were sometimes faded out too early.
• Titanium mesh was not set directly.
• Titanium asteroids on Tuto removed.
• Some units were rendered gray.
• Camera movements of cutscenes de-jerked.
• Terrain-stoneyness locked icon added.
• Trader spaceships – animation went crazy when hovering.

Complete Playtest

• Mission Tuto: bars in the supply capsule were missing.
• Planet Rounos: Joe Dectow’s AI built strange things and sometimes just didn’t do anything it was supposed to.
• Planet Bora – Planetary shield was displayed above all pyramids.
• Planet Edora – The mission got stuck at the end sequence.
• New dialogs that are important to the story can no longer be pushed away as easily as before. As a result, fewer details and info are now lost unintentionally.
• Completion screens for successfully completed missions no longer overlap.
• Various fixes for bugs in the missions Joma, Lorian and Magni, which sometimes made them rarely or not at all playable.

AI Balancing

• In the future, the AI will be prevented from repeating friend requests. Until now, if you were too nice to them, they would literally bug you with alliance offers.

Game Setup UI

• A faction says “Hello” succinctly when you select them.
• Do not show Speaker in Game Setup Editor menus.
• New yellow Okay Button when you are in the options for setting up a custom game on a single planet for competition and endless play mode.
• The number of research licenses is adjustable.
• We moved the UI a bit to the right, so that you can see the place behind menu and character.
• Minimum and maximum planet temperatures were swapped.

Sound Optimizations

• World Sounds, Spoken Language and UI Sounds are now separate options. So in addition to the music, everything can be beautifully fine-tuned for individualized sonic enjoyment of Imagine Earth.
• Pirates, Xrathul, Uplinks and other merchants now have default greetings that come whenever you click on them.
• “Plink” loading sound built out at the beginning of the game because proven to be annoying.
• Two different, new voice announcements when you launch into the main menu.
• The sound effects in the UI now sound more impressive than ever.
• Volume of speakers turned down so they no longer overdrive.
• Sound overload removed when you first start the custom game setup.

List of building panels

• Cleaning tab – move nuclear contamination to the bottom because you can’t do anything anyway.
• Various Highlight and Comfort tweaks.

Resource panels

• Population dropdown now includes extensive indication of when a new landing permit will be issued.

Fixes

• You could blithely wander around the planet with a tower because you could move it within your own radius.
• It was possible to use the left gamepad stick or the mouse during cutscenes and crash the game.
• Switching to the new Unity version brought illustrious render and shadow effects. Hard to imagine such a thing.
• This was also possible in the planet view of the editor.
• Even with shortcuts you could open unwanted panels.
• If you pressed the restart button on a planet, you suddenly started with a different number of victory points.
• Button hover sound was often played twice.
• Disable UseGuiScale for all fullscreen panels and set optimal size.
• Whenever a faction said something and the speech bubble closed, the speaker and dialog popped up again briefly in the message panel.
• Object shadows (except planet): shadow casting for buildings, etc. can be deactivated.
• Strange striped graphic errors in the terrain display.
• Black holes – alpha color values of transparent terrain layers corrected.
• Planet in the main game menu does not rotate.
• Overglow Sunburn issue after update to Unity 2020.2.7f1.
• Sea surface hidden colony borders.
• Operation of different panels, hovering through on planets.
• UI was lost when loading during a cutscene.
• Quest icons flicker on planet silhouette.
• Space was cut off from certain camera angles.

World Congress & Space DLC

• Open Space Planet Menu.
• AI voice allocation on regularities.
• Use UI speaker with subpanel in voting.
• Open Space game concept – A new company in each round.
• Onboarding of Alex a new member of the Serious Brothers Clan.
• We developed a concept that in Open Space mode you have a space base where you can store items. These can then be taken in limited numbers in the capsule to the planet.
• We got the latest version of Imagine Earth running on Xbox One X and One S and to our delight, it runs very well on these consoles after some tweaks.
• Initial load times and GPU optimized on Xboxes.
• Xbox Achievements built in.
• Xbox Submission build and visualization.
• Created a whole mountain of Xbox Submission icons.

Dear planet colonizers, just in time for the Steam Winter Sale we can offer you a very special update as the new illustrator’s character design has been finalized and successfully integrated into Imagine Earh – Planetary Colonization. Please help us by testing the new features and give feedback into the Steam forum. If you like what we are doing think about reviewing the game on steam – this will help the project a lot!

New Factions and Campaign Characters

You’ll see them everywhere once you start the game. Design wise it’s another evolutionary step forward to the finishing line for version 1.0. Because these people are more likely to be taken serious and showing authentic emotions throughout the campaign.

Tension Tracks

Whenever there is danger in the air you will now also be able to hear it. When asteroids are raining down on your colonies or Xrathul aliens are closing in to feast on your colonies special tension tracks will be played that reflect these threats in the music of the game.

Performance Optimizations

On the CPU side of the game calculations the code has been enhanced and cleaned up for multi threading. That enhances the game speed quite a lot – especially for systems that have a slow CPU.

Load Planet Dialogs

These screens finally show all the information you need to know when loading a planet in competitions or in the workshop.

Game Pad UI Optimized

All interfaces for game pad controls have once again been overhauled to make it a joy using game pad controllers as well. The game features on Steam are now officially set to full game pad support. Since we haven’t received a lot of feedback on this yet, we’d be happy if you have a try and tell us what you think.

Interface Changes

The list of Buildings has been redesigned to make mass repairs, cleaning and upgrading of infrastructure in your colonies a piece of cake.

• Hide build menu info when cursor hovers planet behind it
• Hide buildings list until first city is built
• Reformatted descriptions in victory points overview
• Building list notifications centered between bookmarks and factions panels
• New startup logo

Fixes

• Fixed campaign research counter
• Fixed build panel still shows selected item, when another category is selected
• Sound volume should not affect music volume
• AI keeps asking for alliance
• Icon shown in wrong height over asteroids with rare resources
• Editor build menu can now be used with gamepad

Most of this winter’s update 62 for Imagine happens under the surface or in the controls and interfaces. There is a lot of fine-tuning to optimize the general usability of the game with gamepad and mouse alike. We also worked on the Xbox implementation and the translation. Yes, the characters in the game will soon not only look completely different, they will speak to you! But according to the season there are also some improvements on the ice planets, a new soundtrack and much more…

Light Curser

A simple and effective optical innovation is that the cursor now emits a light on the night side of planets. As half of the planet is logically in the dark and the landscape there is not very impressive without shadows from the sunlight, this light brings life to the dark. Water surface reflections and also gold, metal and crystals sparkle exactly where you look and act on the planet.

Heat Radius of Volcanoes Increased

Dormant volcanoes can be awakened with ideon bombs and thus heat up the landscape in order to be able to better grow food on icy planets, for example. For a while now, this can also be achieved with thermal generators. It was urgently necessary to increase the heat range of a volcano compared to that of a generator.

Brand New Ring Styles

The style of the construction and tool rings was adapted to each other and visualized in a cooler way. The information about the tools no longer overlays the navigation in the ring but is clearly arranged on the right side.

Winter Wonderland

The snow-covered landscape was optimized and embellished. Small but fine adjustments ensure that the landscape is still visible under the snow cover and that the structure of the surface is seen. Thus the snow cover also makes houses and plants even more recognizable.

New Character Design

Just to get you used to this quantum leap in character design, here is a preview of what the next update will bring. We found a talented illustrator and he redesigned all the characters and taught them how to talk in elaborate animations. We believe this will give a fundamentally new feeling to playing Imagine Earth.

Keyboard and Mouse Controls Info Optimized

We have also optimized the control display for mouse & keyboard control. On top of that there are a few handy new shortcuts.

New Soundtrack

Another new track has been added to the Imagine Earth soundtrack. Making the whole atmosphere of Imagine Earth more rich, symphonic and diverse.

New Languages

We added community translations for Polish and Japanese language. If you happen to speak one these languages please let us know how the quality is because we can’t check it ourselves.

Autumn Sale – 35% off now!

Gamepad Refinements

• Gamepad cursor with action icon for tool
• Delete mode für Editor planets
• Briefing/Goals/Planet info buttons
• Refined control of factions panel (bottom right)
• Refined gamepad control of button selection
• Directly close build ring

More Fixes

• UI problem in Inventory ring description
• Refined generation of fossils and resources on planets
• Fixed mood influence range of health district upgrade
• Fixed buildings sometimes showing with a delay after camera jumps
• Increased heating range of volcanoes in cold areas
• Build panel now shows building descriptions when no upgrade is hovered
• Reduced Xrathul bait crafting resources to three
• Improved AI abilities to defned against Assimilators and Xrathul

Hey, welcome, everybody! Finally another juicy release #60 has been finished and look what a catchy title it has! If you want to read more about the new traveling back in time laws in our “Imagine Universe” you should scroll down to “Planet Time Lines” in the Update Release Post. Eye candy of the month are the first scribbles of the brand new character redesign that has just begun. Apart from that a lot has happened under the hood again and in terms of game system optimizations and balancing. We always count on you when it comes to testing the new features in practical implementation. Try everything and tell us your opinion. We are happy to take up your wishes and ideas, what do you think Imagine Earth is missing most of all? But for now please enjoy Update #60,

Martin & Jens | Serious Bros.

Difficulty Levels

The selection of difficulty levels has been given an epic pop-up panel that clearly breaks down the characteristics of each level and also tells you what the positive effects it has on your high score.

Improved Buildings List

The new list of buildings from last update, still needed some adjustments to make it nail down its universal usability. The menu and the listing of functions, tabs and options are now rearranged and also visualized more stylishly.

Performance Optimizations

This is something that we have just started to consistently work on, until the final release of the game. With the new release we have tried to identify the biggest performance killers related to special units, e.g. like Assimilators or a lot of Xrathul ships.

Planet Time Lines

If you load an old savegame or restart the planet and then save it, all savegames who are lying in the future on that planet’s time line will be revoked as you obviously changed the past. This automatically prevents savegames with parallel time lines for the same planet from being created and cleanly breaks everthing down to one single, unique time line. No parallel universes or messy stuff like that.

If you are wondering now what this complex change is supposed to be good for at all, the following should be said. We wanted to make sure that the fate of a planet would play an important role, and that the player would always be able to return to the current state of the planet in order to develop their civilization or repair the environmental damage. At the same time, we didn’t want to trample on the luxurious freedom that a flexible savegame system provides. Don’t even try to guess how long we discussed to come up with this linear solution.

Progress Info in Campaign Screen

The new Progress completion box in the campaign galaxy map is more stylish and also contains the finished research as an achievable goal. Further exciting challenges will follow. For example, the mastered difficulty levels on the different planets will be counted from the next version on and will contribute to complete the overall score in the campaign.

Info Panel for Empty Fields

Even this feature might seem so trivial that one wonders why it is mentioned here. That’s also why it took us so long to realize that it’s missing. From now on a howered empty field gets an info panel as well as one with buildings or objects on it. Simply because there are so many interesting values that can be displayed to it. For example, raw and fossil material deposits were previously shown with field graphics, but these were never explained in words.

User Interface Optimizations

• Also rotate planet when dragging outside of the planet area
• Consistent UI back navigation
• Reworked pause visualization for icons
• Increased size of quest icons
• Display quest icons of progress icon
• Hide still active goals in quest goal overview

Character Redesign

Something is happening on this design front, I can only say. If you look at the picture above you might recognize the Midras aliens from the game and you have a look at how they might look like in the future. With the help of our new illustrator we are developing an amazingly vivid fresh style, which will be a quantum leap for the immersive look of the game.

Mechanics & Balancing

• Smoothened seismic activity of volcanoes and made it a bit more likely for some to erupt
• Forbid building city centers on asteroid impact fields
• No longer allow interaction with Illuminati camps after they have been destroyed

Coming Soon: Gamepad Support

Besides that we are currently preparing gamepad support for the game to properly support steam big picture and at some point also game consoles.

Greatings, space colony managers! We have a fine small update ready for you. Even though Martin is on parental leave at the moment and our new third man Rico is still in the getting into things, we were able to put some nice gameplay updates together for you. If you are still thinking about picking up Imagine Earth you can get it for 35% off at the Steam Summer Sale right now. As always we’d love to get your feedback on the new stuff and wanna know how the latest features work out.

Light Effects

There are now glaring light effects during spaceship landings, construction campaigns, demolition lasers and impulse cannons. But also repair actions, harvesting operations and for example rioting aliens cause colorfully illuminated buildings and areas in their vicinity. Of course, these are particularly impressive at night. Don’t worry, you can deactivate them in the options if it gets too much for your eyes.

New Storage Management

We have reorganized the organization of the stored resources. There are now clearer displays of how much storage space has been reserved for different things and how full the storage rooms actually are. The new structure of the buttons and bars also makes this much easier to understand.

Campaign Rating

To make the development of your company even more of a challenge, you will now compete in the ranking against 20 major corporations that you might know from well-known science fiction stories.
This is only a prelude to the leaderboards soon to be completely renewed. And to make them more readable. They belong to the oldest menus in the game and should be able to show even more rankings.

Improved Visualization

Improved visualization by coloring the fields for buildings with improved performance through optimal placement

Interface Redesign

Redesigned user interface with new titles a uniform position for the back button and more consitent menus.

Optimized Building Panel

An optimized building panel gives you more overview and control over all your colony buildings and enables you to bulk upgrade, clean and repair the most urgent cases.

Fixes

• Fixed fade to black transparency problems for panels and tooltips
• We fixed a rare bug that prevented you from getting a 2nd landing permission in the first mission.
• New translation for brazilian store texts
• Ingame time speed problem fixed
• Crash in stock panel
• Also many many UI fixes done

We’ve made a few tweaks for you that improve terrain, interface and shadow calculation in our global civilization builder. Read news in full detail on the Steam page of Imagine Earth. There’s also 35% off weekend sale until monday…

HBAO – Ambient Occlusion

First of all, you should notice more beautiful shadows in the game, which give the constructs, forests and objects more depth and also connect them to the environment and connect them better with the terrain. We were really looking forward to this quite classic technique called Ambient Occlusion when we switched from our homemade engine to Unity, but even they still had to integrate it into their brand new Universal Renderline.

Blueshift in the User Interface

We set out to change from the turquoise UI design to a bluer layout and to unify and standardize the colors in it. This of course serves the purpose of making the Global Colony Management Interface visually less distracting and peaceful. Some game menu elements have already been adapted, but the process is still ongoing.

Planetary Terrain Textures

Fixed severe Icon Bug

Thanks to our new, automated bug tracking system, it was quickly noticed that many players experienced a bug related to interacting with the new clickable event icons that we have thrown out in the last major update. Problem solved.

35 % Sale until this Weekend

In case you haven’t noticed we have the biggest discount sale ongoing on Steam until Monday! Time to grab a unique game about economic growth and climate crisis. If you feel like spreading the news, here is how we put it when trying to describe Imagine Earth briefly in public. Thanks for your support.

Imagine Earth puts the player in the position of a global economic player. He has to build up and supply his civilization, produce and trade goods into space and compete against other corporations. In order to preserve the environmental quality of life for his inhabitants and to avoid a global climate crisis, he has to find a balance between growth and sustainability.

Thanks for your support! We hope you enjoy the changes to Imagine Earth and let us know your ideas about them in the forums.

Enjoy playing and stay save, Jens and Martin

Dear space colonists, today we present our latest update for Imagine Earth – Planetary Colonization. Many improvements to the global management system allow you to keep track and control your complex and full-grown colonies and optimize the daily colonizing work on new planets. We would be happy if you test the latest features and give us your feedback and that you come to the forums and put your most desired features on the wishlist. Best regards, Jens and Martin.

P.S: We hope that you and your beloved ones are and stay healthy. Take care!

Great List of Constructs

The new building list represents an almost too modest revolution for total control over your global colonies. Here you get an overview of all buildings in your colony. You can sort them by productivity and condition and have them equipped with upgrades, repaired or cleaned. There is also a list of all resources that are located in your area and can be mined directly. In the city list all districts are listed and can be checked for their quality of life.

Release Date

What can I say, the veterans among you may already enjoy this as a running gag, but we have to postpone the final release of Imagine Earth 1.0 once again. We ask for your patience and understanding, as it is our main effort to make Imagine Earth really good and a smooth experience. The port to the Unity Engine went relatively well and was worth the work in every respect, but still took twice as much time as we had hoped for. As is often the case, the devil is in the details and there are a lot of game features that need to be balanced and interlinked.

Long story short: We postpone the release until September 2020. It is of course also in the true nature of this project that a global build-up game with economic strategy and authentic planet and climate simulation is a bit oversized for two developers. But we never lost motivation or faith in the core idea and the idealism that made this project so special for ourselves as well. The new date gives us a very generous amount of time to do fine tuning and add some final features. Of course you will always be able to play all finished progress immediately in early access and we will keep you informed on everything…

Remediation and Maintenance

You wished that we introduce the possibility of automatic cleaning of dirt and automatic building repair earlier in the game. The boss will always bring some construction kits for the cleaning center and the maintenance station at the end of the first missions. So they will also be better introduced by the story.

New Item: Propaganda Hack

With the new Propaganda Hack Item you can get the colonists of another faction to revolt. Using the hack will start an uprising in the selected district. This will cause a classic loss of tax revenue and spread to other parts of the city.

New Achievements

Need new challenges playing Imagine Earth? No problem, we have added three new achievements for you to earn. You can complete the mission on Udion Torix or win three competitions on Workshop Planets. One achievement can only be unlocked by building your own planet in sandbox mode.

Interact with Status Icons

This feature is a really practical thing. In the event of a fire, riot, incident or damaged building, you will now have a corresponding icon displayed above the building and you can click directly on it to perform the necessary action such as extinguish or repair. We’ve also unified how the icons above the buildings and units are displayed in the game.

Revised Gaia Graphics and Story

We have rewritten a part of the background story of Imagine Earth. Whenever you discover one of the Gaianic terraforming constructs like a temple or the citadel, the story of the Gaians continues to be told – an ancient race who were able to use and change the planetary force fields. As the game progresses, we will learn why they have left behind their advanced terraforming technology on so many newly discovered planets.
Note: In the preview version this is work in progress.

No More Research Limitations

Correctly read, we recently realized that we have long since developed our research system so comprehensively that we only need research budgets as a limiting factor in the campaign missions. From now on you can freely research what you need in freeplay and in competition mode. By building City Centers and Research Districts you can increase the efficiency of your research.

Prioritized Mining

One of those options where you wonder why they have not always been there. When all of your harvesting drones are busy, you can use this simple button to specify that the targeted resource be mined with priority, then a drone is removed from the most worthless resource that is currently being mined.

Jump to Native Twin Camps

As you probably know, the Rounosian Natives always live in twin camps. With this new button you can jump between them.

Switch Upgrades of Towers

Finally, it is also possible to convert the upgrades of towers, frontier buoys and research centers. So depending on the threat situation, energy shields, lasers or pulse cannons can be installed.

Domination Victory

You can now also win a competition when all other companies give up their colonies or are taken over.

Gameplay Improvements

• Allow to use piracy item on all opponent fields (not only warehouse)
• Allow to hack stock shares of competitors that are hold by other competitors
• Increased rocks, rare resources and deco elements for barren biome type
• Send drone to rebuild constructs
• Terraforming can make volcanoes erupt
• Allow spaceships (e.g. uplink) to land on forests
• Territory of other companies taken over by native camps is no longer considered an offensive act

Graphic Improvements

• Improved overall rendering performance (~10% FPS increase)
• Added sub meshes for big mountains that take multiple fields
• Reduced visibility of front clouds
• Custom selector visualization for ocean fields
• Improved visibility of colony borders at day

UI Improvements

• Show animation when new items are bought or received
• Increased size of bookmark and factions panels (top right and bottom right UI elements
• City bookmarks: Add icon for all your cities that have no bookmark
• Tool ring: Show which icon belongs to open sub panels
• Scan item: Show icons on top of possible fields
• Improved layout of dialogs
• Improved visibility of loading indicator

Fixes

• Fixed alignment of assimilators taking over cities
• Fixed niter-pumpkin graphics (depending on size)
• Fixed problems with too many pirates appearing in competition games