Dear space pioneers, this update means a not inconsiderable revolution for the game. The characters in the game, which we already gave a complete makeover in the last update, learn to speak in this version. That’s easy to say, but it changes the gameplay of Imagine Earth in an incredible way. The talented voice actors we were able to hire give the characters a personality we never thought possible before, and condense the action of the campaign into an unprecedented adventure. We are overjoyed to have successfully completed this elaborate gameplay operation and hope you enjoy it. Replaying the game is more rewarding than ever because of the many improvements we have made in balancing, menus and performance. Give it a try and share your impressions and ideas with us.

You can listen to Alias new voice in the latest official trailer.

https://youtu.be/Kf_ApUXgMtU

Forest Ambient Sound

To increase the atmosphere of the game, we have added forest sounds, leafs rustling in the wind and birds chirping around you when you move the cursor over larger connected forest areas and zoom in on them with the camera. This soundscape will soon be expanded to include civilization noise, sounds from air cars and factories, ship horns and rotors that bring the world to life.

Harvesting Tool

We have revised the multi tools, with which you can perform actions like repairing or harvesting multiple times. Each tool now shows with icons on which fields it can be applied. Upgrading, repairing or cleaning buildings were already there and now we have also combined mining and harvesting operations in one handy tool. It replaces the previous deactivation tool, with which you could temporarily shut down production, because that was very rarely needed.

Technology Panel

Many of you missed the technology panel as it provides such a splendid overview for all available buildings and enables you to install upgrades to all of them. So we put it back in business and enabled gamepad controls as well.

Need for Speed

A lot more performance optimization has been done. More multi-threading to make use of available CPU cores and better distribution of logic calls to get rid of CPU usage peaks.

Cheers to the Winners

We have optimized the Victory Panel to more clearly communicate which faction is ahead in the race for planetary dominance.

List of Buildings

We have further optimized the building list of the global planetary management interface to get a targeted and faster overview of the infrastructure and to be able to react in a comprehensive and far-reaching way.

Everything at a glance

All strategic menus of the game are now united in the message panel, which is uniformly structured in mouse and gamepad control.

Ideon Goals Visualization

The indicator for the completed mission objectives and the Ideon captured on the planet are now also visible during the game.

Share Market Panel

The stock market menu has also undergone a visual overhaul, which is not only pleasing to the eye but also simplifies navigation with the game pad.

New Research Panel

The Research Panel has undergone an update that not only ensures that the upgrade descriptions have now all found a permanent place in the box at the bottom right, so they no longer obscure the navigation in the research grid. The system itself has also changed. To be able to research more than one thing at a time you have to build additional City Centers. Only the amount of research districts now regulates the efficiency or speed of research.

Translations

Big Asian language update! Imagine Earth is now available and playable in a proper simplified Chinese version as well as in Japanese and Korean. Have fun, spread the word.

Interface Changes

• Replaced “Imagine Float” font with “Sansation” for better multi-lingual support
• Gamepad: Display red cursor when something is not possible
• Introduced blur for tool ring when trading with other factions or space traders
• Hide city borders when switching planets
• Planet rotation in main menu
• More visible icons for scrolling in savegame menus
• Display forest debris when damaged by tornado
• Display highlight when game is paused

Fixes

• Renamed Illuminati to Illumati
• Reduced pollution by Fishery and Shellfish farm
• Fixed saving problems for sound settings
• Fertility Gaia power no longer causes creation of a desert somewhere and vice-versa
• Asteroid crater not visible after impact
• Fixed Xrathul vs. AI endless repairing of city centers
• Ideon sold not properly updated
• Each additional spaceport increases frequency of traders
• Don’t let pirates steal Ideon in campaign missions

Friends of planetary colonization, finally a new update is ready and delivers a big chunk of improvements. One of special importance is the integration of the gamepad control, for us the opportunity for a major overhaul of the whole interface. Controller support is important for the XBox version but would you use it on PC? Tell us how you think about it and what else could be tuned. Have fun reading and trying it out, here’s the direct link to the feedback forum.

Research System changed

No more research budgets are required to research in campaign. After the system of tokens and budgets was already switched off for other game modes, you can now finally do research in the campaign without having to wait for another budget. All you need are research facilities to drive the process forward. City centers also come with a built in research unit. Of course you can still buy and sell budgets, they are now called licenses and activate researchable options directly.

Ocean Sound

We installed a new sound system to bring atmosphere and plausible sound backgrounds to the planets, so that the environment feels acoustically richer. First there is an ocean sound, which now increases in volume the more oceanic fields are nearby. Next, we will apply this to city and forest sounds, for example.

Gamepad Control Prototype

We have invested an amazing amount of work in the implementation of a game pad control system so that the game can be released on the Xbox console at the end of January. Because of the use of rings and radial menus from the beginning, the whole thing turned out to be very intuitive and if you know the right places, it works surprisingly faster than the mouse control. But as the headline makes clear, this is all prototype. We would like to hear your opinion about how the game pad control feels in this first version.

New menu button font

One advantage of the whole game pad conversion was that we redesigned a lot of buttons and menu structures to be more readable and accessible. For example we found old load game menus that were long forgotten over time.

Tool Tips in Tool Rings

Previous tool tips have often covered the control ring half or almost completely. Therefore, the tools with name, price and description have been moved to the far right.

Soundtrack

Three new synphonically composed music pieces underline the flow of Imagine Earth in the new version. It is remarkable how much the music adds to the overall atmosphere of the game.

Colony Rating Revised

The dustiest menu of this upgrade was the Colony Rating, so it really deserves an all around makeup. New colors and functions. A division is now called “Commodities and Capital” and counts the liquid capital of a company and also the market values of its buildings there and includes them appropriately in the share value.

Joma Mission refurbished

What should not be missing in the game development is that one of the missions of the story-based campaign needs an update as game features and controls have evolved. This is always a great way to give the mission a refreshing touch.

Buildings List Panel

We delivered this area with a small but crucial weakness in the last update. You couldn’t click on the upgrade buttons and couldn’t jump directly to the buildings. This is now history and the control has been optimized a lot. The tab for dirt and the condition of the buildings has been split into two separate tabs where you can now also directly initiate a repair or a cleaning.

Buildings List Button

This button now makes the total number of pollution, building demolitions, incidents with poor quality of life and loss of productivity visible and allows you to jump there directly.

Game Setup Revised

Creating a new game has now become even more goal-oriented and handsome. Some inconsistencies have been fixed and the menu as a whole has been made more attractive.

Planet Completion

Now the achievable goals are also visualized on planets. This makes it a visible challenge to drive the success of the missions to perfection.

UI & Other Improvements

• Renamed free play to endless game and sandbox to editor
• Better descriptions in endless and competition game
• Crafting and trading panel highlight selection
• Red popup dialog when deleting savegames and profiles
• Fixed load screen
• Revised layout of money, emissions and population panels
• New menu headers when starting a game
• Revised layout and background of profile screen
• Reduced size of forest graphics
• Reduced runtime memory consumption and number of triggered garbage collections
• Fixed visual gap in ocean rendering

We are very excited to share this happy announcement with you today. Imagine Earth now has Turkish interface and Turkish subtitle support! We value our Turkish fans and believe that playing the game in their own language will give them a better experience. We would like to thank Plus Localization for the excellent job they have done translating the game. We hope that strategy and simulation fans in Turkey are going to love Imagine Earth. Thank you to the Turkish players for the support you have given us so far and your support from now on…

Have fun

Size bugün bu mutluluk verici duyuruyu paylaşmaktan oldukça heyecan duyuyorum. Imagine Earth artık Türkçe Arayüz ve Türkçe Altyazı desteğine sahip! Türk hayranlarımıza değer veriyoruz ve oyunu kendi dillerinde oynamalarının onlara daha iyi bir deneyim sunacağına inanıyoruz. Türkçe çeviriyi mükemmel bir şekilde gerçekleştiren Plus Localization’a bu mükemmel iş için teşekkür ediyoruz. Strateji ve simülasyon hayranı Türk oyuncuların, oyunumuzdan keyif alacağını ve Türkçe Dil Desteği sayesinde oyunun Türkiye’de bir satış başarısı yakalayacağını umuyoruz. Bize bugüne kadar verdiğiniz destek ve bundan sonrasında vereceğiniz destek için Türk oyunculara teşekkür ederiz…

İyi Eğlenceler

Wow, update 58 was a tough nut to crack. We did so many things that were not precisely fun to do but necessary for you to have more fun with our global civilization builder. There are also some rather fresh and action packed new features waiting for you. We hope you enjoy and please let us know what you think about the changes to Imagine Earth. Best, Jens & Martin

Galaxy Map for the Hyperspace

The overview of colonizable galaxies is now even more impressive. In the meantime we had moved the additional galaxy with the competition missions into the game mode “competition”, but we now prefer to visualize it as part of the clear part story based campaign. Of course we hope that there will be more galaxies at some point maybe with community generated planets from the workshop.

The Xrathul Bait

The new Xrathul Bait item can be crafted and used to distract invading Xrathul from your base or to directly send them to opposing factions. The honeypot attracts Xrathul who are on the planet. It also increases the probability of new Xrathul coming to the planet by 50%. It spreads Xrathul pheromones and is therefore an irresistible magnet for Xrathul ships, but can of course be destroyed.

Asteroids vs. Space Invaders

Well, you can now throw asteroids on Xrathul ships to totally wreck them. This method or using bombs and ideon bombs to finish them will now result in the giant ship crashing to the ground where you can harvest valuable artifacts from it.

Automation of the Workshop Crafting

Equipment can now be produced automatically as soon as all necessary resources are available. All you have to do is click on the button on the left side of the workshop screen. Automation just rules. The item of which you have the least copies in stock is always prioritized.

Drone Flight Characteristics

Build drones and harvest drones already had a lively way of gathering resources or knocking buildings out of the ground. But their flight behavior was an abandoned construction site for what there was always too little time over several updates. Now they glide wonderfully smooth onto their landing pads and launch pirouettes without any bizarre aerobatics.

The Overtaker

You can now win a competition game by gaining a victory point for taking over a city of other factions. This move is enabled when you buy sufficient shares in an opposing company. We also refined the victory points panel to be more visually appealing on this occasion and it was a good reason to revise the stock market design as well as you will learn here in the following.

Share Market Panel

The stock market is such an important panel for strategic gameplay and still it took us some time to realize we were hiding it in the upper left corner of the user interface too deeply. We have now put the panel on par with the research menu and the development screen. The big button shows how many shares you still own from your colony.

Finish Side Quests Later

You can now finish bonus and ideon goals after the mission is accomplished unfinished bonus quests will not fail any longer. For quite some time already you can visit planets that you built up throughout the mission and will find the goals still active so there’s such much to do when you return to your colonies after a while.

Refined Magni Mission

A new sub quest to obtain the Xrathul Bait item. Several improvements make it now better understandable what needs to be done to succeed the mission tasks.

UI & Graphic Improvements

• Centered resource and time panels on the top of the screen
• Added construct preview images to the build menu
• Improved journal layout
• Increased visibility of limited city building area
• New background for colony rating
• Improved layout for victory points screen
• Fixed lift animation on Tuto
• Improved smoothness of camera animations
• Fixed asteroid crater alpha problems
• Polishing for fireworks
• Added explanation popup for community translated languages

Other Improvements & Fixes

• Keep F8 pressed to hide the UI when you want to create a screenshot
• Reload after subscribing to new workshop planets
• Keep predefined competitors when playing sandbox or workshop planets
• Added more supply capsules to missions
• Removed wind park life expectancy upgrade (in favor of new off-shore upgrade)
• Fixed pirates getting stuck on unowned warehouses
• Refined logic on when and where to display icons on the planet
• Fixed fish and oil fields no being correctly displayed
• Fixed duplicate impact of epidemics on districts
• Improved texts that explain the relationship to other factions

Finally! There it is, the new version of Imagine Earth using the Unity graphics engine. It took us a while to port all visualizations and UI elements, but the result it totally worth it – especially because we can move much faster now based on a modern graphics engine with a lot of tools and features that make the live a lot easier for us.

Full savegame compatibility

Before we have a look into what is new, we want to point out that your existing savegames will still work. If you experience any problems related to that, please note that we lately moved the savegames to a new directory:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\ImagineEarth

If you want to try out the old version again after tomorrow afternoon on for comparison, you can do so with the following instructions:

Right-click Imagine Earth in your Steam Library.
Under „Properties…“ click „Betas„
Enter the password „oldgameengine„

Ocean shader

A good example for these beautiful opportunities is the new ocean shader that comes with refraction effects for objects that are under water.

Physics based materials & new lightning

The unity engine made it a lot easier for us to add beautiful visual effects. We use physics based rendering for all buildings and world objects, which for example gives rare resource deposits metallic reflections in the sun.

Also each planet theme now has a much stronger colorization and individual look.

Post-processing effects

The game now makes use of an improved bloom post-processing effect and a depth of field filter, as shown in the image below.
There is also an exposure filter that lights the scene up on the night side of the planet.

3D Sound

Finally we have a working solution for the 3D sounds in the world. This feels especially great with the new landing sounds of the trader space ships.

Planetary shield

This is the new style for the planetary shield generated by the great pyramids. The triangle elements randomly move and make it look very organic.

Explosions

I picture says more than a thousand words…

Thunderstorms

The thunderstorm has a completely new visualization and each lightning strike puts the scene into a bright light.

Pollution, snow and more particles

Snow areas now look more natural and sometimes have a decent snow particle effect.

We have also used particle effects and the new building shader to intensify the pollution visualization. Thus it’s now easier to see which fields have a high pollution and need cleaning.

Forests

Trees in forest now move independently from each other in the wind. Also we have added basic shadows that make the forests easier to see on the night side of the planet.

Other improvements

• Improved video quality and playback.
• “Building menu” title on the building ring to make it better distinguishable from the tool ring
• Consistent usage of fertility icon
• Volcano and other big objects: The tool ring is now positioned over the clicked field instead of the center of the object

Welcome! The September update of Imagine Earth is ready. Our focus this time is on share trading but as usual you get lots of improvements and new features.

We hope you enjoy all of these goodies. If you haven’t reviewed the game on steam yet, please do! Let us know what you think about the changes. We’re so close to reclaim the 80% – Very good” rating, which would be incredibly great for the reception of the game 🙂 Cheers, Martin & Jens

Shares Trade & AI

You can’t miss the new share panel which is located among the all important panels in the middle bottom. It offers a great overview to all values and numbers that play a role in share trading.

The AI opponents are know actively buying shares. At least those who have share trading in their corporate agenda. On the right you see how many owners a corporation has and how many shares they own. This also means another important thing: AI will now actively take over cities if they have a sufficient amount of shares. The times when you could sell your own shares excessively without a risk are over!

Catastrophes and Global Warming

All possible natural catastrophes are now listed in the Global warming drop down. And the disaster risk is rising by several percentages with ongoing global warming.

You will be notified regularly about the changes in the global ecosystem.

Tools in the Build Panel

We integrated a toolbox into the build ring and the build menu. There you can activate tools for mass upgrading, cleaning and repairing. It’s super handy and it come’s with the new forestation tool: It always plants the best fitting forest on a piece of land. You only have to examine the type of vegetation first.

Productivity Warning Icon

We brought a permanent icon into the world that shows unmistakably when a certain production building is unproductive or misplaced. So you can optimize your colony without having to do guess work and checking each individual field.

Highscores for Steam Workshop Planets

You can now compete for global highscores on every planet that you downloaded from Steam Workshop. Just play it in competition mode and get ready to beat global scores.

Music Tracks

We have a new win theme created by Alex of William E. Audio. A good opportunity to play and win one of those workshop planets and listen to it!

Also, we changed two music tracks that where part of the game for years now. Their highest intensity level for the final state of global warming was an e-guitar melody that most people couldn’t stand for long. We optimized one track to be suitably played as background music for longer time and erased the other completely. Please stay tuned until we have the funding for a full force SciFi soundtrack 😉

New Event Notifications

As you can see new event notification popups will inform you from now on when important things are happening. They popup whenever you earn landing permits, research budget or licenses. They will also show up when catastrophes are threatening your base.

Gamescom, August 20. -24th

We have been to gamescom in Cologne and showed Imagine Earth to the public in the Indie Arena Booth. Definitively the best place for innovative Indie Studios! As expected it was a so called blast to present the game to so many excited players. New ideas and balancing issues popped up by the minute. Also the prime minister of our home state was showing up to try the smartest climate crisis simulator made in Niedersachsen, Germany so far ;D

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In case you’re wondering, the one to my right in the first picture isn’t Martin. It’s Timo from Mad About Pandas who helped me out presenting Imagine Earth for almost 10 hrs over 5 days because Martin has become a father most recently and couldn’t attend the show due to obvious priorities 😉

Lots of Other Things

• Simplified script syntax (will soon be available for workshop as-well)
• Changed color of infrastructure building icons
• Allow to cancel “quit mission” dialog
• Make sure trader has always at least one laser or pulse cannon
• Display faction names in game setup
• Xrathul now “harvest” all colony buildings – not only districts
• Display victory point target number in victory points panel
• Improved camera controls (less sensitive in some situations)
• Also adjust temperature in fields adjacent to area of climate generator
• Display build graphics immediately after placements
• Colorize area that will belong to a city while it’s being built
• Removed annoying sound in colony rating panel
• Make sure AI keeps some resource and items to have better trading opportunities between players
• Improved territorial dominance logic – distance to claiming building should be more important than build order
• Allow cancelling of research

Welcome to the latest update of Imagine Earth. As usual, you can expect a bunch of interesting improvements and new features. We hope you enjoy all of these goodies. Please let us know what you think about the ongoing developments. Cheers, Martin & Jens

New Construct: Thermo Generator

This state of the art geo engineering tech improves agriculture and quality of life in very cold and hot regions by optimizing the temperature by up to 10°. It also prevents climate based tornadoes, thunderstorms, forest fires and desertification in the vicinity. This advanced weather manipulation technology requires a lot of energy and causes emissions.

Related to this the mission on Joma got a makeup. You will find it easier to get development licenses to unlock new buildings. The mission now points to stock trading, where you can buy shares of other companies to participate in their profits. Joma has become colder, making it more difficult to grow food. In return you will receive the new building, the thermo generator…

New Planet: Udion Torix

A new planet has been discovered in the Udoxia Galaxy. A tough competition against ruthless corporations is waiting for you to master it.

New Game Setup

The setup of a new game has been adjusted to give a more meaningful overview of what the player can expect. As the most important change we added a checkbox for sabotage. If you deselect this checkbox, you will be able to play a peaceful construction game that is limited to economic competition and environmental aspects.

Threat waves

You may now experience less isolated catastrophes taking place somewhere on the planet and therefor periodically occurring events during which extreme weather conditions ( Thunderstorms and Tornados ) occur very frequently or seismic activity ( earthquakes and volcanoes ) or an increased occurrence of asteroid and meteorite showers. Special vigilance is required.

Debris animations

We’ve put some fancy animations into the game when you harvest resources. Drones now use various lasers or tractor beams to demolish rocks or forests, repair buildings and clean fields. You can now also observe flying particles that match the units you are working on.

Message journal

The new journal lists all previous dialogues chronologically, like in a messenger. Between the dialogues the fulfilled mission goals are listed, thus an excellent orientation in the temporal sequence of the mission is ensured.

The brand-new journal also contains a “Typo Button” with which you can post discovered spelling mistakes directly to the dedicated Steam forum.

Sandbox Terraforming Tools

We made editing terrain much easier in the sandbox editor. You can now level terrain to adjust it to the height of the first field that you click.

Steam Workshop Briefings

In the Steam Workshop you can now add a briefing to the planets you create.

AI Gives Up – You Go On

You can now continue a competition game after winning to enlarge your civilizations and cleaning up the mess of the economic rivalry.

AI corporations do give up their colonies when they are bankrupt and out of shares. They will leave the planet and you can take over their infrastructure.

Allied native camps

They can now be relocated. Also allied Illuminati camps now provide you with meteorite showers every now and then.

Indie Arena Booth 2019

Also worth mentioning, Imagine Earth is on board of this year’s @IndieArenaBooth 20.-24.8.19 at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. If you’re there, please come over to our Booth! Indie Arena is located in hall 10.2 and has Booth number 021G. Line-Up out now!

Other stuff

• Bonus missions limited to 3 goals each
• Optimized zoom level for camera animations
• Small volcano-like mountains for “volcanic” theme
• Improved main menu sun animation
• Improved unlocking of constructs on Tuto
• Added better explanation for tech licenses
• Removed shadows for construction holograms
• Improved interaction of tool ring and docked panels
• Improved supply capsule user interface
• Increased number of research funds sold by merchant
• Start video can be deactivated in settings file
• Improved UI representation of trade-able items and resources
• Tech licenses can be sold to the merchant again

Fixes

• Fixed rounding error in resources panel
• Fixed trader message “not interested” when you have nothing left to sell
• Fixed animation problem of profile dialog
• Fixed problem with research chunk highlighting
• Fixed color of ocean citadel powers

Greetings, Colony Managers our latest release is ready for you. Tons of bake-fresh features sweeten the colony day. To wrap it up, making the other AI corporations your rivals is more dangerous than ever, now they attack with offensive items. Researching is now less casual and more time based. Some items are produced by districts in addition to being crafted. You can also hack the stock market in a new share panel attached to the tool ring on city centers of other colonies. We polished the new build menu and you can monitor upcoming threads much better in the reworked bookmarks panel.

We hope you’ll enjoy the latest features! Please leave your feedback in our forum. We would be so happy if you’re interested in supporting our project as a beta tester. Which basically means you get the new update earlier than the rest. In case send us a mail. Additionally a 25% sale is coming to Steam on April 22. Mark our words!

Cheers, Jens & Martin.

French language translation

We can’t party hard enough on the commitment of Victor “Lartima” who out of nothing send us a mail with the completed french translation of Imagine Earth! Thanks so many times to you and to Bouy, who got the translation started!

Fresh gameplay trailer

This one is simply showing it all, all features, all threats, all items and all that we worked on over the last two and a half year – as the old trailer was kind of that old. On top it has something special, a final release date. Yes, we are hopeful to finish version 1.0 within 2019… Please share, post and tweet it as much as you can.

https://youtu.be/Cm9TYuhMN1s

Actually this is a good opportunity to thank all the 30.000 supporters that helped to keep the Imagine Earth project alive and well progressing with their early access purchases. If you wanna join the crew, this might be an opportunity…

Shares panel & stock market hack

You can buy the shares of other corporations directly from the tool ring on their city center. There you overview who’s owning the corporations shares and you can directly hack the stock market from here in case you made or bought a stock market hack which is a brand new offensive strategic item in the game.

Count down warnings in UI

The bookmarks and events panel in the top right of the screen now warns you with a countdown before Pirates, Xrathul or Asteroids and other threats kick in. We needed to give players more time to prepare and you can even increase the warning time for an area by building research districts. At the same time we reduced alerts about stuff going on in the middle of nowhere. The panel now gives a better visualization of all the threads and catastrophes next to your cities and around the globe.

Time based research

From now on it takes a certain amount of time to research upgrades to make the decision of what to research first more strategic. You have a research queue that can by prioritized any time and you should pay attention to the efficiency factor which is raised by every research district you build. The city center also contributes to the factor as it has a built in research lab as well.

Item production in districts

We almost accidentally came up with the idea of letting the various types of districts produce items over time. That gives every district a more individual and special functionality. The new build menu nicely visualizes the items that are in production and it also shows the ones that can be crafted.

AI sabotages with offensive items

Based on diplomatic relation and mood of AI factions they start using offensive items against you. Their tension to move against you is raised by an aggressive agenda. They will not hesitate to use pirates, assimilators, asteroids, sabotage and sometimes also explosive device and ideon bomb.

Improved UI of build panel

The build panel is an UI element we reintegrated lately after having it replaced by the practical build ring several years ago. It allows you to permanently see your stock of items and gaia forces, also those who are actually still loading up and in production. This precious piece of user interface needed a cleanup and that’s what we did recently. Also hovering buildings in the build ring or panel will show related resource icons on planet.

Mission improvements

• Tuto: Show research icon more early
• Joma: Birons epidemic quest working again
• Lorian: Changed timing of asteroids and improved trigger for slick bay quest
• Rounos: Joe starts some destructive actions after losing
• Rounos: Gave Joe access to a temple with tornadoes

Improvements and fixes

• Balanced generation and regeneration of pollution
• Districts freely convertible
• Victory point per 5,000 mined rare resources
• Fields can now be bookmarked with CTRL+number key
• Personalized messages by NPCs
• Smoother build radius
• Improved forestry explanation dialogs
• Fixed auto save naming problem (will reduce the number of created savegames)
• Use saw icon for rare plants like corals
• Fixed interaction with icons in navigation mode (space key)
• Sound pitch fine tuning
• Changed color of price text to neutral
• Fixed overlap of alliance confirm buttons in message panel
• Fixed AI selling and back-buying items all the time
• Improved rare resource description texts
• Fertile only from 90% and desert only from 10%
• Editor: Clustering of fossil and rare resources
• Editor: Distribute temples evenly and add ocean citadel
• Editor: Ensure that rare resources are available everywhere

The first update of Imagine Earth in 2019 brings you a new power construct which is built on the open sea with three brand new forces to unleash and a devastating catastrophe. As always there are tons of UI, AI and game balancing improvements. We reworked the first three missions intensively and enhanced the effects and visualization of global warming… We hope you enjoy the latest features and changes and send feedback and requests into our forum! Cheers, Jens & Martin

The Ocean Citadel

The ocean citadel is a powerful construction of the Nootilas, it can convert Gaian energy into force fields which influence sea and weather conditions. It is to be found on the open sea of course.

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Thunderstorms

A power of the ocean citadel provokes a thunderstorm that moves across the planet in wind direction. The storm can cause wildfires and incidents in production facilities. Thunderstorms are also natural catastrophes whose occurrence becomes more likely with increasing global warming.

Ocean vitalisation

This power of the ocean citadel generates a gaian force field that vitalises the flora on the seabed and allows sea plants and occasionally corals to grow. This is helpful to re-balance the carbon emission balance on the planet.

Land subsidence

This Gaian force field of the ocean citadel lowers the tectonic continental plates – entire regions sink into the sea. Keep the mouse button pressed to apply the power.
Land reclamation works the same way from now on.

Multi-use of powers and item

You can now reuse forces and items by holding the shift key as long as you have more items of the same kind or enough gaian energy left in the according power constructs.

Global Warming

Due to the importance of this feature we have represented Global Warming more prominently in the Interface. You get a permanent display and icon for the emission balance and the global warming in percentage. And there is a global value of sea-level and temperature rise. The population counter has moved to the left of the UI also because it is not global.

Land height shown in field info panel

For better information it displays how high a certain piece of land is above the sea-level which is of particular interest in case of global warming. Will it be flooded by the melting polar caps?

“Earth Over” quarantine deactivated

We deactivated the quarantine of the planet in case of climate collapse which ended game way too early. You can now live on a ravaged planet with maximum climate chaos and all the catastrophes arising with it and still try to make your living or win a competitive round somehow.

You can activate this quarantine when starting a new game to stop a round when it gets almost hopeless. Also we changed the visualization of high global warming which was a bit over the top with yellow coloring of the oceans and the atmosphere.

In one of the next updates we plan to further increase the effect of global warming on the local field temperature and buildings

Mission improvements

Again we had to rework many aspects of the first three missions of Tuto, Joma and Lorian to improve the experience of the campaign, make it more accessible to new players and adjust them to the lately added features.

AI improvements

• AI now uses temple powers to sabotage enemy colonies
• AI will actively expand into territory of enemies when additional land is needed
• AI will respect border of alliance colonies
• AI gets a Pulse cannon in time
• AI tries to explore cannons if necessary

UI & graphic improvements

• Display overview of other factions in missions
• a bar displays the goals for achieving new research, tech licenses and landing permits as such.
• storage capacity is visualized more intuitive in the resource menu
• New and universal desktop icon for the game and for all social media accounts
• Increased speed of tooltips. Especially in build menu
• Influence of temperature on productivity is now shown in the build ring as well
• Improved drone flight
• Cinematic landing animation for dropping asteroids, trader, vendor and the Midras drillbot
• Visualization when using Soma item
• Restored loading animation

Bugfixes & improvements

• Fixed some issues of trader speakers, icons and ships that have been swapped
• Fixed pirates event not being triggered
• Towers only loose claim for surrounding fields when completely destroyed
• Increased reach of ideon bombs and comparable items
• Fixed: Speaker is sometimes interrupted by other sounds in the main menu
• Laser attacks should no longer trigger fires
• Selling and buying of items now also influences their pricing
• Increase in Gaia power is no longer increased linearly with additional surrounding population (but logarithmic)
• Fixed pollution created when destroying mountains
• Ideon bomb no longer destroys the rare rocks that appear when a big mountain is blown up
• Science district gives research bonus instead of improved quality of life
• Assimilator settings decrease/increases probability of uplinks landing
• Changed balancing of fights between assimilator drone and frontier towers
• Assimilator drone no longer follows fleeing city capsule
• Temples can now be destroyed