Dear colony managers! You have given us a lot of detailed feedback. With this release we are trying to answer a big part of it – especially the balancing of building upgrades.

TL;DR

• You can now claim new territory with money – a new approach to free expansion.
• The bookmark panel shows what events and threats are taking place in your cities and allow you to jump to any place directly.
• Gaian energy from temples can now be collected and sold in containers. These containers can as well be bought to charge your temples.
• Upgrade balancing.
• Community translations for Italian and Spanish are complete.
• Campaign: Joma, Lorian, Rounos received several improvements and corrections.
• Lots of other fixes and changes.
• Preview: Harvester drones will collect resources and drop them into the warehouses.

Claim Land

A small feature that might turn out as a real game changer got implemented right now. Did you ever feel upset for having an interesting resource field, some crystals or a strategic construct directly in front of you but on the other side of the build radius border? Now you can easily claim ownership of adjacent fields.

Please be aware, that this land is not protected by city center or tower radius. It can be grabbed by other companies right away. This way of expanding your territory allows you to increase your reach onto something of interest besides the city upgrade logic. Note that you can no longer build buoys or towers outside of your build radius. The “claim land” tool must be research as well and until further testing it stays pretty expensive.

Bookmark Panel

This might not look like much at first sight, but the new bookmarks panel on the top right of the interface are a very powerful tool. It shows all your city centers and important constructs or events around them. For example the space ports you got and if there is a trader or merchant on-site at the moment. It indicates problems and events like low productivity, low building health or incidents, incoming meteorites, wildfires and other threats to your colony. Best thing is, you can directly click each icon to jump to the event immediately.

You can also create your own custom bookmarks of any field by holding a certain number key for a second while hovering the intended field.

Gaian Energy Container

The container is charged with gaian energy. This special form of power agglomeration emerges in intensive spheres of lively flora and fauna. Containers can be used to charge temples where gaian energy unleashes specific supernatural forces or they get sold as an invaluable tradable ware.

Generated gaian energy from temples can also be condensed into containers. The process is lossy and two energy charges of a temple result in only one charged container. With these containers gaian energy becomes a tradable and costly ware and can be used to charge other temples.

Balancing of Upgrades

Prices fell significantly – mostly into the range of 500 to 800€. For upgrades that increase the production we have made sure that the production to price ratio is slightly better than the one of the original building.

The efficiency (production to maintenance costs ratio) is now also slightly better than the building’s original efficiency. For fossil power plants it is in the upper-mid of the “no to full fossils” range.

In addition to this some upgrades have received additional bonuses. E.g. nuclear reprocessing now gives a bonus on produced energy to reflect what is extracted from the reprocessed material.

Community Translation

This is working out much better than we expected.

We got some great fans out there who were so kind and excited to translate Imagine Earth into Italian and Spanish language. Thanks a lot to Capybara Localizations and Laura Alba for the awesome work!

In addition there’s a huge rework of the English version going on as well – done by Andrew “Althis” Quadro and Arthur “Skirlasvoud” van der Burgh 🙂

If you find a typo or a some mistakes in texts or dialogs it’s now pretty easy to report them. Just open the “Last Message” panel (left icon at the bottom) and you can see the name of the dialog in the lower right corner of the dialog.

Mission Improvements

JOMA

• Many small improvements to goal and mission design.

LORIAN

• The side quest introducing the Midras race is working again.
• The side quest about the oil spills in slick bay is back in game.
• New Mission Icons will guide to objects and buildings when the bonus or mission goal is connected to any units on the planet.
• Main mission growth goal reduced to 2.5. million people.

ROUNOS

• Fixed: In some cases Joe wasn’t reaching the 2 million people growth goal at all. The goal is reduced to 1.8 million people.
• Fixed: The Natives where not selling their ideon treasure maps correctly.
• Further fine tuning to the mission script

Graphics Improvements

• Construction Drones now have contrails and jet sounds
• Some nicer trees
• Added some wonderful planet textures

Other stuff

• Hovering a laser now highlights the complete area protected by laser cannons. Same for pulse cannon and shield
• Stone quarry now also gets a bonus form nearby mountains
• Fixed wrong numbers in rare resource production statistics
• Fixed Inventory ring graphic problems
• Fixed inconsistent icon colors for upgrades, buildings and research
• (hopefully) fixed sound noise problems
• Fixed city naming dialog cancel problem
• Fixed planet texturing problems in medium shader quality
• Fixed “more than max ideon” problem

Harvester Drones

To thank you for your interest in our update and reading all the way down here, we wanna give a short glimpse into future development. Here you can see harvester drones that will pick up all the stuff in the future. You can staple them on your warehouses which are used as the drone’s home base.

Let us know what you think about the new stuff and if you have any feature requests. You’re welcome to share your ideas for the project in the Imagine Earth forum on steam! Regards, Martin & Jens

The December release brings you a little research revolution. As you can see we finally turned the research system into something that offers you freedom of choice on how to develop and enables strategic decisions.

Hexa Style Research

You can now do cross research: Licensing one research option will unlock all its neighbors. We are about to install a simple system that delivers a function to highlight groups like upgrades, tools, improvements and special functions with different colors.

Indie of 2016

We are in the Top 100 on IndieDB and one of 4 finalists in Genre “Futuristic Sim”. Please support Imagine Earth for indie of the year 2016. Just follow this link and click the vote button. Thx!

Tech Menu: Auto-Build Upgrades

Upgrades that have been researched can now be selected in the development panel. When activated they are built together with the construct they belong to. This immediately rises the functionality of the building and spares you a lot of extra click-work.

The tech panel is now the perfect place to get and compare all information about the available constructs. You can click on developed buildings here to build them directly: The menu automatically closes and you place the chosen structure in your build radius.

Upgrade Balancing

The prices for installing researched upgrades on buildings are now massively discounted and rebalanced. We made it cheaper because the building space is much easier to obtain these days and it’s less important that you can make one field unit produce more.

Play-On Campaign Missions

You can now play along on a campaign planet after finishing it’s mission. Continue expanding your cities find all the Ideon around and finish some bonus mission goals or just go on to expand your colony as much as you like.

Other stuff

• Changed layout of research, tech and landing permit panels
• Ground type fertile now also visible in cold regions
• Cultivation unit does not longer depend on ground fertility
• Show production values of a building during build process
• Fixed problems with Xrathul ships in Magni mission
• Fixed problems with AI players in Bora mission

We are approaching the cold time of the year – at least here in Germany. This means we have even more time to build great stuff and here is the content of our latest release:

• Imagine Earth is ready for community translation
• New construct – Glassworks
• Tech trader
• 3 new items: City expansion kit, Land reclamation, Explosive device
• Sign treaty with natives
• Climate countdown
• Time based auto-save
• Spaceport upgrade: Rocket terminal

Community translation

Imagine Earth is ready to be translated into other languages. The game now comes with a directory that contains the internationalization data. You can access it to translate Imagine Earth into your own language. Read all the details about this in the translation section of the forums.

New construct – Glassworks

The glassworks produces windows, lenses and glass containers. For this purpose particularly fine sand is used. So desert fields increase the productivity of the factory.

The glassworks is introduced in the Rounos mission.

Tech trader

A tech dealer sells special items to you. In addition, he also re-purchases unused ones and is buying rare resources.

The tech trader is introduced in the Joma mission – so this is worth being played again.

New Items

Alpha 27 comes with three new items that are sold by the Tech Trader. All items are introduced in the Joma mission.

City expansion kit

This technology enables you to expand a city district that has not reached the necessary infrastructure level in surrounding districts.
Not applicable to city centers.

Land reclamation

Let an ocean or coastal field will become land.
The field has to be adjacent to another land field.

Explosive device

Enables the blasting of buildings, forests and rocks in your area and on all fields directly adjacent to it. In buildings, the ruin can be removed with a second blast.

Sign treaty with natives

The interaction with native camps has been adjusted a bit:
You can now sign a treaty with the tribe. As the “diplomacy” tool did before, this allows you to trade with them and to use the surrounding land of all the camps of the tribe. In exchange, you provide all the camps with a small amount of goods.

Climate countdown

Once the climate balance goes into negative you can hover the climate information area to see how much time remains to rescue the planet. This is calculated based on the current level of global warming and emissions.

Time based auto-save

The game now automatically saves your state of the game every 15 minutes. In the game options you can also disable this or set it to 30, 45 or 60 minutes.

Spaceport upgrade: Rocket terminal

In order to be able to build rockets to send resources into space you now have to research and build the spaceport upgrade “rocket terminal”.

Additional changes

• The merchant is now part of the Tuto mission
• Destroy Xrtahul harvester ships with meteorites
• Ideon deposits contain either a lot of ideon or a very small amount
• Adjusted mission briefing layout
• Fixed orientation of huge mountains and volcanoes

That’s it! And again: Please remember that you can take part in the community translation of Imagine Earth in the translation section of the forums.

After a great holiday season we are back with a bunch of enhancements and a lot of fine-tuning:

• victory points panel for competition mode
• special offer: ideon scanner
• new item: super fertiliser
• population statistics panel
• Rounos & Magni missions improved
• optimized storage system
• “Sell all” trading feature
• New graphic models – especially for rocks and mountains
• ….

Let’s get into the details.

Victory Points Panel

From now on you’ll find all factions in a competition game in the victory points panel to the lower right. Ranked and easily comparable! Click on any player to jump to it’s next city.

Special Offer: Ideon Scanner

We are starting to equip the space traders store with more interesting tactical items. After being bought they go into your inventory and can be used any time you need.

The Ideon scanner for example reveals the size of an Ideon deposit far away from your base. This is interesting as well in the context that rare resources will now be visible from the distance but it remains unclear how much of a special substance or mineral is actually in the pile of rocks and it will only be revealed by the scanner or by getting that deposit in your building range.

Special Item: Super Fertiliser

Fertilizer can be bought in the shop for 2.500 and raise the fertility by 25% on all fields but deserts. This of course is beneficial for farms and forests.

Population Statistic Panel

It took a long time but now they are ready: Statistics about the life quality of your colony’s inhabitants and the overall housing space.

Rounos & Magni Improved

Both missions are now much better balanced in terms of money available, global climate and difficulty level of the goals. In addition we have replaced some lame goals with more interesting ones and we have done a ton of fine-tuning!

Optimized Storage System

The storing of resources needed a make up. The system is now automatically configured to complete packages of certain resources and specially the ones which where prioritized by you.  It even pauses the mining of rare resources to ensure there is enough place for prioritized ones. This way you will very likely end up with ready-to-sell resource packages when the traders is passing by.

Trade Faster: Sell All

Pretty clear what this function does, isn’t it? If you’re tired of selling your stuff one by one, you can stuff the trader with all you get by the click of one button or ring key shortcut.

New Graphics Models

…and so we added some big mountain models that meet the theme of planet Joma. The big deal about this is that we now got some sets of dependencies like woods fitting to rocks fitting to mountains fitting to big mountains. Themes that would work to create unique styled islands on greater generated planets an the type of rocks or mountains might even indicate which one of the fossils resources you find under them as we develop this further.

• You might as well enjoy the redesigned theme of Magni
• And the new cursor graphics for tools and items

Other stuff

• Sandbox: Terrain tools show values of each field (e.g. temperature, height, etc.)
• Sandbox: Temperature tool modifies whole region instead of single fields
• Balancing of emission values for goods producing buildings
• Free play Rules : Receive city centers for growing population
• Planet rotation in main menu
• Animation for quest icons
• Speaker icons over other player’s cities
• Loads of UI fixes
• Loose game when all cities are taken or destroyed
• Firework goes on during end of mission slides

After the last release focused on the trading system, this one brings:

• Terrain tools –  temperature, fertility and height
• Cragginess of terrain
• Research budget for expansions
• New UI for technology licenses
• New rare resource: Corals
• AI improvements
• Colony value
• High score revolution
• More (see end of post)

The one big thing of this release is the new stats and highscore system that calculates the colony value based on your population, city area, buildings and more.

Terrain tools –  temperature, fertility and height

With the tools shown in the image above you can apply regional modifications to the height, temperature, fertility and pollution of every field.

Cragginess of terrain

High terrain and areas around mountains are more craggy and less fertile. In addition we changed terrain texturing. Areas around fertile fields and desserts become more green or brown due to their actual fertility level.

Research budget for expansions

We tried a messed up science point system and now replaced it with a simple district expansion logic that offers fresh research budgets in an easier way than ever before. You can still get these budgets  from the space trader and it feels good to have these function sorted out of the mission goal system on the lower right of the UI.

New UI for technology licenses

Constantly repeating reward mechanisms, like those for technology licenses, have a new place in the upper left corner of the screen. The company is supporting the growth your colony if you manage to push up your colony value.

New rare resource: Corals

Another precious resource that you can harvest from the depth of the sea. Corals can be harvested for medical substances. This brings us closer to having a great variety of individual resources that are specially made for trade. Corals are the first rare resource that regrows.

AI improvements

• AI now puts more effort into building the cities in a way that allows to expand them as much as possible.
• AI is building a warehouse and harvests rare resources.
• AI opponents are building spaceports and sell resources to the space merchants.

Colony value

Here’s the inconspicuous big move of release 25 because the colony value is an all over indicator for the wealth of your colony.

This colony value now defines how much money you get if sell shares of your colony and how their price is going through the roof in further development. That’s possible because every factor is directly converted into capital ( the official currency in all known space so far. )

It has integrate all mayor factors beginning with the population and the worth of your constructions and their productivity. It also includes the size of occupied land, the quality of life and the count of installed upgrades. And at least it substracts emissions and pollution.

High score revolution

The high score ( now colony score ) is also depending on your reached colony value. But you will only get as much score as you have kept your shares own colony shares. If you sold 50% of them for cheap credit you halved your final score as well…

Still worth noticing that reachable scores skyrocketed with this upgrade and your chance to reach one of the first places is better than ever.

Other stuff

• Meteorites take longer to drop (50 seconds). In addition lasers are now built 50% faster. Thisway, it should be much easier to deal with the meteorite shower on Lorian.
• It’s possible to start building directly from the technology menu
• New Upgrade graphics for park district and financial district
• Planet generator makes sure there is enough space between volcanoes, huge mountains, temples and natives
• Fixed screenshot light problems
• Streets fade in and out while building or destructing

This release comes with the following new content, gameplay features and UI improvements:

• Rare resources: Gold, Ideon & Meteorite Metal
• Changed Warehouse storage system
• Merchant lands on Spaceports
• New user interface for trade
• Natives sell ideon treasure maps
• Reworked Joma and Tuto missions
• More (see end of post)

We are very happy with the feeling of the new trading system. Making additional money to allow for a fast expansion is a real gameplay changer.

In addition to this early access release we will also updated the demo version. The old one still has the state of Alpha 18, so it is about time to update it with the changes of the last half year.

Rare Resources: Gold, Ideon & Meteorite Metal

We have added a new category of resources to the game. Rare resources are not consumed by your people. Instead they can be used for trading and since they are precious you can make a lot of money by selling them.

Important: Ideon is now revealed whenever it’s rock field becomes part of your territory. You no longer need to mine rocks to find out if there is some Ideon hidden within.

When your warehouse storage is full, the mining process will be paused which is visualized by a fading icon.

Warehouse

Mining gold or other rare resources requires a warehouse. By default a single warehouse can store up to 2,000 resource units (used to be 1,000) which equals 2 trade packages.

You can also upgrade the warehouse with a storage for goods and other resources. Please note that the these upgrades now have to be researched first.

Merchant on Spaceport

Instead of landing somewhere on the planet (forcing you to search him) the merchant now lands on the spaceport. As soon as you have built one, you can open it to see when the next merchant will arrive. In addition you can also pay a bonus to the merchant to make sure he doesn’t stop at other planets and comes directly to you.

You can still send up resources on your own by building a spaceship. If you spaceport is blocked by a merchant you can send him away anytime.

Trade User Interface

We have created a new user interface for the trade system. So you no longer need to click through multiple layers in the ring menu to find a resource to buy or sell. The interface gives a complete overview of things you can buy and sell and everything is reachable with a single click.

The same interface is also used when sacrificing at temples or “negotiating” with natives and Xrathul.

Trading with Natives

As soon as you have negotiated a partnership with a native tribe they start to sell native food to you. With the new release the natives now also sell treasure maps that reveal locations of Ideon. This is useful for the Rounos mission, but also important whenever you need to decide on a good spot for the next city landing capsule.

Tuto & Joma Reworked

All the changes describe above need a proper integration and explanation in the game. To assure you understand how to use everything we have modified the Tuto and Joma missions. Especially the latter one is worth playing it again, because there are new goals and things to do.

Miscellaneous

• Credits now properly show the list of our crowdfunding supporters again
• Increased city tax revenue a bit
• Competition AI is now capable to make more than 7 victory points
• New graphics for city protection shield
• Free play and competition: Other companies land with 15 seconds delay
• New laser cool-down animation
• Xrathul harvester ships can now be focused by multiple lasers at the same time
• New icon for negative growth influence on forest
• Fixed message panel layout

Important: With this release we switch our underlying technology from XNA (DirectX 9) to MonoGame (DirectX 11). We have tested this a lot, but it’s still possible that some of you are having problems. Please send an email to support@imagineearth.info.

This release comes with the following new content, gameplay features and UI improvements:

• Snow graphics
• Laser and pulse cannon for frontier tower and buoy station
• New building: Logistics center
• Colony shares section in resources user interface
• Changed research system
• New bottom (messages) and time UI
• List of cities and bookmarks
• MonoGame technology
• More (see end of post)

Although watching Game of Thrones took some of our precious time we are still very satisfied with the results ;-). The next things on our list are: Improve the trading system and UI, add new resources to the game that are not part of your population’s needs, add more visual life to the planet and more.

Laser, Pulse Cannon and Shield for Frontier Tower

There are three things we have done here. First, we have made the laser upgrades available for frontier buildings (tower and buoy). That allows you to defend against meteorites and Xrathul without having to build a research district somewhere outside your cities.

Second, the frontier buildings now also have the shield generator upgrade. It allows you to protect the surrounding fields from tornadoes and volcanic eruptions.

Third, the “Anti-Xrathul Laser” is now called “Pulse Cannon” and received some new visuals as you can see in the following screenshot.

Logistics Center

The logistics center is a complete new building. It optimizes the production and transport of goods and food. The performance of every neighboring construct producing these resource types is increased.

The center can be equipped with auto repair and remediation upgrades (at the same time). Both upgrades are no longer available for frontier tower and buoy station.

There is a new “Infrastructure” category in the build ring which is also visible in the technology menu.

Snow

The last releases have added things like ground fertility and temperature to the game. A local temperature of under -5°C is now visualized by a decent snow cover on the planet, trees and buildings. This is especially important for farms, because their productivity is much lower in cold regions.

Colony Shares

Selling colony shares allows you to increase your capital. In addition you are able to take over cities of other players, by owning 50% of their shares (free play and competition).

This is obviously a very important feature that was not well represented in the user interface. We have added a new slot to the resource bar that gives you quick access to the shares options and shows how much shares you currently own.

PS: Note that you have to pay a dividend to the owners of sold shares. If you buy shares from other companies, you get paid a dividend.

Research

We have decided to increase the total number of research points you can earn in the missions. This means tools and upgrades are no longer unlocked in groups of two. This change also gives us more freedom in terms of adding new stuff to the research.

The migration logic should automatically make sure you keep the things you have researched.

Bottom UI

The user interface at the middle bottom of the screen has received some polishing. All options (previous messages, navigation mode, victory points, statistics and menu) are visible at any time.

Time UI

Time is now visualized in a way that makes it easier to recognize the numbers. For example “34:06” is 34 space minutes and 06 seconds which is comparable to 5 and a half years on earth (one space second is round about a day).

The speed of time is still controllable in 5 steps ranging from one-quarter speed to four times the speed.

List of Cities and Bookmarks

Last but not least a new “power feature”. You can use the numbers keys to bookmark specific fields and jump to them by clicking the number or the new user interface elements at the top right of the screen.

To create a bookmark simply hover a field with the cursor and press the number key for a few seconds. New built cities are automatically added to your list of bookmarks, but you can also use this feature for quick jumps to an enemy colony, a temple or another interesting region on the planet.

MonoGame

With this release we switch our underlying technology from XNA (DirectX 9) to MonoGame (DirectX 11). This makes it a lot easier for us to find bugs and enhance the performance of Imagine Earth. We have tested the MonoGame version a lot, but it’s still possible that some of you are having problems. Please send an email to support@imagineearth.info.

Miscellaneous

• reduced start money for most missions
• camera can zoom closer to the terrain
• price for harvesting forest and rocks is no longer payed upfront, but during the process
• smaller world icons with less object overlap
• tree are slowly moving in the win
• Xrathul ships no longer intersect with the terrain
• player’s laser cannons no longer attack meteorite that targets electronic employee
• AI saves money and buys meteorite to attack electronic employee
• climate levy balancing
• fixed vanishing oil pests on Lorian
• optimized visuals in tool ring
• global warming replaced with player’s emission balance in the stats
• loads of detail improvements