While we are already working on the next big thing for Imagine Earth we have worked on a lot of usability, balancing and performance improvements and decided that this is worth being released in a dedicated update.
Deferred Rendering & Motion Blur
Switching to Deferred Rendering has made our Imagine Earth 10% faster right off the bat while at the same time allowing us to show more individual light sources on the planet.
Motion Blur makes the planet’s rotation look smoother, especially when running a system with fewer frames.
Items & Crafting
We have built a new crafting panel, that automatically buys the needed resources as soon as not all components to create items are available. While working on this we have also balanced which resources are needed for crafting and reduced what is needed for most of the items. Honey Pots, which can be used to attract Xrathul, have been optimized in their operation, especially in the probability with which they lead to Xrathul spaceships arriving on your planet.
Planet Generator Balancing
To get better and play worthy planets we had to diligently tweak the generator. In making adjustments, we tried to achieve as even a distribution of field types and rare resources as possible, while also providing local hotspots that make good starting places for your colony. Also we increased the number of mountains and rocks on the planets and placed more Gaian ruins so that there are more artifacts in the game. Under these circumstances it also made sense to regenerate the Weekly Challenge planets. They are still based on the same planet, but the distribution of resources is a bit different now.
Bugs & Fixes
Dropped Dynamic Resolution
Removed graphics setting for anti aliasing, because only marginal differences can be seen here based on the rendering techniques of the Unity engine we are using
Fixed configuration display of polar ice
Fixed blurred intro
Workshop Planets File System Windows 7 bug
Fixed the description of the frontier station
Navigation: Show only one city of each other faction
World congress is no longer happening during game over
When productivity is low because of plague, show the corresponding plague icon
We hope you started the new year safe and sound and are fit for the challenges it brings, because it will definitely not be boring. The Corona virus keeps the world in suspense and mankind has its trouble to organize itself sensibly against it. After that, the even more colossal challenge of climate change is just waiting to be targeted again. But also in the virtual world, in Imagine Earth, new challenges await you in the new year.
Compete now in Weekly Challenges, Quarterly Seasons and Annual Rankings. Effective immediately, we have unlocked the official 2022 league. In addition, we would like to celebrate the official top 10 annual winners of the 2021 league. We sincerely congratulate all the participants for enrolling in the Imagine Earth’s internal leaderboards forever.
The Greatest Terraformers of 2021
1st place – Franci0 – 1,457,784 2nd place – KiBou – 1,400,492 3rd place – Wingyl – 1,393,397 4th place – craig.akitt – 933,881 5th place – Critical Floof – 913,485 6th place – Artiss – 863,621 7th place – Roderick – 663,128 8th place – RainbowDesign – 532,542 9th place – missladykayura – 473,274 10th place – martin – 457,000
So in 2022, you’ll be competing with other planet managers not only for overall victory in weekly high scores, but also for the lead in quarterly seasons and the overall year-round victory. By the way, we’ll be playing the weekly missions ourselves for testing purposes, so you’ll have the pleasure of competing against the developers themselves, look for Martin and Jooki in the highscore. If that’s not a special challenge.
Rating optimization We have also adjusted the rating of the game rounds. It remains exciting, you still can’t save and load, but you don’t have to reach the first place in the competition anymore and the achieved colony rating will be entered into the highscore, so it’s worth the work in any case. Of course you can repeat the challenge the whole week to optimize your score by ceiling, have fun!
Colony rating
We have given the calculation of the value of your global space colony a new balancing. If you sell all your shares, you will no longer end up with a high score of zero, the impact has been reduced to 50%. The quality of life in your colony plays a bigger role, its impact has been increased from 12.5 to 20%.
Asteroids, moons and lens flare
Graphically, Imagine Earth has also stepped up its game again in this release. There are a lot of visual effects to admire. Moons and meteors orbit your worlds and cast gigantic shadows, in broad daylight they darken the landscape. When you zoom in very close to the planet, the perspective rotates so you’re not always looking at the action from above. Also, the atmosphere on the horizon becomes dense and blurry.
Graphic options
You can now set exactly a target frame rate to better define how much gameplay will hit you on the graphics card.
Automated mining processes
The harvesting drones of the warehouses now start mining valuable resources fully automatically. You now have to disable this instead of activating it individually as before. Simply convenient, we think. This way the warehouses fill up by themselves with valuable resources, which are urgently needed for the production of important equipment.
Landing zone locked
In the future, you won’t be able to accidentally park your landing capsule right next to another civilization, creating a non-competitive launch position for both parties.
Fishing grounds and oil wells So far, procedurally generated planets, have almost no fishing grounds and oil wells. Sea grass has a higher positive impact on fishing and it has also become more productive in principle. Thus, in the future, the sea will be of higher strategic importance as a place of expansion and a source of food.
UI and control improvements
Fields where the temperatures are just too hot to grow food well are no longer shown as particularly fertile.
The display of your cities, top right, is no longer packed with loud icons for bad moods. That was just confusing.
Tooltips and info in the sales and manufacturing panel no longer overlay the menus, but are displayed outside.
We reduced the planetary view in menus and overview also reduced the superfluously large distance to which the planet is zoomed out.
When opening panels like the one for planetary overview or research, the planet in the background is no longer zoomed out.
Font size on various buttons in the game optimized.
Tower is upgraded again when you level it up.
Nitro pumpkin seeds are now also offered by the trader.
Bugfixes
Game pauses in menus decently again – For example, you could just wait in the win dialog until you lost again.
Intro skipping can be defined in the config file again.
UI-Flickr glitch in hyperspace between galaxies is fixed.
The nice melting of the snow when you turn on the thermo-generator is back.
In the Biron faction, some of the dialogs in the voice output are no longer mixed up. It makes more sense to talk to them now ;D
Thanks for reading all this and staying excited about the developments of Imagine Earth! Jens & Martin
It’s been a few weeks since we last updated anything. Time for a sign of life from the Imagine Earth Universe.
Weekly Challenge – New Game Mode
In this brand new mode, you will receive a new mission every Monday. This colonization mission has the highest priority and must be completed by Sunday. The objective is to obtain the sole management license for a planet in a competitive process. It is advisable to familiarize yourself with the planet’s conditions and opponents beforehand by checking the info panel. Loading or saving is not possible in the global competition. Measure yourself against other colonists in weekly high scores and quarterly or yearly seasons.
Beat the developers 2021
Quarterly or annual seasons officially start at the turn of the year. But you can still win the title for 2021 by successfully completing the last 5 missions, and Martin and I will also play the weekly challenge. Let’s see who comes out on top in the leaderboard! Of course we have more ideas, soon the weekly missions will get five objectives to gain additional victory points and we want to generate certain events that will make the gameplay more varied and fun. We also rely on your experience and feedback to figure out what could make this competition more exciting for everyone.
New storage system
It’s only a small button, but it’s strategically important! Now, in the warehouse panel, with another click on the “Automatically purchase” button, you can not only have the quantity purchased for which warehouse space has been reserved. With automatically fill, resources are purchased until all storage space is full. This makes scenarios possible where the supply of the population with a resource is completely controlled by the purchase. This is a possible strategy to save the construction of a lot of infrastructure.
New mountains the world needs
We have added a new set of big and small mountains that will be used on planets with the Frozen, Swamp and Barren themes to provide even more visual variety in our universe. I don’t really need any further words, just have a look.
Ambient Sound System Worldwide
Our world sounds system is finally finished. Now you can hear the birds chirping in the forest or the traffic in cities when you run your camera over them. Enjoy the chirping of crickets in the desert and the whistling of the wind in mountains or the gentle roar of the sea. It’s not entirely new but there were about half the ambient sounds in the game and the volume control, now lets the sound come in smoothly and overlap well.
AI factions more sensitive to climate change
Balancing – AI behavior in case of Global Warming is adjusted, factions are now also more sensitive to climate change. AI also now mines rocks only when there are no valuable resources left.
Control optimization
You can now prioritize resource mining even when the reservoir is full and redirect your drone to it.
Item display
The number of available items is now displayed in the inventory in a decidedly snappier way.
Steam Awards nomination
Hey, why don’t you nominate Image Earth for the Labor of Love Award? After seven years in Early Access, you’d think it would do our little two man team some good đ
Fixed Now
Editor – Planets that are opened in the editor will now start with the correct amount of tech licenses.
Editor – Forests that get under water when terraforming, i.e. lowering terrain, finally die completely and disappear. Previously, tree stumps were still visible, and removing them from entire continents is simply annoying.
Editor – The saved but not loaded settings for selected factions and more.
UI – The exchange of upgrades is no longer done via the building list, this functionally clashed with the option to activate all upgrades at once.
UI – New subtitles in all menu screens, so you always know which game mode you are in. [UI – The order of the factions in the score panel in the bottom right corner of the screen changes on the fly during the game.
Sound – Too many repeated warnings when attacked by Xrathul and pirates, for example. [UI – The highscore screen has been extensively reworked.
Graphics – The normal textures of the fossil fields is corrected, never looked nicer.
Graphics – The main menu now fades in from black when flying towards the planet at the beginning.
Graphic – In the meantime all planets had rings like Saturn.
Graphics – In cutscenes the camera perspective is no longer distorted.
UI – The slider for how much fossil resources are distributed on a planet is functional again.
UI – The buttons in the game error dialog now work reliably again.
UI – Game over message and completion screen still made it possible to interact with some ingame menus even though the game was over and lost.
Bugs – So far there was a phenomenon of unordered factions appearing on the planet, more than you defined at the beginning of the game round.
UI – 4 display bugs fixed.
UI – The population counter in the planet info panel works again.
our monthly update is out, this time mainly fine tunings and fixes. But at the end there’s a preview of the next update with the new Daily Missions game mode. We are always amazed ourselves what can go wrong in a global simulation and where the devil hides in the details. Anyway, the bugs are also getting more and more bizarre and today’s cleanup post is an amusing collection of such occurrences.
A bit of a gut-wrenching September update comes because we had a lot of bureaucratic stuff to do that kept us from generating cool new features. I had to write a colossal final report for the German federal grant that allowed us to stay independent until version 1.0, and porting the Playstation version is keeping Martin busy with some pitfalls longer than he imagined. All the more we’re both looking forward to getting back to our core business and just building fancy new stuff and DLC for Imagine Earth and you, respectively. Soon we’ll be sharing with the world a roadmap of what’s in store for you in the galaxies of our game world. As always, thank you for your sustained interest in our climate crisis simulator project and the obligatory request to support us with a review if you haven’t already. Nothing helps Indie Studios on Steam better than this support, except of course your personal feedback on the latest update, the balancing in the current game and what other wishes remain unfulfilled. But now let’s get down to the nitty gritty. Have fun with it, Jens & Martin
Czech translation
First of all, we would like to announce that Imagine Earth is now also translated into Czech! We wish all Czech players a lot of fun with the new version that was created by Jan Balek of Balek Localization.
The World Congress
Unfortunately, the central diplomatic instance for all global factions was no longer accessible to players after successfully completing missions and competitions. The NPCs then blithely discussed tax increases and funding measures among themselves, while the humanoid player was left out in the cold and faced with a fait accompli. And on top of that, the World Congress featured the wrong representatives of their own faction, apparently the characters from past games. All history now, of course.
AI advanced training in cleverness
The AI in Imagine Earth once again behaves a bit more logically in this update. NPC factions now actively use research licenses. Also, AIs now only mine rocks when there are no other valuable resources, which previously slowed them down mightily. In addition, small changes to priorities have resulted in AI corporations no longer planting trees, and as soon as reforestation became necessary due to climate change, they planted exactly the most inappropriate type of tree in each of the eight different biomes on the planets. This seemingly tiny inconsistency may have led to the fact that in the case of an impending climate collapse, exactly nothing was done to counteract the catastrophe. Which let the economic strategy of the companies turn out rather kamikaze moderately.
Apply All Tool
If you hold down the Alt key during the game you can now install all upgrades of one type on all applicable buildings at the same time again. This is exactly how it works with tools, all fields that could use a cleanup will be cleaned in one go, or all buildings that need a repair will be repaired.
The building list
A must-have management feature for several updates once the colony reaches a global scale. This menu has now received a functional update, the header display has finally been polished in layout and the button that allows you to repair, clean or mine all affected buildings resources deactivates when no such operations are needed or all have been activated. Also, we disabled replaceable upgrades from showing as active in this panel. Because it was easy to accidentally swap when you thought there was still something to optimize there.
Optimization for world editor
A particularly perfidious bug had crept into the editor. Although the editor saved the values for victory points and player factions properly, it did not load them itself. So that one then accidentally saved changed conditions. And because of this, the player faction was often left undefined, whereupon the game system simply picked one at random and simply let another unwanted faction land on the planet.
Taking over towers with the hacker kit
Lately, sometimes enemy towers wouldn’t let me take them over with hacking tools. This strange bug in the game was also hard to identify, as it only occurred if you had previously loaded a game. It was similar with the planetary shield of the Great Pyramids, until today.
System voice warnings
These helpful announcements have piled up to 3-4 times announcing pirates, storms, Xrathul and other disasters. What was actually important, strategic information thus became outright scare tactics.
Crash Fixes
Finding the remaining occasions for crashes in the game is getting more and more difficult and tricky, all the more heartfelt thanks to all of you who report them to us so diligently. The following rare error messages are now a thing of the past: “NullReference in UpdateValue”, “NullReference in UpdateTerritories” and “NullReferenceException in DroneManager.Update”.
Outlook into the next update: Daily Missions
Many of you have asked for the game to offer more long-lasting challenges. That’s why we will work on a new game mode next, which I would name with the working title “Daily Missions”. Players will then be able to colonize a new procedurally generated planet every day where they will have to compete against other corporations. This planetary conquest mission can then only be played for one day to create a high leaderboard ranking. For this, an online league is created in which one can gain the high score lead on a weekly, monthly or even yearly basis.
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Get the Original Soundtrack of Imagine Earth and help planting trees in the real world!
Dear all, we have been working on improvements, fine tuning and bug fixes for quite a while now. This is the basis for us to offer innovative features for Imagine Earth again from now on! We are very excited about this and hope you are too. If you scroll down to the bottom of the post, you will have the opportunity to name your own planet name in the game.
We are always looking to lower the barriers to entry into the game and gather your feedback. The most common criticism is the chattiness of characters, especially that they seem to explain too many details about buildings and tools to players, interrupting the flow of the game. This is also addressed in this update. The player can consciously choose his difficulty level at the beginning of the campaign and also determine the story mode.
Minimalist Story Mode
Now you can choose which difficulty level you want to play at the beginning of the campaign, and we’ve included a reduced story mode that allows you to experience the campaign exclusively with the dialogs relevant to the story.
Building Shader
We have added more contrast to the rendering of buildings and forests. This should make them look more vivid, stand out better against the terrain, and give them more intense color depth and shadows. To do this, we turned up the Ambient Occlusion and made it dependent on the time of day and added an exception for metallic surfaces. Sunlight was made a bit stronger overall and more Exposure was added to the night side. Well, you never think what a well-rounded look causes for work.
New vegetation
There is a new, third vegetation in two of the planet themes. Along with the terran forest and the mushroom forest, it is something between deciduous and flower forest. It is rather slightly alien and exotic. There is not much more to say about it, you just have to see it up close.
Balance of energy production
To some players it seemed as if Imagine Earth was virtually trying to coerce them into using renewable energy sources, yet our goal is to represent global warming authentically and keep all avenues open to the player. In fact, the fossil sources in the game were disproportionately unproductive. Now they produce more, but also the deposits in the earth last longer and allow full productivity until the failure of the unit. After all, the main problem in today’s world situation on Planet Earth is not that coal and gas are all going, but that we can’t burn any more of them without driving global warming to dangerous levels.
Your opinion counts
At this point I’d like to weave in a personal note from the development department. Myself and Martin have been working on this game passionately and dedicated for many years, but currently every update has the stale aftertaste that with every improvement we somehow only create new demands. Some people don’t seem to realize that Imagine Earth is an indie game and already has a lot of features under the hood. If you like it, help us with your feedback and write a review, there is nothing that helps the project more.
Rouno’s optimizations
There is now a lower start and end goal for population growth in this mission so the challenge is not too demotivating. You can now no longer form an alliance with Joe Dectow, and he no longer builds department stores almost exclusively. The landing permit you get after the challenge can now only be used to build up the destroyed colony, which prevents a potential dismantling of the whole colony. All alien NPCs now have greetings out again when you visit their camps, cities or ships. Natives respond more directly to donations.
Uprisings and pandemics limited
We have introduced a limit on negative events, while the emergence of riots in the colony illustrates a dangerous undersupply of the population or the spread of diseases makes too high pollution noticeable, these and similar events should not dominate the gameplay and make it annoying.
Frozen worlds
There is no longer snow on active colony buildings. This doesn’t look quite as great as a completely snow-covered cities, but it’s worth its weight in gold for building recognizability.
World Editor
This goes out to everyone who has already built their own planets with our terraforming editor and shared them via Steamworks. The editor has received a new briefing tab in the setup. In the future, when you create or update new planets, you will be able to write an introduction, mission description or story that the player will see first when downloading and playing the planet via Steamworks. So far you could already upload a script for planets, but the menu structure in Competition and Freeplay could not display it yet.
Modding preview
The briefing is the first step. Soon you will be able to add your own mission objectives, events and dialogs to this script, use characters from the game as voice actors and possibly create your own characters as well as make buildings. And ultimately combine the planets into a campaign galaxy. This will be great, we just have to ask for some patience for this feature….
AI optimization
We also fixed a funny bug: if the planet creator didn’t specify their own faction, the game would assign them an AI faction, which would then blithely mess with players. We’ve also fixed some of the AI’s biggest quirks.
AI was prevented from actively defending against attackers with items through repairs.
AI now builds fewer special districts and more normal ones.
AI now builds its City Centers not so often next to each other.
Improved controls
We made small many control improvements and user interface optimizations, as many newbies were still having trouble getting to grips with managing entire planets.
Improvements
You can finally blast away giant mountains, just needs lots of ideon bombs and explosives.
Laser cannons now let asteroids with precious metals through, if no house is damaged by them.
We have been able to reduce the memory requirements per frame by at least half. Some out of memory problems should be history.
We optimized the design of the faction and trade menus and threw out unnecessary buttons. Especially important for gamepad control. [We have reduced the size of the fossil fields so that you can see more of the landscape. [When you log in the Achievements will be reassigned.
The icon selector was lost for a short time and is now back so you can better distinguish whether you are activating a building’s option ring or a recommended quick action.
Various improvements to the Tuto mission.
Mining drones were too high over forests
Supply pods are closed when they have been emptied.
Midras speaker has been widened so it is no longer cut off.
The calculation of deep ocean fields has been corrected.
Reduced repair speed on uplink and similar units.
Increased probability that a volcano erupted by Gaia force field will hit its target.
Removed the player’s faction indicator in the faction panel from Campaign and Endless because it is only interesting for competitions. [Hacking Tools – the radius in which you can use them has been increased and is now visualized.
When too many small lights were in view due to drone processes, light irritation occurred. Hopefully we have solved this satisfactorily now.
There is a call on our Discord server right now. We invite you to suggest names for planets that we can include in Imagine Earth. We are working on a new game mode where you build a main space station while conquering procedurally generated galaxies. So we need names for all these generated planets. Can you think of names of planets from famous science fiction movies, comics and books that people would like to recognize? e.g. we already have Betelgeuse 7, Melmac, Altair, Kepler 186f…. in the game. We are looking forward to your ideas, post them in the General Channel on Discord or here in the forum!
Have fun with Update 1.02 and see you next time, Martin and Jens
Hotfix 1.02.1
Fixed ArgumentNullException that appeared during missions
Re-activated mass-mode for tool ring (alt key) and added it for the gamepad
Moved “clear/repair/… all” buttons to top of building list columns and also introduced them for upgrades and city leveling
Fixed position of “open hypergate” button
Added missing alert for fires on non-colony buildings (e.g. gaian constructs) in your territory
Gamepad: Added context info for fast ring selection
Dive through the ocean, soar through the air, and hike through the forest in these extraordinary nature games!
Whether you’re looking to design your own world or discover a new one, you’ll be sure to find yourself immersed in the gorgeous games ahead…
World Nature Conservation Day Sale features many nature-themed games of course on Steam ( July 28 – August 2 ) our environment and climate crisis simulator Imagine Earth is on board there with a 30% discount and a stream is running.
Development Blog
And of course, a small update on the state of development should not be missing. We are about to release a new update August 9 that takes into account many wishes and your rich feedback.
New Vegetation
There will be a new, third vegetation. Beside terran forest and mushroom forest it is something between deciduous and flower forest. It is slightly alien-like and will be included in two of the six planet themes.
Reduced Story Mode
Also, at the beginning of the campaign you will be able to choose which difficulty level you want to play and we have a reduced story mode in the works, because again, another faction of players felt annoyed by too much info and popups.
Enhanced controls
There will also be a lot of improvements to the controls and interface optimizations, as many newcomers still had problems getting to grips with the management of entire planets.
So, just as you’re used to from seven years of Early Access, we continue to make Imagine Earth better and add new features. You can be curious about what is still to come and please do not stop to contribute your feedback, ideas and wishes to the development.
Auto-Mining Function
We want to move further in the direction of making automation work better. An important step in this direction is the auto-mining function for warehouses named in the title. When you activate it, your harvester drone automatically flies off and harvests valuable resources. The system even makes sure that different resource loads are collected evenly and prioritizes those that you have reserved for storage. The previous mining tool then also serves as a way to manually prioritize a resource for mining.
Overlay for Resources
It is now possible to activate overlays for rare resources, fossil resource deposits, fertility, temperature and building types via the building menu on the left side of the screen. Some will recognize these from an earlier version. Back then they were immature, but we have revised and brought them back.
Optimized Gamepad Controls
We’ve optimized the gamepad controls and now you can use the directional pad to jump directly to your spaceports to trade, jump to workshops to craft, or jump to the cities or gaia constructs in your area of influence.
World Editor: Control other Factions
When you build a new world in the world editor, you can now click on the factions at the bottom right to switch to them and build buildings for them. Another step in the direction that you can soon script entire missions with story.
Mixed Feelings
Personally, after the particularly brilliant start of the final version of Imagine Earth, we currently have mixed feelings about the feedback we get. Regarding the reviews, it just feels like the game is being torn between two fronts. Some complain about too many dialogs and constant explanations, while the other front is unhappy about too little tutorial and too weak, incomprehensible instructions. Looks like this is really a tricky topic and we have to admit that the idea of making it a challenge to explore and understand the game itself doesn’t have the necessary appeal for everyone.
Anyways, we would really love to have a broader picture, so if you have played Imagine Earth already and normally don’t feel like writing reviews for games, we warmly invite you to take a few minutes and give Imagine Earth a review.
New Features
Added: Uncover rare resources with scan even when paused Added: Highlight new Goals with animation Added: Bonus missions: End Competition after completion. Other competitors will leave the planet to you Added: Interactive context infos for gamepad controls Added: Gaia forces to the ring whenever thereâs place Improved: Make shallow ocean look better Improved: Difficulty “Hard” – Reduce Colony Payout (AIs go bankrupt)
New Fixes
Fixed: On Bora you could pre-activate the great pyramid Fixed: Terraform item sometimes did not work Fixed: Harvesting of rare resources is cancelled when loading a savegame Fixed: Magni unable to complete as can’t decontaminate Fixed: Undiscovered rocks show their resource type in the description Fixed: Colony rating layout Fixed: Wrong gamepad description dialogs taken out to reduce messages Fixed: Gamepad controls: If renaming cities the game menu was opened Fixed: Bora: Mission script error if player takes over other city ruins
Seven years have passed since our real-time global civilization simulation Imagine Earth first embarked on its epic journey through Early Access. Today, the full version of the game finally launches here on Steam – with a big launch update to boot!
Thanks to the 43,000 Supporters – You made this happen First of all, a big thank you to all EA supporters, for your interest and support over all these years! You have made the continuous and independent development of this unusual game possible – global building sim, which can become a real survival thriller in the conflict between growth and sustainability.
Official Launch Trailer
Please stay tuned, we are tinkering with a complete Early Access history recap Imagine Earth entered Early Access in May 2014, and has been growing ever since, with updates coming approximately once a month. Todayâs update is our biggest yet. Weâve rewritten the rules for competition and freeplay mode by introducing the âWord Congressâ – a democratic allegiance containing every faction on the planet, brought together by the threat of a climate crisis and environmental collapse.
Final Release FeatureThe World Congress This is where the battle between sustainable and exploitative corporations takes place. The World Congress is a democratic body with wide-ranging powers, to which each faction on the planet sends a representative. The factions have voting rights in the congress that correspond to their share in the galactic population. In the voting process, they decide on taxes and subsidies, funds for projects, penalties for rule breakers, and emergency aid. In addition, a representative of the United Space Nations USN is always present.
Proposal Round
At the beginning of a session of the congress, each delegation can propose new resolutions, which are then voted on. When resolutions are passed they apply to all factions.
You can see who benefits from your resolutions, as well as who stands to lose out. This data will help you make calculated political decisions.
Voting Round
Once the proposals submitted by the delegations are ready for voting, each faction pursues its own interests. The symbols on the representatives indicate whether they are more likely to vote in favor of or against a bill. Voting behavior is also influenced by a faction’s agenda, strategic advantages and by loyalty in alliances. However, nothing is certain until the final vote is counted. Diplomatic tensions abound!
World Status
This screen is always accessible and provides an overview of the state of the planet. Here you can see how different global trends develop in relation to each other.
LeaderboardsAs you may have noticed, all leaderboards of the early access version have been reset for the Imagine Earth 1.0.
What does the future hold?
Of course, this isnât the end of the road for Imagine Earth. Weâre planning to compile a list with all the unfinished ideas we’ve collected in the backlog to ask you what you think the game really needs. We are already working on an addon where you will be able to colonize procedural galaxies.
Hotfix 1.0.7
Joma: Fixed Birons not willing to by your medicine (really stupid…)
Reduced default world congress intervall for campaign and freeplay mode to 30:00
Updated Russian translations for UI elements
Fixed a few bugs that lead to exceptions or crashes
Global real-time civiliation sim Imagine Earth finally has a Steam release date along with a massive update.Big News Space Colony Managers, Itâs been a long lasting journey of over seven years through the hyperspace of Early Access for Imagine Earth – Planetary Colonization. Our global real-time civilization sim Imagine Earth finally has an official Steam release date and will be delivered with a massive âworld congressâ update PC on 25th May.
Thank you all for making this possible.
Some of you have been following our project for ages, popping in every few years, and some are new to it, having only recently joined our quest for new, habitable worlds. Over all these years, the game has found over 43,000 supporters who have made the development of our world simulator possible until today.
Beta Test for Release Feature
In the next few days we will be making available a beta version of a new feature we are currently working on. If you would like to participate in this beta, please join our Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/fCJAUxc.
Open Space Addon
In parallel, we have already started planning and producing an addon in which you will be able to colonize procedural galaxies and the exchange of goods and commodities between planets will be strengthened. It will also be possible to upgrade your own space base and equip the settlement capsules with special properties.
Early Access Recap Post
To celebrate this important milestone, we will write a comprehensive summary of all the events and developments during that time. It’s going to be a turbulent journey through time.
Community Survey
Over the time of development, we have accumulated a long list of good ideas that we think would be great additions to the game. However, we want to get your opinion and wishes on how best to improve the game. Get ready for a big poll around the release.
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.
