Happy new year again, this time from China! As Steam has started its Lunar New Year sale “Imagine Earth” is 25% off for the first time in 5 years Early Access. Don’t wait for more until the game is finished ;). We are accompanying this sale with an update release that brings you much more than redesigned game characters and a classic strategy game styled build menu for advanced gameplay…

Please note that we are looking for beta-testers who can check on our new update releases days earlier than other players, please mail us if you happen to be that enthusiastic about getting your fingers early on new updates of Imagine Earth!

Meet the New Crew

The old avatars of the main crew members in the campaign are some years old by now and we always knew we’d have to give these guys a makeup someday. Nothing is a better way of showing how this game has grown up over the years than the evolution of Limas character. It goes all the way back when it was a casual game idea with comic characters. Maybe we should not have opened this old box 😉 but with the final release coming in 2019 this nostalgic flashback came over Jens..

The Brand New Control Menu

A new build menu on the left side of the interface will keep you informed about all your build options. Coolest thing about it is that this menu also shows your inventory and on top the craftable items. It has a category for all your gaia forces and shows if they are fully loaded. You won’t have to visit a workshop anymore to craft your stuff. It comes in addition to the classic build ring, so nothing changes, you just get more options.

World Visualizations

The control menu also offers a set of visualization tools. you can highlight fields that are threatened by rising sea-level caused by global warming. You can highlight rare resources, fertility, ground pollution, construct types and colony areas.

Standalone Diplomacy & Trade Panels

If you open a trade or a crafting panel it will be centered on screen from now on. The background is blurred out and playtime is paused, so you can concentrate on deals and negotiations with factions and traders.

Drone Reconfiguration

We are currently experimenting with how the drones are working. We decided to limit the city centers drones to one per level – so you are starting now with one instead of two. This makes it more important to level your city.

The maintenance station no longer comes with a build drone. Instead it comes with a repair drone that only does repair jobs and will automatically do this in the range of the building. As before it can be upgraded with a fire station.

Same goes for the remediation center. It now has a special remediation drones instead of a build drone

Gaia & UI Balancing

Based on feedback and the experiences we received from Wuik in the steam forums, we had another look at the Gaia balancing. The following changes have been done:

• Doubled Gaia production
• Reduced price of Gaia container
• Display correctly how much Gaia is available in a temple
• In addition display how fast Gaia is created and how this is influenced by the nearby population

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.

• 

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

Again we have a big December update for you with lots of interesting features that will refresh the space colonizing business. Have a look and give us your feedback on how they work…

Of course we’d like to take the opportunity to wish you all pleasant holidays and a happy new year in advance! We plan to celebrate the final release of Imagine Earth together in mid 2019!

Sabotage Hacks

The Sabotage item hacks supply buildings within a small radius and sets them into the state of malfunction in which they stop production and are constantly damaged until the building is destroyed or the malfunction is fixed.

Supply Capsules

Supply capsules contain items, resources and building construction kits. The colony that claims the field it landed on can take the cargo. The capsule will then disassemble automatically. They will land randomly on the planet throughout gameplay.

Orbital Lift for Colonists

New orbital lifts show you when colonists are coming or leaving your colony. This animation makes the colony more lively and visualizes where the colonists come from and where they disappear to when the quality of life is too low.

Company Rating

In the campaign galaxy you will now see a completion panel that shows your overall campaign progress. More important the colony ratings on all planets are wrapped up in a company rating that is compared in a global ranking.

Visit Your Colony

You can now revisit colonies after finishing the mission to find the remaining ideon crystals and to raise your colony rating by expanding your colony.

Campaign research and unlocked buildings are permanent. So you can use the technology you gathered in later missions to advance the cities when your return to earlier colonized planets.

Diplomacy States

Other corporations now have three shared diplomatic statuses: rivalry, neutral or alliance. They define if other factions trade with you and if there will be discounts. It also influences AI behavior: An alliance partner will respect your territory – a rival will actively grab your land.

AI Behaviour

We have added brand new AI behaviors to make factions more lively and authentic actors in the game. They may contact you via the message system and to propose neutrality or an alliance. In addition they will cancel an alliance or even declare rivalry when your relation is very bad. The AI remembers when you have helped against threats like an epidemic and alien invasions by using items or temple powers

Additional changes

• Added clarifying goals on Bora to help Otarek against Assimilators
• Introduction briefings for all game modes
• Steam store page updated with images and Simplified Chinese version
• Landing and starting animations for the Boss’ and Leen’s command center
• Increased number of sleeping volcanoes in ice worlds
• AI now uses pulse cannons more often
• Pulse cannons will destroy small meteors with one shot
• Cannons will not focus on asteroids when another cannon is already targeting it
• Engagement popup: Ask players for feedback after having played 20 hours of having finished the campaign
• Asteroid rocks give stone quarry an extra bonus

Fixes

• Now possible to get the “scientists” research achievement
• Harvesting of rare asteroids is properly displayed in the resource statistics
• Alignment of level visualization for city centers
• Waking up volcanoes in sandbox editor is working again
• Size of world icons when using different UI scales
• Leveling frontier buoys is working again
• Display range when building maintenance station and remediation center

Dear Colony Managers, in this update we increase the visual and gameplay diversity of our planets with the themes Jungle, Terran, Swamp, Barren, Volcanic and Frozen. Also we dedicated a lot of our time into making the Tuto and Joma mission a better experience. Read on to find out what else has changed.

Also we are the EGX in Berlin this weekend presenting Imagine Earth in hall 7 at Station Berlin, if you happen to be there come over! In addition we start a week long deal on steam with 20% off beginning on monday…

TL;DR

• • Rocks, Asteroids & Scanner
  • Gaia Forces in Build Ring
  • Drone Priorities
  • Planet Themes
  • Storytelling
  • Translation
  • UI & Graphics
  • Money Balancing

• Balancing & Fixes

Rocks, Asteroids & Scanner

Asteroids now can contain all types of rare resources. They look different and when you decide to throw one of these asteroids against an opponent you might accidentally send him a big present full of ideon or lithium.

Scanners are having an increased scan radius and an increased value in gameplay. You will now have to scan all rocks to find out if there’s any gold, titanium, lithium or ideon hidden in them.
Rare resources are automatically detected when you take over the field into your build radius. The amount of rare resources on all planets has been raised in general.

Gaia Forces in Build Ring

You can now access all the forces you have loaded in temples right from the build ring. Therefor we have thrown the forest ring out of the ring menu because you can only build forests with seed bombs from now on and the different types of forest weren’t relevant enough for gameplay to take up an own slot in the main build menu.

Drone Priorities

Drones no prioritize open tasks. Dealing with fires is most important, followed by repairing highly damaged buildings. After that they will deal with new buildings and other things. They only return to the city center when they need a package to build something.

Planet Themes

We have set up six general presets or themes for planets, so you can choose quickly under which conditions you want to play a competition round or freeplay. Choices are Terran conditions, Frozen World, Swamp, Barren, Jungle or Volcanic World.

In addition there are new mountain models on many of our planets.

Storytelling

We reworked the first three missions, so that you can play more straight through without being interrupted by dialogs and story suddenly popping up. More story elements are now clickable in form of info and mission icons. So you can start cut-scene when you are ready. On the other hand we made them auto started when nothing was happening story-wise for some time so you don’t miss important story elements.
To make the factions more personal we have individual victory messages when others win in competition mode.

Translation

• Steam store front has been translated into Spanish
• Many new Russian translations for buildings, tools and UI

UI & Graphics

• Bookmark panel on the upper right has a special section for dangers now
• New panel to display construct and upgrade details on technology screen
• New character for the Midras Miner
• Visualize fertility influence more clearly
• Districts: blue light when level-up possible
• Increased display size of warning icons
• Reduce snow intensity on streets
• Text colors on menu buttons changed so text stays more readable
• Added out of money message for multi-upgrading
• Progress ring for temple plundering
• New landing animation for Leen’s ship
• Trader Icons darker
• Spaceport launch ramp remodeled

Money Balancing

• When you take over an opponents city by buying up his shares you will no longer have to pay an extra money fee for the takeover as you paid for the shares already.
• City center takeover only costs shares (no more money)
• Rebuilding a city center with a new landing permit is now free of charge because generally you have paid for the landing permit itself or earned it otherwise.
• You will be getting more dividend payments out of shares you hold of other corporations to make the feature more relevant.
• The emission levy costs for air pollution have been reduced as it was so high that it ate up almost all of the companies profit.

Balancing

• New range upgrades for maintenance and remediation buildings
• Relocating fishing ships made cheaper
• Warehouse: Default storage for energy food and goods is smaller. Reduced price for upgrades
• Increase the amount of rare resources on planets
• AI should include pollution in field assessment
• Glass factory and solar park no longer need 45°C to reach max productivity
• Reduced native trade frequency
• Reduced Bironix trade favor to 10%
• Increased number of science level research goals

Fixes

• Activated desertification (!)
• Adjacency bonus for the stone quarry doesn’t work if rocks are in the water
• Food shortage despite reported overproduction
• Remediation does not work on ruin fields
• Negative ghost income on startup
• Radius of lasers and health districts is sometime incorrect
• Black hole on top of small planets (e.g. Tuto)
• Fixed 4:3 screen UI problems
• Research tool-tips were sometimes partly outside of the screen
• Storing mechanic of Lithium not working correct
• Midras and natives repair themselves

Dear Colony Managers, space is getting more frightening by now as a new threat is arising. Read about space pirates, special vendors, unique landing ships for all eight corporations and much more in our latest update release #45. Here’s what we got for you this time:

• Beware the Space Pirates
• New Item: Resource Piracy
• Unique Landing Ships
• Three Specialized Traders
• Resource Trading Partners and Auto-Trade
• Emission Trade and Visualization
• More New Features & Fixes

Beware the Space Pirates

These nasty creatures land a strange kind of unknown flying object right over your warehouse to plunder it with their tractor beam. Simultaneously they start firing their board cannon to vandalize your base.

You can helplessly sit back and relax until they have stolen enough and loose interest. Or, you can choose to pay a ransom or install an energy shield onto a tower to block the guys off from your warehouses. In later missions you might as well develop lasers or pulse canons to give them a warm welcome if they ever return…

New Item: Resource Piracy

These pirates are not only a threat that randomly happens. You can also craft a landing control to send them upon one of your opponents. Sweet addition: You get half of what their ship can steal.

Unique Landing Ships

We are proudly presenting individual colony landing ships for all eight corporations.

After having introduced the individual factions last update now you can tell the difference between them by looking at their landing ship, which is automatically expanded into the main city tower after landing.

Three Specialized Traders

They come around with awesome looking new space ships amazing landing animations ;-). And they are specialized to trade either wares, items and tech, or rare resources.

Resource Trading Partners and Auto-Trade

The resource panel has been split into a money and a resources part. This helps to put the four basic resource classes and their storing and trading issues directly into the middle of your attention.

It now also shows you if there is another colony or trader able and willing to sell a certain resource to you when you need it (e.g for crafting).

You can also activate the automatic purchase and sale of resources. Note that this involves trading with every potential trading partner – regardless of whether the price is fair or not.

Emission Trade and Visualization

The emission levy now always must be payed as soon, as a company on the planet has a negative emission balance. Environmentally friendly corporations get emission trade payouts if there is a company that pays in.
The global emission balance is now visualized with positive values when the world’s climate is OK. It’s represented with negative red numbers when climate balance is going bad. Much more intuitive isn’t it?

 

More New Features

• Now you get written info on all construct upgrades left to the tool ring.
• The field info panel with details on deposits, pollution and other values of a single field is now also visible in navigation mode.
• The probability of occurrence of riots and epidemics was too low. it has been increased by about 40%.
• When using the seed bomb or nitro-skirlide seeds you can now see how well the plants will grow in that area.
• There’s now a countdown for competitors coming down and landing their capsules. This puts you a bit under time pressure to find the best place for the base.
• You can buy landing permits in missions as soon as you got the second city center. Good news in case a city is burning down.
• Temples can now be repaired.
• Trading panel improvements

Fixes

• Rewritten – Hypergate Ideon Objective – the vendor states out more clearly have to find and also sell the ideon crystal to him to open hyperspace gate into Udoxia Galaxy.
• Rebalanced – Higher runtime costs for remediation centers
• Fixed – Temples are no longer charging themselves apparently by surrounding nature or stuff
• Fixed – Rocks had a shimmering on the surface as if they where rare resources
• Fixed – A city center landing is now final – no more abort and vanishing of the landing capsule
• Fixed – Background of colony value
• Changed – Loading screens animations
• Fixed – Many particle emitter problems
• Fixed – Warehouse Upgrades couldn’t be activated in the tech-panel
• Fixed – Cure goal bar looked finished after half of the task
• Fixed – Savegame buttons in sandbox mode or messed up
• Highscore background bar is reworked
• Fixes for Rounos mission: Joe story plot does not wait for clicking the quest icons anymore.
• Tornado fix – still visible in navigation when multiple tornados in one field.
• Midras Extractor Temple has model and animation fixes
• Midras Digger fixed model and particle system. Dust when drilling.
• Spaceport fixes

Thanks for your attention once again! We hope you enjoy playing Imagine Earth and share with us your ideas on development.

Wow, this feels like the biggest game system update since ever. It comes with a Simplified Chinese translation ( many thanks to deloquac! ) and so many other changes. Good timing to invite friends: Imagine Earth is 20% off during the steam summer sale.

Please check out our brand new Discord channel for Imagine Earth where we’d love to discuss the latest features with you. But first of all check out what we got for you this time:

• Items for special buildings
• New rare resource: Artifacts
• Special abilities in research
• Individual corporations
• New faction: Nootilas
• New faction: Privateers
• New UI for build ring
• Global warehouse storage
• Translation for Simplified Chinese
• New savegame menu
• New frontier visualization
• Fixes und Mission Improvements

Items for Special Buildings

You can now craft construction kits and landing controls for special buildings like the temple, pyramid, assimilator, Midras digger and the extractor and then place these units where and when ever you need them.

The extractor can only be build on an asteroid of course. Assimilator and digger can only be build outside the base. In rare cases traders will ship these items.

New Rare Resource: Artifacts

These artifacts are parts of ancient alien technology which enable you to use the Gaian energy force fields of the planet. They are used to craft all the special constructions mentioned above.

To gain artifacts you can now plunder temple ruins and wracked assimilators using drones. In addition they are produced by natives and can by bought from them (as long as you have a friendly relationship).

Special Abilities in Research

We have thrown the standard tools like claim and clean out of the research panel ( they’re all available by default now ) to make place for eleven new research options. They are very powerful general improvements for your colony management system.

Options vary from “-10% construct costs” or “-20% percent emissions” to lower consumption of food or goods and so on. Only difficulty: You need to research a whole research sector line to unlock them on the end.

Individual Corporations

There are now eight different corporations in the game with individual setup of technologies, startup icons and special abilities. In free play and competition mode you can choose one of these parties. The unlocked technologies of each faction also includes research of the upgrades. So each company has its own preset of research points to start with in the research system.

New Faction: Nootilas

Check out the two totally new factions to get a sense of how their individual possibilities are set up! We are actually still working on this and try to balance the factions. Please tell us what you experience throughout the gameplay ..

New Faction: Privateers

These corporations come with an individual background story as well which will be reflected in a kind of personal agenda as developments continues. This agenda will define how the company operates when they are you’re AI controlled opponents if you chose them for a colonization match.

New Frontier Visualization

To get rid of these edgy triangle borders we made the visualization of the borders much more discreet and subtile.

New UI for Build Ring

Last update we integrated infos about a working construct into its ring so you can understand in detail what influences production and mood.

Now we have also added all the general values and information on buildings into the build ring to make the different constructs comparable. In this context the descriptions of all buildings have been revised.

Global Warehouse Storage

There is a global storage system now. The resources will be shared between all your warehouses. Whenever a warehouse gets lost, broken or taken over by an opponent, your precious resources will be shipped to other facilities through an underground tunnel system to ensure nothing gets lost.

Each warehouse now also has two slots for energy, food and goods each by default.

Translation to Simplified Chinese

Well yeah, Imagine Earth is available in Simplified Chinese now. All of a sudden deloquac popped up with a complete translation of our game. Thank you so much deloquac, this really helps us out and we’ll mention you in the games credits! If anyone of you could imagine pushing this project forward with a translation into your native language please let us know: info@imagineearth.info

New Savegame Menu

We have implemented a new approach to the savegame menu as well. You can now see more structured information and a small close up screenshot to pick the right savegame.

UI & Graphics

• Load campaign planets directly from campaign screen
• When placing a building show icons on fields that positively influence the building
• Xrathul particle effects working again
• Replaced € icon with the games currency symbol (
• Show claim tool option on all unowned fields (as a hint that it exists)
• Increase visibility of tooltip window arrow
• Improved store visualization of not available resources and items
• Improved speaker voice quality
• Jump to other faction city by clicking the according goals panel icon (free play)
• Rotate and tilt camera with pressed middle mouse or G key
• Don’t show harvest dust for forests before harvesting has started
• Improved quality of small icons in the world and UI
• New player profile icon
• Construction site is no longer displayed with transparency

Fixes & Improvements

• AI now uses cannons and ideon bomb to defend against assimilators
• Population should always slowly grow when capacity is free and they aren’t starving
• Chemical plants are now available in all later campaign missions
• Clean tool didn’t show on the correct field when occupied by a multi-field building
• Share trading should always be allowed
• Increased likelyhood of incidents for intact buildings
• Renamed Saw mill to Wood factory
• Harvesting any forest type now will always “produce” timber
• Forests shrink slower when negative factors reduce their maximum size
• Temples charge with Gaia twice as fast

Lorian Mission

• Oil pests now take much longer before they disperse
• Reduced fertility and starting area
• Increased likelyhood of meteor showes
• Fixed unclear and wrong parts in space market quest

Rounos Mission

• Joe race goal didn’t properly show population count
• Native quest explains in more details how treaties are working
• Decreased Joe’s expansion speed a bit

Magni Mission

• Xrathul no longer leave without you doing anything. They no loner harvest rocks and forests and only take very few fossil resources.
• You can use rare resources now to “donate” them to the Xrathul

Thanks for your interest in the Imagine Earth Project, tell us what you think about the latest developments or get engaged in any of the games social platforms. For example you can engage in our new Imagine Earth wiki on gamepedia.

Twitter | Discord | Wiki | Newsletter | Website | Blog | Steam | Forum | Youtube | Facebook | Indie DB | RSS

Dear Colony Managers,
prepare yourselves to build some beautiful ocean districts for your people! In addition there are loads of detail improvements that give the overall playability a huge boost! Mostly based on testing and your highly appreciated feedback. Special thanks to Johannes for improving our german translation!

TL;DR

• Display info icons during colony placement
• Trade discounts and surcharges
• Ocean district
• UI improvements for research, colony shares and workshop
• List of gameplay improvements
• New rendering system for buildings and world objects

Colony Placement

Placing a new colony or frontier building now displays icons on the surrounding fields. The represent the quality of the area by highlighting deserts, fields with high fertility, fossil or rare resources and more.

Trade Discounts

The price of resources and items always depends on who you are trading with. Space merchants and tech traders will charge a fee that makes buying more expensive and selling less lucrative. Natives and midras on the other side don’t know a lot about space market prices and often sell stuff very cheap.

Other colonists, finally, link their pricing to your diplomatic relation. This means it can be very powerful to have a good relation towards another company.

Ocean District

This new district is now made available in the Lorian mission.

The ocean district can be built on coast fields and the open sea. Districts have to be linked to others who connect with the shore.

Microplastic collectors clean the seas and recover goods by filtering floating plastic, other waste and impurities from the water.

Ocean thermal energy conversion uses the temperature difference between cooler deep sea and warmer surface water to meet part of the energy demand.

UI Improvements

Research

• Only display elements of buildings that are already available (the buildings don’t have to be licensed, though)
• Highlight research options by improved category: energy, food, goods, income, emissions

Colony Share Trading

• Take-over of a city no longer needs at least 50% of shares
• Clearly display the player’s stake in another colony
• Tooltip with transaction fee and expected dividend

Workshop

• Unite different item categories in single panel with scroll bars

Other UI Stuff

• Added “mission failed” dialog to competitions
• Highlight when an opposing faction is almost winning the competition
• “Back” buttons in game are now called “resume game” to make it more clear
• Infrastructure buildings now have gray icons

Gameplay

• In competition and free play other factions will no longer wait until you have placed your first city center
• Forests and other plants regrow much faster now after being harvested or burning
• Nitroskirlid-pumpkins grow bigger in most areas now
• Increased number of default tech licenses in competition and free play

Graphics & Tech

We have completely rewritten our rendering system for buildings and other world objects:

• Improved render performance
• Much nicer animations
• More powerful particle effects

Attention colony managers,
you may have expected the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything” from update 42 or have you newer sheltered a passing hitchhiker in one of your outposts?

Anyways, what you get instead is of course just another bunch of problems which will make the colonizing business so much more interesting…

TL;DR

• Catastrophes let colony shares drop
• Riots in cities and native camps
• Security Complex
• New item: Soma
• New city center animation
• Anti-aliasing
• Biome & forest diversification
• Fixes & improvements

Catastrophes Let Colony Shares Drop

For example a persisting epidemic in another companie’s colony is lowering their colony’s stock price. Use this opportunity to buy their shares at a discount!

Riots, fires, hackings, flood, tornadoes, asteroids, meteors and other incidents have similar effects. Also threats like Assimilators or Xrathul will cause a drop.

Your ability to artificially trigger these natural catastrophes through temples and items makes price drops an interesting prelude to the next strategic equity buying spree and the takeover of other colonies. The free market makes it possible.

Riots in the Colony

Riots are now a real threat to your colony! This is what happens when your colonists are unhappy for a long time. Under-supply of resources or negative external influences lead to a poor quality of life. If these circumstances continue for too long, people’s misfortune increases to anger and a riot develops. It’s too late to fight the causes of the uprising as soon as it breaks out. A riot can be pacified with the use of Soma and prevented by a security complex or a frontier tower. But the easiest thing to do is to provide good colony living conditions in the first place.

Security Complex

This building stations police units to maintain order in the colony. Riots of dissatisfied colonists in the surrounding area are prevented. This ensures peace and quiet, although this is associated with additional costs.
The facility monitoring upgrade scans production facilities in the surrounding area and prevents incidents.
The cyber security upgrade monitors the information networks in surrounding buildings and prevents hacker attacks.

Soma

We could finally synthesize Soma, the famous drug from Aldous Huxley. This is what the packing slip says: “To avoid major mood swings that can lead to negative moods, people regularly take Soma, a drug that has a mood-lifting and stimulating effect and is also used as an aphrodisiac. Unlike alcohol, it has no side effects at the usual dosage and is produced synthetically.”

To sum it up: it’s raising the general life quality and helps against riots.

New City Center Animation

A new age of ingame animations awaits us! Starting with the colony center base which is expanding in various parts that screw, bend and turn out of the ground when the landing capsule is coming down. The worker drones are now stationed on landing pads from which they will lift off to build and repair.

Anti-Aliasing

Might sound a bit weird but we had to disable this basic graphics feature for ages due to framework issues. But what it adds to the game’s look is awesomely amazing. Lovely, calm and soft edges everywhere especially when you zoom out from the planet, have a look.

Biome & Forest Diversification

Ralph sent us a very detailed feedback with improvement suggestions to make the environment and nature more realistic (Thanks!). Based on this we decided to further diversify the biomes and forests:

• Forests in fertile areas are often better at binding CO2. This is for example the case for rain forest and bog forest
• Big fish swarms are more common in cold areas
• Industrial farming and fishing reduce fertility
• Steppe is bad ground for forest growth, but quite good for farms and especially resistant, so fertility is only slowly decreased
• Rain forest ground in contrast is easily damageable and loses it’s fertility fast

Fixes & Improvements

• Added achievements for Edora, Iqunox and Thera and when reaching 40 points in the campaign
• Workshop queue is only available for workshops of level 2 now
• Camera position is restored when loading a savegame
• Priorization stores at least 10% of a resource’s production. This amount is now shown in the list of consumed resources
• Fossil resources below 10% will decrease a fossil power plant’s productivity (up tp 20%)
• Fixed bugs in highscore list
• New unlocked items are highlighted in the inventory
• Switched background music compression from ADPCM to WMA streaming
• Fixed game freeze and window disappearing problems

Welcome back colony managers,

here comes a set of awesome new features improving your space colonization systems.  This month we spent a lot of time into pimping the user interface of the game into it’s 4th evolution and making it 4k ready by the way.

With the remediation center a very important infrastructure building made it into this release and also the logistic center got a workover enabling you to fully automate repairing and cleaning processes. And there’s more…

TL;DR

• New user interface
• Remediation center & carbon sequestration
• Logistic center is now maintenance station
• Desertification threat and temple power
• Solar park and wind farm alignement
• Mountain variations
• Fixes & improvements

New User Interface

The existing user interface clearly did not meet the demands of our colony & planet simulation. It was very clumsy and reminiscent of a casual mobile phone game.

So we rebuilt it, using the smaller and much clearer Roboto font for all text elements, while keeping our futuristic fonts for headers and elements that need highlighting.

The new interface now has become much easier to read while taking less screen space and thisway giving even more focus to the planet itself.

If you are using a relatively small screen with a high resolution you can still zoom the interface up to 150% in the options.

A side effect of our work is that the new user interface has a higher resolution and thus is ready for your 4K display.

Remediation Center & Carbon Sequestration

The new building remediation center comes with an additional worker drone and uses this drone to automatically start the clean up process for nearby fields.

An powerful upgrade for the center is carbon sequestration – the technical separation and storage of CO2 emissions from surrounding buildings and power plants. Thanks to underground compression, the exhaust gases do not enter the atmosphere.

The second ugrade for this building is “Advanced Remediation Process” it halves the cost of soil clean up in the area.

Logistic Center is now Maintenance Station

The logistic center is now called “Maintenance station” and automatically repairs nearby damaged buildings by default. It’s upgrades are the fire station and “Advanced Repair Process”, which halves the cost of repair processes in the area.

Desertification Threat and Temple Power

In the course of global warming there will be new deserts emerging next to others. Thereby the infertile wasteland is growing. The only way to prevent this is to plant forests onto desert fields so it can’t spread. Trees will effectively stop the process of desertification.

In the illuminati temple you can use gaian energy to create a field of desert anywhere around the world. Except on fields with forests on them.

Solar Panels and Wind Farms

They are aligning to the sun and the wind direction now.

Mountain Variations

Each mountain has two versions now to bring more variety into the game’s look.

These two versions are now put to the three edges of big mountains as well to make it easier to see whether a field is blocked by mountains.

Fixes & Improvements

• Fixed animation problems: we had some seriously strange problems with sub models and animations. Mystery finally concluded!
• Ships and oilplatforms no longer visible under water, while being built.
• City expansion now also needs drones.
• Show diplomatic relation progress as ring (full ring reaches next diplomatic level)
• Fixed orientation angle of volcanoes and huge mountains on small planets
• Sandbox category for mushroom forests

As always we wish you a good fun and hope you let us know if anything comes to your mind about the new features!

Jens & Martin