Dear Space Colonists. We have released our monthly update of Imagine Earth. In the next days we will also update the Demo version to the latest state.

TL;DR

• Atmospheric scattering shader
• Hover cars add some life to cities
• More variety for assimilator battles
• Reworked and extended mission on Bora
• Outro
• Temple sacrifice logic changed
• Loads of detail improvements

Atmospheric Scattering Shader

This release is foremost a beauty and game atmosphere update.

We have implemented a new atmospheric scattering shader that puts every planet into a unique light color situation.

Hover Cars

Hover cars fly through the skyscraper canyons of your cities and show how full districts are. They bring some visual life into the so far empty city districts and the whole colony environment at all

This is only the beginning – we plan to have cars driving to all of the supply buildings as well.

Bora Mission & Assimilator

It got totally reworked to make the end boss more understandable and assailable. The robotic entity is now attackable not only with astroid strikes but also with gaian fire, volcano eruptions from the temple and bombs as well.

The companions are constantly giving you tips how to attack the assimilators.

In addition we put a lot of work into rounding up the storytelling of the mission. Plus there is now a proper outro sequence thanking you for your great efforts to make it this far 😉

Temple Changes

We also had to redesign how temples work. Spells are now available from the beginning as you have to sacrifice anyway to get the construct loaded with gaian energy.

You can now queue sacrifices and load up to four tons of gifts into it that will slowly be turned into gaia one after the other. This makes spells much more accessible and the temples therefor much more use- and powerful.

More Improvements

• Tutorial now points out the hotkeys and control hint panel that you activate by pressing F1
• Build shortcuts are working again: Q,W,E,A,D,Y,X,C will directly take you into the several building categories
• Fixed overlapping button icons in sandbox mode
• Stoniness will no longer be seen in the navigation view options as it is a thing that is changing the landscape only visually and indirectly influences the fertility of a field.
• Corals and seegras will no longer burn.
• You can again save your self-made planets from the sandbox mode.
• No more sounds looping when game is minimized
• Merchant was given more importance by letting him sell landing permits and development licenses exclusively
• Midras: Item and resource availability and food demand have been optimized in their visualization.
• Illuminati now sell gaian containers
• Claiming land costs less next to towers
• Cannons on frontier towers will no longer shoot each other
• Fixed AI behavior in case of climate change
• Smart styled mailing list form: http://eepurl.com/3w7iH
• Mission, info and housing icons reworked
• Fixed company score calculation
• Fishing boats float on the surface of the ocean again
• Editor: special field types can be overwritten again

Links

• Daily Mars – Video Preview

We wrapped up the most important changes of release 33 and 34 in a devlog clip on Youtube again.

TL;DR

• Electronic Employee is now called Assimilator and comes with a floating drone
• Laser und Pulse Cannon can now both be used against asteroids, Xrathul harvesters and Assimilator drones
• Ideon Bomb and Explosive Device can be used in new ways – even against the Assimilator
• Blow up mountains to get more rare resources
• New campaign bonus mission on ice planet Iqunox
• Wake up sleeping volcanoes with ideon bombs
• Added second main objective to Tuto mission
• Electronics Factory

Assimilator Drone

This first point is partly a spoiler. So jump right over it, if you haven’t played the Bora mission yet.

As you know the Bora mission introduces a threat that is kind of an end boss for the campaign. This “Assimilator” (previously “Electronic Employee”) spreads its cables from field to field to reach your City Center in order to assimilate it.

The assimilator now comes with a floating drone monstrosity that increases it’s territory field by field. You can use frontier towers with laser or pulse cannons to defend against it.

Be careful though – the assimilator drone will fight back with a small laser cannon and thus might destroy your defense. And your cannons will only allow you to stop the assimilator from expanding. Meanwhile costing money and your precious attention.

There are several ways to get rid of it. Use asteroid strikes or volcano eruptions. Or expand your territory and apply explosive devices or an ideon bomb.

Laser and Pulse Cannon

The laser and pulse cannon now attack all enemies and dangers that approach you. We have change the values for fire and reload duration and damage and defined how each cannon interacts with the different targets.

E.g. the laser will do triple damage to asteroids and thus destroy it with one shot – just because it is optimized for this purpose.

Towers no longer take fire when being damaged and health is over 25%. You can repair them and they go on shooting.

Ideon Bomb and Explosive Device

We have put some work into improving our blasting items. Both are now dropped by one of the drones starting from the City Center.

The Explosive Device allows the immediate blasting of mountains, rocks, buildings and ruins in your area and on all fields directly adjacent to it – the later one is especially helpful to defend yourself against Assimilator.

The Ideon Bomb has multiple times the effect of an explosive device on an area of four fields. It also disintegrates big mountains and wakes up sleeping volcanoes.

Blasting single field and big mountains will leave the fields with rocks that may contain the rare resources gold and titanium.

Ice Planet Iqunox & Sleeping Volcanoes

We have added the third bonus mission to our campaign.

Since the outbreak of the pan-galactic plaque in this sector of the Udoxia Galaxy the demand for an antidote has skyrocketed.

On planet Iqunox which was known only for its cold and miserable living conditions, giant coral deposits have been discovered.

You will be one of three contractors who are send to extract the coral antidote for the U.S.U.

Sleeping volcanoes are spread all over the planet. You can use Ideon bombs to wake them up and increase the temperate on surrounding fields a few degrees – enough to get rid of the snow and grow food more effectively.

The Iqunox mission also adds the “Emission balance” as a new victory point type: It starts tracking from 20:00 onward. The leader needs to surpass others by at least 40.

Rare Resource Goal on Tuto

Planetary colonization is foremost about making a backup of humanity and populating new worlds. But there is another important goal: Exploiting resources!

To reflect this point we have added a second main objective to the first mission on planet Tuto. It introduces all the recently added gameplay mechanisms for rare resource harvesting, item crafting and blasting mountains.

Electronics Factory

The Electronics Factory replaces the existing Mall. It produces complex electronics and needs trained staff. For that reason it is more efficient next to city parts and research districts. It features “Chemical Filters” and “Entertainment Devices” as upgrades.

The Factory has been renamed to Machine Factory to make it easier distinguishable.

Other

• Fixed a hovering problem of the bookmark panel
• Storage upgrades for warehouse have been removed from the research system
• Removed asteroid explosion graphic bugs on start of freeplay and competition matches
• Show asteroids in bookmark panel (top right of the screen)
• Reduced price for asteroid strikes to 65.000€

We present you the greater changes of the April release #32 in a short video on YT. It’s definitely an experiment we wanted to try. Hope you like it:

TL;DR

• The sea farm is a new food producing building.
• Forest, rocks and rare resources are now harvested with drones that are stationed at your warehouses.
• Researched items can now be reset in the campaign screen.
• We have updated the official trailer. Check it out here.
• Midras and natives now trade with gold instead of money.
• Land claiming and tower claim visualizations have been optimized.
• Day & night lighting improved.
• Fixed a lot of small problems and balancing stuff in the Tuto, Magni and Bora missions

Sea Farms

Building of the month is the new construct called sea farm. It can be build on coast fields and sea fields adjacent to land (called “near-shore”). It works as port logistics for offshore fishing boats and the building can also breed shellfish to intensify food production for higher pollution values. The smokehouse upgrades makes its food production more durable, but comes with higher running costs.

Harvest Drones

Little drones that fly around and actually harvest the stuff you ordered to crop or gather. They are stationed on the warehouse and limit the number of crop actions that you can make. But most of all they are pretty good looking and the AI uses them too.

Reset Research

You can now reset your research decisions and strategy in the campaign screen.

New Official Trailer

The Trailer was reworked to show some more actual footage from the game. It has grown old as i had no time to change the video material for nearly two years. Really ;D Check it out here.

New Construction Site

The construction site model is more advanced now. In the next version we want to add individual build and landing animations, also for space ships to make everything a bit more cinematic…

Tower Range Visualization Changed

From now on if you construct, deconstruct or relocate towers you see a red visualization for the land you loose and blue marks on the field you claim. Expensive Upgrades will be relocated as well.

Planet Day & Night Lighting

The Planet was always too dark and contrast less on the night side. With the new moon light night shifts now have become much easier.

Gold Trading

Some NPCs like Natives & Midras will no longer trade for the universal currency of the galaxy. They stick to the gold standard and you can buy gold from merchants or dig it out yourself. These guys will also pay you for certain resources they’re interested in with gold, so you can gather exchange values this way as well.

Special Upgrade Items in the Shop

Laser, Pulse & Shield Upgrades Items can now be bought from traders. This is especially helpful in the Lorian and Magni missions. So if you do not research you can still defend yourself against alien threats and stuff.

Land Claims Repriced

This tool just got more cost intensive as well. It’s price depends on the distance to the outer radius of your city center. This means the price gets higher the farer away you claim land from your city.

Mission Improvements

Excessive bugfixes and roundups for the missions on Tuto, Magni and Bora.

Other stuff

• Bookmark panel shows twisters and Xrathul harvesters
• Several editor fixes
• Improved animation quality for drones
• Fixed game-speed dependent particle generation
• Improved city level up animation
• Reduced forest’s sensitivity to temperature and fertility
• Renamed meteoroid to asteroid to better reflect size relations and impact
• Cursor shows progress ring when tooltips are coming up
• Fixed sandbox menu
• Improved hyperspace gate menu

Welcome to the hyperspace! We are starting to extend the campaign with bonus planets you can access using a hyperspace gate. This gate is being build by Moax the tech trader, who will be able to complete his construction if you find and deliver him enough ideon crystals during the campaign missions.

Udoxia Galaxy

The gate leads into a new galaxy that contains new planets and missions.

Edora

Edora is the first planet in the Udoxia Galaxy. A small planet with giant icebergs at its polar caps. The low valleys of this planet will be flooded immediately by the melt of global warming.

The planet offers a predefined expansion competition against two opposing fractions. This world is also the experimental test ground to establish and improve AI battles in the game. Please give your feed back on how we could improve the interaction with other factions.

Having predefined competitions with a general comparable highscore might be the main concept of the missions in this galaxy. It adds playable content and challenging competition with some additional extra goals to master. This reduces the necessity of story filled scripted missions that need endless balancing.

New alien race: Minas

This short-lived race of typhers and diggers builds giants machines to rummage through entire solar systems searching for rare earths and noble metals. Even though they totally ignore money they are valuable trading partners. They produce rare items and exchange them for raw materials. You will meet these dudes for the first time in a reworked Lorian mission… and they will occur eventually on all following planets.

New terrain texturing algorithm

We have put some additional work into our terrain texturing algorithm to make sure the characteristics of each field are visualized in a clear way. This includes the fertility, temperature and rockiness. In addition fields that might be flooded by rising sea levels have a more sandy or stony look. The transition from one characteristic to another used to be quite blurred. The new shader uses material based alpha blending to enhance this. For example you will see little green spots on terrain, when it becomes more fertile.

Brush sizes

Choose four different brush sizes when drawing height, fertility, temperature, rockiness, forests and bioms.

Editing local temperature is now clamped between +/-20°C

Forest brush

The brandnew “Forest brush” places forests that match the local field types and ground conditions. That’s good, because the plants need certain climate conditions to prosper and grow.

Improved forests

The updated use of transparency for deciduous and acacia forests, mushrooms and palm trees shows a great way to revolutionize the overall look of Imagine Earth’s flora.

Titanite

Deposits of this new rare metalic resource can be found primarily in the dryland biom which are infertile areas with medium temperature. Titanite is so far just costly and exchangable with bombs at the Minas store.

Campaign translation possible

For those in our community who are interested in translating the game. It is finally possible to do translation of the mission scripts as well. Now it is possible to translate every single written word in Imagine Earth. All details are explained in the community translations section of the forums.

New item: Rocket kit

As rockets are now at the end of the research chain. Luckily you can buy rocket building sets from our latest alien race, the Minas.

Construction drones

We have implemented flying construction drones. They lift off and land in a new hangar at the city center tower. It’s an early version but its already fun to see them being busy to set up new constructs. Future implementations might include harvester drones for resources that start and land on warehouses or automated repair drones on the repair units. Currently the city center has one drone per city level.

Other stuff

• Traders leave when spaceport is destroyed
• Terrain height is visualized with height lines
• Fixed “no sound” problem
• Improved “white screen on startup” problem
• Big Illuminati temples are no longer destroyable
• Activating the shield on Bora needs a single completely loaded big Illuminati temple
• Free Play: Renamed threats to events and added the miner, tech trader and merchant
• Improved “earth over” messages
• Meteorite metal is now called crytanite
• Display status timer ring for crashing meteorites

PS: Thanks to all of you who voted us in the indie of the year competition. We made it into the overall top 100 and the top 4 of futuristic sims – next to Space Engineers, Empyrion and RimWorld!