Greetings Space Colonists,

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.

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

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

https://youtu.be/Kf_ApUXgMtU

Forest Ambient Sound

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

Harvesting Tool

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

Technology Panel

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

Need for Speed

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

Cheers to the Winners

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

List of Buildings

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

Everything at a glance

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

Ideon Goals Visualization

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

Share Market Panel

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

New Research Panel

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

Translations

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

Interface Changes

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

Fixes

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

Dear planet colonizers, just in time for the Steam Winter Sale we can offer you a very special update as the new illustrator’s character design has been finalized and successfully integrated into Imagine Earh – Planetary Colonization. Please help us by testing the new features and give feedback into the Steam forum. If you like what we are doing think about reviewing the game on steam – this will help the project a lot!

New Factions and Campaign Characters

You’ll see them everywhere once you start the game. Design wise it’s another evolutionary step forward to the finishing line for version 1.0. Because these people are more likely to be taken serious and showing authentic emotions throughout the campaign.

Tension Tracks

Whenever there is danger in the air you will now also be able to hear it. When asteroids are raining down on your colonies or Xrathul aliens are closing in to feast on your colonies special tension tracks will be played that reflect these threats in the music of the game.

Performance Optimizations

On the CPU side of the game calculations the code has been enhanced and cleaned up for multi threading. That enhances the game speed quite a lot – especially for systems that have a slow CPU.

Load Planet Dialogs

These screens finally show all the information you need to know when loading a planet in competitions or in the workshop.

Game Pad UI Optimized

All interfaces for game pad controls have once again been overhauled to make it a joy using game pad controllers as well. The game features on Steam are now officially set to full game pad support. Since we haven’t received a lot of feedback on this yet, we’d be happy if you have a try and tell us what you think.

Interface Changes

The list of Buildings has been redesigned to make mass repairs, cleaning and upgrading of infrastructure in your colonies a piece of cake.

• Hide build menu info when cursor hovers planet behind it
• Hide buildings list until first city is built
• Reformatted descriptions in victory points overview
• Building list notifications centered between bookmarks and factions panels
• New startup logo

Fixes

• Fixed campaign research counter
• Fixed build panel still shows selected item, when another category is selected
• Sound volume should not affect music volume
• AI keeps asking for alliance
• Icon shown in wrong height over asteroids with rare resources
• Editor build menu can now be used with gamepad

Most of this winter’s update 62 for Imagine happens under the surface or in the controls and interfaces. There is a lot of fine-tuning to optimize the general usability of the game with gamepad and mouse alike. We also worked on the Xbox implementation and the translation. Yes, the characters in the game will soon not only look completely different, they will speak to you! But according to the season there are also some improvements on the ice planets, a new soundtrack and much more…

Light Curser

A simple and effective optical innovation is that the cursor now emits a light on the night side of planets. As half of the planet is logically in the dark and the landscape there is not very impressive without shadows from the sunlight, this light brings life to the dark. Water surface reflections and also gold, metal and crystals sparkle exactly where you look and act on the planet.

Heat Radius of Volcanoes Increased

Dormant volcanoes can be awakened with ideon bombs and thus heat up the landscape in order to be able to better grow food on icy planets, for example. For a while now, this can also be achieved with thermal generators. It was urgently necessary to increase the heat range of a volcano compared to that of a generator.

Brand New Ring Styles

The style of the construction and tool rings was adapted to each other and visualized in a cooler way. The information about the tools no longer overlays the navigation in the ring but is clearly arranged on the right side.

Winter Wonderland

The snow-covered landscape was optimized and embellished. Small but fine adjustments ensure that the landscape is still visible under the snow cover and that the structure of the surface is seen. Thus the snow cover also makes houses and plants even more recognizable.

New Character Design

Just to get you used to this quantum leap in character design, here is a preview of what the next update will bring. We found a talented illustrator and he redesigned all the characters and taught them how to talk in elaborate animations. We believe this will give a fundamentally new feeling to playing Imagine Earth.

Keyboard and Mouse Controls Info Optimized

We have also optimized the control display for mouse & keyboard control. On top of that there are a few handy new shortcuts.

New Soundtrack

Another new track has been added to the Imagine Earth soundtrack. Making the whole atmosphere of Imagine Earth more rich, symphonic and diverse.

New Languages

We added community translations for Polish and Japanese language. If you happen to speak one these languages please let us know how the quality is because we can’t check it ourselves.

Autumn Sale – 35% off now!

Gamepad Refinements

• Gamepad cursor with action icon for tool
• Delete mode für Editor planets
• Briefing/Goals/Planet info buttons
• Refined control of factions panel (bottom right)
• Refined gamepad control of button selection
• Directly close build ring

More Fixes

• UI problem in Inventory ring description
• Refined generation of fossils and resources on planets
• Fixed mood influence range of health district upgrade
• Fixed buildings sometimes showing with a delay after camera jumps
• Increased heating range of volcanoes in cold areas
• Build panel now shows building descriptions when no upgrade is hovered
• Reduced Xrathul bait crafting resources to three
• Improved AI abilities to defned against Assimilators and Xrathul

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

Research System changed

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

Ocean Sound

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

Gamepad Control Prototype

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

New menu button font

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

Tool Tips in Tool Rings

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

Soundtrack

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

Colony Rating Revised

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

Joma Mission refurbished

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

Buildings List Panel

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

Buildings List Button

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

Game Setup Revised

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

Planet Completion

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

UI & Other Improvements

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

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

Have fun

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

İyi Eğlenceler

Hey, welcome, everybody! Finally another juicy release #60 has been finished and look what a catchy title it has! If you want to read more about the new traveling back in time laws in our “Imagine Universe” you should scroll down to “Planet Time Lines” in the Update Release Post. Eye candy of the month are the first scribbles of the brand new character redesign that has just begun. Apart from that a lot has happened under the hood again and in terms of game system optimizations and balancing. We always count on you when it comes to testing the new features in practical implementation. Try everything and tell us your opinion. We are happy to take up your wishes and ideas, what do you think Imagine Earth is missing most of all? But for now please enjoy Update #60,

Martin & Jens | Serious Bros.

Difficulty Levels

The selection of difficulty levels has been given an epic pop-up panel that clearly breaks down the characteristics of each level and also tells you what the positive effects it has on your high score.

Improved Buildings List

The new list of buildings from last update, still needed some adjustments to make it nail down its universal usability. The menu and the listing of functions, tabs and options are now rearranged and also visualized more stylishly.

Performance Optimizations

This is something that we have just started to consistently work on, until the final release of the game. With the new release we have tried to identify the biggest performance killers related to special units, e.g. like Assimilators or a lot of Xrathul ships.

Planet Time Lines

If you load an old savegame or restart the planet and then save it, all savegames who are lying in the future on that planet’s time line will be revoked as you obviously changed the past. This automatically prevents savegames with parallel time lines for the same planet from being created and cleanly breaks everthing down to one single, unique time line. No parallel universes or messy stuff like that.

If you are wondering now what this complex change is supposed to be good for at all, the following should be said. We wanted to make sure that the fate of a planet would play an important role, and that the player would always be able to return to the current state of the planet in order to develop their civilization or repair the environmental damage. At the same time, we didn’t want to trample on the luxurious freedom that a flexible savegame system provides. Don’t even try to guess how long we discussed to come up with this linear solution.

Progress Info in Campaign Screen

The new Progress completion box in the campaign galaxy map is more stylish and also contains the finished research as an achievable goal. Further exciting challenges will follow. For example, the mastered difficulty levels on the different planets will be counted from the next version on and will contribute to complete the overall score in the campaign.

Info Panel for Empty Fields

Even this feature might seem so trivial that one wonders why it is mentioned here. That’s also why it took us so long to realize that it’s missing. From now on a howered empty field gets an info panel as well as one with buildings or objects on it. Simply because there are so many interesting values that can be displayed to it. For example, raw and fossil material deposits were previously shown with field graphics, but these were never explained in words.

User Interface Optimizations

• Also rotate planet when dragging outside of the planet area
• Consistent UI back navigation
• Reworked pause visualization for icons
• Increased size of quest icons
• Display quest icons of progress icon
• Hide still active goals in quest goal overview

Character Redesign

Something is happening on this design front, I can only say. If you look at the picture above you might recognize the Midras aliens from the game and you have a look at how they might look like in the future. With the help of our new illustrator we are developing an amazingly vivid fresh style, which will be a quantum leap for the immersive look of the game.

Mechanics & Balancing

• Smoothened seismic activity of volcanoes and made it a bit more likely for some to erupt
• Forbid building city centers on asteroid impact fields
• No longer allow interaction with Illuminati camps after they have been destroyed

Coming Soon: Gamepad Support

Besides that we are currently preparing gamepad support for the game to properly support steam big picture and at some point also game consoles.

Greatings, space colony managers! We have a fine small update ready for you. Even though Martin is on parental leave at the moment and our new third man Rico is still in the getting into things, we were able to put some nice gameplay updates together for you. If you are still thinking about picking up Imagine Earth you can get it for 35% off at the Steam Summer Sale right now. As always we’d love to get your feedback on the new stuff and wanna know how the latest features work out.

Light Effects

There are now glaring light effects during spaceship landings, construction campaigns, demolition lasers and impulse cannons. But also repair actions, harvesting operations and for example rioting aliens cause colorfully illuminated buildings and areas in their vicinity. Of course, these are particularly impressive at night. Don’t worry, you can deactivate them in the options if it gets too much for your eyes.

New Storage Management

We have reorganized the organization of the stored resources. There are now clearer displays of how much storage space has been reserved for different things and how full the storage rooms actually are. The new structure of the buttons and bars also makes this much easier to understand.

Campaign Rating

To make the development of your company even more of a challenge, you will now compete in the ranking against 20 major corporations that you might know from well-known science fiction stories.
This is only a prelude to the leaderboards soon to be completely renewed. And to make them more readable. They belong to the oldest menus in the game and should be able to show even more rankings.

Improved Visualization

Improved visualization by coloring the fields for buildings with improved performance through optimal placement

Interface Redesign

Redesigned user interface with new titles a uniform position for the back button and more consitent menus.

Optimized Building Panel

An optimized building panel gives you more overview and control over all your colony buildings and enables you to bulk upgrade, clean and repair the most urgent cases.

Fixes

• Fixed fade to black transparency problems for panels and tooltips
• We fixed a rare bug that prevented you from getting a 2nd landing permission in the first mission.
• New translation for brazilian store texts
• Ingame time speed problem fixed
• Crash in stock panel
• Also many many UI fixes done

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

Galaxy Map for the Hyperspace

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

The Xrathul Bait

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

Asteroids vs. Space Invaders

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

Automation of the Workshop Crafting

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

Drone Flight Characteristics

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

The Overtaker

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

Share Market Panel

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

Finish Side Quests Later

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

Refined Magni Mission

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

UI & Graphic Improvements

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

Other Improvements & Fixes

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

We’ve made a few tweaks for you that improve terrain, interface and shadow calculation in our global civilization builder. Read news in full detail on the Steam page of Imagine Earth. There’s also 35% off weekend sale until monday…

HBAO – Ambient Occlusion

First of all, you should notice more beautiful shadows in the game, which give the constructs, forests and objects more depth and also connect them to the environment and connect them better with the terrain. We were really looking forward to this quite classic technique called Ambient Occlusion when we switched from our homemade engine to Unity, but even they still had to integrate it into their brand new Universal Renderline.

Blueshift in the User Interface

We set out to change from the turquoise UI design to a bluer layout and to unify and standardize the colors in it. This of course serves the purpose of making the Global Colony Management Interface visually less distracting and peaceful. Some game menu elements have already been adapted, but the process is still ongoing.

Planetary Terrain Textures

Fixed severe Icon Bug

Thanks to our new, automated bug tracking system, it was quickly noticed that many players experienced a bug related to interacting with the new clickable event icons that we have thrown out in the last major update. Problem solved.

35 % Sale until this Weekend

In case you haven’t noticed we have the biggest discount sale ongoing on Steam until Monday! Time to grab a unique game about economic growth and climate crisis. If you feel like spreading the news, here is how we put it when trying to describe Imagine Earth briefly in public. Thanks for your support.

Imagine Earth puts the player in the position of a global economic player. He has to build up and supply his civilization, produce and trade goods into space and compete against other corporations. In order to preserve the environmental quality of life for his inhabitants and to avoid a global climate crisis, he has to find a balance between growth and sustainability.

Thanks for your support! We hope you enjoy the changes to Imagine Earth and let us know your ideas about them in the forums.

Enjoy playing and stay save, Jens and Martin