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

Dear space colonists, today we present our latest update for Imagine Earth – Planetary Colonization. Many improvements to the global management system allow you to keep track and control your complex and full-grown colonies and optimize the daily colonizing work on new planets. We would be happy if you test the latest features and give us your feedback and that you come to the forums and put your most desired features on the wishlist. Best regards, Jens and Martin.

P.S: We hope that you and your beloved ones are and stay healthy. Take care!

Great List of Constructs

The new building list represents an almost too modest revolution for total control over your global colonies. Here you get an overview of all buildings in your colony. You can sort them by productivity and condition and have them equipped with upgrades, repaired or cleaned. There is also a list of all resources that are located in your area and can be mined directly. In the city list all districts are listed and can be checked for their quality of life.

Release Date

What can I say, the veterans among you may already enjoy this as a running gag, but we have to postpone the final release of Imagine Earth 1.0 once again. We ask for your patience and understanding, as it is our main effort to make Imagine Earth really good and a smooth experience. The port to the Unity Engine went relatively well and was worth the work in every respect, but still took twice as much time as we had hoped for. As is often the case, the devil is in the details and there are a lot of game features that need to be balanced and interlinked.

Long story short: We postpone the release until September 2020. It is of course also in the true nature of this project that a global build-up game with economic strategy and authentic planet and climate simulation is a bit oversized for two developers. But we never lost motivation or faith in the core idea and the idealism that made this project so special for ourselves as well. The new date gives us a very generous amount of time to do fine tuning and add some final features. Of course you will always be able to play all finished progress immediately in early access and we will keep you informed on everything…

Remediation and Maintenance

You wished that we introduce the possibility of automatic cleaning of dirt and automatic building repair earlier in the game. The boss will always bring some construction kits for the cleaning center and the maintenance station at the end of the first missions. So they will also be better introduced by the story.

New Item: Propaganda Hack

With the new Propaganda Hack Item you can get the colonists of another faction to revolt. Using the hack will start an uprising in the selected district. This will cause a classic loss of tax revenue and spread to other parts of the city.

New Achievements

Need new challenges playing Imagine Earth? No problem, we have added three new achievements for you to earn. You can complete the mission on Udion Torix or win three competitions on Workshop Planets. One achievement can only be unlocked by building your own planet in sandbox mode.

Interact with Status Icons

This feature is a really practical thing. In the event of a fire, riot, incident or damaged building, you will now have a corresponding icon displayed above the building and you can click directly on it to perform the necessary action such as extinguish or repair. We’ve also unified how the icons above the buildings and units are displayed in the game.

Revised Gaia Graphics and Story

We have rewritten a part of the background story of Imagine Earth. Whenever you discover one of the Gaianic terraforming constructs like a temple or the citadel, the story of the Gaians continues to be told – an ancient race who were able to use and change the planetary force fields. As the game progresses, we will learn why they have left behind their advanced terraforming technology on so many newly discovered planets.
Note: In the preview version this is work in progress.

No More Research Limitations

Correctly read, we recently realized that we have long since developed our research system so comprehensively that we only need research budgets as a limiting factor in the campaign missions. From now on you can freely research what you need in freeplay and in competition mode. By building City Centers and Research Districts you can increase the efficiency of your research.

Prioritized Mining

One of those options where you wonder why they have not always been there. When all of your harvesting drones are busy, you can use this simple button to specify that the targeted resource be mined with priority, then a drone is removed from the most worthless resource that is currently being mined.

Jump to Native Twin Camps

As you probably know, the Rounosian Natives always live in twin camps. With this new button you can jump between them.

Switch Upgrades of Towers

Finally, it is also possible to convert the upgrades of towers, frontier buoys and research centers. So depending on the threat situation, energy shields, lasers or pulse cannons can be installed.

Domination Victory

You can now also win a competition when all other companies give up their colonies or are taken over.

Gameplay Improvements

• Allow to use piracy item on all opponent fields (not only warehouse)
• Allow to hack stock shares of competitors that are hold by other competitors
• Increased rocks, rare resources and deco elements for barren biome type
• Send drone to rebuild constructs
• Terraforming can make volcanoes erupt
• Allow spaceships (e.g. uplink) to land on forests
• Territory of other companies taken over by native camps is no longer considered an offensive act

Graphic Improvements

• Improved overall rendering performance (~10% FPS increase)
• Added sub meshes for big mountains that take multiple fields
• Reduced visibility of front clouds
• Custom selector visualization for ocean fields
• Improved visibility of colony borders at day

UI Improvements

• Show animation when new items are bought or received
• Increased size of bookmark and factions panels (top right and bottom right UI elements
• City bookmarks: Add icon for all your cities that have no bookmark
• Tool ring: Show which icon belongs to open sub panels
• Scan item: Show icons on top of possible fields
• Improved layout of dialogs
• Improved visibility of loading indicator

Fixes

• Fixed alignment of assimilators taking over cities
• Fixed niter-pumpkin graphics (depending on size)
• Fixed problems with too many pirates appearing in competition games

Finally! There it is, the new version of Imagine Earth using the Unity graphics engine. It took us a while to port all visualizations and UI elements, but the result it totally worth it – especially because we can move much faster now based on a modern graphics engine with a lot of tools and features that make the live a lot easier for us.

Full savegame compatibility

Before we have a look into what is new, we want to point out that your existing savegames will still work. If you experience any problems related to that, please note that we lately moved the savegames to a new directory:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\ImagineEarth

If you want to try out the old version again after tomorrow afternoon on for comparison, you can do so with the following instructions:

Right-click Imagine Earth in your Steam Library.
Under „Properties…“ click „Betas„
Enter the password „oldgameengine„

Ocean shader

A good example for these beautiful opportunities is the new ocean shader that comes with refraction effects for objects that are under water.

Physics based materials & new lightning

The unity engine made it a lot easier for us to add beautiful visual effects. We use physics based rendering for all buildings and world objects, which for example gives rare resource deposits metallic reflections in the sun.

Also each planet theme now has a much stronger colorization and individual look.

Post-processing effects

The game now makes use of an improved bloom post-processing effect and a depth of field filter, as shown in the image below.
There is also an exposure filter that lights the scene up on the night side of the planet.

3D Sound

Finally we have a working solution for the 3D sounds in the world. This feels especially great with the new landing sounds of the trader space ships.

Planetary shield

This is the new style for the planetary shield generated by the great pyramids. The triangle elements randomly move and make it look very organic.

Explosions

I picture says more than a thousand words…

Thunderstorms

The thunderstorm has a completely new visualization and each lightning strike puts the scene into a bright light.

Pollution, snow and more particles

Snow areas now look more natural and sometimes have a decent snow particle effect.

We have also used particle effects and the new building shader to intensify the pollution visualization. Thus it’s now easier to see which fields have a high pollution and need cleaning.

Forests

Trees in forest now move independently from each other in the wind. Also we have added basic shadows that make the forests easier to see on the night side of the planet.

Other improvements

• Improved video quality and playback.
• “Building menu” title on the building ring to make it better distinguishable from the tool ring
• Consistent usage of fertility icon
• Volcano and other big objects: The tool ring is now positioned over the clicked field instead of the center of the object

Hello lovely space colonizers, a new update had to be done. Some bugs and exotic writing problems in the documents folder of Windows didn’t want to stop appearing for some players while being not reproducible by us. We suspect hyperactive anti-virus programs behind it and the like, but now we’ve rewritten the Imagine Earth method to save your profiles and your savegames to end it once and for all!

No Savegame Left Behind

Imagine Earth will copy your populated worlds and achievements into a new folder the next time you start the game.

Savegames are now stored here: %userprofile%\AppData\Local\ImagineEarth

As always with our updates, all savegames should still work afterwards, a circumstance that is less self-evident than you might think, or so to say that causes extreme activity at our end 😉 Please try if everything still works as usual.

Steam Cloud Support

On that occasion we added steam cloud support for our game. This means savegames and scores will now be synchronized via Steam.

Depending on the amount of savegames you have and your upload speed this may take a while when starting the game the next time.

Unity Engine Beta

Of course also the new Unity Engine beta version of our game has also undergone some optimizations as we want to change to the new Universal Pipeline of the Unity Engine with the new year if all goes well. If you want to have a look at it, check in the last dev post how easy you can unlock it on Steam. Everything is already in its place and running. https://www.imagineearth.info/alpha-56-preview/

Greetings Colony Managers, surely you are wondering what happened to the monthly updates that we used to deliver all the way. The simple reason is that big changes are coming. After 5 years of early access we decided to make an engine switch to Unity before finally releasing the game.

We worked restlessly and after two month the new version is ready to be tested. So to make it short if you’re already supporting Imagine Earth in early access we wanted to give you the opportunity to join the preview of the new version.

Why all the work you might ask. Well we simply wanted to make it easier for us to provide you with great visuals and to have a better out of the box stability and compatibility than the community driven Monogame engine, we used before. It also gives us easy portability to other platforms and consoles. New opportunities await us in terms of graphics and shaders so the quality, look and the atmosphere of the game can finally meet the aspiration and complexity of its content that we have created over all the years.

Please help us getting the new baby tested!

1. Right-click Imagine Earth in your Steam Library.
2. Under “Properties…” click “Betas”
3. Enter the password “unitypreview”.

Important note: You can always leave the beta and return the the existing version of the game. All savegames will be compatible!

The current version comes with automatic crash reporting. This means that we will receive a technical error report that will help us to find and fix the problem.

List of Improvements

• A good example for these beautiful opportunities is the new ocean shader.
• See the noble metal deposits glitter in the sun.
• Experience physics based rendering for all constructs in the world.
• Improved lighting system renders the world more colorful and shining.
• Finally we have an improved solution for the 3D sounds in the world and it comes with new effects for incoming space ships.
  -Finally we have a contemporary implementation for hd video for the intro and cut-scenes.
• A new style for the planetary shield generated by the great pyramids.

Expect more exciting stuff to happen in Imagine Earth – Planetary Colonization soon as the Unity universal render pipeline is still in development we keep the game up to date of course. After all this engineering work we can’t wait to get back into game design and put some well thought-out ideas into practice. Please stay tuned for what comes next.

Welcome! The September update of Imagine Earth is ready. Our focus this time is on share trading but as usual you get lots of improvements and new features.

We hope you enjoy all of these goodies. If you haven’t reviewed the game on steam yet, please do! Let us know what you think about the changes. We’re so close to reclaim the 80% – Very good” rating, which would be incredibly great for the reception of the game 🙂 Cheers, Martin & Jens

Shares Trade & AI

You can’t miss the new share panel which is located among the all important panels in the middle bottom. It offers a great overview to all values and numbers that play a role in share trading.

The AI opponents are know actively buying shares. At least those who have share trading in their corporate agenda. On the right you see how many owners a corporation has and how many shares they own. This also means another important thing: AI will now actively take over cities if they have a sufficient amount of shares. The times when you could sell your own shares excessively without a risk are over!

Catastrophes and Global Warming

All possible natural catastrophes are now listed in the Global warming drop down. And the disaster risk is rising by several percentages with ongoing global warming.

You will be notified regularly about the changes in the global ecosystem.

Tools in the Build Panel

We integrated a toolbox into the build ring and the build menu. There you can activate tools for mass upgrading, cleaning and repairing. It’s super handy and it come’s with the new forestation tool: It always plants the best fitting forest on a piece of land. You only have to examine the type of vegetation first.

Productivity Warning Icon

We brought a permanent icon into the world that shows unmistakably when a certain production building is unproductive or misplaced. So you can optimize your colony without having to do guess work and checking each individual field.

Highscores for Steam Workshop Planets

You can now compete for global highscores on every planet that you downloaded from Steam Workshop. Just play it in competition mode and get ready to beat global scores.

Music Tracks

We have a new win theme created by Alex of William E. Audio. A good opportunity to play and win one of those workshop planets and listen to it!

Also, we changed two music tracks that where part of the game for years now. Their highest intensity level for the final state of global warming was an e-guitar melody that most people couldn’t stand for long. We optimized one track to be suitably played as background music for longer time and erased the other completely. Please stay tuned until we have the funding for a full force SciFi soundtrack 😉

New Event Notifications

As you can see new event notification popups will inform you from now on when important things are happening. They popup whenever you earn landing permits, research budget or licenses. They will also show up when catastrophes are threatening your base.

Gamescom, August 20. -24th

We have been to gamescom in Cologne and showed Imagine Earth to the public in the Indie Arena Booth. Definitively the best place for innovative Indie Studios! As expected it was a so called blast to present the game to so many excited players. New ideas and balancing issues popped up by the minute. Also the prime minister of our home state was showing up to try the smartest climate crisis simulator made in Niedersachsen, Germany so far ;D

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In case you’re wondering, the one to my right in the first picture isn’t Martin. It’s Timo from Mad About Pandas who helped me out presenting Imagine Earth for almost 10 hrs over 5 days because Martin has become a father most recently and couldn’t attend the show due to obvious priorities 😉

Lots of Other Things

• Simplified script syntax (will soon be available for workshop as-well)
• Changed color of infrastructure building icons
• Allow to cancel “quit mission” dialog
• Make sure trader has always at least one laser or pulse cannon
• Display faction names in game setup
• Xrathul now “harvest” all colony buildings – not only districts
• Display victory point target number in victory points panel
• Improved camera controls (less sensitive in some situations)
• Also adjust temperature in fields adjacent to area of climate generator
• Display build graphics immediately after placements
• Colorize area that will belong to a city while it’s being built
• Removed annoying sound in colony rating panel
• Make sure AI keeps some resource and items to have better trading opportunities between players
• Improved territorial dominance logic – distance to claiming building should be more important than build order
• Allow cancelling of research