Bugfix: AI colonization
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AI colonization behavior fixed, AI should now colonize more often
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Some black magic replaced the 0.18 2025 scenario with the 0.17 one. It has been fixed. I also increased the size of the mission tree screen
Hello everyone, here is the full changelog for the 0.18 update.
Mission Trees have been added to some situations, and present new challenges for some nations to do during the game. The idea of mission trees is to incentivize and direct the player without forcing them to do a specific course of action, so they are still very open ended, but provide small or large bonuses based on their completion. Some mission trees also have multiple branching paths allowing for more replay value on some countries.
America's mission tree focuses on reunifying the country and building it up
Europe's mission tree allows for final Apotheosis to occur in a new and interesting way
India can now choose between liberating itself from the Castes or embracing them.
There are new situations for various countries, including Earth, Mars, and each continental formable. These situations are earned when you form the country in question. The Mechanist Coalescene can also now be obtained by Federalizing Europe in 2025.
Anyone uniting Mars will have access to this mission tree
Any continental formable on Earth will get this mission tree
With the new ledger you can measure your progress against other countries, and filter by strength.
I added a bunch of new cool asteroids to the asteroid belt. Some of them even have moons!
Also, the deposits in the asteroid belt have been moved around so the Stable Orbits are no longer the best part of the belt by far. Instead, the really good deposits are scattered between asteroids and each one usually only has one resource in abundance.
I have been slowly changing the 2025 start date to be more in line with reality. The pre existing date had many issues which primarily came from the fact that it was ported with few changes from 2092 and that I was busy working on interstellar when I was making it. I also didn't think anyone really cared about the 2025 scenario since I almost never play it myself.
NATO is more uniformly blue/purple/teal, with the US remaining unchanged (Republic/Liberal/Interventionist) and many US allies being moved more in line with their leader. The exception to the rule here is France, which I liked as a potential NATO renegade and so left them more purple-ish.
China is unchanged, but some of its neighbors have had their reforms altered to make them more erratic.
Africa, with the exception of communist countries like Eritrea and a few others, are uniformly agrarian oligarchies, autocracies, or faulty republics with neutral or restricted civil liberties. This should hopefully make the Green ideology stronger.
South America has been made more divided between socialist aligned bureaucratic republics like Brazil/Colombia (recent election hasn't happened yet) and NATO-aligned countries like Argentina. My intention here is that China will have inroads for expansion into Latin America while NATO will need to play defensively here.
Mexico's cartel countries have been replaced by a cartel situation, which also applies to other countries that have drug trafficking issues like Colombia and Venezuela. You can either embrace the drug trade for easy money or crack down on it for a big eventual reward.
Most of the middle east is unchanged, with some reforms slightly altered for the sake of creating some potential conflict between the Islamic countries there.
Europe's religion/culture traits were not supposed to be the same as their 2092 variants but I forgot to change them. They have been altered to their current values.
All countries' populations have been made to within 5% tolerance accurately represent their real life values.
Population: World Bank 2024
Religion: Pew Research
Political Alignent/Government Form
This was more complex as different sources disagreed with each other on various points. As I understand it, the "Better 2025" mod used primarily the freedomhouse.org source for "Freedom in the World" to determine political alignment, however I found some of the ratings a bit suspect, so I have included 3 sources, one with a known right-bias and one with a known left-bias in order to balance it out:
https://economicfreedom.heritage.org/
Ideally, at least 2 of these sources will agree with each other, and I implemented the results of that (with my own spin on things for the purposes of balance and fun)
I did not add any more organizations because they are annoying enough in the existing 2025 scenario. When I get around to adding organizations that don't function like military alliances (i.e, they don't call all their allies into war with them), there will be more but for now I kept it to NATO, Belt and Road, and CSTO.
I did not modify technology levels either. This is because I would like the colonization gameplay to begin immediately, however unrealistic that may appear to be. In reality, since this game is fast paced anyway, it would either happen too soon or too late, and the AI would be so far behind on colony tech due to randomized research choices that it is functionally much better to encourage AI colonization by giving the world's most advanced space powers the ability to do it from the get-go.
Ultimately, fun is more important than realism. Realism is only good insofar as it enables fun, not otherwise.
UI optimizations
Forming certain countries will give your their Situation
Federalize Organization bug fixed
New Asteroid Belt Asteroids
Graphical improvements
2025: Political changes, culture trait changes, religion changes
New notification when a crisis is happening
New pre-game technologies
AI behavior changes
Back end multiple language support (no idea how to translate properly yet)
AI behavior changes
Evil Crisis situations are now very different: they are "good" and give you bonuses but you can easily lose control of them and become Moloch/Eugenarchy.
Notification Settings: customize which notifications create popups
Subregions enabling can now be selected at game start, but cannot be changed once the game has started
New mod defines editor tool in the mod uploader section. This tool will do the formatting of the json files for you, and help build new mod content.
Research costs reduced by ~20%, but education rate reduced by 50%. This is intended to make research faster in the early game, but slower later on.
New AI Nukes option to disable AI bombing with strategic weapons
AI desire to build spaceports and spaceships increased
Polycrisis severity reduced effects
Costs of buying/selling resource capacities reduced by 75%
Trade barriers and market fee reduced overall
More tooltips
New wonders
New Crisis: The Imaginarium
Can now press Tab to switch between owned planets quickly
Bug fixes
I made a video with some more details on update 0.18 including some of the mission trees I did not talk about in the previous announcement:
Hello everyone, I know there hasn't been an update in a little while and today I am going to explain why. I have been working on some cool stuff recently that has been very time consuming but I am glad to say that it is finally nearly ready for the main branch.
0.18 is going to be live on August 5, and along with all of the stuff currently in the Experimental branch there is some new things that have been in closed testing for a few weeks:
Mission Trees have been added to some situations, and present new challenges for some nations to do during the game. The idea of mission trees is to incentivize and direct the player without forcing them to do a specific course of action, so they are still very open ended, but provide small or large bonuses based on their completion. Some mission trees also have multiple branching paths allowing for more replay value on some countries.
America's mission tree focuses on reunifying the country and building it up
Europe's mission tree allows for final Apotheosis to occur in a new and interesting way
India can now choose between liberating itself from the Castes or embracing them.
There are new situations for various countries, including Earth, Mars, and each continental formable. These situations are earned when you form the country in question. The Mechanist Coalescene can also now be obtained by Federalizing Europe in 2025.
Anyone uniting Mars will have access to this mission tree
Any continental formable on Earth will get this mission tree
There is a new VR-based crisis alongisde Moloch and the Eugenarchy: the Imaginarium. It is similar to the other crisis factions except that it emphasizes total compliance of all humanity inside of its gameplay framework: Reality 2.0. You can discover this crisis for yourself by researching Neural Network based technology.
With the new ledger you can measure your progress against other countries, and filter by strength.
I added a bunch of new cool asteroids to the asteroid belt. Some of them even have moons!
Also, the deposits in the asteroid belt have been moved around so the Stable Orbits are no longer the best part of the belt by far. Instead, the really good deposits are scattered between asteroids and each one usually only has one resource in abundance.
I have decided to delay the full release of Solar Nations 2 from August 2026 to January 2027.
The Discord poll was overwhelmingly in favor of a delay, and I agree that this is the correct choice. The game is not where I want it to be for 1.0 yet, and releasing too early would be worse than taking a few more months to improve it.
Early Access will continue as normal. I will use the extra time to fix bugs, improve the new player experience, polish existing systems, improve balance, and add more content.
Thank you for the support and feedback. I think this will lead to a better full release.
Experimental UI optimizations
Graphical improvements
2025: Political changes, culture trait changes, religion changes
I have been slowly changing the 2025 start date to be more in line with reality. The pre existing date had many issues which primarily came from the fact that it was ported with few changes from 2092 and that I was busy working on interstellar when I was making it. I also didn't think anyone really cared about the 2025 scenario since I almost never play it myself.
NATO is more uniformly blue/purple/teal, with the US remaining unchanged (Republic/Liberal/Interventionist) and many US allies being moved more in line with their leader. The exception to the rule here is France, which I liked as a potential NATO renegade and so left them more purple-ish.
China is unchanged, but some of its neighbors have had their reforms altered to make them more erratic.
Africa, with the exception of communist countries like Eritrea and a few others, are uniformly agrarian oligarchies, autocracies, or faulty republics with neutral or restricted civil liberties. This should hopefully make the Green ideology stronger.
South America has been made more divided between socialist aligned bureaucratic republics like Brazil/Colombia (recent election hasn't happened yet) and NATO-aligned countries like Argentina. My intention here is that China will have inroads for expansion into Latin America while NATO will need to play defensively here.
Mexico's cartel countries have been replaced by a cartel situation, which also applies to other countries that have drug trafficking issues like Colombia and Venezuela. You can either embrace the drug trade for easy money or crack down on it for a big eventual reward.
Most of the middle east is unchanged, with some reforms slightly altered for the sake of creating some potential conflict between the Islamic countries there.
Europe's religion/culture traits were not supposed to be the same as their 2092 variants but I forgot to change them. They have been altered to their current values.
All countries' populations have been made to within 5% tolerance accurately represent their real life values.
Population: World Bank 2024
Religion: Pew Research
Political Alignent/Government Form
This was more complex as different sources disagreed with each other on various points. As I understand it, the "Better 2025" mod used primarily the freedomhouse.org source for "Freedom in the World" to determine political alignment, however I found some of the ratings a bit suspect, so I have included 3 sources, one with a known right-bias and one with a known left-bias in order to balance it out:
https://economicfreedom.heritage.org/
Ideally, at least 2 of these sources will agree with each other, and I implemented the results of that (with my own spin on things for the purposes of balance and fun)
I did not add any more organizations because they are annoying enough in the existing 2025 scenario. When I get around to adding organizations that don't function like military alliances (i.e, they don't call all their allies into war with them), there will be more but for now I kept it to NATO, Belt and Road, and CSTO.
I did not modify technology levels either. This is because I would like the colonization gameplay to begin immediately, however unrealistic that may appear to be. In reality, since this game is fast paced anyway, it would either happen too soon or too late, and the AI would be so far behind on colony tech due to randomized research choices that it is functionally much better to encourage AI colonization by giving the world's most advanced space powers the ability to do it from the get-go.
Ultimately, fun is more important than realism. Realism is only good insofar as it enables fun, not otherwise.
Hello, I made a video about a United Colonies campaign I played, you can find it here:
New notification when a crisis is happening
New pre-game technologies
Bug fixes
AI behavior changes
Hello everyone, I was made aware of an issue where the credits were not displaying properly. This is something I had overlooked, and it led to concerns about some of the exoplanet textures (which are from SpaceEngine, if you did not know). SpaceEngine PRO allows for commercial use of their textures (which are very good), and I have SpaceEngine PRO on my main steam account. However, since the credits were not displaying correctly, people did not know this, so I have added a credits.txt to the game files so that everyone knows what kind of external media I used when making the game.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, the lack of clarity was my fault.
Hello everyone. Today I have some more changes for the experimental branch. I have been working on localization recently, but have so far been unable to make good translations since I do not know any language other than english, however the backend support is now there.
Back end multiple language support (no idea how to translate properly yet)
AI behavior changes
Evil Crisis situations are now very different: they are "good" and give you bonuses but you can easily lose control of them and become Moloch/Eugenarchy.
Standardization of mod .json file naming convention. If yours "wasnt working" it was because of a load-order problem that only showed up on about half of machines.
Notification Settings: customize which notifications create popups
Bug fixes
Hello everyone, I have a significant set of updates today. Here is the changelog:
Subregions enabling can now be selected at game start, but cannot be changed once the game has started
New mod defines editor tool in the mod uploader section. This tool will do the formatting of the json files for you, and help build new mod content.
Research costs reduced by ~20%, but education rate reduced by 50%. This is intended to make research faster in the early game, but slower later on.
New AI Nukes option to disable AI bombing with strategic weapons
AI desire to build spaceports and spaceships increased
Polycrisis severity reduced effects
Costs of buying/selling resource capacities reduced by 75%
Trade barriers and market fee reduced overall
More tooltips
New wonders
Bug fixes
This video talks about some of the things I like most about Solar Nations 2 and why I made it.
Hello everyone, I have something interesting for you today. I have been experimenting with Subregions for a bit and found that they make an interesting addition to the game, but since they are a very significant alteration I want to gauge your thoughts before I commit to implementing them.
Subregions are those little province things you can select on the map with Ctrl-click. Every region is made up of around 5-10 of them, and they dont really do anything in the game. However, I have made a change that treats them like regions for the purposes of unit movement, but not economics.
In a sense, that means that each region can now have many locations inside it for units, which is cool for wars and makes them more interesting in my opinion.
Manpower recovery speed increased
War exhaustion now decreases manpower recovery speed
AI likes to build factories MUCH more
Factories now 10x as expensive, but give 5x as much industrial capacity
Battles take twice as long
Default template nukes will have more breakthrough (AI will also use these)
All land units can now carry aircraft up to 10% of their size with them
Default tank template now includes Fighter support
Changes to AI colonization logic
"Last Stand" bonus for countries that are losing wars, which reduces war exhaustion
The other changes will almost certainly be added to the game, so the only thing I am testing is the subregions.
Overall, the tweaks to the AI result in them being 2-3 times more threatening overall, especially in the mid game. I would be wary of playing on higher difficulties until you get a feel for them.
The war changes make cycling your units more important, and also make morale more important since now morale decay is often a more significant factor than damage for morale. This is interesting but sometimes produces interesting effects, where you can lose despite outnumbering the enemy 10 to 1 because they have more morale than you. I am ok with this because it discourages mindlessly overstacking battles, which makes war more fun.
It is also much harder to dismantle large countries in single wars, not only because subregions make capturing their territory more difficult but also because they will gain the Last Stand bonus as you capture their territory, meaning that if you get stuck halfway in then they will eventually overwhelm you.
Hi everyone, I am impressed by the community content some of you have made so I decided I would showcase it in a video.
Hello everyone, today I am pushing the 0.17.2 Update from the experimental branch into the main branch. If you are already on the experimental branch there is nothing new, but everything in the update is compiled here for convenience.
Now, any time a tooltip generates a word that corresponds to a game concept, it will show up with a blue tint and an underline. When you hover over this element, it will show you even more information. You can continue to middle click to freeze the tooltips in order to read as much as you need to about each game system.
Colonization is now a set population (10k) with slight alterations from policies
New colonial policy for some bonuses in colonization
Fixed 2025 world wonders not being there
Added some more factories and buildings to various countries in 2025
Revised some reform and border inaccuracies in 2025
Lost units will now temporarily reduce the capacities they were composed of
More tooltips
Outliner UI changes
Nested tooltips
New content for League of Blood (now Red Planet Alliance)
Changed Specializations to Urbanization, no longer requires player interaction
Fixed Max UObjects crash bug
That bug was also causing unusual lagspikes and performance decline
Made automatic unit control update more frequently
Fixed overflow damage bug with losses penalties
Bug fixes
Made automatic unit control update more frequently
Fixed overflow damage bug with losses penalties
Bug fixes
Fixed Max UObjects crash bug
That bug was also causing unusual lagspikes and performance decline
Mostly bug fixes
Fixed flicker bug
Fixed particle effects not working bug
Misc bug fixes
UI Improvements
Can now reorder research queue
Ledger
AI behavior modifications
Hello everyone, I know a lot of people have been complaining about the UI and I have been working on some things to try and improve it. One consistent desire has been to implement nested tooltips which give more information about certain game systems. I initially believed it would be quite difficult to implement this given the constraints of the engine, however I discovered a method that allowed me to do it quite easily.
Now, any time a tooltip generates a word that corresponds to a game concept, it will show up with a blue tint and an underline. When you hover over this element, it will show you even more information. You can continue to middle click to freeze the tooltips in order to read as much as you need to about each game system.
Nested tooltips
New content for League of Blood (now Red Planet Alliance)
Changed Specializations to Urbanization, no longer requires player interaction
Bug fixes
Hello everyone today I have some changes for the experimental branch. They are mostly bug fixes, but there are some other things.
Colonization is now a set population (10k) with slight alterations from policies
New colonial policy for some bonuses in colonization
Fixed 2025 world wonders not being there
Added some more factories and buildings to various countries in 2025
Revised some reform and border inaccuracies in 2025
Lost units will now temporarily reduce the capacities they were composed of
More tooltips
Outliner UI changes
Bug fixes
I made another video:
This one is more about the world of the game, its feel, and how you can get creative with your country.
Middle class faction privileges buffed
Laborer (Rural) faction privileges also buffed, centered more strongly around development and consumer goods
Changed names of some things for clarity
Bug fixes
Small update, mainly to rebalance some thins
Tech cost doubled
Era techs no longer cost stability, but require 50% of previous tier techs/culture to be researched
Culture tech stability gain from factions divided by four
New warnings for unrest
Bug fixes
New "Resolution Scale" setting for lower end PCs
Slight UI changes to diplomacy screen
I am pushing a balance update to the experimental branch. These are the main changes:
Tech cost doubled
Era techs no longer cost stability, but require 50% of previous tier techs/culture to be researched
Culture tech stability gain from factions divided by four
The idea is to make it more necessary to diversify tech as well as to slow down the (especially stability) pacing, while preventing death spirals from happening in the early mid game.
People have been complaining at me about politics shenanigans and I decided I would address the problem by Improving the 2092 scenario with more things that fit the hard sci-fi elements of the game and getting rid of some of the silliest content.
New Cascadian Technate: 3rd American contender faction
European Economic Zone is now purple, a mix between technocratic totalitarianism and faux socialism
League of Blood has been made more interesting
2092 changes to all US successors, Europe, China, and lunar and mars powers.
New regions in asia and Europe for nicer borders
Asteroid Belt Pirate Federation with raiding abilities
5th International removed, replaced with new technocratic Faction
Rewritten political jargon for more immersion
Fixed incorrect population fractions in Europe (they were copied from 2092 and I forgot to change them)
Bug fixes
Fixed venus flicker bug
If you are experiencing performance issues, I want to know! Please email me at [email protected] with as many details as you are willing to provide.
I made a tutorial video you can watch it here:
So someone told me about some things I could do to fix some of the Unreal Engine performance issues, especially on lower end machines. I am now pushing them.
Please let me know if it broke anything!
To anyone who was trying to play the demo between about 2AM yesterday and right now, I made a mistake that caused it to be inaccessible. It has been fixed.
Hello everyone. Today I am releasing some of the major changes from 0.17 into the default branch. I am doing this earlier than expected because there are alot of ambiguities between the two branches and I want to clear things up for new players, and make sure they get the best experience possible.
I did not expect the video on youtube to get as much attention as it did, so thank all of you who decided to give the game a chance, I really appreciate it!
The big new feature is espionage. Espionage is controlled by espionage offense and defense, as well as diplomatic capacity.
When you spy on people, you gain a certain amount of influence each year, and you can stockpile 25 years worth of influence. You can use influence on operations, which require you to have a certain amount of influence and cost a certain amount when used.
Some operations are instantaneous, and others are continuous. Continuous operations usually grant modifiers to you or the enemy based on what they are. These modifiers are based on certain conditions specific to each operation.
For example, Siphon research allows for you to gain research speed based on how much more technologically advanced the person you are spying on is than you are. This is useful if you are a low literacy country like India.
Some operations are more destructive than others
Favors are a new mechanic for diplomacy. They can be granted at will to other powers, but beware that every favor you owe to another civilization will cost you if they decide to redeem it in a way you do not like. When you interact with another country that you have favors with, you can leverage your favors to make them accept your proposals or pay that much stability. While this may not be powerful with only 5 favors, if you have 50 or 100, you can essentially force other countries to do your bidding.
Every Favor counts as +1 for AI acceptance
I know a lot of people have been asking for unit automation, and since this game doesn't have really complex army movement, the solution I came up with was to give you the option of relinquishing your units to AI control with maximum convenience (1 button click).
Currently, when you automate your units, they will stay confined to the planet of choice for automation. This allows you to have greater control of your units and where they go. The units are automated according to the exact same logic as the AI, so essentially you are giving your units to the AI to control, and therefore expect your automated armies to make similar movements to AI armies, that is to say that they move relatively passively and do not attempt certain things like carpet sieging.
I was thinking that since half the time in the game is spent navigating the menus, it would be cool if that process was more satisfying, so I have tried to make clicking the buttons feel nicer by making an animation for the button presses, as well as changing the texture so as to give the UI more of a deeper feeling to it. So let me know if the UI changes make it feel nicer to navigate or not because I think that it is very important for a spreadsheet simulator to have cool feeling spreadsheets.
Bug fixes
Defensive culture trait no longer gives 2000% entrenchment
You can now send resources to other countries
Buff to AI situation
New "Power meters" around planets to show who is present on them
Reduced stuttering from AI operations
Losses in combat now actually kill your manpower
Civilian/Military losses reduce stability through increasing war exhaustion
AI bordergore behavior reduced
AI less likely to form large organizations
AI more likely to increase education spending
You can give money to AI to build buildings autonomously for you
Units can now be saved to templates and conformed to templates easily
You can now destroy the biosphere of planets like Earth by nuking them too much
You now lose reputation for nuking people and generally being aggressive
AI will more aggressively coalition people that have bad reputations
Colonization time now varies more based on region size and manpower allotted, but is generally slower, especially for interstellar objects.
New UI sounds and texturing for niceness
Low difficulty now reduces unrest
Tutorial now specifies you need to click a region to recruit a unit
Removed last AI gen placeholders
Added some more classical music I like to the soundtrack
About
This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for Solar Nations 2, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main Solar Nations 2 statistics page.
Articles link back to Steam for full changelogs. SteamScope refreshes news entries as new posts are published to the game's Steam hub.
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