The Spatials: Galactology news & patch notes

3.13 is almost ready! I've updated the Windows build in the pretest branch for all the brave testers who want to try the new planet missions. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/26c5641d69232892e71dbb728bfaf1aabe1c00b7.jpg In some missions, like Making enemies, Intelligence assault or Unrequested demolition you will visit planets of a civ whose ancestral enemy wants you cause some annoyance, if by annoyance we consider leveling down entire buildings. You will get combat objectives on the planet and will have to pass several phases, depending on the difficulty rating. At insane level you will have to fight a boss level mob! Defending friends, We got spooks and Stop them early are similar in concept, but this time the ancestral enemy is camping on the planets of your friends and you need to deal with the invaders and their constructions. Reinforcements will be called, for sure. Both groups of missions are based on the ancestral enemy system between civs, and even civs that hate you will give you missions. This is an easy way to gain their favor (and to sink your reputation with their foes, of course). Pesky fauna and Disease outbreak are meant to be earlier level missions for planets whose civ is friendly to you. Don't be fooled by their lack of warfare, at higher difficulty levels they are really hard, and reward just as good items and bonuses as the others.

After a two month pause to get some rest and some work done in non-WaW related business, we are back to working on 3.13. The next item is a big one: playable random planet missions. This is a major feature and it will take longer than the previous miscellany features in 3.13. The work presented in this update post is not yet published in the pretest branch (playing just one kind of mission would not be very interesting anyway)..

Planet missions

The big missing piece for planet gameplay now has its foundations in place. One planet per system can now get a random mission, and it will be displayed in the galaxy map with the universally familiar icon: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6ea83870f54ec19dd6a60bc7a180f61ebb31f36d.jpg Hovering over the star or planet will display the full mission information, as opening the planet window: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/ceb1c23efb4d752cd79378ebc50fd1735a1f9cfe.jpg Missions can have 4 difficulty levels, and by default, their rewards are proportional to the planet level. The player can choose to purchase a reroll of the rewards to match their unlocked tech level, but this will also increase the mission level. Once on the ground the player will need to solve one or more objectives, and not all of them will be about killing. For example the current test mission requires to apply healing in a new way: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/ae05b334f3cfecfb1a984bb64f90ef44cf8a12df.jpg Now that the foundations are ready and one test mission has been implemented we will focus on adding more mission types.

The first post-EA build is now ready for testing! Please switch to the pretest branch in the Steam game properties. See this post with instructions on how to change the game branch: https://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1697169163416373010/ We are using a branch for now due to the nature of some of the changes, and because 3.13 breaks saves with 3.12. This way we get more time to test 3.13 and give more time for players to keep playing the default 3.12 branch. 3.13 still has some months of development left, stay tuned for more development updates and pretest builds.

Named enemies with progression and persistence

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/1fbc4be7b25fd50ca565e2dea674698992462acb.jpg Enemies now always have an unique name, instead of the generic names in earlier versions. The main reason is that they are also persisting. This means a given named enemy will always have the same sprite, if they manage to survive. Survive? Yes. Just as you can install insurance cloners for your officers, enemies that reach certain notoriety fighting you will get a chance to be saved before you kill them. They will teleport out instead of dying. Notoriety? Yes. Since enemies are persisting, they now also have a simplified leveling system. There's 30 enemy rankings, and each ranking gives the enemy more hitpoints and more weapon power. The higher rankings make them truly formidable adversaries. Rankings are a bonus on top of their level. Ranked enemies which survive your encounters will be able to face you again in the future. Every time the game spawns a random enemy it will also consider spawning a persisted named enemy instead, allowing them to gain an even higher ranking. This also comes with a nerf to the loot drops from enemies. Lower ranked enemies will never drop wearable items, while higher ranked ones will, and for the first time they will also be able to roll items with rare/epic/legendary bonuses, depending on their rank.

New station raids

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2e1a5572ab52a5d4bab1a6c5302f79b2dfed2144.jpg Station raids have been greatly enhanced in 3.13. They are now able to really scale up, to create an actual danger to your station, proportional to your development and your enemies hate. The size of the foot soldier group is now variable and can include more than 20 units. A proportional subset will always have higher rankings, even if the game has to generate fresh new higher ranked enemies. Siege objects are now introduced, and they will spawn in higher difficulty raids. Turrets are always spawned to protect them. Mortars are slow artillery, that fire a slow projectile, and can reach any point on the map. The explosion of the projectile is devastating, but the game will always tell you in advance where it is going to fall with a red circle area. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/84eac16335d4747dee9158af5169c3d44f4fc87d.jpg Docks are exactly that. Enemy shuttles will keep docking there unless you destroy them, and they will unload small enemy groups. They have a long cooldown, but more than one dock is possible. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/1926b35be25015a95a5e789d2d7c1ecd0bc8b2a7.jpg

Tombs

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/221d3eaf096c480aafa65a186571317118749628.jpg Fallen officers will now occupy a new object, tombs. If an officer dies the game will try first to occupy their assigned tomb, and if they have none, any non-assigned empty tomb. This happens even if the officer dies while exploring a planet. It's not mandatory to build tombs, officer corpses will still be spawned if there are no available tombs at the moment of death.

Lactians triggered by Mystery Milk

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/83c7bdd1175df5e4b05ec1ade5faca3801db19c5.jpg Lactians will turn into an hostile antagonist civ when you unlock the last tier of food & drinks. They will still visit you in peace (and in litter) before that .

Balance sheet

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/16faee7c5d5e7af09e41b20f69ebce077afd285c.jpg An often requested feature, now more important than ever.

Ancestral enemies for civs

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/f35c209bb8d25a4b519c00193474748a98ed7618.jpg Some of the civs in the galaxy now have an ancestral enemy. These enemies are other civs, and they are always paired to each other. When gain rep with the civ, you lose the same amount with their enemy, and viceversa. This applies to all possible rep changes, not just those from combat. This means you will now have to make some hard choices about which civs you will be friends with.

Player invasions with upkeep costs

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/0eed4cf1df3d6470fa98b4a05cb15205091bfc4e.jpg Invading's not free anymore. When you invade an hostile planet so you can extract its resources in peace, you will have to pay an upkeep price per minute, which goes up the higher the planet level is. You can stop the invasion in the planet dialog: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/fe9c5bec1ba10d0b8f09a34b67686cad616d0439.jpg Going bankrupt will stop the invasion automatically: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/472fd4420f2188efcbb16bf94ff937389a00d274.jpg The combination of ancestral enemies and invasion upkeep will make mid to end game more interesting to play.

New ship skills: jumpdrive and insurance

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/959c7d5fb7a5f203ee14cfc4a514c47d783f8347.jpg Ships equipped with a jumpdrive skill can travel instantly between star systems, reducing travel time to the minimum possible amount. They still have 10 second approach time to any body inside the system. The jump drive is always available and the AI will also use it for autopilot. The ship insurance skill will save one officer downed in battle once every 3 minutes, while exploring a planet. Both ship skills are only available in some ships in the higher end tiers of research.

Officer demands for products

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/d5efd858279f01eaead03d2bc3a8fa6061419640.jpg Graduate and master officers will now demand specific products for some vitals, and will refuse to consume anything else. These demands are balanced with the progression of research and planet resources in mind. They should be easy to satisfy for graduates and trickier for masters, and they are also predictable and standardized for all officers of the same spec. This change is the most speculative of the patch, so we will see if keep it or not.

3.13.1

• Add development option to re-enable the connectivity cache

Tombs

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/221d3eaf096c480aafa65a186571317118749628.jpg Fallen officers will now occupy a new object, tombs. If an officer dies the game will try first to occupy their assigned tomb, and if they have none, any non-assigned empty tomb. This happens even if the officer dies while exploring a planet. It's not mandatory to build tombs, officer corpses will still be spawned if there are no available tombs at the moment of death.

Lactians triggered by Mystery Milk

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/83c7bdd1175df5e4b05ec1ade5faca3801db19c5.jpg Lactians will turn into an hostile antagonist civ when you unlock the last tier of food & drinks. They will still visit you in peace (and in litter) before that .

Balance sheet

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/16faee7c5d5e7af09e41b20f69ebce077afd285c.jpg An often requested feature, now more important than ever.

Ancestral enemies for civs

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/f35c209bb8d25a4b519c00193474748a98ed7618.jpg Some of the civs in the galaxy now have an ancestral enemy. These enemies are other civs, and they are always paired to each other. When gain rep with the civ, you lose the same amount with their enemy, and viceversa. This applies to all possible rep changes, not just those from combat. This means you will now have to make some hard choices about which civs you will be friends with.

Player invasions with upkeep costs

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/0eed4cf1df3d6470fa98b4a05cb15205091bfc4e.jpg Invading's not free anymore. When you invade an hostile planet so you can extract its resources in peace, you will have to pay an upkeep price per minute, which goes up the higher the planet level is. You can stop the invasion in the planet dialog: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/fe9c5bec1ba10d0b8f09a34b67686cad616d0439.jpg Going bankrupt will stop the invasion automatically: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/472fd4420f2188efcbb16bf94ff937389a00d274.jpg The combination of ancestral enemies and invasion upkeep will make mid to end game more interesting to play.

Is there life after a game is released? Yes! We left some of the more far fetched ideas for trying them after our EA launch, so we are back to hacking on the game to see what fits and what is fun. These notes reflect the work in progress for version 3.13, which is not public. We will keep adding new features to this new version and in the coming weeks we hope to open it up for testing in a Steam beta branch.

Named enemies with progression and persistence

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/1fbc4be7b25fd50ca565e2dea674698992462acb.jpg Enemies now always have an unique name, instead of the generic names in earlier versions. The main reason is that they are also persisting. This means a given named enemy will always have the same sprite, if they manage to survive. Survive? Yes. Just as you can install insurance cloners for your officers, enemies that reach certain notoriety fighting you will get a chance to be saved before you kill them. They will teleport out instead of dying. Notoriety? Yes. Since enemies are persisting, they now also have a simplified leveling system. There's 30 enemy rankings, and each ranking gives the enemy more hitpoints and more weapon power. The higher rankings make them truly formidable adversaries. Rankings are a bonus on top of their level. Ranked enemies which survive your encounters will be able to face you again in the future. Every time the game spawns a random enemy it will also consider spawning a persisted named enemy instead, allowing them to gain an even higher ranking. This also comes with a nerf to the loot drops from enemies. Lower ranked enemies will never drop wearable items, while higher ranked ones will, and for the first time they will also be able to roll items with rare/epic/legendary bonuses, depending on their rank.

New station raids

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2e1a5572ab52a5d4bab1a6c5302f79b2dfed2144.jpg Station raids have been greatly enhanced in 3.13. They are now able to really scale up, to create an actual danger to your station, proportional to your development and your enemies hate. The size of the foot soldier group is now variable and can include more than 20 units. A proportional subset will always have higher rankings, even if the game has to generate fresh new higher ranked enemies. Siege objects are now introduced, and they will spawn in higher difficulty raids. Turrets are always spawned to protect them. Mortars are slow artillery, that fire a slow projectile, and can reach any point on the map. The explosion of the projectile is devastating, but the game will always tell you in advance where it is going to fall with a red circle area. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/84eac16335d4747dee9158af5169c3d44f4fc87d.jpg Docks are exactly that. Enemy shuttles will keep docking there unless you destroy them, and they will unload small enemy groups. They have a long cooldown, but more than one dock is possible. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/1926b35be25015a95a5e789d2d7c1ecd0bc8b2a7.jpg

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/12bc2075d3ed906e6c6e05a18a7b08a5f41bd447.jpg After nearly two years we are moving Galactology out of Early Access! The battle against bugs has been won and the frameworks for a complex and fun sim have been built and polished, along with a ton of new content and balancing. Here's an incomplete listing of all the additions:

• Colony stations built on planets
• Building system based on rooms with separate flooring and walls
• New room styles
• Combine any floor tiles together with a range of colors
• New objects to furnish the station, both decorative and functional
• New space flight system based on wormholes
• Ship construction
• Civilizations also have ships and use them to visit you
• New civilizations (Chuchus, Cucurbians and Meductians)
• Per-factory order queues
• Global mode for factory production based on stock levels
• Per-job per-officer job priorities
• Class system with task-based learning and progression and a new set of skills
• Private property and rooms for your officers – and demands related to class
• Equippable items for your officers, make them more powerful with better loot
• Security system with item progression, shields turrets and security doors
• Events and disasters, spies, monsters, and VIPs can come visit your station
• Disease system with healthcare and hospitals
• Hotel system
• Visitor archetypes with different needs and expectations
• Redesigned research system and UI
• Redesigned staff screen
• Door filters
• Room-level aesthetic score and noise levels, which can affect vital tasks
• Large optimizations and performance enhancements
• Support for languages with custom fonts
• Built-in support for Chinese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Turkish and Russian

This is just one more milestone in the development of our game and we have quite a bit of roadmap to get through this year. The plan now is to keep development versions in a Steam beta branch for those who want to test them. We will post more details when the first public beta builds of 3.13 are ready. To our devoted translators, all the players who gave us feedback and suggestions during Early Access, and to those who bought the game and supported us: THANK YOU! Edit: the changelog for updates to the 3.12 version is in the 3.12 announcement news post: https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/1649881367332195987

3.12 is a stability small features release, with no huge changes. This version has been available for some time in the pretest branch and should be a solid release. As we are close to going out of Early Access our focus has been in polishing the game.

Game guide

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/c98debd91225067afedbd041aa2bd71b7effb916.jpg The biggest new content in this release is the game guide. It covers a lot more of the game systems and mechanics than the tutorials, without being intended to cover 100% of the game.

Delivery stations

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/90f71f17ddf702af965e64cfaa3a411413c9448e.jpg Selling products to civ planets now requires to first build a delivery station on a planet. This delivery station will allow you to pick which product you want to deliver to this planet, from the list of products accepted by the planet civ.

Autopilot changes

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/a650dea7fa4b7c38b401f4d42cce3a6c6e7bcc98.jpg The autopilot has been made more usable with some much needed improvements. The selection row in the autopilot window now behaves correctly when adding, deleting or moving orders. An icon will now display which resource will be loaded next to the planet icon, to make it much easier to figure out what a ship is doing. Notice the drag and drop orders icon is now a button? This is what it opens: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/ca982aab8dd31cf2b67614e3d9b95fb4a0327eef.jpg Instead of hunting around for the correct system and planet and then dropping an icon on top, a picker is now displayed, showing only the planets that have extractors installed, along with important information like how many ships are visiting them and which resource they are extracting.

Unique discoverable objects

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/52646cb91be8e0458b6bf0e51a4627c679c94969.jpg Discoverable objects are back! The entire set from V2 is now available, plus another new batch for Galactology. Just keep your eyes open when landing on planets and if you find one, click it to unlock it.

Full Korean translation by kiironosora

kiironosora, a member of this forum, has produced a full and detailed Korean translation. Thank you very much!

Other changes

This release was much focused on smaller changes. Here's some "finally!!!":

• Delivery after production: only do if officer has delivery job enabled
• Separate menu for ship listing in officer list filter menu
• Add four sided fallback positions for some jobs, specially for construction ones
• Extra checks to not allow autopiloted ships to explore planets. Stop them first.
• Do not crash on some GUI errors
• Do not allow room marking beds (master, cryo) to be blueprinted outside of a room
• Fix: officers with multiple beds get wrong values in their demands
• NPC invaders on planets must spawn at least at raider level
• Outdoor attrition system: give the warning immediately but start the damage only after some minutes
• Add missing levels to recycler
• Fix: when forcing a delivery, if the officer is standing on a pallet of the resource kind, resources are teleported into the stack, even if the stack is far away
• Fix: floor replacing should not mark a room as outside
• Fix: manual repair orders via context menu do not work
• Fix: demands listing text does not fit for most languages
• Neutral civs do not come visiting anymore, you need friendly
• Before neutral you cannot cargo to civs, only pay tribute
• Reputation-based progressive tribute prices
• Add flagging for destruction action to objects
• Add storage area to copy-able objects
• Fix: reputation is not being added if you liberate a planet
• Fix: built walls over existing finished floors are not painted properly

3.12.1

• Better pathing for station raiders. Raiders will now ignore walls unless absolutely nothing else is available, including entities beyond their sight range. They will get flexible but persisting damage targets (like forced targets for officers) and will try to look for them inside the station in populated areas. This is not the big raiders review, but it's a first step to make them more interesting.
• Taking from a stack first splits it into two stacks, then marks one as busy. This is a subtle change with a potential big impact. For starters it should fix most or all bugs related to false job starts, failed deliveries and stampede effects on new stocks. A new system has also been introduced to unify back the stacks into one in case the job abandons the busy stack.
• New achievement, counter, and goal for discovering 10 uniques on planets. Reveal goal only when landing on a planet with a spawned unique.
• Extra ui sounds for construction
• Add icon to ship listing cell to indicate if it has dock assigned
• Fix: doctor cures counter should count cured patients, not medical actions
• Fix: some deconstruct wall flagging does not produce jobs
• Fix: direct delivery to nearby pallet after production should always work, even if the officer has no restocking job enabled
• Fix: focus officer in staff (link action) should switch to staff listing from recruit listing if required
• Fix: "Kill x enemies" goal description should not say anything about civs
• Fix: goal alert click should focus on the goal in the goals window
• Fix: Add manual recycle action to context menu
• Fix: do not allow to trigger self destroy more than once in pause mode
• Fix: manual delivery orders should respect entity max carry amount
• Fix: starting a job should stop any walking

3.12.2

• The star and planet name generator has been removed. Now names will be picked up at random from a list of real star names. The reason for this change is that the generator sometimes created real words that were offensive. To fix this a blacklist is required. But the game is now localized to half a dozen languages, and it is impossible to have a comprehensive blacklist. So now a whitelist will be used instead. Planets will now be named with the star name plus a roman numeral.
• Fix: nearby deposit on pallets for officers with no restocking job should always work
• Fix: stack split for jobs must preserve some flag components (fixes tourists picking up free products)

3.12.3

• Buff aesthetics for unique objects
• Add price to product listing when choosing a product for the delivery station

3.12.4

• Make floater builder robots so they are much faster when moving and working
• Halve required research XP for master researchers
• Update some missing translations
• Fix: medical event adds rally flag to visitors to path to a doctor desk. Make sure the way is path-able for them
• Fix: make sure auto stack pallet output for factories considers the proper 3x4 area
• Fix: when using copy mode for the object build tool make sure fields are copied and not just referenced
• Fix: Turkish guide crash

3.12.5

• Translation updates

3.12.6

• Show system level in galaxy map when civ overlay is enabled
• Higher default amounts for shops (3/10) and pallets (10/50)
• Right click on crew slots to quickly remove officers from ships, plus tooltip
• Right click on pallet resource picker button to clear selection, plus tooltip
• Right click on ownership officer picker button to clear owner, plus tooltip
• Show a warning modal when leaving a planet with a product-less delivery station
• New inspector tab for officers: owned objects
• Add selection button to portrait in the owner tab for objects
• Planetarium info in systems with no pending links should explain that all the links are unlocked
• Add default non demand price for products in the civ screen
• Button to copy autopilot from another ship
• Add filter for kind of equipped active item for all officer listings
• Add tooltip listing the entire list of recipes in resource ingredient information elipsis
• Add factory information to product information and recipe information
• Add list of recipes to factory object descriptions
• Remember staff picker sorter/filter choice
• Update some translations
• Fix: jumpy autopilot order listing should not be jumpy
• Fix: delivery station "demand" is actually "demand increase speed", fix label
• Fix: resources refunded from dismantling ships should spawn in walkable border tiles
• Fix: cancel construction button for tile building job builds the tile
• Fix: properly focus the listing selector in the staff screen when selecting an staff alert
• Fix: noisy objects should force a room noise recalc for all possible construction and destruction scenarios
• Fix: some civ objects had wrong names
• Fix: some civ boxes were not spawned as boxes
• Fix: proper sorting in build menus
• Fix: when an officer is not in the station the equipment matrix should behave the same as the per-officer equipment picker
• Fix: allow keypad enter in text modal prompts
• Fix: don't require so much aluminium for so many active and wearable item recipes
• Fix: landing on an previously player invaded planet should not trigger the retaliation event
• Fix: floating robot gets stuck after building walls or objects

3.12 is a stability small features release, with no huge changes. This version has been available for some time in the pretest branch and should be a solid release. As we are close to going out of Early Access our focus has been in polishing the game.

Game guide

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/c98debd91225067afedbd041aa2bd71b7effb916.jpg The biggest new content in this release is the game guide. It covers a lot more of the game systems and mechanics than the tutorials, without being intended to cover 100% of the game.

Delivery stations

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/90f71f17ddf702af965e64cfaa3a411413c9448e.jpg Selling products to civ planets now requires to first build a delivery station on a planet. This delivery station will allow you to pick which product you want to deliver to this planet, from the list of products accepted by the planet civ.

Autopilot changes

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/a650dea7fa4b7c38b401f4d42cce3a6c6e7bcc98.jpg The autopilot has been made more usable with some much needed improvements. The selection row in the autopilot window now behaves correctly when adding, deleting or moving orders. An icon will now display which resource will be loaded next to the planet icon, to make it much easier to figure out what a ship is doing. Notice the drag and drop orders icon is now a button? This is what it opens: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/ca982aab8dd31cf2b67614e3d9b95fb4a0327eef.jpg Instead of hunting around for the correct system and planet and then dropping an icon on top, a picker is now displayed, showing only the planets that have extractors installed, along with important information like how many ships are visiting them and which resource they are extracting.

Unique discoverable objects

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/52646cb91be8e0458b6bf0e51a4627c679c94969.jpg Discoverable objects are back! The entire set from V2 is now available, plus another new batch for Galactology. Just keep your eyes open when landing on planets and if you find one, click it to unlock it.

Full Korean translation by kiironosora

kiironosora, a member of this forum, has produced a full and detailed Korean translation. Thank you very much!

Other changes

This release was much focused on smaller changes. Here's some "finally!!!":

• Delivery after production: only do if officer has delivery job enabled
• Separate menu for ship listing in officer list filter menu
• Add four sided fallback positions for some jobs, specially for construction ones
• Extra checks to not allow autopiloted ships to explore planets. Stop them first.
• Do not crash on some GUI errors
• Do not allow room marking beds (master, cryo) to be blueprinted outside of a room
• Fix: officers with multiple beds get wrong values in their demands
• NPC invaders on planets must spawn at least at raider level
• Outdoor attrition system: give the warning immediately but start the damage only after some minutes
• Add missing levels to recycler
• Fix: when forcing a delivery, if the officer is standing on a pallet of the resource kind, resources are teleported into the stack, even if the stack is far away
• Fix: floor replacing should not mark a room as outside
• Fix: manual repair orders via context menu do not work
• Fix: demands listing text does not fit for most languages
• Neutral civs do not come visiting anymore, you need friendly
• Before neutral you cannot cargo to civs, only pay tribute
• Reputation-based progressive tribute prices
• Add flagging for destruction action to objects
• Add storage area to copy-able objects
• Fix: reputation is not being added if you liberate a planet
• Fix: built walls over existing finished floors are not painted properly

3.12.1

• Better pathing for station raiders. Raiders will now ignore walls unless absolutely nothing else is available, including entities beyond their sight range. They will get flexible but persisting damage targets (like forced targets for officers) and will try to look for them inside the station in populated areas. This is not the big raiders review, but it's a first step to make them more interesting.
• Taking from a stack first splits it into two stacks, then marks one as busy. This is a subtle change with a potential big impact. For starters it should fix most or all bugs related to false job starts, failed deliveries and stampede effects on new stocks. A new system has also been introduced to unify back the stacks into one in case the job abandons the busy stack.
• New achievement, counter, and goal for discovering 10 uniques on planets. Reveal goal only when landing on a planet with a spawned unique.
• Extra ui sounds for construction
• Add icon to ship listing cell to indicate if it has dock assigned
• Fix: doctor cures counter should count cured patients, not medical actions
• Fix: some deconstruct wall flagging does not produce jobs
• Fix: direct delivery to nearby pallet after production should always work, even if the officer has no restocking job enabled
• Fix: focus officer in staff (link action) should switch to staff listing from recruit listing if required
• Fix: "Kill x enemies" goal description should not say anything about civs
• Fix: goal alert click should focus on the goal in the goals window
• Fix: Add manual recycle action to context menu
• Fix: do not allow to trigger self destroy more than once in pause mode
• Fix: manual delivery orders should respect entity max carry amount
• Fix: starting a job should stop any walking

3.12.2

• The star and planet name generator has been removed. Now names will be picked up at random from a list of real star names. The reason for this change is that the generator sometimes created real words that were offensive. To fix this a blacklist is required. But the game is now localized to half a dozen languages, and it is impossible to have a comprehensive blacklist. So now a whitelist will be used instead. Planets will now be named with the star name plus a roman numeral.
• Fix: nearby deposit on pallets for officers with no restocking job should always work
• Fix: stack split for jobs must preserve some flag components (fixes tourists picking up free products)

3.12.3

• Buff aesthetics for unique objects
• Add price to product listing when choosing a product for the delivery station

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/7845c796664f148dcd55dba65d63768db76e2990.jpg 3.11 is here! This version has had a shorter development cycle because we wanted to get the new translation system out as soon as possible, to make sure we get it tested. But as always you can count on a batch of small and not so small enhancements. Check the following release notes in case you missed our development updates.

Resource list in galaxy view

The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4af2bcd4863ef4246b4b88d14e19072774c4269d.jpg

Per-ship filtering in officer listings

All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/73c96740431c309ab6eb76e8a74d87a69e6450f8.jpg

New planet header images

Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/77f8035ff3aa6b047ff92f8855700b11c73094e0.jpg

New docks

After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4e889dd09711792057dea6dd70691d1e565f499c.jpg Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.

New reveal event for Lactians

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/32597b90e06ca132b77d3d1401e5ea3d88d6d8eb.jpg Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.

Research screen final design

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2f1c23705233180a85ea0f9d6e5bb5db9377497f.jpg The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.

New security objects

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/8d6c614264613aba8e2447651241bfc5a4bfd5b2.jpg Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door. The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one). We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration. And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.

Getting serious about localization

For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG. This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so. We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/100bb753548896c63695ce93c3136b077cd2a3ad.png This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death). http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6df2ca4474d346891ce55b31182ce1d8eec486b3.jpg Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. Check the details on how to contribute here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1700542332324695551/

Achievements!

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/f1c894bbf22b1336705855817a2d3e1efa684a31.png Yep, another "finally" :)

Update 3.11.1

- Add some achievement translations - Fix: selection rectangle cannot select entities on the +edge of the map - Fix: add more active margin to selection rectangle - Add support for non breakable spaces and fix French translation to use them - Fix: spurious officer portraits in alerts - Fix: crash with Chinese translation - Fix other translations with potentially the same bug - Fix: allow forced deliveries to any pallet under max stock, not just under min stock - Update translations with more contributed strings

Update 3.11.2

- Big update to german translation, bringing it up-to-date - Tweaks to other translations

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/7845c796664f148dcd55dba65d63768db76e2990.jpg 3.11 is here! This version has had a shorter development cycle because we wanted to get the new translation system out as soon as possible, to make sure we get it tested. But as always you can count on a batch of small and not so small enhancements. Check the following release notes in case you missed our development updates.

Resource list in galaxy view

The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4af2bcd4863ef4246b4b88d14e19072774c4269d.jpg

Per-ship filtering in officer listings

All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/73c96740431c309ab6eb76e8a74d87a69e6450f8.jpg

New planet header images

Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/77f8035ff3aa6b047ff92f8855700b11c73094e0.jpg

New docks

After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4e889dd09711792057dea6dd70691d1e565f499c.jpg Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.

New reveal event for Lactians

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/32597b90e06ca132b77d3d1401e5ea3d88d6d8eb.jpg Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.

Research screen final design

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2f1c23705233180a85ea0f9d6e5bb5db9377497f.jpg The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.

New security objects

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/8d6c614264613aba8e2447651241bfc5a4bfd5b2.jpg Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door. The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one). We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration. And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.

Getting serious about localization

For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG. This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so. We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/100bb753548896c63695ce93c3136b077cd2a3ad.png This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death). http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6df2ca4474d346891ce55b31182ce1d8eec486b3.jpg Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. Check the details on how to contribute here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1700542332324695551/

Achievements!

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/f1c894bbf22b1336705855817a2d3e1efa684a31.png Yep, another "finally" :)

Update 3.11.1

- Add some achievement translations - Fix: selection rectangle cannot select entities on the +edge of the map - Fix: add more active margin to selection rectangle - Add support for non breakable spaces and fix French translation to use them - Fix: spurious officer portraits in alerts - Fix: crash with Chinese translation - Fix other translations with potentially the same bug - Fix: allow forced deliveries to any pallet under max stock, not just under min stock - Update translations with more contributed strings

Update 3.11.2

- Big update to german translation, bringing it up-to-date - Tweaks to other translations

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2775d3a05f5df030e034f5a549149428ba6eb33a.jpg Lots of developments going on, and not all of them are about code! That image? Why, keeping up with current events, that's all. It may even be a hint of a future version allowing you to find long forgotten relics of humanity past... As always here's what we have been working on for the past few weeks.

New security objects

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/8d6c614264613aba8e2447651241bfc5a4bfd5b2.jpg Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door. The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one). We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration. And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.

Getting serious about localization

For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG. This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so. We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/100bb753548896c63695ce93c3136b077cd2a3ad.png This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death). http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6df2ca4474d346891ce55b31182ce1d8eec486b3.jpg Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. It will go public some days before 3.11 hits, check the forums for an announcement. UPDATE: The server is now online, check this thread for more information: http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1700542332324695551/

Achievements!

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/f1c894bbf22b1336705855817a2d3e1efa684a31.png Yep, another "finally" :)

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2775d3a05f5df030e034f5a549149428ba6eb33a.jpg Lots of developments going on, and not all of them are about code! That image? Why, keeping up with current events, that's all. It may even be a hint of a future version allowing you to find long forgotten relics of humanity past... As always here's what we have been working on for the past few weeks.

New security objects

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/8d6c614264613aba8e2447651241bfc5a4bfd5b2.jpg Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door. The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one). We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration. And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.

Getting serious about localization

For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG. This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so. We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/100bb753548896c63695ce93c3136b077cd2a3ad.png This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death). http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6df2ca4474d346891ce55b31182ce1d8eec486b3.jpg Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. It will go public some days before 3.11 hits, check the forums for an announcement. UPDATE: The server is now online, check this thread for more information: http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1700542332324695551/

Achievements!

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/f1c894bbf22b1336705855817a2d3e1efa684a31.png Yep, another "finally" :)

Work has started on version 3.11, and as always a batch of small enhancements and fixes goes first. Here's what's been brewing for the last two weeks.

Resource list in galaxy view

The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4af2bcd4863ef4246b4b88d14e19072774c4269d.jpg

Per-ship filtering in officer listings

All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/73c96740431c309ab6eb76e8a74d87a69e6450f8.jpg

New planet header images

Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/77f8035ff3aa6b047ff92f8855700b11c73094e0.jpg

New docks

After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4e889dd09711792057dea6dd70691d1e565f499c.jpg Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.

New reveal event for Lactians

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/32597b90e06ca132b77d3d1401e5ea3d88d6d8eb.jpg Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.

Research screen final design

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2f1c23705233180a85ea0f9d6e5bb5db9377497f.jpg The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.

Work has started on version 3.11, and as always a batch of small enhancements and fixes goes first. Here's what's been brewing for the last two weeks.

Resource list in galaxy view

The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4af2bcd4863ef4246b4b88d14e19072774c4269d.jpg

Per-ship filtering in officer listings

All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/73c96740431c309ab6eb76e8a74d87a69e6450f8.jpg

New planet header images

Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/77f8035ff3aa6b047ff92f8855700b11c73094e0.jpg

New docks

After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4e889dd09711792057dea6dd70691d1e565f499c.jpg Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.

New reveal event for Lactians

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/32597b90e06ca132b77d3d1401e5ea3d88d6d8eb.jpg Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.

Research screen final design

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2f1c23705233180a85ea0f9d6e5bb5db9377497f.jpg The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.

What a better way to start the new year than with a new Galactology release! The big new feature for 3.10 is planetary invasions. Planets are can now be invaded by hostile civs to interrupt your business, or by the player to secure extraction on hostile planets. Watch out for their vengeance! Here's the development notes, in case you missed them:

*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs

We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB. (For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.) After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/ab2641f837726a4fa1eb3361f7af00b5067e0c69.jpg Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.

Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets

Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/81ac46446462c7282a32b8f9ff49cb1e75be26de.jpg This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.

Noise

A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/de45a15fb8e6a40bf8f124c799d9a75ff4218cdb.jpg Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values. Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple. Interrupted tasks show up like this: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/fcf170481247ef96fe7a109eee11130d467aff0f.jpg And they also add a negative feeling: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2ae8f9e10b3f9906710d61539eb95066ff2962b1.jpg

Stock charts

What's a management sim without charts? http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/1a1bd926c236d7c6e1c3da988cdc3269e9b10362.jpg

Translucent docks on mouse hover

"Finally" :) http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/0e30c4f6e3c19475e1649096a0e8d1b58d3718bf.jpg

Show ships with autopilot stop

To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/91dcf170f26445578cb4cd8b5645b003bb8be362.jpg

Manual forced delivery

An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9185df56831feb003a015943681a608e76544df0.jpg

Reputation gains when selling products

Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level). http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/611d770b74a80b48c0bf670b1f16af8b582976c6.jpg Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.

Planetary invasions

Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2fb92a1afe58cab9f28b228e443fceab82946369.jpg The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses. The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/d8fa28339a936580f8908c3778e47364c6cb36e1.jpg Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9fca548b1421789d6d8d72113a8224ab02c42e76.jpg But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4d9a7d0e7d65663ca5d44383a4bfe5bdf12eaef4.jpg Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/5aadb1d1be26c1763ddd09628626316bc4d8153b.jpg

New antagonist civ variant

Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/e0345bcf154339f87b34146d388f34fe7b4b2160.jpg And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/58c87eb77d8cec3b70fd00682754367540d75379.jpg

Lactians

The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4151e0a3e533d087d41f8723195cdb67ec832100.jpg They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.

Ship skills

Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/931c7ad0a37aa42227382f48cd25b2077ede6081.jpg Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are: - Surface teleport: the one already in game - Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!) - Healing wave: all officers get healed - Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned - Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time - Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.

QoL fire changes

Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall. Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner. Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case. Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).

Update 3.10.1

- Greatly decrease planet invasion event frequency - Add per-planet invasion cooldown - Antagonist civ reveal events must follow the same rules of invasion events - Adjust internal event cooldown - Remove "too close to enemy objects" rule, which is nonsensical now - Fix some text fitting/scaling issues

What a better way to start the new year than with a new Galactology release! The big new feature for 3.10 is planetary invasions. Planets are can now be invaded by hostile civs to interrupt your business, or by the player to secure extraction on hostile planets. Watch out for their vengeance! Here's the development notes, in case you missed them:

*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs

We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB. (For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.) After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/ab2641f837726a4fa1eb3361f7af00b5067e0c69.jpg Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.

Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets

Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/81ac46446462c7282a32b8f9ff49cb1e75be26de.jpg This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.

Noise

A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/de45a15fb8e6a40bf8f124c799d9a75ff4218cdb.jpg Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values. Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple. Interrupted tasks show up like this: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/fcf170481247ef96fe7a109eee11130d467aff0f.jpg And they also add a negative feeling: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2ae8f9e10b3f9906710d61539eb95066ff2962b1.jpg

Stock charts

What's a management sim without charts? http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/1a1bd926c236d7c6e1c3da988cdc3269e9b10362.jpg

Translucent docks on mouse hover

"Finally" :) http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/0e30c4f6e3c19475e1649096a0e8d1b58d3718bf.jpg

Show ships with autopilot stop

To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/91dcf170f26445578cb4cd8b5645b003bb8be362.jpg

Manual forced delivery

An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9185df56831feb003a015943681a608e76544df0.jpg

Reputation gains when selling products

Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level). http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/611d770b74a80b48c0bf670b1f16af8b582976c6.jpg Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.

Planetary invasions

Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2fb92a1afe58cab9f28b228e443fceab82946369.jpg The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses. The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/d8fa28339a936580f8908c3778e47364c6cb36e1.jpg Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9fca548b1421789d6d8d72113a8224ab02c42e76.jpg But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4d9a7d0e7d65663ca5d44383a4bfe5bdf12eaef4.jpg Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/5aadb1d1be26c1763ddd09628626316bc4d8153b.jpg

New antagonist civ variant

Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/e0345bcf154339f87b34146d388f34fe7b4b2160.jpg And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/58c87eb77d8cec3b70fd00682754367540d75379.jpg

Lactians

The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4151e0a3e533d087d41f8723195cdb67ec832100.jpg They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.

Ship skills

Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/931c7ad0a37aa42227382f48cd25b2077ede6081.jpg Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are: - Surface teleport: the one already in game - Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!) - Healing wave: all officers get healed - Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned - Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time - Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.

QoL fire changes

Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall. Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner. Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case. Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).

Update 3.10.1

- Greatly decrease planet invasion event frequency - Add per-planet invasion cooldown - Antagonist civ reveal events must follow the same rules of invasion events - Adjust internal event cooldown - Remove "too close to enemy objects" rule, which is nonsensical now - Fix some text fitting/scaling issues

Version 3.10 is almost ready, with some bugs and testing left to do. A few more features have been implemented to round up the release in the past week.

New antagonist civ variant

Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/e0345bcf154339f87b34146d388f34fe7b4b2160.jpg And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/58c87eb77d8cec3b70fd00682754367540d75379.jpg

Lactians

The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4151e0a3e533d087d41f8723195cdb67ec832100.jpg They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.

Ship skills

Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/931c7ad0a37aa42227382f48cd25b2077ede6081.jpg Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are: - Surface teleport: the one already in game - Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!) - Healing wave: all officers get healed - Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned - Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time - Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.

QoL fire changes

Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall. Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner. Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case. Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).

Version 3.10 is almost ready, with some bugs and testing left to do. A few more features have been implemented to round up the release in the past week.

New antagonist civ variant

Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/e0345bcf154339f87b34146d388f34fe7b4b2160.jpg And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/58c87eb77d8cec3b70fd00682754367540d75379.jpg

Lactians

The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4151e0a3e533d087d41f8723195cdb67ec832100.jpg They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.

Ship skills

Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/931c7ad0a37aa42227382f48cd25b2077ede6081.jpg Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are: - Surface teleport: the one already in game - Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!) - Healing wave: all officers get healed - Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned - Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time - Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.

QoL fire changes

Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall. Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner. Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case. Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).

New year, new version almost ready! Work progressed into the main 3.10 feature, planetary invasions, plus some smaller enhacements.

Show ships with autopilot stop

To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/91dcf170f26445578cb4cd8b5645b003bb8be362.jpg

Manual forced delivery

An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9185df56831feb003a015943681a608e76544df0.jpg

Reputation gains when selling products

Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level). http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/611d770b74a80b48c0bf670b1f16af8b582976c6.jpg Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.

Planetary invasions

Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2fb92a1afe58cab9f28b228e443fceab82946369.jpg The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses. The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/d8fa28339a936580f8908c3778e47364c6cb36e1.jpg Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9fca548b1421789d6d8d72113a8224ab02c42e76.jpg But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4d9a7d0e7d65663ca5d44383a4bfe5bdf12eaef4.jpg Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/5aadb1d1be26c1763ddd09628626316bc4d8153b.jpg

New year, new version almost ready! Work progressed into the main 3.10 feature, planetary invasions, plus some smaller enhacements.

Show ships with autopilot stop

To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/91dcf170f26445578cb4cd8b5645b003bb8be362.jpg

Manual forced delivery

An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9185df56831feb003a015943681a608e76544df0.jpg

Reputation gains when selling products

Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level). http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/611d770b74a80b48c0bf670b1f16af8b582976c6.jpg Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.

Planetary invasions

Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2fb92a1afe58cab9f28b228e443fceab82946369.jpg The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses. The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/d8fa28339a936580f8908c3778e47364c6cb36e1.jpg Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9fca548b1421789d6d8d72113a8224ab02c42e76.jpg But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/4d9a7d0e7d65663ca5d44383a4bfe5bdf12eaef4.jpg Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/5aadb1d1be26c1763ddd09628626316bc4d8153b.jpg

Work has stated in 3.10. The main feature of this version will be new systems to make planet gameplay more interesting. The usual list of small features goes first tho, so here's what been brewing since the release of 3.9.

*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs

We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB. (For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.) After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/ab2641f837726a4fa1eb3361f7af00b5067e0c69.jpg Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.

Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets

Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/81ac46446462c7282a32b8f9ff49cb1e75be26de.jpg This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.

Noise

A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/de45a15fb8e6a40bf8f124c799d9a75ff4218cdb.jpg Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values. Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple. Interrupted tasks show up like this: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/fcf170481247ef96fe7a109eee11130d467aff0f.jpg And they also add a negative feeling: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2ae8f9e10b3f9906710d61539eb95066ff2962b1.jpg

Stock charts

What's a management sim without charts? http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/1a1bd926c236d7c6e1c3da988cdc3269e9b10362.jpg

Translucent docks on mouse hover

"Finally" :) http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/0e30c4f6e3c19475e1649096a0e8d1b58d3718bf.jpg

Work has stated in 3.10. The main feature of this version will be new systems to make planet gameplay more interesting. The usual list of small features goes first tho, so here's what been brewing since the release of 3.9.

*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs

We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB. (For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.) After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/ab2641f837726a4fa1eb3361f7af00b5067e0c69.jpg Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.

Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets

Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/81ac46446462c7282a32b8f9ff49cb1e75be26de.jpg This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.

Noise

A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/de45a15fb8e6a40bf8f124c799d9a75ff4218cdb.jpg Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values. Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple. Interrupted tasks show up like this: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/fcf170481247ef96fe7a109eee11130d467aff0f.jpg And they also add a negative feeling: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2ae8f9e10b3f9906710d61539eb95066ff2962b1.jpg

Stock charts

What's a management sim without charts? http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/1a1bd926c236d7c6e1c3da988cdc3269e9b10362.jpg

Translucent docks on mouse hover

"Finally" :) http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/0e30c4f6e3c19475e1649096a0e8d1b58d3718bf.jpg

The new station <--> civ commerce system is the big feature of this release. Cash becomes much more important with a limited amount to start with and the need to produce and sell excess output from your factories to finance your station growth. Check the tutorial in the Civs screen for more details. Here's the development notes for 3.9, in case you missed our updates.

Room-level aesthetics

Aesthetics refuses to die! I've spin again the idea, this time as a value that gets calculated for whole rooms, and displayed in the building overlay: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6ce54bfe4af4ac45ec8d88925f53f88735352e50.jpg It's calculated from the contributions from the room flooring and its objects. Now that this is more visible officers will also require a minimum aesthetic value for their bedroom: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6a27734e1c2cf3fcb98782282eba006b955dda5a.jpg Notice something in the previous screenshot? Yep, graduates do not require a private room anymore. Instead they will just require a basic bed (which now can be made private to an officer) plus an aesthetic value for their bedroom (which is any room the bed is located at). Since basic beds do not assign ownership to their surroundings and can be built in multiples in the same room, this means graduates will happily sleep in barracks, as long as it's a nice barrack. This will solve the issue of having to build huge housing areas for your graduates, which could get quite tedious. Master officers will still demand a private room and will also ask for a high aesthetic value, along with all of their previous demands.

Import limits

Resources that are imported into your station (basically all recipe ingredients) now have a configurable limit: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2f14715913bcc0c4d4c92e1d3eceb4837fb4f3d3.jpg This means your ships will stop collecting Fruit when your station stock reaches 7500 (this default value is equivalent to 10 stacks). This will alleviate the issues with having to build too much storage areas, and it will be useful when the full import/export economy is in the game.

Clone insurance

Have this super well equipped master level officer that was in the original 6 and you don't want to lose? There's an object for that now: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9022e85246e035da575452d7b859b2eb2c4d9dd3.jpg First you assign an officer to the clone chamber object (only one officer per chamber, as with any other object ownership association). If the officer dies they will immediately spawn inside the clone chamber, at full health, even if the officer was in a ship or exploring a planet. This will also destroy the clone chamber object, but such is the price of insurance. Speaking of prices, it's also very expensive. If you *really* like your officer you can assign them to any amount of insurance objects, giving them as many lives as your cash allows.

New resource distribution and recipe balance

Raw resources are now limited to one per planet, and are strictly bound in level ranges: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/5c6952639e8dfe9e7e5a7bd69bf2c504b970f4aa.jpg In the same vein all recipes have been reviewed so early research recipes also consume low level resources, instead of the very mixed ingredients they had before. The research tiers have also been reviewed and the required points have been increased, since the previous amount were too low (but aided in testing the game).

Civ exports

Raw resources are not free anymore. They now cost credits, and the station wallet will pay for them when one of your ships loads them from a planet. This is expressed from the point of view of the civs that allow you to extract raw resources from their planets, so it's called an export: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/05412e97b707e48c392549581f0d146ef20961c0.jpg All raw resources have a fixed standard price, but the more a civ likes you, the cheaper they are willing to sell those resources to you. It can go from 100% of the price at neutral to just 10% of the price at the highest possible reputation level. Your ships will automatically purchase the resource they load from the planets, as long as you have the money for it. Higher level resources can be quite expensive, specially when purchased from neutral civs. More care will be now required to set up routes, instead of the endless abundance of previous versions.

Civ imports

The export system was clear from early on, but the design ideas for the import were less clear. After some false starts 2 designs extremes were identified: A) Import happens only to visitor ships (simplest). The player would only be able to sell its products to visiting ships from non-hostile civs. A simple interface would display those ships demands ("We want 10 rations, would you sell them to us?") and an accept/decline prompt. B) All galaxy planets are available as import receivers and the user distributes to them using the autopilot. All planets in the galaxy have demands for one or more products, and the player can supply them to make money. This requires enhancing the autopilot to a full blown auto trading system. Each planet order would need to include the order kind (buy resources / sell products / load from home) plus the resource subject and amount. This would also require multiple items per order (think about a home visit, it's legitimate to want to load several different products plus unload the raw cargo), smart stocking choices (what happens if there's not enough station stock to satisfy the order? Wait for more production or leave with whatever is available? Then how must the products be distributed for the sell orders, given the defined amount won't be meet?). This is a very deep rabbit hole. The end result would be formidably complex too. In the end an hybrid solution is being implemented, with some of the complexity of B but crucially removing the auto piloted auto trading aspect. http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/b21d10b4a35b158c104145b78cfee3b8e3d58202.jpg Unlike the civ exports tab, the import tab will be interactive. Just as with raw resources, civ planets will only crave a single product. Products are also strictly assigned to civs, so for example you'll only be making rations for the humans. First you select the resource you want to sell. Then a list of that civ planets that crave that resource will be displayed, along with a price. That price will reflect the internal demand of the planet, which will be based on a simulated value over time (and it will be disturbed in case you sell to them). In the right side you'll be able to change the amount of that product you want to sell to that planet, and which ship you want to use to perform the delivery (from the ships currently parked at home). Then you can start the delivery and the ship receive an order to travel to the planet, sell the product and come back home (this will be internal code, not configurable as an autopilot). The idea is to make this manual action easy enough to perform, but still have some strategy and consequences. You'll be affecting demand in the planet, at least for some time after the delivery, so you can't spam a single planet with your cheap rations. You'll need to have ready to go ships parked at home, and their cargo hold size will be of relevance. But also their speed, since the demand price changes over time. It's not as complex or as "real" as the B option, but it's not the trivial solution either. The "Avg BOM" value deserves a mention. BOM is for Bill Of Materials. Since you are selling products whose raw ingredients you paid for, this is a very important number to keep in mind when deciding to sell something. You could be selling under cost! But calculating this is very complex, since you can be sourcing the same raw from different civs at the same time. The game will try to keep average purchase tallies from your planet extraction and use those numbers to calculate the products BOM, so you can compare them to the price offered by the simulated demand pricing. That pricing in turn will be based on the product BOM assuming a purely neutral civ, so with some patience it will be possible to score large profit margins in your sales. As you can see I'm a logistics/systems geek, but I have to exercise some restrain to keep the game playable (and to release at some point before 2025 :)

Smaller changes

- Optional exclusive fullscreen mode - Inside the object tool alt click will now also copy the settings from the object, valid for objects that are rebuildable after destroy (factories and pallet-like objects) - Better spawning areas for some non-violent events, including allowing to spawn inside the station. And better area selection for other events, still spawning at the border but now actively choosing a location close to inhabited areas. - Shift click with the info tool now allows to add officers to the selection - New officer sorting option: seniority. Sorts officers by how long they have been part of your staff. - New officer sorting option: average item level. Sorts officers by their average equipped item level in increasing order.

The new station <--> civ commerce system is the big feature of this release. Cash becomes much more important with a limited amount to start with and the need to produce and sell excess output from your factories to finance your station growth. Check the tutorial in the Civs screen for more details. Here's the development notes for 3.9, in case you missed our updates.

Room-level aesthetics

Aesthetics refuses to die! I've spin again the idea, this time as a value that gets calculated for whole rooms, and displayed in the building overlay: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6ce54bfe4af4ac45ec8d88925f53f88735352e50.jpg It's calculated from the contributions from the room flooring and its objects. Now that this is more visible officers will also require a minimum aesthetic value for their bedroom: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6a27734e1c2cf3fcb98782282eba006b955dda5a.jpg Notice something in the previous screenshot? Yep, graduates do not require a private room anymore. Instead they will just require a basic bed (which now can be made private to an officer) plus an aesthetic value for their bedroom (which is any room the bed is located at). Since basic beds do not assign ownership to their surroundings and can be built in multiples in the same room, this means graduates will happily sleep in barracks, as long as it's a nice barrack. This will solve the issue of having to build huge housing areas for your graduates, which could get quite tedious. Master officers will still demand a private room and will also ask for a high aesthetic value, along with all of their previous demands.

Import limits

Resources that are imported into your station (basically all recipe ingredients) now have a configurable limit: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2f14715913bcc0c4d4c92e1d3eceb4837fb4f3d3.jpg This means your ships will stop collecting Fruit when your station stock reaches 7500 (this default value is equivalent to 10 stacks). This will alleviate the issues with having to build too much storage areas, and it will be useful when the full import/export economy is in the game.

Clone insurance

Have this super well equipped master level officer that was in the original 6 and you don't want to lose? There's an object for that now: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9022e85246e035da575452d7b859b2eb2c4d9dd3.jpg First you assign an officer to the clone chamber object (only one officer per chamber, as with any other object ownership association). If the officer dies they will immediately spawn inside the clone chamber, at full health, even if the officer was in a ship or exploring a planet. This will also destroy the clone chamber object, but such is the price of insurance. Speaking of prices, it's also very expensive. If you *really* like your officer you can assign them to any amount of insurance objects, giving them as many lives as your cash allows.

New resource distribution and recipe balance

Raw resources are now limited to one per planet, and are strictly bound in level ranges: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/5c6952639e8dfe9e7e5a7bd69bf2c504b970f4aa.jpg In the same vein all recipes have been reviewed so early research recipes also consume low level resources, instead of the very mixed ingredients they had before. The research tiers have also been reviewed and the required points have been increased, since the previous amount were too low (but aided in testing the game).

Civ exports

Raw resources are not free anymore. They now cost credits, and the station wallet will pay for them when one of your ships loads them from a planet. This is expressed from the point of view of the civs that allow you to extract raw resources from their planets, so it's called an export: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/05412e97b707e48c392549581f0d146ef20961c0.jpg All raw resources have a fixed standard price, but the more a civ likes you, the cheaper they are willing to sell those resources to you. It can go from 100% of the price at neutral to just 10% of the price at the highest possible reputation level. Your ships will automatically purchase the resource they load from the planets, as long as you have the money for it. Higher level resources can be quite expensive, specially when purchased from neutral civs. More care will be now required to set up routes, instead of the endless abundance of previous versions.

Civ imports

The export system was clear from early on, but the design ideas for the import were less clear. After some false starts 2 designs extremes were identified: A) Import happens only to visitor ships (simplest). The player would only be able to sell its products to visiting ships from non-hostile civs. A simple interface would display those ships demands ("We want 10 rations, would you sell them to us?") and an accept/decline prompt. B) All galaxy planets are available as import receivers and the user distributes to them using the autopilot. All planets in the galaxy have demands for one or more products, and the player can supply them to make money. This requires enhancing the autopilot to a full blown auto trading system. Each planet order would need to include the order kind (buy resources / sell products / load from home) plus the resource subject and amount. This would also require multiple items per order (think about a home visit, it's legitimate to want to load several different products plus unload the raw cargo), smart stocking choices (what happens if there's not enough station stock to satisfy the order? Wait for more production or leave with whatever is available? Then how must the products be distributed for the sell orders, given the defined amount won't be meet?). This is a very deep rabbit hole. The end result would be formidably complex too. In the end an hybrid solution is being implemented, with some of the complexity of B but crucially removing the auto piloted auto trading aspect. http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/b21d10b4a35b158c104145b78cfee3b8e3d58202.jpg Unlike the civ exports tab, the import tab will be interactive. Just as with raw resources, civ planets will only crave a single product. Products are also strictly assigned to civs, so for example you'll only be making rations for the humans. First you select the resource you want to sell. Then a list of that civ planets that crave that resource will be displayed, along with a price. That price will reflect the internal demand of the planet, which will be based on a simulated value over time (and it will be disturbed in case you sell to them). In the right side you'll be able to change the amount of that product you want to sell to that planet, and which ship you want to use to perform the delivery (from the ships currently parked at home). Then you can start the delivery and the ship receive an order to travel to the planet, sell the product and come back home (this will be internal code, not configurable as an autopilot). The idea is to make this manual action easy enough to perform, but still have some strategy and consequences. You'll be affecting demand in the planet, at least for some time after the delivery, so you can't spam a single planet with your cheap rations. You'll need to have ready to go ships parked at home, and their cargo hold size will be of relevance. But also their speed, since the demand price changes over time. It's not as complex or as "real" as the B option, but it's not the trivial solution either. The "Avg BOM" value deserves a mention. BOM is for Bill Of Materials. Since you are selling products whose raw ingredients you paid for, this is a very important number to keep in mind when deciding to sell something. You could be selling under cost! But calculating this is very complex, since you can be sourcing the same raw from different civs at the same time. The game will try to keep average purchase tallies from your planet extraction and use those numbers to calculate the products BOM, so you can compare them to the price offered by the simulated demand pricing. That pricing in turn will be based on the product BOM assuming a purely neutral civ, so with some patience it will be possible to score large profit margins in your sales. As you can see I'm a logistics/systems geek, but I have to exercise some restrain to keep the game playable (and to release at some point before 2025 :)

Smaller changes

- Optional exclusive fullscreen mode - Inside the object tool alt click will now also copy the settings from the object, valid for objects that are rebuildable after destroy (factories and pallet-like objects) - Better spawning areas for some non-violent events, including allowing to spawn inside the station. And better area selection for other events, still spawning at the border but now actively choosing a location close to inhabited areas. - Shift click with the info tool now allows to add officers to the selection - New officer sorting option: seniority. Sorts officers by how long they have been part of your staff. - New officer sorting option: average item level. Sorts officers by their average equipped item level in increasing order.

For the past two weeks work has been focused on the new commerce civ import/export (AKA sell/buy) feature in 3.9.

New resource distribution and recipe balance

But before the new export system was possible, a mass rebalancing was required for raw resources and recipes. Raw resources are now limited to one per planet, and are strictly bound in level ranges: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/5c6952639e8dfe9e7e5a7bd69bf2c504b970f4aa.jpg In the same vein all recipes have been reviewed so early research recipes also consume low level resources, instead of the very mixed ingredients they had before. The research tiers have also been reviewed and the required points have been increased, since the previous amount were too low (but aided in testing the game).

Civ exports

Raw resources are not free anymore. They now cost credits, and the station wallet will pay for them when one of your ships loads them from a planet. This is expressed from the point of view of the civs that allow you to extract raw resources from their planets, so it's called an export: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/05412e97b707e48c392549581f0d146ef20961c0.jpg All raw resources have a fixed standard price, but the more a civ likes you, the cheaper they are willing to sell those resources to you. It can go from 100% of the price at neutral to just 10% of the price at the highest possible reputation level. Your ships will automatically purchase the resource they load from the planets, as long as you have the money for it. Higher level resources can be quite expensive, specially when purchased from neutral civs. More care will be now required to set up routes, instead of the endless abundance of previous versions.

Civ imports

The export system was clear from early on, but the design ideas for the import were less clear. After some false starts 2 designs extremes were identified: A) Import happens only to visitor ships (simplest). The player would only be able to sell its products to visiting ships from non-hostile civs. A simple interface would display those ships demands ("We want 10 rations, would you sell them to us?") and an accept/decline prompt. B) All galaxy planets are available as import receivers and the user distributes to them using the autopilot. All planets in the galaxy have demands for one or more products, and the player can supply them to make money. This requires enhancing the autopilot to a full blown auto trading system. Each planet order would need to include the order kind (buy resources / sell products / load from home) plus the resource subject and amount. This would also require multiple items per order (think about a home visit, it's legitimate to want to load several different products plus unload the raw cargo), smart stocking choices (what happens if there's not enough station stock to satisfy the order? Wait for more production or leave with whatever is available? Then how must the products be distributed for the sell orders, given the defined amount won't be meet?). This is a very deep rabbit hole. The end result would be formidably complex too. In the end an hybrid solution is being implemented, with some of the complexity of B but crucially removing the auto piloted auto trading aspect. http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/b21d10b4a35b158c104145b78cfee3b8e3d58202.jpg Unlike the civ exports tab, the import tab will be interactive. Just as with raw resources, civ planets will only crave a single product. Products are also strictly assigned to civs, so for example you'll only be making rations for the humans. First you select the resource you want to sell. Then a list of that civ planets that crave that resource will be displayed, along with a price. That price will reflect the internal demand of the planet, which will be based on a simulated value over time (and it will be disturbed in case you sell to them). In the right side you'll be able to change the amount of that product you want to sell to that planet, and which ship you want to use to perform the delivery (from the ships currently parked at home). Then you can start the delivery and the ship receive an order to travel to the planet, sell the product and come back home (this will be internal code, not configurable as an autopilot). The idea is to make this manual action easy enough to perform, but still have some strategy and consequences. You'll be affecting demand in the planet, at least for some time after the delivery, so you can't spam a single planet with your cheap rations. You'll need to have ready to go ships parked at home, and their cargo hold size will be of relevance. But also their speed, since the demand price changes over time. It's not as complex or as "real" as the B option, but it's not the trivial solution either. The (still not ready) "Avg BOM" value deserves a mention. BOM is for Bill Of Materials. Since you are selling products whose raw ingredients you paid for, this is a very important number to keep in mind when deciding to sell something. You could be selling under cost! But calculating this is very complex, since you can be sourcing the same raw from different civs at the same time. The game will try to keep average purchase tallies from your planet extraction and use those numbers to calculate the products BOM, so you can compare them to the price offered by the simulated demand pricing. That pricing in turn will be based on the product BOM assuming a purely neutral civ, so with some patience it will be possible to score large profit margins in your sales. As you can see I'm a logistics/systems geek, but I have to exercise some restrain to keep the game playable (and to release at some point before 2025 :)

For the past two weeks work has been focused on the new commerce civ import/export (AKA sell/buy) feature in 3.9.

New resource distribution and recipe balance

But before the new export system was possible, a mass rebalancing was required for raw resources and recipes. Raw resources are now limited to one per planet, and are strictly bound in level ranges: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/5c6952639e8dfe9e7e5a7bd69bf2c504b970f4aa.jpg In the same vein all recipes have been reviewed so early research recipes also consume low level resources, instead of the very mixed ingredients they had before. The research tiers have also been reviewed and the required points have been increased, since the previous amount were too low (but aided in testing the game).

Civ exports

Raw resources are not free anymore. They now cost credits, and the station wallet will pay for them when one of your ships loads them from a planet. This is expressed from the point of view of the civs that allow you to extract raw resources from their planets, so it's called an export: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/05412e97b707e48c392549581f0d146ef20961c0.jpg All raw resources have a fixed standard price, but the more a civ likes you, the cheaper they are willing to sell those resources to you. It can go from 100% of the price at neutral to just 10% of the price at the highest possible reputation level. Your ships will automatically purchase the resource they load from the planets, as long as you have the money for it. Higher level resources can be quite expensive, specially when purchased from neutral civs. More care will be now required to set up routes, instead of the endless abundance of previous versions.

Civ imports

The export system was clear from early on, but the design ideas for the import were less clear. After some false starts 2 designs extremes were identified: A) Import happens only to visitor ships (simplest). The player would only be able to sell its products to visiting ships from non-hostile civs. A simple interface would display those ships demands ("We want 10 rations, would you sell them to us?") and an accept/decline prompt. B) All galaxy planets are available as import receivers and the user distributes to them using the autopilot. All planets in the galaxy have demands for one or more products, and the player can supply them to make money. This requires enhancing the autopilot to a full blown auto trading system. Each planet order would need to include the order kind (buy resources / sell products / load from home) plus the resource subject and amount. This would also require multiple items per order (think about a home visit, it's legitimate to want to load several different products plus unload the raw cargo), smart stocking choices (what happens if there's not enough station stock to satisfy the order? Wait for more production or leave with whatever is available? Then how must the products be distributed for the sell orders, given the defined amount won't be meet?). This is a very deep rabbit hole. The end result would be formidably complex too. In the end an hybrid solution is being implemented, with some of the complexity of B but crucially removing the auto piloted auto trading aspect. http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/b21d10b4a35b158c104145b78cfee3b8e3d58202.jpg Unlike the civ exports tab, the import tab will be interactive. Just as with raw resources, civ planets will only crave a single product. Products are also strictly assigned to civs, so for example you'll only be making rations for the humans. First you select the resource you want to sell. Then a list of that civ planets that crave that resource will be displayed, along with a price. That price will reflect the internal demand of the planet, which will be based on a simulated value over time (and it will be disturbed in case you sell to them). In the right side you'll be able to change the amount of that product you want to sell to that planet, and which ship you want to use to perform the delivery (from the ships currently parked at home). Then you can start the delivery and the ship receive an order to travel to the planet, sell the product and come back home (this will be internal code, not configurable as an autopilot). The idea is to make this manual action easy enough to perform, but still have some strategy and consequences. You'll be affecting demand in the planet, at least for some time after the delivery, so you can't spam a single planet with your cheap rations. You'll need to have ready to go ships parked at home, and their cargo hold size will be of relevance. But also their speed, since the demand price changes over time. It's not as complex or as "real" as the B option, but it's not the trivial solution either. The (still not ready) "Avg BOM" value deserves a mention. BOM is for Bill Of Materials. Since you are selling products whose raw ingredients you paid for, this is a very important number to keep in mind when deciding to sell something. You could be selling under cost! But calculating this is very complex, since you can be sourcing the same raw from different civs at the same time. The game will try to keep average purchase tallies from your planet extraction and use those numbers to calculate the products BOM, so you can compare them to the price offered by the simulated demand pricing. That pricing in turn will be based on the product BOM assuming a purely neutral civ, so with some patience it will be possible to score large profit margins in your sales. As you can see I'm a logistics/systems geek, but I have to exercise some restrain to keep the game playable (and to release at some point before 2025 :)

It took some time to get to full speed after the holidays, but here we are! 3.9 is well underway. This version will be smaller than previous ones, since October was not very productive and I don't want to make it too long between releases. The big new feature of 3.9 will be import/export commerce, but as usual the work started with smaller enhancements.

Room-level aesthetics

Aesthetics refuses to die! I've spin again the idea, this time as a value that gets calculated for whole rooms, and displayed in the building overlay: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6ce54bfe4af4ac45ec8d88925f53f88735352e50.jpg It's calculated from the contributions from the room flooring and its objects. Now that this is more visible officers will also require a minimum aesthetic value for their bedroom: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6a27734e1c2cf3fcb98782282eba006b955dda5a.jpg Notice something in the previous screenshot? Yep, graduates do not require a private room anymore. Instead they will just require a basic bed (which now can be made private to an officer) plus an aesthetic value for their bedroom (which is any room the bed is located at). Since basic beds do not assign ownership to their surroundings and can be built in multiples in the same room, this means graduates will happily sleep in barracks, as long as it's a nice barrack. This will solve the issue of having to build huge housing areas for your graduates, which could get quite tedious. Master officers will still demand a private room and will also ask for a high aesthetic value, along with all of their previous demands.

Import limits

Resources that are imported into your station (basically all recipe ingredients) now have a configurable limit: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2f14715913bcc0c4d4c92e1d3eceb4837fb4f3d3.jpg This means your ships will stop collecting Fruit when your station stock reaches 7500 (this default value is equivalent to 10 stacks). This will alleviate the issues with having to build too much storage areas, and it will be useful when the full import/export economy is in the game.

Clone insurance

Have this super well equipped master level officer that was in the original 6 and you don't want to lose? There's an object for that now: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9022e85246e035da575452d7b859b2eb2c4d9dd3.jpg First you assign an officer to the clone chamber object (only one officer per chamber, as with any other object ownership association). If the officer dies they will immediately spawn inside the clone chamber, at full health, even if the officer was in a ship or exploring a planet. This will also destroy the clone chamber object, but such is the price of insurance. Speaking of prices, it's also very expensive. If you *really* like your officer you can assign them to any amount of insurance objects, giving them as many lives as your cash allows.

Smaller changes

- Optional exclusive fullscreen mode - Inside the object tool alt click will now also copy the settings from the object, valid for objects that are rebuildable after destroy (factories and pallet-like objects) - Better spawning areas for some non-violent events, including allowing to spawn inside the station. And better area selection for other events, still spawning at the border but now actively choosing a location close to inhabited areas. - Shift click with the info tool now allows to add officers to the selection - New officer sorting option: seniority. Sorts officers by how long they have been part of your staff. - New officer sorting option: average item level. Sorts officers by their average equipped item level in increasing order.

It took some time to get to full speed after the holidays, but here we are! 3.9 is well underway. This version will be smaller than previous ones, since October was not very productive and I don't want to make it too long between releases. The big new feature of 3.9 will be import/export commerce, but as usual the work started with smaller enhancements.

Room-level aesthetics

Aesthetics refuses to die! I've spin again the idea, this time as a value that gets calculated for whole rooms, and displayed in the building overlay: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6ce54bfe4af4ac45ec8d88925f53f88735352e50.jpg It's calculated from the contributions from the room flooring and its objects. Now that this is more visible officers will also require a minimum aesthetic value for their bedroom: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/6a27734e1c2cf3fcb98782282eba006b955dda5a.jpg Notice something in the previous screenshot? Yep, graduates do not require a private room anymore. Instead they will just require a basic bed (which now can be made private to an officer) plus an aesthetic value for their bedroom (which is any room the bed is located at). Since basic beds do not assign ownership to their surroundings and can be built in multiples in the same room, this means graduates will happily sleep in barracks, as long as it's a nice barrack. This will solve the issue of having to build huge housing areas for your graduates, which could get quite tedious. Master officers will still demand a private room and will also ask for a high aesthetic value, along with all of their previous demands.

Import limits

Resources that are imported into your station (basically all recipe ingredients) now have a configurable limit: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/2f14715913bcc0c4d4c92e1d3eceb4837fb4f3d3.jpg This means your ships will stop collecting Fruit when your station stock reaches 7500 (this default value is equivalent to 10 stacks). This will alleviate the issues with having to build too much storage areas, and it will be useful when the full import/export economy is in the game.

Clone insurance

Have this super well equipped master level officer that was in the original 6 and you don't want to lose? There's an object for that now: http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25185065/9022e85246e035da575452d7b859b2eb2c4d9dd3.jpg First you assign an officer to the clone chamber object (only one officer per chamber, as with any other object ownership association). If the officer dies they will immediately spawn inside the clone chamber, at full health, even if the officer was in a ship or exploring a planet. This will also destroy the clone chamber object, but such is the price of insurance. Speaking of prices, it's also very expensive. If you *really* like your officer you can assign them to any amount of insurance objects, giving them as many lives as your cash allows.

Smaller changes

- Optional exclusive fullscreen mode - Inside the object tool alt click will now also copy the settings from the object, valid for objects that are rebuildable after destroy (factories and pallet-like objects) - Better spawning areas for some non-violent events, including allowing to spawn inside the station. And better area selection for other events, still spawning at the border but now actively choosing a location close to inhabited areas. - Shift click with the info tool now allows to add officers to the selection - New officer sorting option: seniority. Sorts officers by how long they have been part of your staff. - New officer sorting option: average item level. Sorts officers by their average equipped item level in increasing order.