Development Tracker Thread

[Nyphur]

Hey guys,

We're going to use this thread to keep everyone updated on the development of Predestination. Below is a list of major and minor features that we would like to implement before the end of Beta and full release, and information on what we're working on right now! If you have any thoughts on development or what features you think should take priority over others, make a post and let us know. Please also let us know if you think there are features we've forgotten to include in this list.

Current Major Version: v1.0.0.X

Currently In Development: v1.1.0:

Below is a summary of what we're working on right now in addition to our normal bugfixing and iteration based on your feedback: Last updated 21 June 2018.


Purchasing Ship Production:
We’re going to add a new feature that will let you pay BC to purchase ship production on the private market. Rushing ship production will complete the ship instantly but won’t be cheap, as you’re not only paying for the metal but also the extra construction work.
Status: Complete (█████████░ 100%)

Rebalance Markets:
Rebalancing the Industrial Market, Agricultural Market, and Energy Market to make them viable again as an economic strategy, and adding a new Black Market racial trait to the Renegades that doubles income from markets. We will also trial making this a small building.
Status: In Progress (█████████░ 90%) (complete, testing for balance)

Tax Rebalance:
It's currently too hard to generate enough income using Citizen tax to sustain many types of colony, and you have to run with 50 or 60% tax just to break even. We're rebalancing the citizen tax and industrial tax so that it's easy to make sustainable planets and 20% to 40% tax rates will be the norm. A well-designed residential planet will produce a significant amount of income. Industrial tax income is also being increased so that it's competitive with the new higher citizen tax.
Status: In Progress (█████████░ 90%) (complete, testing for balance)

Misc Economy Changes:
Cities and Infrastructure with Biospheres currently cost extra BC each turn in maintenance, and trade routes are currently a little bit too cost-effective to the point that not using them is a big disadvantage. We'll be rebalancing both of these after the economy changes, and trying different strategies for biospheres sucha s increased energy or staff requirements. A road type rebalance is also in this change
Status: In Progress (█████████░ 90%) (complete, testing for balance)

Race bonus overhaul:
Now that the final gameplay is in, some of the race bonuses feel underwhelming. We're rebalancing all of the races around a new standard. Each race with no special ability will be getting one, and small bonuses such as +10% to food will be drastically increased so that they have a big impact on gameplay.
Status: In Progress (████████░░ 80%) (Complete, testing each race extensively)

Star Claim overhaul:
Following the release of our Star Claim feature, we read all of your feedback and formulated a new final design for the feature. The new system will allow you to quickly stake a claim to a limited number of uninhabited star systems at one time, and those claims are broadcast to all races. Instead of having to negotiate the claim with each race, you simply issue the claim and races that like you will respect the claim. At least most of them will! The Z'loq will now be more territorial and ignore most claims if they want the system.
Status: In Progress (███░░░░░░░ 30%) (Designed, in development)

Random Event Overhaul:
We have a very small number of random events in Predestination and they're mostly environmental disasters. We plan to overhaul this by adding new positive events, changing it to a timer-based system like the random Revenant Attacks, and improving the outcome of exploring Temporal Rifts.
Status: In Progress (░░░░░░░░░░ 00%)

Asteroid Mining Overhaul:
Asteroid Miner ships currently just generate metal in the system they're stationed in. We'll be changing this to make actual asteroid belts spawn in some of the empty orbits of star systems and each asteroid miner will produce an amount of metal depending on how many asteroid belts are in the system.
Status: In Progress (░░░░░░░░░░ 0%)

Planetary Iteration:
A number of the planet gameplay features need some improvement. We'll be revamping the Soil Enrichment, Seismic Excavation, and Oil Drilling services to be planet-wide rather than making you click on individual hexes to look for resources. The Soil Enrichment service will improve the planet's Organic rating, Seimic Excavation will improve its Mineral Rating, and Oil Drilling will spawn a number of fossil fuel deposits on habitable worlds. These are designed to be something to spend all your BC on and will be pretty expensive.
Status: In Progress (████████░░ 80%) (complete, balancing and testing)

Ship Designer Simple Mode:
Many players have commented that they don't like being forced to design their ships using our advanced 3D ship designer -- they would much rather pick a pre-designed style and just select which modules and weapons to add onto it. This is exactly what we're going to do! We'll be adding this as a Simple Mode editor option when designing a ship.
Status: Complete (██████████ 100%)

Ship Engine Rebalance:
Currently it's not easy to build fast ships as there's a limit of one Augmented Engine per ship, but if we let them stack then you could add loads of them to larger ships and they'd be faster than smaller ones. To solve this, we're splitting the Augmented Engines module into different size classes of module (Frigate, Cruiser, Battleship, and Dreadnought) that each have different power grid requirements. We'll then allow them to stack so you can build fast small ships much more easily, while faster large ships would cost you a lot of power and waste weapon space
Status: In Progress (█████████░ 90%) (complete, testing)

Ship Armour/Shield Rebalance:
Similarly to the Engine problem, stacking lots of shield and armour modules into a ship feels like a chore on the larger ships. We'll instead be changing this so that there are different size classes of each Shield Emitter type and different sizes of modules that increase armour by a percentage. This should make it much easier to build tanky ships while balancing hitpoints better across all ship sizes.
Status: In Progress (█████████░ 90%) (complete, testing)

AI changes:
Every feature in Predestination has an associated AI that knows how to use the feature about as competently as a human player, and we’ve kept these up to date with each update. Once all of these iterations are complete, we’ll have to revisit every aspect of the AI to ensure it’s still able to play competently, and build new AI routines for all the new gameplay. This is difficult for players to see but hopefully you'll notice the difference when our AI improvements go live in V1.1
Status: In Progress (█░░░░░░░░░ 10%)

Content still to complete during Beta:

• Backer Missile Designs (Complete)
  
• Backer Ship Weapons/Modules (Complete)
  
• Backer Star Names (Complete)
  
• Diplomacy Audio lines (Partially Complete)
  
• Story Missions ( 1 / 12 Complete)
  
• Challenge Maps ( 1 / ? Complete)
  
• Backer Crew Names
  
• Backer Nebula Names
  
• Backer Ship Captains / Planet Leaders
  
• Backer Races
  
• Backer Level Designs
  
• Ship Models: Kazzir
  
• Ship Models: Starforged
  
• Ship Models: Revenant (Backer Reward)
  
• Ship Models: Sauros
  
• Final Standalone 3D ship designer (once all models are complete)
  
• Backer Default Ship Designs (once standalone ship designer is complete)
  
  
  
  

  Major features we would like to add by v1.0*:

  (All completed!)
  
• Tax settings
  
• Ground combat & planet capturing
  
• Empire Age options
  
• Low morale and loyalty planet events
  
• Trade Routes
  
• Freighters (Feature cancelled, rolled into trade routes)
  
• Diplomacy (Coercions, Threats, and Memory system still to come)
  
• Race Stats & finished race screen
  
• 3D Ship Designer & racial ship part models
  
• Ship captains and colony leaders
  
• Fully directed tutorial for 4X newcomers
  
• Wormholes
  
• Planet specials
  
• Warp-capable missiles
  
• Temporal Rifts and Revenant attacks (random events)
  
• Finished building and infrastructure models (final batch in progress)
  
• More technologies in Tech Era 3: First Contact
  
• Tech Era 4: Galactic Domination
  
• Tech Tree: Synergies
  
• Victory conditions
  
• Spying (Moved from after release to main release due to high demand)
  
• First episodic story mode mission
  
• User interface dropdown menus
  
• Main Menu screen overhaul
  
• Challenge maps
  
• Fleet Combat in space (not at planets)
  
  
  

  Features we'd like to add after release*:

  The following is a list of major features that we'd like to get into the final release of Predestination or to add later in a free update.
  
• Multiplayer gameplay (online & LAN)
  
• Detailed modding support
  
• Space Monsters
  
  
  
  *Note: As per the Steam Early Access guidelines, please be aware that our development plans are always subject to change, and we are not promising that specific features will definitely be added in the future. This thread is intended to keep track of what we're working on right now, and what features we'd like to add before release.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for Hotfix V0.9.3.2 (Build ID: 1181169)

• Fixed Shipyards not being detected in the System window after saving and re-loading the game.
  
• Fixed crash when clicking on a shipyard on the planet screen after saving and re-loading the game.
  
• Fixed crash when the Shipyard screen is open when a ship build completes
  
• Added thread locking code to protect shipyard build queues, which should prevent any remaining crashes with shipyards.
  
• Fixed diplomacy string crashes with the Kazzir caused by the wrong character being used for quote marks
  
• Fixed diplomacy first contact accidentally being reversed, causing the alien race to incorrectly identify the type of ship you made contact with.
  
• Changed Graviton Sensors and Phase-Aligned Sensors to improve orbital telescopes rather than being integrated into all starbases
  
• Fixed typo in modules.txt causing Neutronium armour plating to add 24hp instead of 240
  
• Fixed crash with audio when no sound device is available. Now the game will just mute audio if no device is detected rather than crashing.
  
• Fixed bug where the tooltip on the Research icon in the top left corner of the screen could crash if opened while research completed.
  
• Fixed crash with the Research dropdown panel if you clicked on it while ending turn. This menu can no longer be interacted with when the end turn thread is running.
  
• Fixed crash relating to the bonus research points from the Airponics Bay.
  
• Fixed crash when a bomber tries to refill ammo at a star with no starbases (this shouldn't happen, but could trigger in certain rare circumstances. These are now handled).
  
• Fixed Ship memory leak with ending sound by making ships reference the sound effect by name and having the sound effect system handle instances.
  
• Fixed bug with Planet AI building shipyards immediately on colonising new planets, even before basic needs are met
  
• Fixed bug with Planet AI not building shipyards on some planets
  
• The Planet AI will now attempt to build other orbital infrastructure such as the Weather Control Satellite and Orbital Telescope when they are available, and will eliminate a non-essential piece of infrastructure to do this.
  
• Fixed bug with Planet AI not correctly destroying and replacing infrastructure.
  
• Fixed bug with Galaxy AI not selecting the optimum shipyard to build ships in. Now it looks for an empty one with the highest build rate first, then an occupied one with the highest build rate next.
  
• Fixed bug with Aquatic race archetypes where the Galaxy AI would try to colonise desert planets. Without oceans to sustain them, the colony would then immediately fail.
  
• Fixed bug with popups on Data Disk finds on planets not returning the correct response if you got enough RP to complete your research job.
  
• Added thread locking code to the Road system to prevent crashes when roads change during the End Turn process while the planet screen is open. This happens when looking at the AI's planets and they build something.
  
• Fixed bug where the Planet AI would sometimes build cities on top of roads, causing some road hexes to be wasted and ruining the city's output.
  
• Fixed bug where the Planet AI wouldn't recognise excavated ruins and ships as scientific resources and wouldn't bother rebuilding a destroyed artifact excavation infrastructure.
  
• Fixed bug where ships in a shipyard's build queue could be lost when saving and reloading the game.
  
• Fixed bugs where ships outside your sensor range can become visible if they get near a wormhole, even if you haven't visited the other end of the wormhole.
  
• Fixed display bugs with planetary scouts. Their lines now always go the correct way around the planet and are always curved. Also included a small optimisation here where all planets share the same scout graphics instead of each planet having its own.
  
• Fixed the zoom level and orientation when zoomed into a city in some resolutions, which caused buildings to go outside the visible screen area. This has been tested in 1920x1080, 1024x768, 1600x1200 and a few other resolutions.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Salvage button wasn't correctly highlighting when ships were/weren't selected.
  
• Fixed system window bug where ship selection could persist through end turn sometimes.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for Hotfix V0.9.3.3 (Build ID: 1188332)

This is a quick hotfix to solve some big crashes that have come in through the crash reporter thanks to an influx of new players.

• Fixed the crash that happened when you opened the game and hit Continue
  
• Fixed a WorkOutStarsWithinSensorRange crash caused by the sensor treaty code.
  
• Fixed all crashes relating to characters not being valid. Invalid characters now draw as "?" instead.
  
• Fixed a bug with the shift key not registering with certain other key combinations on the ship naming dialog popup
  
• Fixed a bug with the Tutorial that allowed you to click on other parts of the UI during the tutorial and accidentally break it. This would often lead to either a confusingly broken tutorial or even a hard crash.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for hotfix V0.9.3.4 (Build ID: 1189592)

This hotfix solves a new crash when generating a map that we inadvertantly caused with ;ast night's crash hotfix. Please accept our apologies for the oversight, and thanks for sending in crash reports to let us know it was happening.

Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch notes for V0.9.4.0 (Build ID: 1238764)

Dev Update incoming with full breakdown of this update (21st July).
This major patch implemented the Galactic Council, overhauled the Sociology and diplomacy technologies, laid the ground work for Spying, and made improvements to Trade Routes and Commanders. It also completely overhauls the 3D ship designer's mechanics and user interface based on recent feedback. We would greatly appreciate feedback on the revamped 3D ship designer before we complete implementation of the remaining races' ship designs.

Galactic Council:

Before the original Revenant war, the races of the galaxy regularly met to discuss and vote on matters of galactic importance as the Galactic Council. The first race to research the Galactic Council technology will recreate the council and become its leader, after which any race can choose to join. Council Members can propose a variety of resolutions, and a council meeting is scheduled for 10 turns later to vote on the issue. Each council member gets 1 council point per turn and each resolution costs a certain number of council points to propose, and only one proposal can be pending a vote at a time. The council leader gets +1 point/turn.

• Implemented the galactic council's core voting gameplay
  
• Implemented new diplomacy screen visuals and UI for voting on council resolutions.
  
• Changed the "intelligence" tab in the Diplomacy drop down menu to "Galactic Council"
  
• Implemented the UI for the Galactic Council dropdown menu. This panel displays all council members, council points, council tax, current council bank total, the current pending vote, and a list of resolutions to vote on.
  
• Implemented Weapon Ban resolutions (Genesis Device, Bio-Toxin Bomb, Stellar Converter) **Still some bugs to fix with this resolution**
  
• Implemented Building / Infrastruture ban resolutions (Nuclear Power Plant, Fossil Fuel Power Plant)
  
• Implemented Open Civilian Trade resolution (reduces cost of all trade routes by 1BC/turn)
  
• Implemented Vote New Leader resolution (vote your race to become council leader)
  
• Implemented Security resolutions (Share Intelligence, Intelligence Updates, Intelligence Network)
  
• Implemented Health resolution (Share Medicine, Medical Conference, Universal Healthcare)
  
• Implemented Combat Rating resolution (Share Weapons, Weapons Trade Fair, Joint Training Exercises)
  
• Implemented Shipyard Capacity resolution (Share Schematics, Astro-Engineering Conference, Joint Engineering Projects)
  
• Implemented Morale resolution (Share Culture, Entertainment Expo, Cultural Exchange)
  
• Implemented Metal Production resolution (Share Metallurgy, Geology Conference, Industrial Exchange)
  
• Implemented Food production resolution (Share Food, Agricultural Conference, Seed Bank Initiative)
  
• Implemented Research resolution (Share Knowledge, Scientific Conference, Science Collaboration)
  
• Implemented Financial Aid resolution (Request Financial Aid (10%), Request Financial Aid (25%), Request Financial Aid (50%))
  
• Implemented Request Economic Stimulus resolution (all races get even share of council bank)
  
• Implemented Limit Military resolution (-5 command points to all races)
  
• Implemented Share Strategic Resources resolution (all strategic resources are shared with all council members)
  
• Implemented Share Sensor Data resolution (all council members are treated as having Sensor treaties with each other)
  
• The AI now makes a decision on whether to join the council each turn once it's founded.
  
• The AI will not place any banned infrastructure.
  
  
  

  Diplomatic Victory:

• Once the Revenant planet reveals itself, the Ignore Revenant Planet resolution appears for voting in the Galactic Council.
  
• If Ignore Revenant Planet resolution is passed, the AI will not colonise the Revenant planet. (Still to be tested)
  
• If the Ignore Revenant Planet resolution is passed and you colonise the Revenant planet, you are immediately ejected from the council and banned from re-joining. Diplomatic victory is then impossible for you, and you could lose if another council member gets diplomatic victory.
  
• Once the Ignore Revenant Planet resolution is passed, the Galactic Peace Treaty resolution is available for voting.
  
• If the Galactic Peace Treaty resolution is passed, all current wars immediately end and the Declare War option will no longer be available in diplomacy with other council members.
  
• If the Galactic Peace Treaty resolution is passed, the AI will not declare war or engage in combat with other council members. (War AI not yet implemented, so this has not been tested)
  
• If the Galactic Peace Treaty resolution is passed and any council race attacks another, the attacker is immediately ejected from the council and banned from re-joining. (Still to be tested)
  
• Once the Galactic Peace Treaty resolution is passed, the Universal Alliance resolution becomes available for voting.
  
• When the Universal Alliance resolution is passed, the Diplomatic Victory Condition is triggered.
  
• If the Revenant planet is colonised before the Ignore Revenant Planet resolution is passed, the resolution is removed from voting and selection, and this victory path is no longer possible until the Revenants are unleashed.
  
• Once the Revenant force is released from the planet and begins attacking the galaxy, the Revenant Priority Act appears for voting. This functions the same as the Galactic Peace Treaty.
  
• Once the Revenant Priority Act is passed, the Revenant Defense Initiative becomes available for voting.
  
• If the Revenant Defense Initiative resolution is passed, all council races take half damage from Revenant weapons. This will help them fight back the periodic fleets from the Revenant planet, and makes the Destroy Revenants victory condition considerably easier.
  
• Once the Revenant Defense Initiative resolution is passed, the Universal Alliance resolution appears in the voting list. As above, this triggers the Diplomatic Victory Condition.
  
  
  

  Complete overhaul of the 3D Ship Designer

  Recently we brought Predestination to the annual Q-Con gaming event in Belfast and ran a 3D ship designer competition to collect feedback and see how people use the designer. We have now completed a full overhaul of the ship designer's construction mechanics based on that feedback, including a complete revamp of the toolbox and the addition of more advanced CAD-like design tools. The addition of CAD-like advanced tools was one of our stretch goals on Kickstarter that we promised, so we're very happy that we've now got that implemented.
  
  
• Ship parts can no longer be picked up by clicking and dragging. This eliminates the problem where people would accidentally click and drag a part when attempting to rotate the camera
  
• Move Tool: A new intuitive CAD-style movement tool has been added to the toolbox. When toggled on, three arrows appear around the selected ship part that allow you to drag it in three directions. The Move tool correctly aligns itself based on the ship part's rotation.
  
• Scale Tool: A new intuitive CAD-style scale tool replaces the scale slider bar in the toolbox. When toggled on, three arrows appear around the selected ship part that allow you to stretch the part in one of three directions. This is an improvement over the existing system as it allows you to scale the model on the X, Y, and Z axes separately to produce more varied shapes. A checkbox in the toolbox allows you to toggle on the option to rescale all three directions at once if you want to make an entire item bigger or smaller but keep its current proportions the same.
  
• Rotation Tool: A new intuitive CAD-style rotation tool replaces the X, Y, and Z rotation dials in the toolbox. When toggled on, three rotation arrows will appear around the selected ship part that allow the player to rotate the part on three axes. This tool correctly aligns itself based on the ship part's current rotation. When rotating a ship part, a visual rotation disc will appear in 3D to indicate the plane around which you can rotate.
  
• New Design Window: When creating a new design, the player is now initially presented with the "New Design" window. Buttons along the top allow you to select the hull size you want. A list of pre-made ship designs available for the selected hull type is shown, and clicking on one will give you a copy of that design to start working with. A second list of Base Hulls allows players to create a blank design starting with one Crew Quarter mirrored. Players who aren't interested in designing their own ships cosmetically but are more interested in function can simply select a pre-made design and then throw the modules and weapons they prefer on them. Those who like designing ships from scratch can use the base hull options, or even start with a blank slate.
  
• Advanced Undo feature: The previous "undo" feature was full of bugs and only stored the rotation and scale of one part at a time. We've now replaced this with a much better universal undo feature that saves the entire ship's state using a deep clone procedure every time a change is made, saving up to the last 50 changes (changing part scale, rotation, moving a part, adding a new part, deleting a part, resetting a part, or mirroring a part). It can be triggered by clicking a new Undo button at the bottom of the screen or pressing Ctrl-Z.
  
• Other Toolbox Improvements: Made prominent buttons for the "Copy Group", "Delete Group", "Mirror Part" (formerly "Mirror X), and "Reset Part" options.
  
• Removed the Mirror Y and Mirror Z options from the toolbox as they were confusing to some people and in reality only Mirror X was ever used.
  
• Removed the Flip X, Flip Y, and Flip Z options from the toolbox as they were confusing and not actually very useful.
  
• Added a toggle switch to snap rotation angles to the nearest 15 degrees. This should make lining up angles a lot easier.
  
• Ship part extra rotation is now stored as a Quaternion so that it can be rotated on arbitrary axes without running into problems. Previously rotation was stored as three Euler angles representing yaw, pitch and roll, and then converted into a Quaternion/Matrix on demand. This caused issues depending on the multiplication order used for the yaw, pitch, and roll, so we replaced it with a Quaternion and used swing twist decomposition to perform rotations around arbitrary axes in the ship designer.
  
• Implemented backward compatibility mode for old ship designs. When a design is loaded, the old Euler angle rotations and single float part scales are converted into the new Quaternion rotation and Vector3 part scale regime. All ship designs are now saved using the updated schema.
  
• All races now have separate sets of default ship designs that are loaded from file. This is required for the implementation of some backer rewards.
  
• Added an exception triggered when you try to add more than 255 parts to a ship. Don't do this :p
  
• The perpendicular base hull plane cross has been replaced with a single vertical plane to work better with the new base hull paradigm. You can see this if you create a new design using a Base Hull and then select and delete the base hull.
  
  
  

  Sociology Technology Overhaul:

• All diplomatic treaties are now available without researching them via the Sociology tree.
  
• Implemented the Improved Trade Pact and Improved Research Treaty technologies, which double the bonus of the corresponding treaty.
  
• The Diplomatic Computer technology is now a robotic version of the Diplomatic Advisors technology
  
• Moved the Ambasssador Module earlier in the First contact era so that it is still useful in small maps.
  
• The Galactic Council is now at the end of the First Contact tech era.
  
• Buffed the Xeno Psychology technology to +25% to all diplomatic offers and moved it to the end of the First Contact era. It is now an alternative to selecting the Galactic Council, so if the Galactic Council is already founded then you'll have something else to pick.
  
• Implemented spying technology placeholders in the First Contact era of the Sociology tech tree.
  
• Added Spy Pod to the Troop Pod technology to create the "Spy & Troop Pods" technology. The spy portion is not yet implemented, but acts as a placeholder for when spying is implemented.
  
• Added the Self-Destruct Device technology, which gives a 50% chance when a ship is taken over that it will self-destruct.
  
• Restructured the right hand side of the First Contact tech era so that we have three alternate paths: Spying techs, Ship Defense against boarding, and boarding techs.
  
• Implemented Exo-Systems Analysis technology. When you capture enemy ships or planets, you have a 50% chance of discovering the technology behind each unknown weapon, module, building or infrastructure.
  
• Implemented Subvertive Psychology technology, which increases the effectiveness of threats and coercions in diplomacy by 50%. Threats and Coercions have not yet been implemented, so this acts as a placeholder for now. This is another alternative technology to the Galactic Council so that you can pick it if the council has already been formed.
  
• Implemented the Council Influence technology in the Galactic Domination tech era of the Sociology tree, which gives you +1 council point per turn.
  
• Implemented the Financial/Scientific/Industrial/Open Border Resolutions technologies in the Galactic Domination tech era of the Sociology tree, each of which unlocks another set of resolutions.
  
  
  
  

  Misc Gameplay Changes:

• Trade Routes are now limited to 50ly range, so to set up longer trade routes you'll need to send it via an intermediary star system.
  
• The Open Trade Routes technology now increases trade route range to 100ly
  
• When setting up a trade route, the game now displays the range of your route and all stars in range.
  
• Trade routes now cost a flat 1BC/turn for Food and Metal or 2BC/turn for Energy/Population. Previously they cost BC per 50ly.
  
• Trade routes can now correctly go through wormholes. If a star is within range and has a wormhole then you can also set up trade routes with the star on the other side of the wormhole
  
• Commanders now start showing up periodically once you break the warp barrier rather than waiting for you to research the Homing Beacon initiative.
  
• The Homing Beacon Initiative now increases the frequency with which commanders offer their services to your empire by 50% (from about once every 150 turns to once in 100 turns).
  
  
  

  Bugs and Crashes:

• Fixed a spritefont crash caused by certain characters not being available in certain languages
  
• Fixed a bug causing the last ship captain and planet leader in the list not to load
  
• Fixed a crash with the planet scout icons
  
• Fixed a bug with certain mouse clicks going through the tutorial window and allowing you to break the tutorial
  
• Fixed a bug with the keyboard input on text boxes that was making the shift key not press correctly in some circumstances and preventing keys like the @ key from being pressed.
  
• Fixed a thread crash caused by generating the graphics for temporal rifts
  
• The Farm and Ore bonus from race bonuses etc is now applied correctly. Previously it was being divided by 100.
  
• The player should no longer get messages about planet surveys being blocked that were actually meant for other races.
  
• Fixed a bug with text on the title of tooltips extending out of the tooltip box if it was too long. This can now take up to 2 lines.
  
• Racial bonuses to diplomacy were not being added to diplomatic proposals. This has now been fixed.
  
• Fixed various bugs with placement of ship parts in several existing ship designs after conversion to the new system.
  
• Fixed z-fighting on ship parts that are mirrored or placed exactly on the same plane.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch notes for Art Update 1 (V0.9.5.0, Build ID: 1327913)

Please Note: This update will make your old save game files incompatible.
This patch adds high-resolution planet textures, a new improved planet shader, 3D ship Designer parts for the Z'loq and United Colonies, and more. The Large and Huge map sizes have been unlocked, Leader Names have been implemented, Star Names from Kickstarter backers have been added, and the start sequences and victory sequences have been implemented (temporarily disabled while we add voice narration hopefully for tomorrow!). For this update we've also implemented and tested all the code for Spying, which will be released as soon as we can develop the user interface for it.

Hi-res planet Textures:

• Generated new planet environment map textures with greater variation. The game now has six Ice, Terran, and Desert maps.
  
• Created several new Grass, Dirt, Sand, Light Rock, Dark Rock, Lava, Ice, Snow, and Toxic planet textures.
  
• Each planet now selects three random textures based on its type. For Example, Terran planets get Grass, dirt/sand/light rock, and ice/snow.
  
• Modified the terrain shader to make the texture areas more closely match the environment map. It is now much easier to see the environment of a hex by visual inspection without using the environment map.
  
• Modified how noise is applied to the terrain in the shader to improve performance and visuals with the new hi-res textures.
  
  

  3D Ship Designer:

  Ship Models: Z'loq - We've now added a series of ship parts for the Z'loq race and implemented some default designs. The Z'loq ships have unique designs using organically grown blue metallic coral and huge sails for catching warp currents, a unique racial trait of the Z'low that allows them to move faster in FTL.
  Ship Models: United Colonies - We've now added a series of ship parts for the United Colonies race and implemented some default designs for them. The United Colonies ships look a lot more technologically advanced than the Renegades ships, and are covered in bright white plating.
  
• Added a new Global Mirror option for ship parts. This functions like the Mirror X option did previously.
  
• Modified the Mirror X function to now be a local mirror on the X axis. This option allows you to mirror a part in place so that it produces a symmetrical version of itself rather than making a mirrored part on the other side of the model.
  
• The Reset Part button wasn't very useful now that we have a working Undo feature, so we swapped it for a Global Mirror button.
  
• Refactored the ship part code to make modding easier. Model and part directories are now merged together, with each part being represented by a separate .dat file within the model directory.
  
• Models can now be loaded directly as .X models using slimDX instead of putting them through the XNA content pipeline. Ships loaded in this manner are automatically scaled to within pre-defined limits that match the perfect size for the 3D ship designer and to fit within a small square icon when drawn in 2D.
  
• The new .X model loader now checks for a data.txt file in the same folder as the .x file. This file applies modifications to the model vertices during the loading process, allowing some transformations to be applied without editing the actual model. The transformations available are Scale, Scale on X/Y/Z axis only, rotation around the X/Y/Z axis, Mirror on the X/Y/Z axis. Transformations are applied in order.
  
• Modified the ship loading algorithm so that parts may no longer be mirrored or flipped on the Y or Z Axis. This was removed in the previous update, but any designs using it will now be manually changed when loaded to eliminate it.
  
• Fixed a series of bugs relating to the angle and position shaders for parts that were locally or globally mirrored.
  
• Fixed a series of bugs relating to the rotation dials for parts that were locally or globally mirrored.
  
• Fixed a few bugs with items that were mirrored and placed on a flipped side. These should now draw correctly and no longer switch sides when you disable the mirroring.
  
• Disabled code that made a ship part attach to the base hull when dropped on the hex. Parts must once again be place on the actual ship.
  
  
  

  Start Sequence & Victory Sequences:

  These have been completed but are not activated yet as we're working on adding audio narration!
  
• Expanded on previous groundwork on the victory sequence to allow for seamless image transitions in the middle of a sentence, so we can do some faster slideshow-type animation.
  
• Added the ability to change music during the start sequence, to change shaders between images, and to have separate shaders for the characters and race background if required.
  
• Wrote the victory sequence for Galactic Domination and implemented it in a moddable text file, along with all of the images required for the slideshow.
  
• Wrote the victory sequence for Destroying the Revenants
  
• Wrote the victory sequence for Diplomatic Victory
  
• Wrote the victory sequence for Diplomatic Victory after Revenant Release
  
• Wrote the victory sequence for Technological Victory
  
• Wrote a short sequence for losing the game
  
• Wrote a short sequence for losing by economic collapse
  
• Wrote a short sequence for losing by loyalty crisis (being deposed as a leader).
  
  
  

  Minor Features and Changes:

• Crashed ships are now drawn as actual ships on the ground. The model selected is the one corresponding to the selected crashed ship i.e. Science Vessel, Colony Ship, Warship, or Mining Barge.
  
• Changed the Save Game popup so that it now asks you for a name.
  
• Leader Names have now been added for all of the races. Leader Names are separated into Scientist, Diplomat and Soldier names, selected depending on what government type is rolled.
  
• Activated the Large and Huge map sizes
  
• Removed a lot of old unused models that were still in the codebase from earlier prototype versions of the game.
  
• Stars in the System window are now slightly smaller and should render slightly faster as the model has been swapped out for a simpler one.
  
• Minor changes have been made to the lighting on planets on the System Window from their parent stars.
  
• Added Star Names from backers
  
• Made city hexes more visible, and eliminated mouseover on hexes outside city as that was confusing.
  
• Gave each race its own ship shader, and decoupled the ship shader from the building shader.
  
• Ship designs are now re-ordered based on size, with battleship first, then cruiser etc.
  
• Removed the three ship variations Beam / Projectile / Missile from default ship designs and replaced them with a generic War one that picks your best weapon.
  
  

  Other Bugfixes:

• Fixed bug where the crashed ship wasn't showing up
  
• Fixed issue where the galaxy AI executed during the tutorial, causing the Sauros to colonise a planet in their system.
  
• Fixed bug with fleet combat ships during the tutorial
  
• Fixed several scale problems with ship shaders
  
• Fixed an orientation problem with the lighting on ship parts that are rotated via the data.txt file
  
• Fixed scaling issues on 2D renders of ships
  
• Removed ship rotation on 2D renders of ship to fix some aliasing issues.
  
• Fixed bug where weapons would always load as if they were being mounted on a frigate if you selected "Best Beam" etc. This would prevent weapons over 50mw from being used on a larger ship for some reason
  
• Fixed bug where missile ships were just crammed full of missiles and no modules
  
• Made it so the AI will no longer destroy orbital infrastructure in order to build other orbital infrastructure e.g. destroy a starbase to build a telescope. This could get caught in an infinite loop.
  
• Fixed a bug with the code that merged identical fleets which could cause a crash
  
• Fixed a bug with circular weapon arcs taking far too long to calculate when the range is greater than 6.
  
• Modified the ships in the tutorial so that the fleet combat can definitely not be lost. Your ships now have dragonium armour plating.
  
• Fleets can no longer accidentally attack their own planet. This could happen extremely rarely when the AI dispatched ships to attack a planet but conquered the planet before the fleet arrived.
  
• Fixed a few crashes and hangs in Temporal Rift generation.
  
• Starbases now correctly add command points to your empire. This was broken when we switched starbases from buildings to infrastructure, but is now working correctly.
  
• Fixed a duplicate "the" on the diplomacy screen when drawing the race's leader name etc.
  
• Fixed ship self destructing code. Races with the Self-Destruct Device will now correctly self-destruct when their ship is captured, and the explosion size will be larger.
  
• Fixed bug causing sensor range to get limited to 25ly
  
• Fixed a crash caused by an uninitialised list of races sharing sensor range
  
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for Art Patch Part 2 (V0.9.5.1, Build ID: 1334135)

This update activates the victory sequences and start sequence, and includes the voiceover audio for them. We've also rolled in a number of fixes for serious bugs and crashes reported by players.

Start Sequences:

• Enabled start sequence. This will play the first time you load the game after the update, and you can re-watch it by clicking the Intro Sequence button on the main screen.
  
• Enabled all victory sequences. These will now play when you trigger any of the victory conditions in the standard sandbox game mode, and each one tells the story of what happened to your empire after you won the game.
  
• Added a new Voiceover audio system and integrated it into the start/victory sequences
  
• Recorded audio narration for the start sequence and victory sequences, and added it to the game.
  
  Bug-fixes:
  
• Fixed warp missiles being destroyed when you fired a single bomb from them. Now they are only destroyed once all bombs are destroyed.
  
• Fixed multiple cases where warp missiles could "restock" ammo now they they don't get destroyed on the first bomb hit.
  
• Fixed a lockup that could happen in the fleet code.
  
• Fixed ShipyardScreen.Activate crash when you have a shipyard that isn't attached to the city yet and you click on the model.
  
• Fixed Genesis Device crash
  
• Fixed GalaxyBillboardHandler.Build crash caused by spawning Temporal Rift code. The rift graphics were being accidentally re-generated every time a rift spawned, now they are generated once and simply moved to their final locations.
  
• Fixed bug causing backer star names to not be selected by the galaxy generator
  
• Fixed UpdateFleetLines crash
  
• Fixed WorkOutStarsWithinSensorRange crash
  
• Fixed bug with Genesis Device where the planet textures didn't swap after firing the device
  
• Fixed bug where warp missiles remained on the planet screen UI after being destroyed
  
• Fixed bug where United Colonies colony ship didn't have an actual colony module
  
• Fixed a rare ScreenManager crash caused by the victory/diplomacy screen triggering in the middle of the wrong piece of code.
  
• Fixed race name being used instead of demonym on New Game screen tooltips, causing text such as "The The Starforged"
  
• Sectioned off some long methods that are prone to generating crash reports into several methods so that diagnosing crash reports will be easier. In each case, a potential fix for the reported crash has been implemented but the crash can't be replicated yet, so please keep sending in those crash reports! Each one gives us another clue as to what is causing a particular crash.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer
  

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for Hotfix V0.9.5.2 (Build ID: 1336774)

• Fixed a bug causing the scroll bar on the planet screen to not reach down far enough when you researched the space telescope/orbital satellite.
  
• Fixed an unexpected Predestination.GameOptions.SaveSettingsToFile crash.
  
• Implemented a save and load retry system for the settings file. The game will now re-try the failed GameOptions save or load process three times before actually crashing. This should make it so that the game doesn't crash if it somehow tries to save the file twice in quick succession.
  
• Increased the size of the large tooltips by 25%, fixing several bugs where the text didn't fit in the tooltip box and giving us more space to work with for future tooltips.
  
• Attempted a fix for a rare UpdateFleetLinesSubConstructLines crash possibly caused by ships going through wormholes. Please keep sending in these crash reports if you experience this crash!
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for Hotfix V0.9.5.3 (Build ID: 1343698)

• Fixed the bug causing players to get trapped inside temporal rift encounters! This was a long-standing bug that never came up in testing, but I was able to find the problem based on clues from your bug reports.
  
• Fixed bug where the Orbital Satellite didn't show up after researching it unless you switched to another colonised planet and back. The planet now correctly refreshes the infrastructure lsit every time you discover a new piece of infrastructure tech.
  
• When a road is demolished, the infrastructure it was connected to is now correctly disconnected from the city. This allows you to re-connect it via a different road type if you're using the advanced roads option.
  
• Ships that travel through wormholes will no longer attempt to immediately turn around and go home during the End Turn code, and should no longer disappear or get stuck in an infinite loop of being dispatched through the wormhole every turn but not actually moving.
  
• Increased the map drag distances in fleet combat to allow you to drag the grid further offscreen, as the previous limits made getting a good view on some battles difficult.
  
• Added in a "X Blocked" message in fleet combat to show when damage is 100% blocked by the shield. This happens if you fire laser cannons at temporal shields, for example, as they block 100% of the damage.
  
• Mines from the Orbital Minefield tech are no longer cloaked. These caused some confusion and frustration in fleet combat as they couldn't be avoided and would blow up on your own ships. We are currently considering replacing this with a different technology as the minefield isn't that useful.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for Spying and War mega-patch (V0.9.6.0 to V0.9.6.2, Build ID: 1499713)

Note: This is a major update with new features and makes save game files from before V0.9.6.0 incompatible.

New Weapons and Technologies:

• Plasma Storm Bomb: Reduced from 200 damage to 100 and added the secondary effect of creating Electrodynamic storms in the planet's atmosphere, making it impossible to run any factories and ore refineries for 5 turns. This can help you stop an enemy from rebuilding as you lay siege to his planet.
  
• Empulsor Device: An Electromagnetic Pulse device powered by an anti-matter reaction and designed for planetary bombardment. The Empulsor bomb can be dropped anywhere on a planet and will immediately shut down all infrastructure and orbital structures on the planet for the next two turns. The device gives off harmful radiation and is only suitable for use on unmanned warp-capable missiles.
  
• Disassembler Bomb: The Disassembler Bomb contains a breed of destructive nanites enclosed in a standard bomb casing. When used to bombard an enemy city, the nanites seek out and disassemble a piece of infrastructure connected to the city, turning it back into raw materials. Half of the metal used to build the structure is reclaimed by the planet's owner.
  
• Graviton Field Emitter: By shunting high-energy plasma through a sustained graviton emitter, the Graviton Field Emitter ship weapon creates an uncontrolled graviton field on the battlefield. The field deals 20 damage to all ships in its area of effect each turn, slows all ships in its area of effect, and lasts until the end of combat.
  
• Proto-Wormhole Generator: By interleaving two opposing graviton fields, the Proto-Wormhole Generator ship weapon causes a localised spatial displacement, sending any ship in the selected hex to a random unoccupied position on the battlefield. The weapon has to cool down for 3 combat rounds between uses.
  
• Quantum Destabiliser: The Quantum Destabiliser uses a modified tractor beam to scramble the enemy ship at the molecular level, causing components to fuse and short circuit. The beam deals 10 damage directly to a ship's armour, bypassing any shields, and increases by 10 damage each turn until the target ship is destroyed or the beam is terminated. Each Quantum Destabiliser weapon can be active on only a single ship at a time.
  
• Psionic Flux Phaser: The Psionic Flux Phaser is a ship weapon that uses psionic frequencies to transmit thoughts and propaganda directly into the minds of enemy crewmen, disorienting them during the battle and causing them to make mistakes. The affected ship's engines, weapons, or shields will be disabled for 3 turns.
  
• Fleet Heart: The Fleet Heart is a power-hungry ship module that uses quantum entanglement to link together the computers of every ship in a fleet and share sensor data in realtime. Every ship in the fleet benefits from +20% damage and a +10% chance to dodge incoming attacks while a ship carrying a Fleet Heart is operational. Only one Fleet Heart can be fitted to a ship, and the effects of multiple Fleet Hearts in the same fleet don't stack.
  
• Habitation Module: Contains living space, hydroponic farms, and facilities for 2,000 citizens. When stationed in a friendly star system, the self-contained miniature city will produce 4 BC, 50 metal for one planet in the star system, and +10 morale for all planets in the system each turn. If it ever gets destroyed then you'll suffer a -20% morale hit on all planets across your empire.
  
• Dessication Device (Reptilian Only): The Dessication Device is a low-yield bomb that introduces a self-replicating crystalline structure into the oceans of the target world, where it absorbs water and locks it away underground to reduce the sea levels. The planet's climinate will become 10% closer to Desert status, making it more habitable for Reptilian species and less habitable Humanoid, Aquatic, and Robotic races.
  
• Liquefaction Device (Aquatic Only): The Liquefaction Device is a low-yield bomb that spreads catalytic nanoparticles throughout the atmosphere of a habitable planet, combining free oxygen and hydrogen into water in order to raise the sea levels. The planet's climinate will become 10% closer to Ocean status, making it more habitable for Aquatic species and less habitable Humanoid, Reptilian, and Robotic races.
  
• Weather Stabiliser (Humanoid Only): The Weather Stabiliser is a low-yield bomb that spreads biological catalysts throughout the upper thermosphere of a habitable planet to stabilise the planet's weather patterns and promote diverse ecologies. The planet's climate will become 10% closer to Terran status, making it more habitable for Humanoid species and less habitable Aquatic, Reptilian, and Robotic races.
  
• Smogger Bomb (Robotic Only): The Smogger is a low-yield bomb that spreads light-blocking particles of carbon soot and dust throughout the atmosphere of the target planet, reducing the global temperature and attempting to trigger an early ice age. The planet's climate will become 10% closer to Ice status, making it more habitable for Robotic species and less habitable Aquatic, Reptilian, and Humanoid races.
  
• Genesis Device: This is now a super-weapon that can be used on ANY planet type. It will wipe out all life and structures on the planet and instantly transform it into a terran world. The Genesis Device is an expensive single-use warhead that can only be fitted to warp-capable Missiles.
  
• Plasma Mine Layer: Modified the Plasma Mine Layer to deploy small fields of mines instead of just one at a time.
  
• Neural Training Uplink: All ships start with entirely elite crew and bonus XP
  
• Titan Ship Hull: The titan is now the largest ship class in the game and we've activated it for players to use. The Dreadnought ship hull size has been removed from the game as it didn't fit the technology progression in the current tech trees, caused some problems in Fleet Combat, and wasn't very practical to build anyway.
  
  
  

  Spying Gameplay:

  The core spying gameplay has now been implemented, as discussed in our previous development blog. In testing, we discovered that the proposed system was very micromanagement-heavy and we had to re-design it to be more passive. Now instead of spending money to send a spy on an individual mission, you pick from a variety of ongoing missions that each cost a certain amount of money/turn and periodically attempt their missions. The default option is a free mission to hide and infiltrate the planet, raising your spy's infiltration rating over time.
  
• Renamed "Spy and Troop Pods" technology to "Drop Pods"
  
• Added Spy Pod module and Spy Transport default ship design.
  
• Added "Hide" Mission. "Infiltrate the planet and lay low awaiting further orders. All spies gain +1 infiltration rating each turn, with the possibility of establishing contact with criminal and subversive elements in the target planet's society for a surprise 25% bonus once every 10 turns."
  
• Added "Hack Computers" mission. "Hack the planet's computer systems to steal important data. Spies may steal the enemy's maps of the planet, money from the treasury, research points from the scientific network, or even complete technologies."
  
• Added "Sabotage Computers" mission. "Introduce a virus into the planet's computer systems, disrupting planetary activities. This may destroy research points, shut down infrastructure, reduce planetary morale, reduce the planet's health rating, or reduce the planet's security rating."
  
• Added "Plant Bombs" mission. "Attempt to plant bombs inside cities, buildings, infrastructure, starbases, and ships in orbit of the planet. This mission carries the increased risk that the spy may blow himself up in the destruction."
  
• Added "Incite Civil Unrest" mission. "Attempt to incite civil unrest and rebellion among the population, reducing the morale and security ratings of the planet temporarily. If the planet's loyalty rating drops low enough, the planet may even defect to your empire"
  
• Added "Assassinate Leader" mission. "Attempt to assassinate the legendary planet leader currently stationed on this planet."
  
• Implemented spy installation mechanics and Spying tab on the planet interface. Deploying a spy costs 100 BC and requires dropping one onto a city. This can be done even while there are ships defending the planet.
  
• Implemented spy catching mechanism. On executing a mission, the spy has a chance of being caught and causing a diplomatic incident. You can lose favour, treaties can be cancelled, and it can even lead to war being declared.
  
• Implemented spy outcome chance rolls. Defensive score is based on the planet's security rating and technologies, plus a difficulty factor based on the mission. The offensive roll is based on the spy's infiltration rating and spy technologies.
  
• Planet Leaders can now give bonuses to defensive rolls against spies.
  
• Added new Atomiser Implant technology that allows spies to kill themselves and completely destroys their body when caught, leaving no evidence that can link back to your race and eliminating the diplomatic backlash of a failed mission.
  
• Added new Computer Hacking technology that provides a +20 bonus to the Hack Computers spy mission and a +20 spy defense bonus against enemy spies hacking your computers.
  
• Having a spy on a planet now lets you open the planet and view its current fleet defences etc.
  
• Added the Spy Satellite technology, which unlocks a special warp-capable probe that can be installed on an enemy planet through the Spy tab. The Spy Satellite provides a +50 bonus to all spy actions on that planet and lasts for 100 turns. This tech also lets you install a second spy on all planets, but we'll likely be moving that ability to new technologies and racial traits in the future.
  
• Improved the Neural Interface technology by adding a +10 spy bonus to it.
  
  
  

  Implemented War AI:

  
  War Declaration: The AI now periodically assess whether they should declare war on another race using parameters such as fleet strength, strategic weaknesses in the enemy planets, their current favour level, the difficulty setting, and the personality type of the race's randomly generated leader. The AI also now automatically declares war if you bomb their planets or attack their fleets.
  
  Strategic Analysis: When in a war, the Strategic Analysis AI will periodically analyse the enemy planets for strategic weaknesses and compare the strength of its own fleets to the strength of your fleets and planetary defences, also taking into account all the ships that could reach the target system in time to defend against attack.
  
  Defensive Deployment: The Defensive Deployment section of the War AI deploys an empire's ships based on an assessment of nearby threats. It works out how many enemy ships could reach each star system, assesses the threat they pose (modified by whether they are at war or have a peace treaty or alliance) and sends enough ships to defend. This naturally tends to deploy ships around the race's borders and concentrates them near other races they are at war with.
  
  Bid For Peace: The War AI continually re-assesses how its current wars are going and can decide to bid for peace with the enemy race. It will generate an offer that it thinks the enemy will accept, which may contain technologies and money to sweeten the deal. If the race is losing the war and it's absolutely hopeless and they think they're never going to be able to secure a peace treaty, they can sometimes even surrender to another race. All assets and planets are transferred over to the new race on surrendering, and a special diplomacy event announces it.
  
  
• Laid the groundwork for an extortion algorithm in the War AI that makes demands against weaker races. This will have to be activated later once we get the threats and coercions system implemented.
  
• Laid the groundwork for player-designed starbases, which we can implement in a future update.
  
  
  

  Galaxy AI and Diplomacy AI Changes:

  The Galaxy AI has been overhauled with the addition of a new Goal system that operates in distinct phases. All races start off with the goal of expanding their empire, then later switch to different goals depending on the circumstances they find themselves in. The AI continually re-assesses its strength and empire next to the others in the game and makes its decision on what goal it should pursue based on that.
  
• Added the Expand goal that prioritises expanding into new star systems.
  
• Added the Consolidate goal that prioritises colonising and building up all of the planets in your existing star systems.
  
• Added the Diplomacy goal that prioritises diplomatic contact, building military defences, and slower expansion.
  
• Added the Defend goal that prioritises military defences and building ships, and slower expansion.
  
• Added the Conquer goal that prioritises declaring war on and attacking other races, building military defences and building ships, and slower expansion.
  
• Added incentive for the AI to colonise planets with strategic resources or other specials, and star systems with a wormhole connection.
  
• The diplomacy AI now values Peace and Alliance treaties differently, based on the relative strength of each race's total military presence (planets and fleets).
  
• The AI now uses its leader's personality type and race archetype to influence research choices. Special racial technologies are prioritised, warlord races will focus on ground combat techs etc.
  
• Robotic races will no longer get free armour regeneration in Hard and Impossible difficulties. This was previously added because they tended to lag behind in technology, but we've since fixed this with the Robotic race overhaul.
  
• Races will no longer automatically race for the Diplomatic Victory when on the galactic council. Instead, they'll tend to propose resolutions that will benefit them.
  
• The AI is now able to siege planets, continually bombing them every turn until repelled by an enemy fleet.
  
• AI missile fleets will now head home to re-arm if they run out of ammo.
  
• The Galaxy AI now builds ships in up to 3 separate locations, rather than always picking the same location. It selects the best locations based on metal production and build capacity of the shipyards.
  
• The AI now recognises when a planet's metal production drops so low (possibly due to bombing) that it won't complete a ship build and cancels it so the planet can use the metal to rebuild.
  
• The AI no longer considers the defensive stats of a planet's shields etc when working out how well defended a planet is, as fleet combat now ends if the planet is the last remaining structure. Starbase defenses are also weighted lower than other ships when assessing military strength because they can't move.
  
  

[Nyphur]

Planet Generation Tweaks:

A player on the Steam forum pointed out that planets with higher mineral ratings have more deposits of Ore but that what they really need is larger deposits so you might get more clusters of 5-7 ore for your Ore Refineries. We took this feedback to heart and re-designed the resource distribution mechanics to do exactly that and also adapted the new mechanic for the distribution of coal, food, and other resources.

• The number of ore veins on a planet is now determined by its size class, and the size of those veins is determined by the planet's mineral rating, leading to much larger veins of ore.
  
• Gas clusters will no longer frequently contain ore deposits on Toxic planets. These should now be much more separate and easier to harvest.
  
• Fish shoals now generate in larger groupings based on the planet's Organic rating on Swamp and Ocean planets.
  
• Fertile Soil deposits now generate in larger clumps together depending on the planet's organic rating rather than being spread in small clumps across the planet.
  
• Land Animals now spawn in small herds rather than individual deposits on Terran worlds to make them easier to harvest.
  
• Planets with the special Ancient Civilisation will now generate two clumps of 2-3 Ancient Ruin resources.
  
• Planets with the special Crashed Warships will now generate two clumps of 2-3 Crashed Ship resources.
  
  
  

  Morale/Security/Health Overhaul:

• Added a new part to the Loyalty Graph section of the UI to show the net change in security, morale, and health each turn and updated the warnings associated with low stats.
  
• The tax calculation has been adjusted. City GDP is now 4BC per 1k population multiplied by any race multipliers and tax office bonuses, +1 BC per infrastructure built, and +10% if the planet has a starbase.
  
• Population tax rate now decreases the morale per turn in each city by a certain amount. Planets with more cities will be affected more by tax, but the effect can now be more easily counteracted by building more entertainment centres in each city.
  
• The Tax Policies technology now reduces the morale penalty from taxing citizens by -2%, and completely eliminates the penalty from having a 10% tax rate.
  
• The Psychiatry technology now gives +1% morale per turn in cities with a hospital.
  
• The Tax Office building now gives +25% GDP in a city and -2 morale per turn
  
• The Entertainment Center now gives +1 morale per turn
  
• The Genetic Enhancement: Happy technology now gives +5% morale per turn to every planet across your entire empire.
  
• The Waste Management technology now gives +1% health per turn on all planets.
  
• Added new planet leader Slave Driver Korn, who gives +10% metal production per turn but causes -4 morale per turn on the planet.
  
• Planet Leaders can now have stats that increase or decrease morale per turn, health per turn, and security per turn on their home planet.
  
• Weapons can now have effects that decrease morale, security, health, or loyalty by a fixed amount.
  
• The Neural Scanner technology now gives +2 security per turn on all planets in addition to its +10 spy bonus.
  
• The Universal Antidote technology now gives +5 health rating per turn on all planets and a 100% resistance to biological weapons.
  
• The Crimewatch Network technology now gives +1 morale per turn in cities with a police station
  
• Added new Security events for your planets: Petty Crimes when below 75 security, Rioting when below 50, and Organised Crime when below 25.
  
• Added new Health events for your planets: Minor Virus when below 75 security, Disease Outbreak when below 50, and Epidemic when below 25.
  
• Warlord races now get -1 morale per turn for each city without a military barracks.
  
  
  

  Robotic Race Improvements:

• Robotic races no longer require coal/food to now build new population, they can do it just with money and can now build up to the planetary maximum even if there isn't enough room for a full build load (e.g. if there's space for 750 pop and you would build 1000, you can now build the remaining 750 while you previously couldn't).
  
• Added a new "Forge Patch: Antivirus" technology that you can activate once every 10 turns at a cost of 500 energy to increase security on the planet by a flat 20 points. This option is under Forge Services in the Services panel.
  
• Added a new "Forge Patch: Spy Scan" technology that you can activate once every 10 turns at a cost of 500 energy to tell you how many spies are on a planet and have a 25% chance to kill one spy. This option is under Forge Services in the Services panel.
  
• Added a new "Robot Deconstruction" technology that lets you deconstruct 1000 population in exchange for half the metal used in their construction. This option is under Forge Services in the Services panel.
  
• Added the Nanite Engineering technology, which gives all ships an additional +10% armour regenerated per turn in addition to the standard Robotic race bonus. Also gives +10 ground troop and boarding party bonus. This has now been activated and should be working correctly.
  
• Robotic race AI now use their lack of farming and residential city requirements to their advantage -- building more Defense cities.
  
  
  

  Other Features and Small Changes:

• Ice planets now have a much smaller equatorial region with terran and desert land. As a result, Tundra planets (50% Ice 50% Terran) also now retain most of their ice.
  
• Race colours are now randomly selected from a list of 6 possible colours, which were chosen to be distinctive enough to avoid confusion in fleet combat. The player is always green, but colour selection will be added in a future update.
  
• The Save Game dialog now prompts the player for a name for the save game file. The save box has been altered to fit the new name, and the confirm overwrite window is no longer needed since you have to type a name and click the button or enter key now to save.
  
• The Auxiliary Forge now holds 1000 population and is still limited to one per city. We've been having a discussion recently on the forum about these limits, and this may change in the future.
  
• The AI will now build propaganda transmitters on all new planets if it researches them.
  
• The Survey Scanner now scans 100 hexes per turn, up from the previous value of 50 per turn. Probes still have one scanner and multiple scanners on a ship still stack, so a science vessel with multiple scanners will make short work of scanning a planet.
  
• The Ambassador Module has now been changed from a flat favour generation per turn to a +10% bonus to the value of all diplomatic offers to other races as long as we have an ambassador in one of their star systems.
  
• Added a new Solar Flare on Red Giant disaster that can happen if you colonise a planet in a Red Giant system. It's extremely rare but will wipe out everything on the planet and turn it into a molten wasteland.
  
• Added a new Global Warming disaster
  
• Rearranged some of the tech trees to make room for new technologies
  
• Removed the Laser Rifle technology as you don't engage in ground combat this early and if you pick it you can be without a turret. This also caused the AI to sometimes build warships with armour plates but no weapons.
  
• The Orbital Minefield now deploys mines on top of several enemy ships so that they explode at the start of the combat.
  
• Fighters and Heavy Fighters now have their own modular ship designs.
  
• A small number of kickstarter backer star names proved to be too long for the game, so we've had to split them up into multiple names.
  
• The planetary stats should no longer appear to randomly flicker when hitting End Turn. This was caused by the game updating planetary stats while drawing from the same variables. The stats are now cached while the new ones are recalculated to prevent this.
  
• The Revenant ships have been nerfed. The Spectre (Frigate) now has a damper field, one bomb and one particle beam. The Phantom (Cruiser) has a damper field, one armour plate, two beams, one bomb, and one fighter. The Battleship has lost a few armour plates but is otherwise unchanged, and the Titan has been added. We may increase the number of ships in revenant fleets later as part of a balance pass and may factor in the game's difficulty setting.
  
• Temporal rifts now open in 6 to 17 turns instead of 12 to 23.
  
• Fighters and Heavy Fighters now always contain one beam weapon with a range of 2 rather than sometimes using a projectile weapon. If the race has no beam weapon, they will instead be equipped with slightly worse "Prototype Laser Cannon" beams. This can still be modified in the weapons.txt file to make them carry other weapons (for modders). If they do ever happen to use a projectile weapon, it will deal half damage.
  
• The map will no longer rotate when you hold the left mouse button on the End Turn button.
  
• The Auto-Resolve option for Fleet Combat has been enabled.
  
• When you auto-resolve a fleet combat, the game now displays the Fleet Combat Victory panel to tell you the result and let you level up crew members and salvage ships. Right now the entire battle happens instantly.
  
• Increased the point cost of galactic council resolutions to account for new council technologies
  
  

  Bug-fixes:

• Solved several crashes that can happen when ending turn while on the Shipyard screen
  
• Shipyards no longer accidentally use metal and build capacity from enemy planets in the system
  
• Natural disasters such as the Solar Flare will no longer make you declare war on yourself (lol)
  
• Shipyards will now pause when their owner has insufficient command points remaining to build the ship.
  
• The GalaxyAI now correctly re-initialises after creating or loading a level. Previously it didn't start making decisions for 1-2 turns.
  
• Robotic race AIs will no longer sometimes accidentally set a tax rate and ruin their income.
  
• The galaxy AI is now executed before the rest of the end turn code, so races can no longer dispatch ships on the same turn that they arrive (an ability the player can't have).
  
• Fixed a bug in the code that checks treaties between two races. This had no effect before this patch because all treaties previously came from your race, but we noticed it when we made the AI able to declare war.
  
• Fixed several crashes that could happen when ending turn due to changing ship numbers in the system window.
  
• Fixed potential crashes in the code that dispatches fleets.
  
• Fixed bugs in the Merge Fleets code, previously sometimes fleets belonging to the same race didn't merge correctly when idle at the same star system.
  
• Fixed a crash that could rarely occur when a popup appeared during the level creation process that caused the game to play a music jingle before it loaded the music.
  
• Fixed a visual bug with one of the United Colonies ship parts
  
• It should no longer be possible to accidentally open two fleet combats at once by responding to two attack popup boxes in a row. The popup dialog queue is now saved when you open fleet combat and restored after combat ends to prevent this problem.
  
• Revenants now correctly attack enemy fleets, bomb enemy planets and self-destruct after the bombing run. Previously they would just arrive in the system and stay there quietly for the rest of the game.
  
• Fixed a bug where you could get the Revenant threat message when the Revenants were dispatched to attack an enemy planet. (Note: We may actually put in a separate message when the Revenants attack another race as it's good to know when it happens)
  
• Fixed a bug with farms sometimes getting bonuses from the wrong hexes and missing bonuses from others.
  
• Fixed a bug where certain untradeable technologies were making their way into the trade list for diplomacy.
  
• Fixed a bug with certain planetary disasters that caused them not to activate. That red giant you're colonising can now correctly throw off a solar flare and cook your planet. Enjoy :D
  
• Fixed a bug with the Bio-toxin bomb that prevented it from being fired.
  
• Fixed a bug with ships going through wormholes they hadn't discovered yet or taking shortcuts through wormholes even if they can't reach the other side normally.
  
• Fixed a bug with ship captains that would cause anyone giving an armour HP bonus to give 100 times the expected bonus.
  
• Fixed a bug in the shipyard window causing ship design 0 to be non-modifiable. This should never happen unless you're modding the game.
  
• Fixed a bug preventing the "Upgrading to Blueprint" message from being drawn from the city view
  
• Weapon stats from weapons.txt are no longer case sensitive. This fixed a small bug with one of the weapons, and ensures we don't get a repeat of that error in future, and it'll be easier for modders.
  
• Fixed a bug with disaster immunity not applying correctly. We are going to drastically increase disaster immunity turns in a future update when we add more disasters
  
• Fixed bug causing planets not to update after a disaster if you happen to be at the planet when it occurs.
  
• Planetary defenses will no longer prevent you from bombing the planet on their own, as this would lead to a fleet combat that ended immediately.
  
• The AI will no longer accidentally attack a planet even if the owners have changed since the fleet was dispatched to attack it.
  
• Fixed a series of bugs with the planet screen code that caused various mechanics to mis-calculate areas near the planetary seam. This led to some strange behaviours all across the game, from the AI code and bombing to resource generation.
  
• Fixed a bug where the AI wouldn't realise the planet maps wrapped around and would screw up placement on the planetary seam. This is a separate issue than the previous one.
  
• Fixed a number of End Turn crashes when you're on the planet screen.
  
• The Fighter Squadron Cruiser ship design will no longer have multiple augmented engines. It should only be possible to have one of these per ship.
  
• Fixed various Fleet Combat bugs causing ships to move or fire at the wrong time or target.
  
• Fixed a crash in Fleet Combat caused by the game thinking a ship is moving but it actually has 0 moves in its movement queue
  
• Fixed a visual bug and related crash in Fleet Combat caused by the game using the wrong variable to draw the laser for reactive strikes
  
• Fixed a bug with the display of star system names when multiple races colonised the same star system.
  
• Fixed a bug with the display of the number of turns for a fleet to reach its new selected destination
  
• Fixed a bug with auto-resolving fleet combat that caused the victory window not to have anything to salvage.
  
• Fixed a bug with the fleet combat wrap-up code that destroys starbases etc that were knocked out during the battle. When starbases are destroyed, the star system will correctly update to reflect this immediately instead of waiting until the next time you click End Turn.
  
• When an AI fleet attacks a planet, all combat ships belonging to that race that are stationed in the system (and may be performing a trade route blockade) will now join the fleet combat. This makes the AI-spawned fleet combats consistent with player-spawned ones when attacking a planet.
  
• Fixed a bug with how the AI valued the military force of ships using missiles and drones. Now your best warhead damage is used in the calculation for missiles, and your best beam weapon damage is used for fighters.
  
• Fixed missing Spy Pod module for Zloq and United Colonies.
  
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for Hotfix V0.9.6.4 (Build ID: 1502418)

This was a hotfix for an issue preventing the planet screen from drawing the UI or allowing you to build in cities. It was caused by a mistake in the code that handles debug keys, so we didn't notice it on the test PCs with debug keys enabled. We've also refactored the debug code in this patch to allow me to toggle debug keys for testing and prevent this issue from happening again without being noticed. Please accept my apologies for not noticing this issue with the patch, and thank you for your patience while I solved it.

Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch notes for Singleplayer Pre-Patch (V0.9.6.9, Build ID: 1679380)

Just a quick note that a full dev update blog with screenshots and in-depth details on everything in this update will be released this weekend, hopefully at the same time as the first singleplayer mission goes live for testing. It'll also have an update on a few things that unfortunately caused us delays over the past two months, the final steps to get Predestination feature-complete, plans to finish off the UI, and more!

Singleplayer Missions:

The vast majority of development time on this update has been spent on implementing the Singleplayer Mission system, a robust and highly moddable framework for creating story content within Predestination that we'll be using to deliver episodic story missions in regular free updates after release. The first singleplayer mission is being tested right now and will be released very soon as 0.9.7.0, for the sake of getting this very overdue update released ASAP we've pushed it out before the mission is ready for the public. All of the underlying coding and systems have been implemented for singleplayer campaigns and tested with a test mission, it all works as expected and I hope you enjoy the missions as we release them.

The singleplayer campaign will be split into two main story arcs: The first set of missions will follow each race's story from before the Revenant war and eventually leading up to the temporal disaster that threw all of the races back in time. The second campaign will follow each race's story after being sent back in time as they struggle to rebuild, become embroiled in engaging with their lost neighbours, and find a way to defeat the Revenants.

The first mission (which will be released hopefully this weekend) tells the story of the Kazzir space race, fuelled by the financial success of the planet's biggest entertainment corporation. This mission functions partly as a hands-off tutorial by guiding the player through the Pre-Warp era of the game as the Kazzir explore their planet, build massive cities and industrial infrastructure, and eventually race to the stars in search of alien life and bigger TV ratings.

• Implemented Singleplayer Missions. Each mission contains a set of mission Stages, each of which contains a list of objectives to complete to trigger the stage's completion.
  
• Implemented Objectives code. This uses reflection to look up a variable within the game and checks it against the supplied value. Objectives can be optional or mandatory, and a failed mandatory objective will trigger the stage's failure condition.
  
• Implemented Stage Triggers. On failure or success of a stage, it can then trigger either another mission stage, a victory or loss sequence, or a Conversation. This allows you to have brnaching storyline missions where failure of a stage can lead you to different dialogue and missions rather than just failing the whole mission.
  
• Implemented Conversations. These are animated sequences featuring characters from any race in the mission (can be your own) or even just images loaded from the mission folder. The characters talk about something, and the player can at certain points be offered a choice between multiple alternative responses. The selected response can branch the conversation off into a different direction, cause a stat boost or penalty, grant a free technology from a special mission technologies file, or trigger a particular mission stage.
  
• Implemented special mission technologies. This is a separate list of special mission-exclusive technologies that don't appear in the tech list, but can be granted to you by mission Conversations. These can be used as rewards for picking a certain dialogue option or mission objective. For example, a mission could ask you to pick your governmental policy for the next ten years and give you three options that give different stat boosts.
  
• Implemented mission tech tree overrides. Each mission is loaded from its own specific folder. Singleplayer missions can detect technology files in their mission directory and load them instead of the standard technologies. This allows full customisation of the tech trees for each mission.
  
• Implemented mission sequences. Each mission begins with a slideshow-type sequence just like the intro or victory sequences, with optional music and voice narration. This then gives way to the mission, which can start either with the first Stage active or by jumping into a Conversation. This is a pretty versatile system, for example the Kazzir mission's start sequence is simply a black screen saying "Loading Mission..." and it jumps straight into the first conversation to get the story started.
  
• Implemented GalaxySetupData.txt. This allows you to specify the exact galaxy setup you want this mission to use. You can specify all of the galaxy parameters, whether to use a static or random seed, timers for temporal rifts / revenant attacks / legendary leaders (more info below), whether to make the map 2D or 3D, whether to start in the Pre-Warp or Space Exploration stage, whether to add the Revenant planet, whether to disable wormholes or not, and how many AI are in the game with you (including 0 if you want none).
  
• Implemented new race setup system. GalaxySetupData.txt allows you to specify which races are in the mission, but also allows you to make changes to those races and their homeworlds through a new race setup system. You can specify the government type, leader name, which damaged ship to start with (or none if you want to remove it), how many cargo containers and crash survivors are scattered around your planet to be found, how many of a specific resource are on the planet, and how many of a specific resource are within 6 hexes of your starting city. For example, the Kazzir mission has no damaged ship, no crashed ships, and no survivors on the planet as it's a pre-temporal-disaster story.
  
• Implemented MissionData.txt. This is where all of the mission stages and objectives are defined,
  
• Implemented hidden objectives. Objectives can be marked as hidden to hide them from the player, which has multiple uses. You can have multiple stages active at a time and only trigger the win condition when all are complete by having a hidden control variable that checks if the other missions are complete too. You could have a hidden bonus with additional points awarded for completing a secret objective. Or you could make the story suddenly take a twist by having a conversation pop up in response to something you did, for example building a nuclear power plant after being threatened by another race not to build one.
  
• Implemented timed objectives. Some objectives can have turn limits, after which if you haven't completed the objective then the stage's failure mechanism is triggered. They can also be set up as Survival objectives where you have to last for the specified number of turns without fulfilling the condition, for example surviving for 100 turns without losing more than 10 ships.
  
• Implemented mission UI. This dropdown style UI displays information on all active mission stages and objectives. Each stage and objective can be expanded for further info and to track your progress, and there are tick boxes to show successful objectives or failed optional objectives. A failed mandatory objective will cause the stage's failure condition to trigger and deactivate the mission stage.
  
• Implemented mission saving/loading. Singleplayer mission status and progress is now saved to the save game file and picks up where you left off upon loading.
  
• Implemented GameStatistics class. This records a variety of stats and gives access to various useful objects such as the player's homeworld, and is intended to be used with the Singleplayer Mission Objective code, which uses reflection to look up variables to see if you've met the objective.
  
• Temporal Rifts, Legendary Commanders, and Revenant Attacks can each be switched off in the singleplayer mission parameters file by deleting the relevant commands or commenting them out.
  
  
  
  

  Morale/Health/Security V2.0

  Feedback from the recent Health/Security/Morale system update has been mixed, and players pointed out that it felt quite random and often difficult to manage. We went back and took a long hard look at this system and decided that the previous implementation was better, so we've gone back to the pre-0.9.6.0 version and then iterated on that with some changes and improvements. The short version is that Health and Security now show what percentage of your population is covered by those services and Morale is now a flat percentage, and planets can now acquire permanent bonuses to Health, Security and Morale through random events. A series of escalating disasters will hit you if you let Health or Security drop below 75% or morale drop below 50%, and some spy missions etc disrupt those stats.
  
  
• Morale has been changed back to the way it was before 0.9.6.0. It's now a flat planet-wide value between 0% and 100%, decreasing based on your tax rate and increasing from Entertainment Centres and various technologies.
  
• Health rating has been changed back to the way it was before 0.9.6.0, but with some tweaks. The rating is now a percentage between 0% and 100% indicating how much of the planet's population has medical cover. Each Hospital increases medical cover by 2,000 population, and various technologies increase it further.
  
• Security rating has been changed back to the way it was before 0.9.6.0, but with similar tweaks to the health system. The rating is now a percentage between 0% and 100% indicating how much of the planet's population has security cover. Each Police Station increases security cover by 2,000 population, and various technologies increase it further.
  
• The Loyalty stat has been completely removed from the game. Its role is now played by Morale, if you let it hit 0.
  
• The Entertainment Centre is now a piece of planetary infrastructure rather than a building inside the city, and has been buffed from +10% morale to +20%. This makes more sense as morale is a planet-wide stat and different sizes of planet have different numbers of cities.
  
• Morale below 100% now reduces the combat rating of the cities on the planet in response to enemy ground troops by (100-morale). E.g. morale of 75% will give -25 combat rating. This is a significant enough penalty that players should want to avoid more than -10 to -30% when at war, and will want to use Propaganda Transmitters.
  
• Health coverage below 100% now reduces the population growth rate of the planet by (100-health)%. E.g. A 75% health rating will reduce population growth by 25% (40/turn would become 30/turn). This isn't a huge problem, but health disasters of escalating severity begin to be triggered below 75%, 50%, and 25%.
  
• Security coverage below 100% now reduces the planet's economy by (100-security)%. E.g. A 75% security rating will reduce a GDP of 100BC/turn by 25% to 75BC/turn. As with health, disasters of escalating severity begin below 75%, 50%, and 25% security.
  
• Added a new system of permanent planetary bonuses or penalties to Morale, Security, and Health. The homeworld starts off with +10 to each and all planets start off with +2000 health and Security coverage so your first city is safe, and further bonuses or penalties can be accrued through random events.
  
• Redesigned all of the Disasters that trigger on low morale/health/security to provide options that may permanently raise or lower the planet's stat by 10 points.
  
• Captured planets now suffer from a flat -40% morale penalty that you have to deal with, either by building entertainment centres or dropping your global tax rate.
  
• Added the Mind Control technology, which eliminates the -40% morale penalty for conquered planets and allows the Psionic Flux Phaser to be used in planetary bombardment. When used to bomb a city, the Psionic Flux Phaser immediately mind controls the population with no resistance regardless of any ground troops. This is a very powerful endgame technology in the Galactic Domination stage of the Sociology tree.
  
• Added a new Morale disaster for when morale hits 0 in which the planet attempts to leave your empire. Options include allowing them to leave, pacify by force, and granting a civilian government. This new civilian government option cuts the planet's tax and productivity and puts an AI in control of it, but allows it to remain in your empire.
  
• Added new disasters for conquered planets with morale below 50%, where Rebels can plant bombs to obliterate farms, ore refineries, or a whole city.
  
• Added a new disaster for captured planets in which a freedom fighter re-captures one of the cities.
  
• The Tax Office has been re-branded as the Housing Office. It still increases taxable economic wealth by 25% in the city, but now reduces the combat rating of that city by -20 rather than changing planetary morale. This seems more sensible as morale is a planet-wide stat.
  
• Warlords such as the Z'loq now get -5 Morale for each city on the planet without a military barracks.
  
• Nuclear power plants now reduce the planet's health coverage by 2,000 population.
  
• Crimewatch tech now provides +5 morale for each city with a police station
  
• The Sabotage Computers spy mission now reduces Security coverage by 8,000 citizens while active, and periodically attempts to shut down farms, refineries, or research labs for 10 turns. The security hit makes this mission's success rate higher than usual if the planets' security is low enough that it drops below 100% security coverage.
  
• The Incite Civil Unrest mission now reduces Morale on the planet by 40%. The mission will be augmented in a future update to periodically cause a riot disaster, which can cost the enemy money to handle or even permanently reduce planetary morale. At the moment, this is only achieved if the planet's morale drops below 50%.
  
• Adjusted the warning section of the planetary resource graphs etc to give more information. It now also explains the penalties for low health, security, and morale.
  
• Propaganda transmitters no longer affect races you have an Alliance with. They still affect those you have a Peace treaty with as it's considered a covert action and the enemy race cannot discern where it's coming from.
  
• The Tax window now gives an orange warning if any planets will have below 100% morale with the selected tax rate, and red warning if any will be below 50% morale.
  
• Adjusted all technologies and Galactic Council resolutions involving Morale, Security, and Health to provide +10, +20, and +30 bonuses rather than +1/2/3 per turn.
  
  
  

[Nyphur]

Robotic Race Overhaul:

The Robotic race archetype still had several organic-based technologies in its tech trees and some options such as the Forge Services turned out to be extremely micromanagement-heavy. We've solved this by adding new Robotic-only technologies that unlock Forge Services, and overhauling how the forge services work. There are now three construction options (Construct Citizens, Deconstruct Citizens, and Construct Seed Ship), and four toggleable Forge Patches (Virus Scanner, Spy Scanner, Distributed Computing, and Bytecoin Mining) which consume energy per turn to run. We've also added some new endgame technologies for the Robotic races, such as a powerful new power plant and food source that requires Toxic planets.

• Added a new Forge Construction: Seed Ship technology that adds the ability to construct a seed ship to the forge build options. This turns 2,000 population and 5,000 metal into a special colony ship with no warp drive.
  
• Removed the Forge Patch options that were activated manually and replaced them with four new options, only one of which can be toggled on at a time and all of which are unlocked by technologies:
  
• Forge Patch - Virus Scan: +50 security when toggled on. Costs 50 energy/turn to run this program.
  
• Forge Patch - Spy Scan: +50 spy defense when toggled on. Costs 50 energy/turn to run this program.
  
• Forge Patch - Mine ByteCoin: +1 BC per 2,000 population when toggled on. Costs 100 energy/turn to run this program.
  
• Forge Patch - Distributed Computing: +1 RP per 2,000 population when toggled on. Costs 100 energy/turn to run this program.
  
• Robotic races are now affected by morale bonuses and penalties (e.g. Propaganda transmitters), but cannot be taxed or research the Entertainment Centre. They instead get -10% morale for each city with no Support Center to encourage you to expand slowly on new planets.
  
• Robotic AI will now correctly build the Support Center in every city once they have it. This is optional for players as Robotic races can function fine with negative morale down to -50, but morale penalties now decrease combat rating and propaganda can cause it to dip below 50%.
  
• When on the planet screen as a Robotic race, the economy stats displayed no longer include Citizen tax and now include Bytecoin Mining.
  
• Renamed all Design Enhancement technologies to Upgrade instead, as it's shorter and makes more sense.
  
• Replaced Bio-Engineered Crops technology for Robotic races with Radiogenic Power Plant, a new power plant that consists of a modified Gas Harvester which draws in radiogenic particles from the atmosphere of Toxic planets and generates 200MW of power
  
• Replaced Cybernetics technology for robotic races with Radiogenic Fuel Pellets. Unlocks the Radiogenic Fuel Pellet Factory infrastructure, which produces 4000 fuel pellets per turn and can only be built on toxic worlds inhabited by a robotic race.
  
• Replaced Android Citizens technology for Robotic races with The Cloud, which allows your citizens to exist within a virtual data cloud and control multiple robotic bodies as needed. This doubles the number of citizens that can be built on all planets across your empire.
  
  
  
  

  Misc Features and Changes:

• Temporal Rifts, Legendary Commanders, and Revenant Attacks now all happen on timer systems so that they happen regularly throughout the game rather than just being random. Revenant Attacks can also be switched off for sandbox games using the galaxy creation menu as below.
  
• Added a new "Revenant Attack" slider to the New Game galaxy creation screen that varies the strength and frequency of revenant attacks. Options are: Small, Average, Large, Insane, and Off. (Small produces a 50% strength revenant attack every 90-110 turns, Average produces a 100% strength attack every 115-135 turns, Large produces a 200% strength attack every 140-160 turns, and Insane produces a 200% strength attack every 40-60 turns.)
  
• The planet interface now remembers which tab was selected when you zoom in and out of the planet, and remembers where each of the tabs' scroll bars were.
  
• Improved the tooltips for all the race stats on the Race Select screen
  
• Improved the graphics on the Race Select screen by using the race logos instead of text and changing the bar image
  
• Added capability to have ships with no FTL drives. These have red text saying "No FTL" on the system window and are left behind if you try to move them from one system to another.
  
• Replaced the combat type damaged ship with a new more powerful ship with shields, armour plating, lasers, and mass drivers but no FTL drive. This should help it stay useful later into the game.
  
• Increased the Fleet Combat field size when a large fleet is involved, and placed them further apart.
  
• Temporal Rifts can now spawn on maps with no AI races. This could not happen in a standard game but could in singleplayer missions with no AI.
  
• Updated the Planet AI to take into account the need to build Entertainment Center infrastructures to keep the tax rate comfortably at ~40%.
  
• Homeworlds can now generate with additional deposits of resources specifically near the first city or elsewhere on the planet. This can be from either a racial trait or a singleplayer map generation parameter.
  
• Planets now generate fewer ore deposits, but the deposits that are generated are larger and less random (2-4 times mineral roll, plus 1 times mineral roll in deep core deposits).
  
• Toxic planets now generate more gas deposits and fewer ore deposits.
  
• Coal now generates in small groups deposits on any planet that has it, rather than isolated single deposits. Planets with lots of coal may have it split over more than one deposit.
  
• Cleanup: Removed old code for disease outbreaks, rioting and radiation on planets. We've re-built these things as Disaster events with immediate consequences.
  
• Cities now get +1 ground troop per 1000 population, or +1 per 500 population for Warlords. This is worked out using an even distribution of population proportionally across all cities.
  
• Added new Ship Module passive effects to increase Security, Tax income, and max population to a planet.
  
• Galaxies now generate 1 nebula per size category, regardless of galaxy age (1 for Tiny, 2 for Small, 3 in Medium, 4 in Large, and 5 in Huge). The size of the galaxies on larger maps have been slightly reduced to compensate, and Nebulae can now contain homeworlds. A fix was previously put in to prevent homeworlds in nebulae from being re-generated and accidentally annihilating a race at the start of the game.
  
• Shipyards will now pause if there is no metal available due to colonies upgrading blueprints. Colonies are now always prioritised over the shipyard.
  
• Shipyards will now pause if there aren't enough command points remaining to build the ship.
  
• Replaced the ugly stat list on the System window's Stats tab with shiny icons
  
• The City Stats window when zoomed into a city now draws starbases or other pieces of infrastructure with orbital ships attached by drawing the ship rather than the building. No more giant orbital tether sprawling across the screen!
  
• Improved the diplomatic advisor reports to be more specific about how much a deal is in your favour or the enemy's, and separately to judge whether they'll accept it. For example, if a deal is clearly weighted toward you but you have positive favour with the race, they may accept it anyway.
  
• The Homing Beacon Initiative now provides only a 33% increase in legendary leader spawn rate, down from 50%. This now stacks with the Charismatic trait (not currently used by any race yet).
  
• When exiting the Shipyard Screen, if you were previously on the Planet Screen then the game will open the planet again rather than the Galaxy screen.
  
• Cleaned up all of the Level creation code and split it into generation and cleanup methods that can be invoked separately. This allows me to create levels via other means (e.g. singleplayer missions) and then perform all of the Level creation cleanup manually.
  
• AI races are now slightly more inclined to annoy each other and declare war on each other if they think they have the advantage. This will need to be looked at a little more closely as I implement the Diplomatic Demand AI.
  
• Added new ini options tooltipAnimationFramesClose and tooltipAnimationFramesOpen so now they open faster than the tutorial windows.
  
• All Disaster events now provide a short immunity to further disasters happening in your empire and a longer immunity to that specific type of disaster happening again. This should make them less frequent and annoying while maintaining them as punishments for running a poor empire.
  
• The Habitation Module is now a non-combat starbase module that provides living space for 2,000 population, +4 BC/turn and +20 planetary morale. If it ever gets destroyed, the planet it was stationed on will suffer a permanent -20% morale penalty. Unlocks the Starbase (City) design.
  
• Technologies can now contain a variety of Stat bonuses rather than just enabling pre-defined boolean flag that causes the stat increase. E.G. The +10 ground combat increase from Combat Boosters could now be done directly by specifying "Stat = GroundCombat, 10". This is used primarily for special singleplayer mission techs.
  
  
  
  

  Bug-fixes:

• Fixed a bug causing tooltips to get stuck in a loop of rapidly opening and closing sometimes.
  
• Fixed a bug preventing the Upgrade button from appearing on tiered buildings when zoomed into the city.
  
• Fixed a bug with tutorial popups sometimes getting stuck on the diplomacy screen
  
• Fixed a bug causing planet mineral deposits to be re-rolled differently depending on when you first open the planet. It was accidentally using the global random number generator rather than the planet seed.
  
• Fixed a related bug causing extra Fertile Soil and Fish deposits to be generated on a planet using the global number generator rather than the planet seed.
  
• Fixed a bug causing Gas Harvesters to get research points from gas other than Xenon.
  
• Fixed a bug with the food bonuses from technologies not always applying if you have a racial bonus (e.g. Renegades)
  
• Fixed a bug causing the planet's stats to not update immediately when you demolished a building.
  
• Modified the nebular graphics to prevent a strange washed out effect that could sometimes be seen in the middle of some of them.
  
• Fixed a bug causing ship weapons with ammo to magically refill on entering fleet combat or performing any action that refreshed its stats such as saving and loading. Ammo status is now maintained across weapon refreshes.
  
• Fixed a bug where certain galaxy parameters were being set on a temporary galaxy during map creation rather than the actual galaxy being generated. This didn't cause any noticeable effects on gameplay, but was spotted when it caused problems for singleplayer missions using non-default options for some galaxy parameters.
  
• Stars that visibly appear to be inside a nebula should now correctly recognise that they are in a nebula. This mostly affected Primordial age maps with their giant nebulae.
  
• Fixed a number of instances of text misalignment in dialog boxes.
  
• Fixed a rare bug that could happen after the Victory sequence played that caused the screen to just go black rather than quitting back to the main menu.
  
• Fixed a small bug with the height of the Trade Route window, which would make it so you couldn't scroll down the whole list in the System Window for a star system with a large number of trade routes.
  
• Fixed a crash if you attempted to sve a new ship design with the Save button instead of Save As. The Save button should be grayed out, but sometimes was not.
  
• The AI will no longer attack your planets if the attack fleet was in transit when a peace agreement was reached.
  
• Fixed a small bug causing the Revenant ships to sometimes get stuck in a star system because something happened to the planet they were on their way to attack.
  
• Fixed a bug causing the Food starbase to use the Energy starbase design.
  
• Fixed robotic AI accidentally setting a tax rate
  
• Race-specific technologies are no longer considered equivalent to a technology which is functionally identical but belongs to another race. E.G. All races have a tech that gives +10 Spy Bonus but for Robotic races it's called Predictive Algorithms and for organic races it's called Psionics. Previously the game thought these were the same tech and allowed you to trade Predictive Algorithms to a humanoid race, grant them Psionics. This is no longer possible.
  
• Fixed bug preventing the plural demonym of races from being loaded. Functionally, this made no difference as it wasn't used anywhere until now.
  
• Fixed a bug causing some technologies to be incorrectly classified as race-locked techs just because they had been moved around in the race's tech override files.
  
• Fixed a number of small mistakes in the tutorials, and updated a few of the tutorial text files with new information.
  
• Fixed a bug in the Robotic tech trees where Bytanium Battle Armour didn't link to one of the techs it was supposed to.
  
• Fixed one of the premade frigate ship designs having Asteroid Miners attached instead of fake cosmetic ones.
  
• Fixed a bug where tooltips would display for elements that are currently invisible. Sprites drawn with an alpha of over 0 were being drawn even if the supplied colour had an alpha of 0, which caused the game to think they were still visible and pop up tooltips on mouseover.
  
• Fixed a crash that could happen if a singleplayer mission limited the tech eras to pre-warp only.
  
• Fixed a bug where clicks could go through the Diplomacy screen and into the Galaxy screen behind it in rare circumstances, allowing you to hit the End Turn button accidentally.
  
• Fixed a strange bug that could allow the diplomacy event queue to persist through load game calls and even new level creation, leading to some strange effects and even crashes. This was extremely rare, and I'd be surprised if anyone encountered this bug in the wild.
  
• Fixed bug where the AI wouldn't evaluate all races until the 2nd turn after creating or loading the game.
  
• Fixed bug causing the game to only attempt to save or load the game once. Now it retries a few times if something goes wrong rather than just crashing immediately.
  
  
  Cheers,
  
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for V0.9.7.0 and V0.9.7.1 (Build ID: 1701603)

This patch activates the first singleplayer mission "The Kazzir Story," which was developed for and discussed in the V0.9.6.9 patch notes. We've also extended the mission tools with the ability to load more custom content and used that in the Kazzir mission to give it a unique feel. We've also added the ability for specific races to have unique technologies (e.g. The Kazzir now have a Broadcast Tower instead of the Entertainment Centre), resolved a number of bugs and crashes, and made a number of other small changes.

• Added the ability for a singleplayer mission to disable the default ship designs so you have to build from the designs it gives you or create your own.
  
• Implemented the ability to load custom ship designs for a singleplayer mission straight from the mission directory.
  
• Implemented the ability to load custom tech trees for missions, including custom starting techs, ancient techs, synergies, and race-specific tech overrides.
  
• Implemented the ability to load custom buildings, infrastructure, ship modules, and ship weapons for missions.
  
• Implemented a new system for defining race-specific technologies that replace certain techs in the tech tree. This is used to replace the Kazzir's Entertainment Centre with a new Broadcast Tower infrastructure.
  
• Implemented the Memory Events system that can remember key choices you make throughout your singleplayer campaign so they can be used in future missions. This is used at the end of the Kazzir mission.
  
• Implemented a special mission-only technology list that can be given out to the player depending on which options they select in the mission conversation dialogues. This allows us to attach special rewards and bonuses to your choices and unlock specific ship techs and designs with certain choices.
  
• Mission completion status is now saved in a file in the user's save directory. Right now we just display a tick next to the Singleplayer Mission button to indicate that the mission has been completed, but this will be used in the Main menu overhaul to provide more info on each mission that has been completed or unlocked.
  
• Implemented the ability to load custom shaders for singleplayer missions for the conversation system. This is used in the Kazzir mission to show the distorted United Colonies signal.
  
• Improved the Conversation system to be able to trigger a victory screen or end the mission at any time. This allows us to do branching storylines with different endings rather than having all story threads meet up at the same ending.
  
• Added the ability to add some extra text to the Conversation screen when displaying your dialogue choices. We use this in the Kazzir mission to let the user know when his choices will be remembered in a future mission.
  
• Added the dialogue text from our writer to The Kazzir Story mission and trimmed it to fit within the screen.
  
• Added a copy of the Renegades ship parts under the Kazzir race files. This will slightly increase the loading times, but solves a wide variety of bugs and needs to be done before we can add the final Kazzir ship parts anyway.
  
• Added the ability to have gold deposits on the homeworld as a racial trait, and used it in the Kazzir mission.
  
• Added the Ship Module ability to generate a flat amount of money per turn. Previously this multiplied for every planet in the system, which was wrong.
  
• Reduced the impact of diplomacy actions on a race's favour, both for positive and negative reactions. Positive reactions reduced from 25% of net score to 10%, and negative reduced from 6% when extremely offended and 2% when offended to 5% and 1% respectively.
  
• Damaged Colony Ship now gives +10 Health and Security so that it can handle the extra 2,000 population it stores without causing difficulty.
  
• When exiting the Shipyard Screen, the game now remembers if you were at a planet or on the galaxy screen and re-opens the last screen you were on.
  
  Bug-fixes:
  
• Fixed a new crash caused by 0.9.7.0 when loading the tutorial. Thanks for sending in those bug reports!
  
• Fixed a crash when loading a game saved during a singleplayer mission. Note that there is still a bug that cancels the mission when you load so you can't pick up where you left off, but we will be solving this in another bugfix.
  
• Fixed the calculation of Research per turn over the whole empire. The old system was spread throughout the code and sometimes resulted in certain bonuses being applied twice or to the wrong things. Now it's all done in one place to minimise errors, and the number you see on the research hex is always correct.
  
• Put in an exception test for when certain ship parts are not located in the game files. Previously, this failed silently and just resulted in an invisible model. Now the game will crash to let me know something's missing. This was the cause of the crashes experienced in 0.9.7.0 and the missing models have been corrected for 0.9.7.1
  
• Fixed a crash on singleplayer missions limited to only the pre-warp era but that have AI races in them. The AI would always attempt to research the Starbase tech, but it's in the Space Exploration tech era. Now the AI will check if that era exists before attempting to research Starbases.
  
• Fixed a bug where planets that generated Gold deposits naturally would always fail to produce the deposits.
  
• Fixed a bug where legendary leaders and temporal rifts could spawn in singleplayer missions when they had been disabled.
  
• Fixed a bug with missions that didn't contain a map seed always using a blank seed. Now they use a random one. This bug didn't actually occur yet as the Kazzir mission uses a fixed seed.
  
• The module, weapon, and building code now checks for duplicates in case two modules etc are accidentally given the same name.
  
• Fixed a bug causing gold deposits to increase in value by +1 BC each turn when harvested. This led to ludicrous amounts of money being generated each turn!
  
• Fixed a bug with the display of mission text when percentages are used. Previously it showed 0.25% when it meant 25%. This bug will not have occurred in anyone's game as the mission was not accessible.
  
• Fixed a crash in the conversation screen caused by clicking too fast to get through the text.
  
• Fixed the proportions of images in the Conversation screen based on screen resolution and aspect ratio. This should now look fine in all resolutions and aspects. A similar bug may exist in other screens such as diplomacy, which we will be testing in a future update.
  
• Excavated ships and ruins now still count as special rare resources.
  
• Fixed dozens of miscellaneous bugs and crashes in the mission data for The Kazzir Story mission.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

[Nyphur]

Patch Notes for Bugfixing patch (V0.9.7.2, Build ID: 1721319)

This patch just fixes a number of bugs and crashes reported by players since the patch went out, and some more that I noticed while bugfixing and decided to quickly fix while I was at it. If this build is stable, we can start work on the next features.

• Fixed a bug causing the population of a planet to always reset to 2,000 when you built a new city.
  
• Fixed a long-standing bug with the System window moving planets offscreen when players played in resolutions larger than 1920 x 1080. This screen now zooms in and out to compensate for the screen resolution being used.
  
• Fixed a display bug with the backgrounds and characters in the Singleplayer Mission Conversation system when playing in resolutions larger than 1920 x 1080.
  
• Fixed a similar display bug on the Diplomacy screen when resolutions larger than 1920 x 1080 were used.
  
• Fixed a number of cosmetic bugs with dropdown menu elements not fading out as you close the menu.
  
• Fixed a bug where playing the singleplayer mission and then creating a new game would make the new game limited to the Pre-Warp era.
  
• Fixed a display bug on popup dialogs with images in the top left. The text gets cut into an upper and lower portion for display, and often the gap between the two portions was wrong.
  
• Fixed a bug throughout the game causing text in boxes to automatically move down one line if the first word is too long to fit into the box. This should fix some text alignment errors in the game.
  
• Fixed a crash on the Victory Screen caused by clicking too quickly through parts of it. We could not replicate this but a player noticed this happened in his game and sent in the report, and we've fixed the most likely candidate for this bug.
  
• Fixed a bug causing the Sauros crashed ships to overlap with other resources near the city on rare occasions. Now they just get a bonus +1 crashed ship near the city rather than two right next to each other.
  
• Fixed a bug in the diplomacy screen where the contents of a diplomatic offer or counter-offer would remain on the screen after you've already accepted it.
  
• Fixed several bugs with infrastructure not going offline when it should (e.g. when there's a power cut or your population is killed and there aren't enough to staff it). Also fixed the reverse happening when you used a weapon like the empulsor bomb, which caused all infrastructure to remain offline indefinitely.
  
• Orbital infrastructure is now given higher priority for staff and power than general infrastructure like ore refineries. This now includes any infrastructure that generates a ship in fleet combat and any starbase, so the starbase shouldn't go offline first in a power cut when there are ore refineries that could take the hit.
  
• Possibly fixed a crash with any disasters that cause the planet environment to change such as solar flares, global warming, and nuclear meltdown.
  
• Fixed a bizarre bug causing fleets to instantly reach their destination after exiting a wormhole when using the auto-wormhole shortcuts.
  
• Fixed a crash when loading a game that has special racial tech overrides or weapons/modules. e.g. any game with the kazzir in it since the latest update, as they get Broadcast Towers instead of Entertainment Centres.
  
• Fixed a bug causing the Uranium Handling technology to fail to correctly stop the Nuclear Meltdown disaster event.
  
• Fixed a bug where Forge Improvement techs researched for robotic races would spill over into the next game you create.
  
• All existing roads in your empire will now automatically upgrade to Railways when you research the technology. This also happens for Underground Tunnels and Planetary Transporters. Note that the roads system is due for a balance pass to make the road upgrades more appealing, especially toward the end of the game.
  
• Fixed a bug causing the Underground Tunnels technology to actually increase staff requirements by 50 rather than decreasing them.
  
• Fixed a bug causing the Planetary Transporters tech to not give any bonuses. It now gives the same bonuses as Underground Tunnels.
  
• Changed how ship names are drawn on the ship design panel and shipyard screen. They should no longer extend out of the bounds of the box.
  
• All ship metal and money prices above 999 which were being rounded to the nearest thousand and displayed in thousands will now round up to the nearest 100 e.g. 12345 becomes 12.35k. This is to ensure the text always fits within the assigned area.
  
• The Morale / Security / Health readouts now just display a percentage. e.g. it used to display "74 / 100 %" and now simply displays "74%"
  
• Changed the Diplomacy Screen to display a single column of items in the offer and demands sections rather than two very narrow columns. This opens up more space for the full names of technologies, but means that the list becomes truncated with half as many items.
  
• Fixed a mistake in the text for the Scout Speed technology to clarify that it increases scout speed from 3 hexes per turn to 6 rather than from 2 to 3.
  
• Made the mouseover/clickable area around planets in the system window much larger, and scaled it larger for larger resolutions so planets should now be easier to click on regardless of your resolution.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer