Predestination Hotfix V1.4.0.1 released (Load Game Crash fixed)
The V1.4 update went out recently, and a number of you started experiencing an odd crash when loading some games. Thanks to everyone who sent in crash reports, and to one person in particular who figured out that it only happened when he traded with an alien race for a race-speci
The V1.4 update went out recently, and a number of you started experiencing an odd crash when loading some games. Thanks to everyone who sent in crash reports, and to one person in particular who figured out that it only happened when he traded with an alien race for a race-specific technology. We've tracked down this and several other problems with the latest mission and previous missions. Full patch notes below:
Original post - Solved the Load Game crashes a number of you experienced. Your old save games should function normally again, so you can return to them.
- Fixed a serious bug with the latest Starforged mission that could cause the Starbase not to unlock, blocking mission progress. This happened if you picked a certain option in the preceding conversation, so not everyone will have been affected by it.
- Reduced the size of the starbase models in the UI to make the buttons look better in different aspect ratios.
- Fixed a bug with the Starforged story mission where the Efficiency Bonus Objectives could sometimes start ticked and show -1 turns remaining.
- Fixed a number of mission objective dropdowns where the text was longer than the box allowed.
- Fixed several bugs where completing two mission objectives on the same turn might not advance the mission immediately.
- Fixed one of the bonus objectives in the Starforged mission being mandatory
- The Starforged mission now clarifies that you need to research Support Centre and other technologies when another part of the mission is to use them.
- Fixed a bug with the Kazzir mission that caused one of the mission stages not to activate. This could cause the second stage of the mission to complete with one objective still to go.
Hey everyone!
I posted this update a few weeks ago with the V1.3 patch but it didn't seem to go live, so I'm re-issuing it. Apologies for the inconvenience to anyone left wondering about what was in the update.
The V1.2 update has been in people’s hands for a while now and we’ve deployed 7 follow-up patches with bug fixes and small changes since then. We’ve also just released V1.3 and want to get everyone caught up with the latest developments.
These updates contained the final 3D ship part models for all races, huge optimisations in the map generation and End Turn code, two new story missions (with two more coming this month), Ancient Ruins improvements, AI improvements, some Diplomacy changes, and a series of small features and bug fixes.
The biggest feature in V1.2 was the release of all the 3D ship parts for all races. The Sauros have gold and sand coloured components with ornate wings, the Starforged have huge utilitarian blocks with pipes and grills, and the Kazzir have brightly coloured racers with floating cameras and completely unnecessary wings and spoilers. We’ve also added a default Dreadnought ship design for each race, and unique new models for the Revenant ships. Check out the screenshots below for more:
The V1.2 launch update included a series of major optimisations to speed up the game. We added a Planet cache system with hundreds of pre-generated planets of all types and sizes, drastically speeding up planet generation times in exchange for the game taking up 2gb more hard drive space. This completely eliminated the delay when opening a planet for the first time, and cut down Space Exploration and Space Colonisation era map generation times by over 70%.
We also extended this to add a Homeworld Cache for each race, with a collection of pre-generated homeworlds for each race. This reduces sandbox game generation times by up to 90% depending on settings as the most resource-intensive part of generating a new map is colonising the AI homeworlds. It used to do that completely from scratch every time even though the outcome is always about the same, and now it just uses one of 100 pre-generated planets and makes small changes.
A series of AI optimisations reduced AI processing time down from 200-500ms per turn to 0-10ms, which in turn allowed us to run the AI code on every race each turn to make them smarter. Previously the AI took turns executing some of their more complex tasks, and this could delay their response to a threat. Multithreading the planet End Turn code also yielded 25-50% performance increases, but we have disabled this feature temporarily as it prompted a number of unusual edge case crashes.
Story Mission: The Z’loq Emerge: “Having conquered the oceans of its homeworld, the Z’loq empire is now facing overpopulation in the Coral Spire. The legendary Z’loq Chieftain Grizn’q has demanded that additional spires be built and the planet’s oceans be exploited to their fullest potential. As the population grows, the Z’loq now look for new territories to explore … or to conquer.” This story mission is complete and released.
Story Mission: The Colonies Unite: “The colonies of Earth have united under a single banner and begun an era of space exploration and colonisation. Mysterious ancient ruins found on Earth have given hints of powerful technology scattered throughout the galaxy, and the new United Colonies Technocracy aims to find them all.” This story mission is complete and released.
Upcoming Story Mission: Renegade Republic: “The United Colonies of Earth have plundered ancient ruins throughout the star cluster and unwittingly awoken the ancient Revenant threat. As word of the United Colonies’ part in the disaster spreads, support for a new Renegade political faction is growing and the colonies are fracturing.” This story mission is complete and releasing in the next few days.
Upcoming Story Mission: We Are Starforged: “Abandoned on an icy world, a United Colonies troop transport filled with Robotic AI soldiers has become the seed of new race: The Starforged. Trapped on the planet, these robots have adapted themselves to run on fossil fuels and are now emerging into sentience.” This story mission has taken a bit longer than usual to test but will be releasing as soon as possible.
We improved the ancient ruin excavations system. Ruins on the homeworld now always give you a piece of ancient infrastructure when excavated, and ancient ruins or crashed ships further from homeworlds get more powerful technologies. We’ve added some more powerful pieces of ancient infrastructure such as the Ancient Robotic Lab, Ancient Robotic Factory, and Ancient Robotic Farm.
Crashed Ships can now yield Ancient Ionising Beam (beam weapon), Ancient Ionic Missile (missile weapon), or Ancient Ion Cannon (projectile cannon) techs. They can also give Ancient Alloy Design (+10% armour HP), Ancient Shield Design (+25% shield regen), or Ancient Thruster Design (+1 combat speed). More powerful crashed ships can give +25% beam, projectile, missile, or drone damage.
In V1.30 we also fixed a major bug causing ancient ruins and crashed ships to be deleted when colonising the planet in some circumstances, and made them more likely to spawn on uninhabitable planets (Barren, Molten, and Toxic).
When you reach the First Contact tech era and haven’t met another race yet, you used to get a popup saying you received a transmission from deep space, but nothing actually happened. Now you will automatically make contact with the closest alien race when the transmission is received. When the Galactic Council is formed by any race, all races who haven’t made diplomatic contact with each other will also automatically meet each other.
This helps maintain the diplomatic pacing throughout the game, especially in large maps where you might not meet everyone quickly enough. We’ve also sped up the council voting animations based on feedback and the vote now takes place on the planet of the person who proposed the vote as that made more sense.
We made some big improvements to the AI in order to make them create better empires. The AI will now colonise non-habitable planets using biospheres and can set up trade routes between planets to supply them with food, which in turn allows you to passively harm their empire by sending ships to blockade the trade route.
The AI also now explores temporal rifts for bonuses, and it can now rush production on ships for money just like the player when it comes under threat. The value the AI places on money in diplomacy will now depend on how much money you have, and money is now traded in increments of 100 as the previous increment of 10 was insignificant and could still trigger the “gift” response from AI.
Portable switch: Adding a portable.txt file to the Content folder will enable a new portable mode where the ini file and save game files are relocated to within the game folder rather than in your AppData folders. This would be useful if you wanted to run the game off a pen drive and keep your saves with the drive so you can bring them to any PC. If you disable the portable switch, the game will automatically try to copy your local save games into your appdata the next time you launch the game.
Technology Tree changes: We realised that the pacing was off for players who wanted to conquer alien worlds more than colonise heavily, so we moved the Troop Pod technology to the start of the Space Colonisation tech era. This let us expand the First Contact tech era with a series of spying technologies.
Left Handed Mouse: We added left-handed mouse support to the game, which works automatically depending on your system settings. Before this version, left handed mouse users would have broken radial menus and some buttons wouldn’t click properly.
Tax Changes: The default tax rates are now automatically set to 30% Citizen Tax and 30% Industrial Tax when you start a new game.
Ship Shaders: Each race now has its own ship shader and shader variables, which are loaded in from moddable files. They allow us to add some animated effects etc to the ships, for example the blue parts on the United Colonies ships now pulse with light and the red crystals on Sauros ships now glow with a cloudy burnt orange light.
Star/Fleet Selector: When clicking on a Star or a Fleet on the Galaxy Screen, the game now opens whichever is physically closest to your mouse pointer on the screen. This should help you sellect fleets that are near stars more easily and stop the UI from getting stuck.
Text Updates: We’ve added the credits screen and dedication, final crew names for all races, star names, and nebula names.
The number of bugfixes we made in V1.2, V.13 and all the intervening patches is too long to list, but a few headline fixes include:
(left to right) Craig, Brendan, Steven and Tina at the NI Game Awards 2018
(Brain and Nerd in its new location in the Pixel Mill accelerator)
If you've any questions, comments, or words of encouragement to send our way, please reach out either here or by email to 
Predestination V1.10 has now gone live on Steam! This is the first major gameplay iteration since we officially entered beta and it revamps a large number of gameplay systems, so this is going to be a massive dev update article. The 3D ship designer has been improved with the promised Simple Editor Mode, and shield, armour, and engine modules have been rebalanced across all ship classes. We’ve also implemented ship refitting, ship crew bonuses, and the ability to rush ship production by spending BC.
The Star Claims system has been completely revamped into a much more useful version and a new galaxy map option will let you see claimed star systems. Asteroid Belts can now be found in star systems across the game, and the economy gameplay has been completely rebalanced to give players plenty of options for generating wealth to spend on ships. All races have now been rebalanced, each one has been given two unique technologies that tie into its play style, each now has a useful special trait, and new AI Behaviours will modify how each AI plays.
The user interface has been pretty high priority for this update, with the Fleet Combat user interface being completely redesigned and the City Stat and Planet Stat tabs on the Planet Screen being graphically overhauled. New right click Radial menus on the Galaxy and Fleet Combat parts of the game now let you quickly toggle various visual options, and new scrollbar and smooth highlight systems have improved the UI all across the game. The few remaining building models are now in-game, new building base graphics add some visual polish to cities, and several buildings have been rebalanced.
Read on for a full breakdown of everything in this enormous update, screenshots of new or changed gameplay, and details of other changes and major bugs fixed as part of the update.
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We made a major iteration and balance pass on all races in this update to meet a specific set of design goals. We made sure that each race has a preferred economic option and is designed for a specific play style, and that each race has a significant enough bonus to both the galaxy-level gameplay and the fleet combat gameplay. Each race now has at least one special trait that influences its play style and two unique technologies that integrate well with its play style, and we’ve added several new AI behaviour mutators to make each race AI behave a little differently.
Full details of the race update are 
Minor Feature: Scrollbar System: One of the most common bugs we get reported is that parts of the UI sometimes don’t allow you to scroll down far enough to access something, or that they sometimes let you scroll down way past the actual content in the window. We have also had some inconsistent behaviour from scroll bars across the game, some allowing click and drag and others not. We took the time to overhaul the scrollbars across most of the game by creating a Scrollbar system that can be applied to any in-game window. The new scrollbar automatically resizes to fit the content drawn in the window, and should eliminate those pesky scroll bar bugs across the game for good. Please continue to report any bugs of this nature if they do happen again, as they will be much easier to fix now with a single centralised system.
Minor Feature: Smooth Highlight System: Various buttons and UI elements across the game display a highlight when moused over to let the player know that it’s clickable, but this was inconsistent across the game and the highlight was quite jarring in some cases and made the UI seem unpolished. Some highlights were also hidden by some UI elements, while others weren’t. We’ve overhauled this to create a dedicated Highlight system that provides consistency across the game. The main things you’ll notice are that mouseovers and highlights are brighter and more obvious, and that they now smoothly fade in and out as you move the mouse over an item. We think this adds some much-needed polish to many parts of the user interface.
Minor Feature: Music System Improvement: We noticed that the Ship Designer and Fleet Combat music were broken by a previous update and weren’t playing, and also that some bugs could cause the game to play two pieces of music at the same time under some circumstances. We took some time to improve the Music system to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and now the correct music plays when in the Shipyard and Fleet Combat screens.
Minor Feature: Training Facility: The Training Facility used to be a large building that was limited to one per planet, which was out of line with the rest of the game. Now that the Market buildings have become standard one-per-city Service buildings, we’ve done the same to the Training Facility. We’ve removed its bonus to ground combat and reduced its ship XP per turn bonus from 2% to 1% in order to compensate for the fact that you can now put one in every city. This means you could build a ship training star system with multiple training facilities across several planets, and the bonuses will all stack.
Minor Feature: New Building Bases: The old city buildings were placed on top of these odd hex shaped flat planes that didn’t look very good. We’ve replaced them with a new more solid base that looks better and has groove cut into its edges with a road for transporting civilians around inside the city. This was a minor feature that didn’t take a significant amount of extra time, and it adds to the polish of the game.
Minor Feature: Final Building Models: We’ve added the final textured models for a few remaining buildings that were missing from the game. These include the Tier 3 Factory, Fossil Fuel Plant, Research Lab (Tier 2), Research Lab (Tier 3), and The Forge.
It’s been some time since the last major dev update article, so this is going to be a big one as we have a lot to catch everyone up on! First I’d like to say thanks to all the people who offered words of support recently when I mentioned on Steam that my dad had passed away. We’ve been working hard on the game since then and the big news is of course that we hit a major milestone with the release of V1.0, which marked the point at which Predestination officially left alpha and entered the beta release stage.
All of the gameplay is complete in V1.0, and we began a series of iterations and overhauls touching on almost every part of the game using your feedback. We’ve already deployed several hotfixes and our first gameplay iteration on the Resource system, and have started a whole series of other iterations across the game that should make it a lot more fun and cohesive. The upcoming V1.1 major iteration update will contain a total economy balance overhaul, new economic options, a sweeping rebalance of race bonuses, an overhaul to the Star Claims diplomacy gameplay, random event improvements, asteroid mining, planet gameplay improvements, a ship design overhaul, major AI improvements, and more.
In this dev update, we’ll briefly break down the improvements made in the V1.01 to v1.03 hotfixes and delve into the details of major iterative improvements we’re working on or considering for each area of the game.
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Most of the work since the V1.0 release has been fixing bugs and crashes as reports come in, but we’ve also made some general improvements based on feedback:
Resource Spawning: In our first significant iteration, we tackled a number of issues with resources and how they spawn on planets. On rare occasions, resources such as Coal, ancient ruins, or rare Coffee Beans could spawn completely surrounded by ore deposits, making them completely inaccessible. We revamped the placement code to group resources that can be harvested by the same structures together, and generate a border around dissimilar deposits so that they don’t overlap and become inaccessible. It’s possible to find Coffee Beans next to Fertile Soil deposits, for example, but not next to Ore. Resources are also now spread out more evenly across a planet and are more strictly limited to certain environments (fertile soil on Terran environment hexes etc).
Farming Improvements: We made a few changes to level the playing field in farming gameplay for different race archetypes. We added a new Cactus Plot resource that generates food in Desert environments and can only be harvested by the new Cactus Farm, a specialised Reptilian replacement for the standard Farm. The humanoid Farm has been renamed to AutoFarm and can harvest Fertile Soil and Land Animals but not Cactus or Fish. Humanoids can now research the Fishery structure to farm for fish on Ocean planets with very little Terran environment land. And Aquatic races can finally harvest Coffee Beans and grow food on ice or desert worlds with a new Algae Farm infrastructure, giving them a way to colonise those planets before terraforming them.
Ocean Planet Generation: We iterated on how planets are generated in the engine, with the specific goal of making sure that Aquatic races can never start with land under their starting city. This persistent bug had been squashed 3 or 4 times previously but always somehow managed to return, so we took the time to investigate exactly how it was happening and added special rules for Ocean planets to prevent it in the future. We’re confident that this bug should now never return.
Dynamic Descriptions: The descriptions on buildings and infrastructure can now contain variables and they will update to reflect changes due to new technologies etc. For example, Ore Refineries will now correctly update to state that they generate 3 metal per ore deposit in range when you research Carbonide Drills. This was reported as a bug by a few confused players who expected the tooltip to update, so we considered it an important quality of life improvement.
Starbase Improvement: When you start designing your own starbases, you can quickly find that the metal costs get way out of hand and it can be difficult to build them simply because a planet doesn’t have enough metal storage space. We also wanted updates to custom starbase designs to be automatically rolled out across a player’s empire, which again posed a problem due to the difference in metal cost. We quickly settled on a solution: All starbases now cost only 5,000 metal, and the BC cost of all modules and weapons added to a design have been doubled to compensate. We may revisit these costs when we do the upcoming economy iteration.
Optimisations: After the first round of optimations in V1.0, we released a number of other improvements in further patches. The planet generator’s procedural seed textures are now automatically pre-loaded and kept in memory throughout the game rather than being loaded only when generating a planet, for example. This increased memory usage by about 100mb (eating into some of the V1.0 memory savings), but reduced planet generation times significantly and solved a number of reported crashes.
Quality of Life Improvements: In addition to a dizzying array of bug and crash fixes, we’ve been implementing small quality of life improvements to parts of the game to make the game easier to play. Researched technologies are now unlocked as the first step in the End Turn code, for example, so the effects will apply on the turn that you get them and the user interfaces will all update automatically to reflect that (previously it took 1 turn for some effects to apply). We also fixed the problem with clicking on a star or fleet on the galaxy map when two stars or fleets were very close together, the game now works out which is closest to your mouse pointer and clicks on that one. Build New City buttons are correctly grayed out when you’re at the planetary maximum, and a number of issues with the city blueprint system have been fixed. A full listing of the bugs fixed in these updates can be found in the 
All of the core gameplay that will be in the final release version of Predestination is now in the game, but some of it will need improvements before it’s ready for release. We’ve been collecting your feedback for some time and compiling a list of areas of the game that could use improvements, and this is all being rolled into V1.1, our first major iteration. Work on this update is already well underway, several features have been completed and we plan to deliver them all as one big update as some of them are interdependent. I’d like to break down each aspect of the iteration now, and if you have any thoughts on these changes then we’d love to hear them.
A discussion thread started some time ago on the Steam forums about Predestination’s economy gameplay, and we discussed various changes that could be made to improve it. In addition to doing a balance pass on the economic gameplay, we plan to both improve the different ways of generating money and add new outlets for spending it. BC should be a universal currency that lets you cut corners throughout the game, something that you save up when you can so that it’s there when you need it.
The primary goal of this iteration is to make it very easy to make enough money to support a planet and run an expanding empire while giving advanced players a benefit for figuring out more efficient setups. The secondary objective is to make multiple viable strategies for generating money, which will vary between races and depending on what types of planets you find and races you meet. The plan to achieve this breaks down into the following major changes:
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, so you could pick any ship that’s currently in your build queue and pay BC to immediately complete construction. Not only would this skip lengthy build times but it would also give you a way to build a ship even when there’s already something earlier in the build queue. You could rush-build a colony ship or survey probe to take advantage of a nice find, or combat ships to defend against an impending attack. Rushing ship production won’t be cheap though, as you’re not only paying for the metal but also the extra construction work.
Markets: One of the parts of the economic gameplay that we’ve had a hard time balancing is the Industrial, Agricultural and Energy Market buildings. These sell the excess metal, food, and energy produced by a planet on the open market for BC, but only once the planet’s stores are full. These used to be the best way to generate income as you could turn habitable planets into profitable farm worlds and molten planets into giant geothermal money-factories, but they were a bit too strong so we nerfed them. We plan to rebalance these so that they’re viable again, and provide a new Black Market racial bonus (for the Renegades) that makes them more effective.
Citizen Tax Rebalance: Citizen tax is intended to be the main way that non-robotic races generate the income needed to run their empire. Cities and infrastructure all cost upkeep in BC/turn, and taxing your citizens a reasonable amount should pay for that in practically every case. Right now you can break even at about 50% tax, but that feels too much compared to real life tax systems. We plan to just tweak all of these numbers so that tax is now optimal at 20-30%, that penalties will make 40-50% tax work in the short term but punishing for long term use, and that 60% or more tax rates can generate significant money but will start causing serious problems with escalating civil unrest. New racial bonuses to planetary economy size will also make certain races generate a lot more citizen tax, and the morale penalties from tax will be rebalanced.
Industrial Tax Rebalance: Industrial tax is intended to be a way to temporarily trade off your industrial growth and ship production capabilities for extra income, something that you do occasionally in order to save up for something big like a large ship. This is in a good place right now, but we’ll have to rebalance the numbers after we rebalance citizen tax and markets. Industrial Markets should pay a better rate than 100% industrial tax, for example, as they take up a large building slot.
Trade Routes: Trade routes currently cost 1BC/turn per route, and they are limited in range but not in capacity. We plan to experiment with adding capacity limits or scaling costs to make it more expensive to send huge amounts between planets. The goal should be that trade routes give you a way to make more efficient empires (e.g. have dedicated farming worlds) but to make it cost enough to make it a meaningful choice. We’re also considering having set up times for trade routes to simulate ships travelling with supplies, as right now it happens instantly. This would not only make trade routes more interesting but also make blockades a more destructive tactic. This feature will rely on us make the AI set up its own trade routes so you can disrupt their empires without direct combat.
Biosphere Change: All cities and infrastructure in environments outside your race’s primary environment are automatically enclosed in biospheres, which currently just add 1 or 2 bc per turn to maintenance costs. This was intended to encourage players to colonise their own race’s environment preferentially and be picky about planet selections, but that’s not always in your control as resource placement and planet rolls are pretty random. We plan to try removing these additional maintenance costs and exploring a few more options such as increased staff requirements or energy consumption. This should ensure that all planets are tax positive once they are up and running regardless of what types of planet you’ve found, and so should help you scale your empire up.
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The racial bonuses in Predestination haven’t changed since race stats were first implemented, and we’ve noticed that some of them are unbalanced. The United Colonies’ Creative trait that allows them to research all branches of the tech trees can be super powerful, for example, while the Renegades’ Hardy ability that lets them live on Ice, Desert, and Ocean environments without biospheres is a bit crap. Now that the final gameplay is in place, bonuses such as +10% to food or metal production also feel pretty weak and will need to be buffed.
With this update we are giving each of the races an iteration pass. A full breakdown of each race’s new profile will be released in another article once the details are finalised, but the goal is that each race should feel like it plays differently and has one or more optimum strategies. Each race will have:
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We recently added the Star Claims feature that lets you negotiate with the other races for exclusive ownership of uncolonised star systems. We’ve collected solid feedback on the feature and done a lot of internal testing and have now come up with a plan to improve it. We’re going to flip the Star Claims on their heads. Instead of individually negotiating the same claim with every race you’ve met, you will issue a global claim and races that don’t like you may choose to disrespect it. The design we have right now is as such:
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Random events are a core feature in any 4X game, and in Predestination they take the form of Planetary Disasters, Revenant Attacks, and Temporal Rifts that can be investigated to find anything from free ships to bonus research. We recently changed Revenant Attacks to happen on a turn-based timer to keep tighter control over how often they appear and to use as part of the difficulty system, and now we plan to do the same with other random events. At the same time, we plan to iterate on the planet disasters, add positive planet events, add more random events, and improve temporal rifts:
Temporal Rift Improvements: Temporal rifts take several turns to open and then have an effect, some of which only occur if you investigate the rift (such as getting a free commander) and some of which happen anyway (such as ancient ruins appearing on a planet). We’d like to clean this up, so temporal rifts will only produce something if you investigate them and the other random events will be in a separate system like we did with the Revenant Attacks. We also plan to just improve the rewards from Temporal Rifts so that they always give something useful.
Positive Planet Events: Right now planets can experience disasters, such as acid rain or global warming if you have too many fossil fuel power plants. We plan to augment this system with more positive random events, some of which will be random and others that will act as rewards for good planet management. Examples include unearthing ancient ruins, finding more ore deposits, population booms, and permanent bonuses to morale or other stats. We will be using this as part of the difficulty rating system and the race designs if we decide to add a Lucky race trait.
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The Asteroid Miner module currently just produces 25 metal/turn for a planet in the system, and there are no actual asteroid belts in the game. We plan to add asteroid belts as a type of planet and spawn them into some of the empty spots in generated star systems, and then Asteroid Miners will produce 25 metal/turn for each asteroid belt in the system.
This will make Asteroid Miners useless in systems with no asteroid belts, but extremely useful if you happen to find a system with several asteroid belts. We can also then make the Stellar Converter superweapon destroy a planet into asteroids rather than into a molten planet as currently happens. The Strip Miner module will be changed to produce 50 metal/turn for each uninhabited planet in the system. Mockup below (it won’t actually look like this, but something similar):
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Infrastructure Build Queue: We’ve been investigating the idea of adding an Infrastructure Build Queue the same way we have for city buildings. If you place an infrastructure that you can’t afford the metal cost for, it would be added to the queue and appear as scaffolding while its cost is slowly accumulated. This would also solve the issue where a Tiny planet still needs a minimum of 5,000 metal storage to build a starbase. There are some problems relating to staffing infrastructure and which ones it should build first, but we’ll implement this and do some tests to see if it performs well.
[Complete] Soil Enrichment Iteration: The Soil Enrichment planet service currently lets you place new Fertile Soil deposits on the planet in exchange for some money and energy from the planet’s reserves. We plan to completely overhaul this, replacing it with a new option that lets you spend a large sum of money to boost the planet’s Organic rating. All food deposits on the planet (Fertile Soil, Cactus, and Fish) will be expanded by several hexes so that they become the size that they would have been if the planet had started with that organic rating.
[Complete] Seismic Excavation Iteration: Similar to the Soil Enrichment iteration, we’re changing Seismic Excavation to do the same thing with the planet’s mineral rating. This will probably still be limited to Barren planets, and we might add a small chance that planets excavated in this manner will blow up in a random event, turning it into a Molten planet or Asteroid Field.
[Complete] Oil Drilling Iteration: The Oil Drilling service currently lets you excavate a small area for underground oil deposits, but it feels clunky. We’ll change this instead to something where you can spend a large sum of money to excavate the whole planet at once, generating a number of fossil fuel deposits depending on planet size. This will of course only be possible on habitable planets, and we will be reducing natural oil deposits on several planet types to make this more necessary for robotic races.
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[Complete] Simple Mode Editor: Last time we overhauled the ship designer, we added advanced editor tools for placing items on the ship hull, scaling, rotating etc. In the next update we’ll add a simple mode editor that lets you design a ship quickly by picking a hull size, selecting one of the pre-designed visual designs, and then dragging weapons and modules into a simple list. When creating a ship design, you will now choose between using the Simple Editor or Advanced Editor.
[Complete] Engine/Speed Improvements: Right now it’s not possible to design a very fast ship because all ships are limited to one Augmented Engine, but if we let you to add a large number of them then larger ships with their huge power cores would become faster than small ships. Instead, we’ll allow these to stack but create different sized versions for each ship that each use different amounts of power core and cost different amounts. This allows all ship sizes to have high speed, but balances that speed against losing more weapons on larger ships.
[Complete] Ship Armour Plating Changes: You can currently add individual standalone armour plate modules to your ship that increase hitpoints by a flat amount (e.g. Bytanium Armour Plating). On large ships, you can end up placing dozens of these on your ship. Instead we’ll replace these with a single stacking “Heavy Armour” module that increases your ship’s armour by +25% and with different versions for each class of ship to balance armour across all ship sizes just as we’re doing with Augmented Engines.
[Complete] Shield Emitter Changes: Shield emitters are currently individual modules of varying grades (Electron, Magnetic, etc) that block a certain amount of damage, then absorb the rest to a pool of hitpoints that regenerate 10% each combat round, and stacking multiple emitters adds their hitpoints together. We’ll follow the engine change model with this and create different sized shield emitters for each ship class, which use more power but also give more hitpoints. This essentially just makes larger emitters work the same as groups of them, but lets us tweak shield balance differently for different ship sizes. For example, we can give larger ships slightly more shield HP/MW or different recharge rates if we want to.
Ship Refitting: We plan to add a new Refit option to the build panel in the shipyard that lets you select a ship in the system and then pick a ship design of the same hull size to refit it into. This will immediately cost the money difference between the two ships, salvage all modules and weapons for 50% build cost in metal, and then put the ship into the build queue with the new design. Once it’s in the queue, you can let it build normally or buy it using the new ship purchasing mechanic. All ship crew and captains will be transferred onto the new ship when it’s complete, so you’ll keep their XP and bonuses.
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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 includes but is not limited to: