What a better way to start the new year than with a new Galactology release!
The big new feature for 3.10 is planetary invasions. Planets are can now be invaded by hostile civs to interrupt your business, or by the player to secure extraction on hostile planets. Watch out for their vengeance!
Here's the development notes, in case you missed them:
*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs
We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB.
(For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.)
After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context:
Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.
Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets
Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too:
This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.
Noise
A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels.
Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values.
Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple.
Interrupted tasks show up like this:
And they also add a negative feeling:
Stock charts
What's a management sim without charts?
Translucent docks on mouse hover
"Finally" :)
Show ships with autopilot stop
To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet:
Manual forced delivery
An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage:
Reputation gains when selling products
Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level).
Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.
Planetary invasions
Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface:
The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses.
The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert:
Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal:
But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it:
Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre:
New antagonist civ variant
Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount:
And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory:
Lactians
The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like:
They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.
Ship skills
Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced:
Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are:
- Surface teleport: the one already in game
- Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!)
- Healing wave: all officers get healed
- Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned
- Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time
- Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned
These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.
QoL fire changes
Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall.
Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner.
Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case.
Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).
Update 3.10.1
- Greatly decrease planet invasion event frequency
- Add per-planet invasion cooldown
- Antagonist civ reveal events must follow the same rules of invasion events
- Adjust internal event cooldown
- Remove "too close to enemy objects" rule, which is nonsensical now
- Fix some text fitting/scaling issues
