For the past 2 months, work has continued across both the surface and the universe aspect of the game. Once more I'll focus on the latter, but I hope to talk soon about the surface (side-view) part which has seen huge progress lately.
Since a few months, the development routine way aimed at polishing, UI improvements, code consolidation, which often comes alongside some rewrite of game mechanism, AI, AI, AI and more AI (yes, writing AIs takes time, especially for economy).
A perfectly functional feature is often redone 4-5 times during its existence, due to code structure consideration, gameplay and often perceived redundance. This is quite normal and a sane way of developing a complex system, and is the primary reason why it takes so long. This is also why, despite my perceived imminence of an alpha release of the game, that I am abstaining from giving any release date yet. I cannot ill-afford any fundamental flaws in the program to be carried to an alpha, and pay the interests of any technical debt in the years following the release.
Therefore, despite my impression that I can announce it now, coming soon will remain the release "date" until contradictory notice.
But enough of my useless talk. Along with polish, some new stuff were carefully added. I'll talk about it briefly. This is a little showcase of what was done, I emphasize the fact that it represents a fraction of the work, as to not discredit the importance of other aspects.
Personal Points
I have replaced "Political Points" (which was messy and intertwined) with "Personal Points" which is a pool passively used to train skills, divert money, increase influence, improve reputation, rally toward your ideology, fight corruption but also perform various one-time actions, such as political actions in the parliament.
It will also be used (not implemented yet) for plot and plot defense. This is essentially the "off-time" daily actions your character will take. He can also do nothing and save these personal points.
Orbital bombardment
It is now possible to bombard planets and asteroids. It is similar to targeting a spaceship (here I select a specific city located on the surface of the planet).
The warheads cause damage to one or more "tiles" on the planet, targeting a city means that the projectile will impact the city's controlled tiles, thus damaging its infrastructure and causing casualties among the population, including any existing native population.
In addition to soot which is raised with high-yield impacts, I have also added radiation (planet-wide or specific to a tile) which affects habitability. The radiation yield is of course specific to the weapon.
Due to the atmospheric simulation terraformation and the new simulation of natural disasters, a bombardment can ruin the planet's biosphere permanently.
Native populations
Natives are now much, much more detailed but also optimized as they no longer take a toll to performances.
They are separated into 6 factions/classes, one could mod additional "classes" into alien species if they wanted.
Each faction has its own set of bonuses and maluses (some are nasty !), production, and political leaning. The dominating faction weights much more than others.
For example, the Urghosts, with their minds alienated to the Urghogh's (lack of) will are the worst neighbors you could have. They are not aggressive but produce next to nothing and are almost impossible to assimilate.
Natives are no longer just a value on the planet as they concentrate in visitable settlements.
Trade is important with natives as they sell at low prices and may buy your excess production.
Improved diplomacy & war
War is finishing in its initial implementation, it tracks spacecraft destroyed, and civilian and military personnel casualties separately as I plan later to simulate revanchism and war crimes. It has a war exhaustion and war goal system.
This includes the diplomatic deal system where peace can be negotiated at any time of the war among the main belligerents.
Relations are now much more dynamic.
Treaties were overhauled and expanded as well, with multiple criteria.
Improved escape pod
It is possible to take an escape pod from a spacecraft, this also replaces the previous uncontrollable escape pod when the spacecraft blows up.
Due to the fact this escape pod is a spaceship by itself, the initial code considered that having your escape pod blown up would spawn ... another escape pod. This matriochka bug was reluctantly corrected.
Colony & organization templates
I consider that the best paradigm in procedural generation is to have "guided" randomness, this is why I have added a moddable template system that actively attempts to populate the galaxy with custom-created cities and organizations given many criteria. Consequently, much content was added, giving some flavor and background to the universe without betraying the sandbox nature of the game. This change came alongside yet another deep work on the historical generation of the universe (the thing that pre-simulate the universe during thousands of years)