Hello everyone and welcome to the Balancing Update!!
We have rebalanced the entire game and even added lots of new production chains.
Also: new User Interface, new additional buildings, high-speed access roads for storehouses and similar, as well as tons of bugfixes!
If you want to keep playing your old save: Lots of industries changed, so you'll have to fix your city. You automatically get a grace period where no one moves out until you're done fixing it. See bottom of this post for more infos and tips!
New User Interface
Let's get this out of the way first: InfraSpace has a new look!
We added so many new buildings that they didn't fit into the old interface, so we had to add subcategories for some buildings. We took the opportunity and overhauled the entire bottom panel:
Don't worry, you can still find the city info numbers on the top right!
New Production Chains
While we were balancing the update, we noticed that many factory chains repeat themselves endlessly. So, it was necessary to create some new production chains and we might have gone a little overboard :D
I'll just show you a couple of the new buildings:
Oil industry:
Stem Cell Laboratory:
Copper Mill:
Sensor Factory:
Uranium Enrichment Facility:
Plastic Manufacturing:
(Industrial) Chemicals:
There is also a new factory for superconductors and heat exchangers which are important parts for late game buildings, and many more.
New Buildings
Besides new production chains, we also added additional buildings for the rest of your city building needs:
The Holo Cinema is an alternative source of entertainment additional to the stadium.
Some new monuments and decoration buildings to celebrate your achievements!
And finally we were also fed up with low car input rates for storehouses and other buildings that require large amounts of resources.
So, for the big storehouse, the spaceship construction facility, the adamantine drill, and the magnetic field generator, we added direct access roads so you can use full-width highways to pump as many resources into those buildings as you like!
With all these new buildings, unfortunately the game size ballooned quickly hitting even 10 GBs at one point! Many developers nowadays are releasing games that just fill up your disk, but we wanted to do a better job. So we put some effort in and through texture compression we got the game down to 4.7GB. Not perfect, but much better!
New Spaceship Bonuses
The spaceship bonuses always seemed a little bit tacked-on, because they didn't provide much of a real world boost to be honest. This changes now!
The new spaceship bonuses change your production recipe so you can produce much more of a specific resource for the same cost! Check it out and let us know if this is op, hehe ;)
Balancing
- Rearranged production chains, added lots of new ones
- Now production chains should work more and organically without repeating themselves so much
- Less neural processors and nanotubes
- Changed production numbers to easily fit with other factories. You can now calculate how many electronics factories you need for your computer factory, for example.
- Some industries are boosted and time is lowered in mid and end game to produce stuff
- Science is now more easily accessible in the beginning
- The game progresses a little faster at the beginning, no down time
- Faster production of concrete and steel
- All parks can now be used to fulfill the park requirement. Different radii
- Public service buildings like parks, entertainment buildings, and schools spawn 3x less traffic
- Increased max zoom out level (popular community request)
- Gondola is now easier to be placed, smaller collision
Tech tree
- Technologies require only one type of science pack instead of multiple
- Easier to unlock stuff early on until yellow science
- Terraformung is locked behind adamantine as it's required to build them
- Upper part of the tech tree is only for decoration technologies
- New buildings integrated naturally into the tech tree
Building Power Ups
- High tech gives now 50 % efficiency boost
- Industrial Robots provides different boost depending on the building
- Now more durable
- Neighboring building efficiency boost now provides 10%
- Energy producers don't receive efficiency boosts
Bug Fixes
- Fixed Building Decal so the foundation doesn't clip into the ground when seen from afar
- Fixed various building animations
- Fixed pipe placement not working above each one antoher
- Fixed issue where the language in the main menu was english even though the settings were set to other languages
- Fixed issues where some parts of buildings were not white in visualization mode
- Fixed multiple localization issues
- Fixed a bug in the immigration rate calculation
- Fixed 2 bugs that could lead to cars disappearing (thanks Bayonette)
- Fixed an issue where grass didn't get removed reliably when placing roads (still one issue left with terraformed grass, on our list!)
- Fixed rails going completely out of whack when being replaced
- Fixed issue where you'd build a road, click on the delete button while building and get free concrete forever
- Fixed issue where schools did not produce traffic
- Fixed issue where public service buildings only required valid routes one way
- Changed rails material to make direction arrows more visible
- Highways have fewer pillars now
- Fixed cars to properly go in the middle of their lane
- Fixed issue where the game would try to autosave in the main menu
- Fixed an issue where the game would freeze during loading a save
- Improved world loading speed (less time on "spawning terraformables)
There is still one rare issue left that crashes the game for a small number of players. We are working hard on it! If you get any crashes or freezes yourself, please report them!
Grace period
This update changes a lot of industries. This messes a little with your old saves. We know how important it is to some players to keep their old cities.
So we implemented a grace period - a duration of time in which you can fix your city for the update without people moving in or out. Once you are done, you can press a button to end the grace period and continue normally.
If that is not enough, you can do 2 more things:
You can use the world settings to "enable cheats" for a while. This way you can fix your city without anything breaking down. You can even unlock buildings temporarily if you are missing some research!
You can always go back to the older version! Open the InfraSpace properties on Steam, go to Betas, and select Beta 1. Your game will stay on the Beta 1 branch until you switch back to "None", which is the current branch.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for all your support. Without your suggestions and feedback, an update of this size would not have been possible. Special thanks to all our playtesters on Discord, who tirelessly try to find issues with the update before we release it publicly.
We hope you like this update, please let us know what you like the most!
If you run into issues, be sure to post about it.
As always,
Happy playing!
Daniel, Andreas, Sepehr, Adriana & Lasse