It's been a while, more than initially planned on account of real life occasionally getting in the way- but my commitment to Solar Nations remains as strong as ever, and I am happy to reveal that Empires of Man has been in the works for a while now so that I have enough to show you all in order to make it worth the wait.
To start, I would like to introduce the first of many changes- and although it's a small one, I'm sure many of you will appreciate it:
Font Size Increase
Clearly the most important of all updates, the font size has been increased! (Along with some GUI modifications to prevent clipping on some monitors)
On to the real meat of 1.2. The economy of Solar Nations is something I always felt was kind of lacking, and so in order to remedy the situation there is a new building system which makes further use of the galaxy map in order to more closely intertwine the economic and military aspects of the game.
You can see here the process of constructing a "building" (planets are buildings now). Once construction finishes, it provides resources according to both it's own production and that of adjacent buildings. Radii like that of the Black Hole in the image provides some bonuses (or downsides) to constructing buildings there, so that is something you will have to plan around.
That Black Hole also has the effect of slowing ships within it's vicinity down a great deal, and could be instrumental in military campaigns for this reason- as you could guard the area surrounding the hole to force your enemy to move through it's snare.
Furthermore, there are some other important QoL features implemented in 1.2, including an outliner and some changes to the internal structure of the game, which gives us the ability to display more proper tooltips for various things, such as techs.
Now you don't have to wonder what the cryptic "unlocks buildings" text says! How kind of me.
Anyway, there will be more later, and I've got more work to do. Next time I will be going over the Factions overhaul and the addition of subject empires.