Hello everyone, I know there hasn't been an update in a little while and today I am going to explain why. I have been working on some cool stuff recently that has been very time consuming but I am glad to say that it is finally nearly ready for the main branch.
0.18 is going to be live on August 5, and along with all of the stuff currently in the Experimental branch there is some new things that have been in closed testing for a few weeks:
Mission Trees
Mission Trees have been added to some situations, and present new challenges for some nations to do during the game. The idea of mission trees is to incentivize and direct the player without forcing them to do a specific course of action, so they are still very open ended, but provide small or large bonuses based on their completion. Some mission trees also have multiple branching paths allowing for more replay value on some countries.
America's mission tree focuses on reunifying the country and building it up
Europe's mission tree allows for final Apotheosis to occur in a new and interesting way
India can now choose between liberating itself from the Castes or embracing them.
New Situations
There are new situations for various countries, including Earth, Mars, and each continental formable. These situations are earned when you form the country in question. The Mechanist Coalescene can also now be obtained by Federalizing Europe in 2025.
Anyone uniting Mars will have access to this mission tree
Any continental formable on Earth will get this mission tree
New Crisis: The Imaginarium
There is a new VR-based crisis alongisde Moloch and the Eugenarchy: the Imaginarium. It is similar to the other crisis factions except that it emphasizes total compliance of all humanity inside of its gameplay framework: Reality 2.0. You can discover this crisis for yourself by researching Neural Network based technology.
Ledger
With the new ledger you can measure your progress against other countries, and filter by strength.
Asteroid Belt
I added a bunch of new cool asteroids to the asteroid belt. Some of them even have moons!
Also, the deposits in the asteroid belt have been moved around so the Stable Orbits are no longer the best part of the belt by far. Instead, the really good deposits are scattered between asteroids and each one usually only has one resource in abundance.
Full Release
I have decided to delay the full release of Solar Nations 2 from August 2026 to January 2027.
The Discord poll was overwhelmingly in favor of a delay, and I agree that this is the correct choice. The game is not where I want it to be for 1.0 yet, and releasing too early would be worse than taking a few more months to improve it.
Early Access will continue as normal. I will use the extra time to fix bugs, improve the new player experience, polish existing systems, improve balance, and add more content.
Thank you for the support and feedback. I think this will lead to a better full release.