by Eldarin
Hi everyone!
It’s been a little while since our last dev diary - this one’s also going to be a bit short since we’ve been focusing on stabilizing 4.0 as much as we can.
The 4.0.17 and 18 updates we released yesterday is a pretty massive one with some impactful fixes. I'm pleased with the amount of things we got into it.
Here are the release notes:
4.0.17 and .18 Release Notes
Improvement
The Hive Fallen Empire ships are now available for Biological Ship Empires if you progress down the Cosmogenesis Crisis Path.
Changes to ecumenopoleis, ring-, nanite-, hive-, and machine worlds:
District specialisations now visually swap to the appropriate art and district names for easier differentiation.
Secondary districts now have double the jobs of the primary districts.
Reverted the most recent changes to fallen empire building limitations. We'll be looking at a better solution for a future patch.
4.0.18: Reverted all fallen empire building limitations from 4.0
Further Improved the Behemoth Fury endings
Added the Voidspawn Myocardius relic awarded to whomever manages to take down the Elder Voidspawn
Starbase Capacity tooltip now shows the number of owned systems contributing to Starbase Capacity.
Habitation districts on knight's habitats now swap to the Order's Demesne.
The host now gets a tooltip in Multiplayer on the Start Game button with a list of players that are holding up the game
Balance
Wilderness Empires no longer have to consolidate 2500 biomass on a planet to build a Grand Archive
Secondary districts on hive worlds and machine worlds should now support targeted research specialisations
Wilderness empires now start with a Heartgrove specialisation instead of a Threadway specialisation
The event A Complete Collection will now only take one pop, avoiding depopulating entire planets.
AI empires will be more likely to declare a Cosmogenesis empire a crisis as they develop more Infinity Theses
The Synaptic Lathe will now ask for a refill if it drops below 50 pops instead of letting itself drop all the way to 0.
The Lathe had a "stable state" hack that stopped the purge below 40(00) pops to prevent it from decolonizing before - this has been removed as it should no longer be necessary. Burn those pops if you want science.
The Control Fragment now waits 2 decades before getting upset about your borders. Expand away!
Fallen Empire biological ships now equip the reactors of one size category larger, this also applies to Cosmogenesis biological ships.
Resource Consolidation origin needs to have the ability to make more machine (or nanite) worlds to unlock the full potential of their machine world (this includes the doubled jobs in the above patch note)
Updated weights for techs that unlock rural district specializations
Doubled the resettlement attractiveness of the Trium Atmospheric Deodorizer(tm).
Bugfix
Fixed Wilderness issues
It should no longer implode randomly.
Balanced effects for Innate Design with Wilderness.
Turned Wilderness enforcers into Immunosymbionts to differentiate them from soldier Tamersymbionts.
The Wilderness Subterranean Cache building can now be placed in urban and trade district specializations
Fixed Synaptic Lathe issues
The Synaptic Lathe now correctly purges pops and produces science. (Special thanks to /u/Little_Elia for investigating. We fixed some of it differently than you did, but your post helped in identifying the issues.)
Pops will correctly process in or out of Neural Chip state if they are moved to or from the Lathe. (They will not be visible in the Neural Chip job until the monthly tick passes.)
The Synaptic Lathe purge should once again benefit from things that modify purge speed.
The Synaptic Lathe will now ask for a refill if it drops below 50 pops instead of letting itself drop all the way to 0. (The Lathe had a "stable state" hack that stopped the purge below 40 pops to prevent it from decolonizing before - this has been removed as it should no longer be necessary. Burn those pops if you want science.)
Fixed how Synaptic Lathe is being displayed in the sector view.
Fixed non-slaves being assigned to jobs before slaves.
Fixed recent issues introduced to the Synthetic Fertility origin by removing the invisible purge that was being applied (result in no factions being formed and no leaders being recruitable)
Virtuality Civilians are now also properly deleted if they do exist somehow. Non-Virtual Civilians can still exist for Virtual Empires.
You may no longer scrap 50% of your virtual pops for alloys.
Fixed issues where free traders could start with too many buildings
Fixed issues with fallen empires spawned by the Scion origin having incorrect buildings and districts
The composer of strands should no longer devolve thousands of pops. 400 is plenty.
The Pioneer Politics Agenda now has an appropriate icon.
Enabled the Heartgrove district specialisation for Wilderness empires
Treasure Curators now have an actual building icon as their workplace instead of a deposit icon.
Fixed a rare scenario where Driven Assimilators couldn't assimilate.
Prevent marking some jobs (criminals, civilians, unemployed) as favorite that should never be prioritized.
Space Fauna ship size selector will correctly display ship model preview.
Space Fauna designer will show the progress bar when creating a new design.
Purging a Gestalt Pop Group will no longer instantly kill all of them. Extract resources to your hearts content!
Conquered Starbases will no longer have text appear on the "Return Starbase" button
When checking if ship designs are identical, we now ignore the order of components within a section.
Fixed saving a Deep Space Citadel design creating duplicate designs and instantly changing the design of your DSCs.
Update Districts display if their swapped appearance changes
Processing and Forced Labor Purge should now correctly give resources when purging lithoids or machines
Habitats now get their districts even when not colonized yet
Added tooltips to the Behemoth mutation option icons
Reset Starting System when changing Origins when needed during the Empire Creation
Mechromancy Empires purging organics once again generate cyborg zombies.
Blocked Fallen Empire resource extraction buildings from the 6 government building slots
Blocked the Surface Quarry building on ringworlds and habitats
Nanotech Research buildings now give regular research jobs, but swap engineers to nanotech researchers
Researchers for machine intelligences now use more appropriate icons
Updated the effect tooltips for the Trium Atmospheric Deodorizer(tm) and Cyberdome.
Empires with Genesis Guides civics now start with a food stockpile and some food income.
UI
The "Save As New Design" popup now updates the Save button immediately when you edit the name.
Fixed ship designer not updating the design name when you change it to the currently saved name.
Improve Buildings tooltips modifiers handling
Colony naming will now more often use custom names for the default value (colonizing Mars will propose Mars as the default colony name)
Fixed some planetary modifier icons that were low resolution
Fixed some modifiers not appearing in the empire size tooltip.
Performance
Reduced mil power recalculations done by outliner fleet entry
Reduced habitability recalculations done by pop growth/decline
Reduced amount of times planet view tries to update pop group clothing
Stability
Fixed crash in accepting peace due to deal containing transfer of non existing starbase
Fixed cross OS issue with randomized ethics in pop assembly leading to NUM_POP_GROUPS OOS (this is a big one)
Fixed mismatch in synchronized/unsynchronized nemesis handling in the voidworms AI that might lead to OOS when becoming a crisis.
Six more Out of Sync fixes
Modding
Adds swap_type and swap_type_weight for districts to District Specializations.
District Specializations now belong to sets, and Zone Slots can now include or exclude entire zone sets
Migrated zone slots:zone relationships to zone_sets in place of using inline scripts
Added can_change_category to pop categories.
Changed various effects using pop amount/size to allow 0
Added ship_uses_corvette_reactors and ship_uses_destroyer_reactors scripted triggers
Added planet_is_habitat_equivalent, planet_is_ecu_equivalent, and planet_is_ring_world_equivalent scripted triggers which are used to determine the job numbers for district specialisations instead of checking the planet classes directly.
Updated scripted triggers for districts
Updated scripted triggers for zones
Updated inline scripts for some research district weights
Updated events for zone assignment upon a planet becoming a hive, machine or nanite world
Removed unneeded script for ecus transformations since industrial districts no longer exist
This update has a significant number of major changes, including district swaps for special planets like Ecumenopoleis and Ring Worlds, more fixes to Wilderness, the Synaptic Lathe, slavery, and the most common Out of Sync errors (including the cross-platform OOS that has been plaguing us).
We ended up reverting the changes that were made to Fallen Empire buildings - while we believe that they’re too easily acquired and plentiful, we’re going to take things slower and revisit them sometime in the future. (FE resource extraction buildings are being restricted to appropriate districts though.)
Modders should find the new zone_sets useful. It cleans up a lot of the work we were previously doing with inline scripts.
Instead of individually listing every District Specialization that is allowed or excluded using inline scripts, you can now assign one or more zone_sets to them.
Code:
zone_industrial = {
[...]
zone_sets = {
urban
habitat_urban
nexus
hive
ring_world
}
[...]
}
You can then reference these in the zone_slots:
Code:
slot_city_01 = {
included_zone_sets = {
urban
}
[...]
}
The intent is for this to make the creation of District Specializations a bit less error-prone, and make it easier for multiple mods to add more without interfering as much with each other.
Wilderness Open Beta
We’ve seen a lot of erratic behavior with Wilderness empires, especially when your Biomass totals on a planet get too low, where sometimes jobs would go unworked, and you aren’t always able to influence it in any way.
We’re going to update the beta branch on Steam today to test some experimental quality-of-life changes we’ve made to Wilderness. Some of them are impactful and different enough that we want to get some more eyes on them and get feedback before we consider moving them into the release build.
In the Wilderness Beta, jobs are actually worked automatically, using your primary species for traits. After all, you are the empire. This replaces the massive Workforce bonus that Wilderness pops received, and makes it behave closer to the intended design of the origin. This change intends to make Wilderness generally more robust against bugs and less prone to economic crashes when creating buildings that consume most of their Biomass.
Biomass should still chill “unemployed” like before, but the jobs will use 0 pops instead of 1. This should resolve any of those edge-case issues when many of your jobs wouldn’t be producing.
Bad planet!
As part of this, we’ve enabled the workforce sliders for Wilderness jobs like other Empires have. This should give you more control over your economy, so you can disable certain jobs if you’re running a deficit or otherwise optimize your economy by only working the jobs that you need.
Much better.
We recognize that this makes your Biomass species less important overall. You’ll probably want to optimize them for growth rather than production since they won’t be working the jobs anymore, so we wanted to put this up in an open beta to get your thoughts.
The Open Beta branch will also include the experimental fast save transfer that we’re currently expecting to go live after we can add a toggle to disable it if it’s causing save transfer issues.
Wilderness Open Beta Release Notes
Feature
Experimental changes to Wilderness:
To prevent issues with biomass not being available on planets due to construction, all Wilderness jobs are now automatically worked without requiring biomass. These jobs are worked by your primary species.
Jobs for Wilderness are now also properly represented instead of being worked by a single pop with massive workforce bonuses, you now see exactly how the job is worked, and the sliders are also now usable to customize how much of each job will be worked.
These changes are intended to prevent situations where some jobs would go unworked, make Wilderness less bug-prone, and are intended to give you more control over your economy in deficit situations. Please provide feedback!
The experimental fast save transfer for multiplayer is included in this build.
Bugfix
Fixed ringworlds colonized by gestalt empires having a mysterious city district that shouldn't exist.
Our intention is to run this Wilderness Open Beta for the rest of the summer so we can gather feedback.
What’s Next?
4.0.19 is tentatively scheduled for next week, with more bugfixes and optimizations.
Today I'll be looking at purging, but if there’s one other bug you could demand we fix in it, what would it be?
Since next week is Midsommar week,our next dev diary will be on June 26th. See you then.