This is a major update, next is the description of the most important features introduced with it:
1. Energy
Finally, energy is fully implemented. It brings full control on management and opens new features like redirecting energy to boost your preferred platforms.
Are your processing plants in the colony struggling with not enough materials?: boost your raw extraction platforms to work faster or reduce the energy for your processing plants until you get a proper stack, etc.
2. Colonists
2.1- Promotion: Colonists, once reached level 10, won't auto-promote to a higher rank, instead you will have to do it yourself with a cost in influence docs (diplomacy).
2.2- Skills: Vital Reserves are becoming more efficient training and evaluating the colonists that will become available later for the colonies. After this patch, picking a char of a profile will ensure he/she has the proper skills and in more according level to their rank.
2.3- Progression: Colonists will improve their skills according to the tasks they do. These skills depend on the profession you assigned to the char, and, you can see it in their sheet.
The numbers in green are the active skills to calculate the workpoints, the number in orange is the skill used to calculate how much xp the colonist will earn (a char with a higher intelligence will learn faster).
2.4- Numbers:Awakening colonists will be now more expensive, on the other hand, the amount of workers required per lane have been dropped substantially.
Colonists new defrost price:
- Junior from 250 to: 500
- Senior from 500 to: 2,500
- Master from 1,000 to: 5,000
- Super Engineer from 2,500 to: 10,000
2.5- Directors: Finally, becoming more relevant for the buildings they are in.
- A worker will add points to the blueprint he/she is linked every time his/her production is finished and the blueprint will stack these points until getting the required work points to produce.
- The work speed for a colonist depends on his/her morale.
- The amount of points a colonist adds to the blueprint depends on his/her profession involved skills, and, from now on, there is a new "third" skill summing up, which is the director's leadership.
How does the activity system works?:
Imagine 2 persons, A and B, bringing boxes from point 1 to 2.
The fast they move the boxes depend on their morale and the amount of boxes each one carry depend on their strength. 2 persons with the same morale will move at the same speed, but, if person A is twice stronger than B, person A will carry 2 boxes and B only 1 box.
Our system works the same. Colonist morale tell us how fast they progress in the blueprint, and, once it’s finished, the skills will tell us how many “boxes” (work points) are added to the blueprint.
3. Organization Chart
Nodes will show now more information, and, a new "manual" mode is available. This mode allows you to share the director leadership bonus point manually among your blueprints.
4. GUI
4.1- Construction panel: Templates will indicate now also its energy consumption per cycle.
- The sum of all the buildings’ energy consumption, on a platform, will tell us its energy consumption.
- The sum of all platforms energy consumption will tell us the colony total consumption.
4.2- Help panel (F1): Help windows have been updated according to the last patch.
Redesigned the main window to show more clear that you can drag it.
4.3- Char sheet: Char sheet has been redesigned.
Promote char button has been added.
4.4- Log: There is a new button in the management bar, on top of the Log panel, to display the health panel, but it is still in-progress (disabled).
5. Key bindings
5.1- Ctrl+Click:We have set the Ctrl+Click combination to go anywhere in the world. Do you see any word in brackets in the log? Ctrl+click to center the screen on it.
E.g.: In the log, click on a char in brackets to open its sheet, or Ctrl+click on it to go to the building he/she works. Click on a production in brackets to open its Org Chart (its related blueprint will be remarked), or Ctrl+click on it to go to the building. In a char sheet, Ctrl+click on the org chart button or residential to go to the building that char works or lives respectively.
5.2- Management bar shortcuts: Use numbers to open/close all the management bars in the same order as they appear in the management bar: 1. Market, 2: Quests, 3...
- Some extra key shortcuts:
- I key: Opens/Closes the Inventory.
- C key: Opens/Closes the Construction window.
- M key: Opens/Closes the Market window.
- O key: Opens/Closes the Organization Chart window (only if you have selected a building).
5.3- Building Search window:
- Click on a building to open its Organization Chart.
- Ctrl+click on a building in the search window table to find it in the scenario.
6. Productions:
6.1- Generator components new production values:The materials needed to craft generator components has been modified to a more easy combination. Basically you will need x4 items of a quality to craft a new one of a higher quality + some extra component. *Core qualities require x8.
6.2- New diplomacy items: Use the corporation buildings to produce influence documents of their color or transform them into Vital Reserve and the rest of corps influence docs.
*Until the diplomacy is implemented (very soon) there is only one source to obtain influence docs: through a special production in the corporation buildings.
6.3- Farming
The production times and costs have been changed to a more realistic values.
To extract or recover seeds, it will require Green Investigation docs.
7. Minor bugs and fixes
- Help windows updated to the last changes.
- Wrong resolution for DPP >96 screens resolved.
- Cabbage seeds was missing in the Botany Lab.
- WASD keys were blocking game hotkeys for opening inventory, market, food and other menus. Now you can access any game shortcut at the same time than moving camera.
- We uploaded a new dll version for our audio libraries to help on some users issues.
- Morale bonus from entertainment buildings was giving always the max bonus.
8. Performance improvements
- Interface text generation has been optimized to run faster.
- Log message queries have been optimized to not impact FPS on new queries.
- UI responsiveness improved (still more work to do in this area).
As always, thanks for your interest in Project Aura ;)
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Pixel Quality Games
http://www.projectaura.com
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