Patch notes for V0.8.8.3 (Build ID: 845558)
This patch modifies the tax and economy systems to make it easier to generate money in a way that mirrors your empire's design. All empires now start with 20 BC per turn by default, and can now tax their citizens and industry separately. The Tax window has been expanded and two sliders let you modify the citizen tax rate (as a % of GDP) and the industry tax rate (as % of metal production). The system has been designed so that you can colonise your entire homeworld with zero tax, but by the time you have a few planets you'll need to settle on a money-making strategy. As always, the numbers are subject to balancing.
This patch also contains a new Music Jingle system that lets us made the music to play short jingles. We've added jingles to a few events and to completing research, and to hear them you have to have the music enabled. The patch also fixes a number of stubborn bugs that had been accumulating in the code over the past few months of feature updates.
Note: Old save games will not work with the new version.
Tax System & Economy Iteration:
Morale is now capped at 100%. Bonus morale above this is now wasted instead of giving a bonus to metal production.
Morale has been fully decoupled from metal production.
The Tax Window has had a new Slider added for Tax Industry that diverts a percentage of your metal production empire-wide into producing money. Money produced is 1BC per 10 metal/turn and the slider is a percentage from 0% to 100%.
Each city now has a GDP rating based on the following formula: (Population/1000) * 6 BC/turn. +25% for shipyard, +50% for comemrce station, -x% for security below 100%
Tax from population has been changed to a percentage of each planet's "GDP" from 0% to 100%.
Morale decrease from tax rate is now the percentage of the planet's GDP that is being taxed.
The Tax Office is a one per city building that generates +25% GDP in the city but -5% morale.
Entertainment Centre is a building that generates +5% planetary morale.
A city's GDP is now displayed in its stats window along with how much of that is being taxed.
Every race now starts with +20 BC per turn base finances to work with before tax. This gives plenty of money until you get to multiple planets, at which point you'll need to have figured out a way to make money (taxing population, taxing industry, farming energy markets etc).Other Changes:
Science Station RP bonus reduced from 20 to 12, as it is effected by the research bonus
Increased the cost of Survey Probes by 250 metal and 25 money.
Morale is now capped at 100% on all planets.
The AI will now build scout ships and survey probes if required before building a colony ship
The AI will no longer queue up loads of combat ships. It will now build a maximum of 1 warship at a time.
The Capitol City now starts with 2 research labs (increased from 1), a Tier 1 Food Processor (if available), 2 energy batteries and 8 metal silos.
Homeworlds now start out with a slightly larger area pre-scanned and starting resources spread out a little.
The area around the first colony on the homeworld is now forcibly set to to the owner's native habitat so you can access all the starting resources even if there visually appear to be other environments there.
Robotic race AI now start with the Science Vessel instead of a colony ship as they only colonise 100% scanned planets and this delays them a bit.
Increased the speed of the basic Orbital Scanner module from 50 hexes per turn to 100 hexes per turn.
Nebulae are 1/3 smaller on 2D maps now to accomodate the fact they're always plane-aligned
On small and tiny maps, the game will sometimes be unable to place some strategic resources. Rather than stalling or accidentally overwriting a home system (leading to a crash), the game will now start without that resource if it can't find a viable star to place it at after several attempts.
Changed number of stars per map size (Tiny: 32, Small: 64, Medium: 96, Large: 128, Huge: 156
Tweaked starmap plane size and nebula size based on map size.
AI races that aren't creative now select only one path through the tech tree at random.
When starting a game in the Space Exploration era and you aren't creative, a path through the tech tree is chosen for you at random.
Added a music jingle system that fades the music out temporarily and plays a short musical jingle for various events.
Implemented jingles for some random events, discovery events, and research complete events.Bug fixes:
For full list of bug fixes, see the development tracker thread.
Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer