Hello everyone!
We have just released the Phoenium update, previously known as the February Update.
We have dedicated most of our time the last few weeks on balancing key aspects of the game and changing how certain things work. Many of these changes were suggested by the community so we want to thank everybody for the continued support and feedback.
Some of these include major changes on how colonization works, with new colonies being even weaker than previously and colonization isn't instant anymore. Also key changes were made to the AI, with it being far less aggressive and eager to declare war. There's also some major new additions, including story events, new resources and new mineable asteroids, black holes now serving as portals to previously inaccessible portals, and the addition of the Mining module, mining ships and mining stations.
Important! Because this update changes certain aspects of the game, this update could not be made save game compatible. Thanks for understanding.
Please see the log below for a list of all changes and don't forget to tell us what you think on the forums.
Changelog:
New content
- Added Obsidian resource
- Added Obsidian Deposit
- Blackholes now function as portals to previously inaccessible systems
- Added lots of new technologies
- Added Story events
- Added Mining module
Empire management changes
- Mining is now done exclusively through Mining ships or a ship equipped with a mining module. Once mining starts, the mining ships gives place to a mining station, which can't be moved but can be destroyed
- Players now have maximum funds, but this limit can be increased through technology
- Prosperity is now increased by +1 if player has approval above 50%
- Taxes now generate 50% more income
- Rebalanced tourism to provide more income by default, but Famous governor trait now provides only 3 times more and the Beautiful Landscapes now provides 3 times more.
Colonization
- Colonization is not instant anymore, and colony ships can be destroyed preventing them from colonizing
- Default build and infrastructure speeds are slower by default, making new colonies less useful at first
- Starting homeplanet has Level 1 Industry Infrastructure
AI Improvements
- Decreased overall aggressiveness when it comes to Declaring war
- Having the same political system now counts towards good relations
- Military and Technological power now doesn't count towards relations
- When a AI faction is looking to build a good relationship, relations improves and it's indicated in the tooltip
- Decreased frequency at which they send trade deals to the player
- Decreased focus on expansion and build a more sustainable economy
- Balanced AI when it comes to choosing their research queue more efficiently instead of focusing so much on technologies with lower research time
Other changes
- Titan ships must now be researched before they can be used
- Titan ships can now have 1 extra weapon slot, 1 extra defence slot, base HP of 2000, base max weight of 130 and base cost of 320
- After researching respective technology, stations can now use 6 weapons and 6 defence modules
- Taxes for the Rich policy now generates +10% tax income instead of +5%
- Capital ships now have 900 base HP
- Mineable resources now show the icon of resource it generates as well as what bonuses each one gives
- Got rid of the Deceitful and Deceiving traits and replaced them with the Xenophobes trait
- Got rid of "destroy monster X" events whenever you find them and replaced with other similar events
- Auto explore button now turns grey when autoexplore is not activated
Fixed
- Player receiving alerts from factions he hasn't met yet
- Infrrastructure Development getting stuck after being maxed out
- Monster bullets not being correctly removed
- Invasion explosions not being correctly removed
- Visible city lights in some oceanic planets
- "Decreasing Approval" text in tooltip being in wrong colors
- Black ball artifact in blackholes
- Planets changing type after loading a game
- Selection marker still showing even at a big distances
- White ball hanging around ships
- Government menu crashing when player has more than 8 strategic resources
- Issue in galaxy generation time in which certain systems were completely disconnected from all the others, making them always inaccessible
- Late game events not being triggered after loading a game
- Characters would spawn at startup in the same system and in the same position
- AI player praising and executing other diplomatic actions and the human player receiving the respective notifications even if he doesn't know them.
- Bug in which surveying an anomaly or planet would be done instantly