Patch 412 is available now on the beta branch. Don’t know how to access beta? Read this.
Patch Notes
This week the dev team has been focused on the stellar assets (planets in this case) and the foundation of population growth and development. We are working on information updates for the Terran home page with more details on the topic world, types, resource and improvement.
Getting to know stellar assets.
The first step in securing your first world is to find an available ‘asset’, for the Sector K72 patch have a look at the J40 system. Next you need to ‘scan’ the asset, this process will identify the world and its general make up including any special traits it may have such as unique flora or fauna, primitive inhabitants and so on. Finally you will ‘claim’ the asset, this process will deploy a command tower station in orbit and enables you to manage the assets development.
Over the next few patches the development team will be focused on balancing population growth and resource consumption rates. The nature of assets has been adjusted to ignore improvement capacity and the populations are not calculating cultural factors e.g. its free build mode. This will change as growth patterns are settled. The final form will see each planet type present a given capacity for improvement further modified by the planets size. Non-planet assets are similarly effected though by different factors. Cultural influence will be introduce along with political mechanics as we near the end of Sector K72’s beta cycle.
Technical
We shuffled around a number of the internal variables between the main profile save file and meta data save file to improve flexibility and decrease disk IO. The change should notably improve save and load times as well as resolve several serialization related bugs.
Additional work refining the rendering of text was done in this weeks patch; this will be an on-going item.
NAN errors; several conditions were found where in SIM Vectors (culture) and other such structures would deserialize to NAN causing subsequent math operations to fail. These have been corrected and safety checks put in place to recover existing data in the event an element is effected by the problem.
Changes have been made to the underlying data model for assets and improvements introducing new functionality and simplifying the resources structure. These changes will invalidate previous saves but offer a cleaner solution than attempting to maintain backward compatibility. Of course post release we will not make deliberate changes that invalidate save files however as this is beta cleaner is preferable to backward compatibility.
Game
Time Control; updated the colouring and layout of the time control UI (upper right corner of Dashboard), the new pattern should be more intuitive.
Time Control; enabled the control and adjusted the min and max step count e.g. how slow and how fast time can be made to progress while in the Dashboard.
Footer Controls; Updated the ‘footer’ of the Dashboard to correct several layout issues caused by the length of strings changing, these would not have been apparent in the previous build as the time control was disabled. The controls have also been rearranged to a more intuitive order.
System View; Enabled Scan and Claim functionality. At current these functions only test to see if the player is an organization leader, the do not currently have any associated resource cost.
Adjusted the natural base of the following world types.
Note that ‘natural base’ refers to the raw values of the world relative to its size before modifiers e.g. x5 indicates a base value of (5*size) before traits, improvements, organization stats and population conditions are accounted for.
- Terrestrial: x5 to residential space x1 to common matter x0.25 to uncommon matter x0.0125 to rare matter x5 to commodity production x5 to leisure value x5 to storage capacity
- Dust: x2 to residential space x1 to common matter x0.5 to uncommon matter x0.0175 to rare matter x15 to storage capacity
- Rocky: x3 to residential space x1.5 to common matter x0.125 to uncommon matter x0.0025 to rare matter x20 to storage capacity
- Ocean: x4 to residential space x0.5 to common matter x0.35 to uncommon matter x0.02 to rare matter x5 to commodity production x2 to leisure value x1 to storage capacity
- Ice: x1 to residential space x0.75 to common matter x0.3 to uncommon matter x0.015 to rare matter x10 to storage capacity
Expanded the rollup of asset data to include estimates on population growth and storage contribution for assets, systems, sectors and organizations. These changes are most apparent when simulating vary large galaxies (lots of populated planets)
Expanded organizations such that production automation can be improved via enhancements and other conditions and unlockables. By default, a minimal automation rate of 0.00025 will be applied and capped at 1.0. Automation is an organization wide ability to produce goods and materials without a population. Production calculations have been adjusted to account for this new variable value.
Organization wide storage limits have been adjusted along with base values for asset improvements to decrease the initial growth time of new empires. Balancing of initial growth curve will be of attention over the coming patches.
7 Asset Improvements have been added giving player a full set of basic improvements with 8 upgrades per. The Improvement UI controls have also been re-worked to support both ‘tech rank’ and ‘funding amount’ greatly improving players control over an asset development. Note that more work is being done in this area and the UI is not quite complete.
Quite a few bugs have been sorted in the patch, check the Trello Roadmap for full details on these and as always if you have any questions just let us know in the Steam Community forums or via Heathen’s support portal.