Greetings fellow carbon creature, may your roots always be well watered.
This week's "Stargate Update" patch contains the features needed to make the Phidi and Ashdar Imperials playable (mercenaries and stargates), and so both those factions are now unlocked in the faction selection screen. We also have the usual smattering of tweaks and fixes. As always, we thank you for your Early Access support and for your helpful feedback and suggestions. Keep them coming!
New Playable Faction: Phidi Combine
The Phidi are an aquatic race of enthusiastic traders. Their watery homeworld of Tendao is poor in industrial metals, but rich in Opil crystals, a unique resource that everyone simply must have. Opil enhances the Currency and Influence yields of Phidi markets, amplifying their additional income from Phidi population and trade routes.
Mercenary Exchange
Though an economic powerhouse, the Phidi have few military hulls, as they have never been comfortable with the idea of armed conflict. However, they are not above hiring aliens to do their fighting for them, and so the Phidi can use their business savvy within any foreign Trade Charter they have signed to contact the local underground and hire mercenary forces. The Phidi faction must have sufficient reputation and influence to recruit mercenary companies, and must pay each turn to maintain the ships they hire -- but this is no problem for expert riders on the Great Tide of Free Enterprise.
New Playable Faction: Ashdar Imperials
The Imperials are a group of Ashdar that are still living on their ancient homeworld of Ashdar Prime. It is a graveyard of a planet, arid and mostly lifeless, but below the surface is a warren of ancient city infrastructure, providing living and working space and concealing ancient artifacts that boost the scientific output of laboratories. Ashdar Prime is inhabited by both of the Ashdar sub-species: the wealthy Haduir artistocracy, and the harder-working Teros.
Stargates
One of the most prominent features of Ashdar Prime is the gigantic ancient stargate that hangs in orbit. For centuries it lay dormant, but now it has reawakened along with the warp lanes, and the Ashdar have used the arcane knowledge hidden within the crypts of the homeworld to unlock its secrets.
An ancient stargate acts as a one-way portal to any star system within a fleet's effective range -- it could send vessels farther, but they would be unable to return. In addition to accelerating the pace of exploration, the stargate allows the Ashdar to keep most of their fleets at the capital, and rush them instantly to any trouble spot.
Patch Notes for 7 December 2016 (ver. 18533)
Changes and Additions
- Phidi Combine and Ashdar Imperials are now playable factions.
- The Phidi Mercenary Exchange allows the Phidi faction to hire mercenaries from any of the major races with whom they have established a Trade Charter.
- Excess wrench production from prior projects will now carry over to the planet's next project, and a planet can complete more than one project per turn if it has sufficient production capacity.
- The number of available domestic trade routes has been reduced.
- Colony ships and Colony bases now both remove a colonist from the world producing them when they complete.
- Phidi and Orthin will no longer be able to colonize Steppes worlds without hostile-environment technology.
- Gremak are now able to colonize Arid, Desert, and Steppes worlds without hostile-environment technology.
- Gremak now have slightly higher pop caps on Arid worlds, Phidi and Orthin slightly lower.
- The yields from using enslaved population for Forced Labor or Experiments now scale with technologies that upgrade Factories and Labs, respectively.
- The 'Marauder Raiders' ground unit is now unlocked by the 'Marauder Raiders' tech rather than 'Marauder Weapons.'
Bug Fixes
- Entering a save game name with a leading or trailing space should no longer cause an error.
- Repackaged the sound effect assets to reduce the game's system memory footprint.
- Fixed sound effect configurations of several mid-late game beam weapons.
(Click here to view the complete development changelogs.)
Goodbye once and future ally, human.