All posts by jooki

1.13 – Customizable Controls

Serious Bros. proudly present the latest minor update for our building and simulation game, Imagine Earth. From now on, you can enjoy customizable keyboard controls! You can imagine how busy we two are keeping the global climate simulation up to date and adding new features. Nevertheless, we wanted to prioritize this feature due to interested inquiries from players.

We know how important control and precision are in gameplay. Every second counts when you’re building a thriving civilization and want to expand faster than your competitors. With this latest update, you now have the ability to fully customize your keyboard layout to suit your individual playstyle and preferences.

Efficient and intuitive navigation and management of your cities is the key to success. Above all, we look forward to seeing how you, our dedicated and creative player community, will use this feature.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you. Without your support, your feedback, and your passion for Imagine Earth, this update would not have been possible either.

Further Improvements

  • The duration for the production of items through buildings and upgrades has been increased by 25%.
  • Additionally, the influence of additional buildings has been reduced. Previously, the time was halved with 8 buildings, but now it’s only reduced by 25%.
  • Rare resources are now immediately visible again after the blasting of mountains.
  • Merchant Quest on Tuto and Joma is now triggered correctly again, even when a dialogue is still open.
  • Merchant no longer sells Machinery on Tuto in order not to undermine the corresponding quest.
  • We don’t show building menu details while hovering over the CityCenter panel.
  • We made explosions a bit louder.
  • No more warning to be played while a message to the player is active.

In this spirit, we wish you a lot of fun with the new update! Best regards, Jens & Martin.

Blog, Updates

1.14 – Bird Watching

From now on you can watch birds in Imagine Earth. Soon, more species will surely be sighted. And then we also assign them a central role in the ecosystem or global simulation of our planet. I’m still not sure if they are the right size or if it’s a pity that you never get them really close in front of your lens. For example, it was quite a challenge to take this one snapshot for the update.

Editor improvements

In the editor, the land grab button was overlaid by the purge tool, so you couldn’t expand your colony in that mode.
Also, when creating new planets, you can now again predefine the difficulty level a player must master of your planets!
Would be very interested in how accessible you find the editor as such, would it be more exciting for you if you could play multiple planets in a galaxy map or would it be more interesting for you to be able to script complex missions with a story told by voice actors in dialogues?

New building textures

We have created new roof textures for coal-fired power plants, industrial farm and organic farm. All buildings should create a better visual balancing act between post-industrial look and futuristic appearance. At the same time, the new textures of the roofs should visually connect them, so that they also fit with the quarry and the forestry farm. They now look more like you would build these buildings if you landed on a new planet in a capsule and wanted to provide basic supplies for your colony. I personally feel the style is a successful mix of steampunk and post-industrial age, what do you think?

Icons for tree species

The nine tree species of the third vegetation type, which we have affectionately christened Thicket, now have individual icons that make them more recognizable when planted. Thicket tree species grow on wasteland and frost type planets, these worlds offer the most exotic plant life next to mushrooms and terrestrial forests, check them out to see how appropriate they seem to you.

More Features & Fixes

  • Pause and select button icons were still displayed in the build menu, but did not work.
  • Display category and building icons/buttons in build menu with equal spacing at the same height
  • Cars in cities do not jerk anymore
  • Optimized build process makes updates easier

As always, thank you very much if you had the interest to read this far!
Jens & Martin

Blog, Updates

1.11 – Linux Support and Planet B

Welcome to our latest update, with which we deliver nothing less than the long-awaited native Linux version. We hope for a good start on this new platform and serve you some more crisp features with update 1.12, but read for yourself. Summer greetings, Jens & Martin

Native Linux Support

We have good news for all Linux users. After receiving a lot of requests to provide a native Linux version of Imagine Earth, the time has finally come.
We have ported all functionalities and tested the game on Ubuntu and SteamOS – so Imagine Earth can now be played as a native version on the Steam deck.
We appreciate feedback from all of you and hope you will enjoy the game!🚀🌎

New Challenge – Saving Planet B

We have a special challenge for you this week, a new planet to basically explore the idea for a new game mode in Imagine Earth. Would be happy if you feel like thinking with us about how we can make this more interesting.

The basic idea is that the players don’t have to build up a civilization first, but find a relatively heavily built-up planet with cities. So you become directly the rebuilder and improver of the world, which is an exciting challengel. The emissions balance is also already tipping into the negative, so climate change is imminent. So you have to consider with all expansion steps to compensate the additional emissions of the new buildings and additional supply buildings with reforestation and other methods.
In return, you’ll find plenty of infrastructure and technology on the planet that you can take over and optimize through strategic realignment.
As I said, we’re testing this out and seeing that we need to balance planets in this game mode to make it fun and challenging.

New construction ring

An amazingly simple, yet effective change. The build ring just got bigger and now includes all the available build options plus the tools, functions and inventory. We studied other simulation games and their gamepad controls to come to this conclusion. As a result, the building ring is now also much more distinct from the building options and the individual building categories.

Hitech building in technology panel

This move was only logical since we put the Hitech special buildings for terraforming and geoengineering into one category in the build menu, making them so much more available, look in the technology panel for better what a wide variety of build options, Imagine Earth offers.

The Takeover Panel

We have also redesigned this to make the acquisition of competing cities clearer. With the necessary majority of shares in a corporation, you can directly take over individual cities and bring them under your control.

Population free areas on the planet

When we built the above planet B, we wanted to enable the scenario of finding more cities or soon maybe slums on the planet that could be taken over and transformed in an efficiency and environmentally friendly way. To do this, we first had to create the condition that even in areas not controlled by factions, people live in the cities and are supplied by farms and power plants in the surrounding area.

Gamepad – Major changes

  • We have once again intensively rethought and optimized the gamepad controls for Imagine Earth. It should be almost more dynamic to control than with the mouse, give it a try.
    [Digitalpad controls the main UI elements: Tree menu, resources, building list, trader menu.
    [Left shoulder: research, tech, stocks
    [Right shoulder: city navigation
  • Select & Start: Navigation, game menu, journal, statistics
  • Therefore no more additional menüring
  • Significantly more overlays directly in the UI

More optimizations and fixes

  • Dialogs no longer overlay pause screens and other panels that pause the game.
  • Improved Storytelling – First entry in planetary journal reports that no story has yet taken place on untouched planets.
  • Bora Mission – Added direct rebuild target for city centers.
  • Unintended city placement basically disabled.
  • Jump to cities – buildings no longer appear with delay
  • Midras merchant, permanent icon is out of the game

Please vote for us in the Player’s Choice Award

The Green Game Jam has started! Many game studios have launched Green Activations to save the planet’s most important habitats, and so have we. If you click on the image, you will be taken to Imagine Earth’s contest page and you can support our project in this jam.

Updates

1.11 – The Satellite Hub

Greetings space colony managers. The next technological update is ready to optimize your world building workflow. As promised, we are now releasing the new Hi-Tech buildings to shorten your wait for the DLC. As always, we look forward to your feedback and hope you enjoy the latest features and changes! Cheers, Martin & Jens

Relay Station for Orbital Satellites

The satellite is a mobile space unit in a lower orbit, which has the following functions integrated.

Ion Cannon

It can be used to defend against invaders or to blast mountains to expose raw materials.

Espionage

Allows to copy and use the researched building upgrades of other factions. This is achieved by scanning an upgraded building.

Scanner

Scans an area for rare resources that may be contained in rocks.

Watch your brand new satellite launch into space straight from its hub.

Charity Sale Event

We will donate the 10% of the income from the running sale from April 4th to April 11th to WDC to save whales and dolphins. This might remind you of our Nature Update 1.8, in that we brought whales and other sea creatures to our planets as the first animal life forms.

Drones follow the construction queue

Previously, the construction drones liked to take care of the construction site closest to them, and in the process it could also happen that they overlooked some construction orders and left them unfinished.

Gaia Powers are renamed as Functions

We have also renamed the Inventory to Items and the Multi tools are now simply called Tools. This makes a lot of things easier and more understandable.

UI hiding for Trade Panel

To leave you more visual space to think about the trades you are making we hide the surrounding user interface while you’re in this panel.

Hi-Tech Constructs in Buildmenu

In this new category you will find more buildings in the future as well as the gaian constructs which we also wanted to rebrand as high tech buildings with strategic functions. We also adjusted the building descriptions to make them sound less mythical.

Examination of ruins

Now you can also unlock ruins by exploring them. This will allow you to build these special technological buildings as soon as you have enough artifacts.

Fixes

  • Build menu with gamepad
  • Updates to Korean translation since the release version retranslated
  • Icons for all languages fixed
  • Speaker less chopped off in menus
  • Maximum influences from fields not in construct description
  • Point at research in technology panel
  • Only Gaia temple should still give quality of life
  • Xrathul temple have a negative impact on life quality
  • water-building and coast-building kept their production when water is removed from them via terraforming
  • Rare error in Joma and Rounos: DefineField/DefineArea ‘LeenHome’/’PlaceA’ was not yet executed

Open Space – DLC

Check the full update history at the roadmap page on steam > click image.

Updates

1.10 – Forests and Performance

Dear Civilization Manager Guild,
finally we have the update announced for February in the box. Due to the long waiting time, the blog post has become quite a few pages long, stuffed with optimizations of game mechanics and interfaces, plus a performance turbo of up to 100%, which we had to bring forward for the implementation of the game on consoles. That’s why this time there are only a few small goodies that make Imagine Earth more interesting from a gameplay point of view. Please keep in mind that there are still only two of us working on our complex world simulator, but rest assured that we won’t give up until it is complete in our eyes.
There is still a big add-on on the horizon that will be accompanied by some great new features for the main game, so stay tuned.

Fusion Power Plants

Power plants of this class no longer consume lithium constantly. Only a certain amount is now needed to build them. Thus, we have ended the absurd special status of this building. It was the only one ever that required a rare resource in operation. In exchange, we reduced the overall power of this unit a bit and gave it a special bonus when placed next to lithium deposits. Looking forward to see how you think this power plant is used best.

Forests are Back in the Build Menu

For a game that is not least about climate change, we have to note that the function for planting forests and reforestation was surprisingly difficult to find. Although we had built a very convenient control option that automatically plants the best fitting forests, this was unfortunately hidden in the sub menu Tools. Quite occasionally the feedback came “why this function is so strangely difficult to use”. All forests are pretty crucial buildings in the game and we have now combined the forest menu with the automatic forestation tool so that you can automatically see which appropriate forest is placed and what individual values the tree species has.

Upgrade for Thermo-Generator

The thermal generator plays a central role in colonizing and terraforming inhospitable planets. Therefore, this has now received a range upgrade that you can unlock via research.

Sounds and Ambience

We’ve worked through an age-old feature list and added 14 new sounds to the game to make the game world more vibrant and atmospheric, such as when you’re upgrading towers, having incidents, or clicking on a ship and a foghorn sounds. When there are riots in your districts, you will now hear an angry protesting crowd and when the probe comes to pacify the riot, a siren.

Title Screen

We always wanted to show you a beautiful sunrise on the start screen of the game, but this meant that the whole planet was in front of the shadows at first. Now the game starts with a beautiful day and shadows are allowed behind the mountains.

Performance optimization

If any of you were wondering why the latest update took so long, it’s partly because of how labor-intensive the game’s performance optimization has been specifically for the Switch console. It was worth it though – resulting optimization of processes and graphics provides a big performance increase on older systems without dedicated graphics card it can be to 100%. On current systems it feels a lot more smooth now.
This improvement is accompanied by a few new graphic options that allow you to adjust the quality of shadows, lights, clouds, meshes and the planet shader.

Achievements

  • We have decided to significantly lower the requirements for the competitive achievements down to 50, 100 and 200 victory points achieved in competitions and the weekly challenge. As a result, you may simply have already completed certain objectives the next time you restart the game.
  • The “multitalent” achievement is working again.

Research Filters and Bonus

We have included an additional visualization for meta-research. To highlight the overarching benefits of having a fully completed research lane.
With an improved filter in the research area, you can now see even better which researchable upgrades have certain positive effects.

Shop and Trade

  • Merchants that are in the approach are now directly cancelable outside the ring. Especially useful if you didn’t call them at all or just misclicked.
  • Merchants now always bring 20 items instead of just 12 when they come over.
  • To adapt to systems with smaller resolutions, we have made the icons of items in the trade panel more concise and recognizable.
  • Traders now have more storage space to buy your goods.
  • Resource usage info is now on the side outside the panel instead of underneath where they liked to overlay the controls.
  • Merchants now have a spaceship preview graphic that makes it a bit easier to distinguish them.

Crafting Optimization

  • Auto Crafting is now possible with gamepad and you can see by default which items are available for selection.
  • In the Victory Panel we also cleaned up a bit – line breaks when describing the essential victory points are reduced to the minimum.
  • Crafting Panel no longer remembers which build category was previously selected, so you always see all options when you open it.

AI Learnings

Working with AI is a challenge in itself, it’s a lot about balancing and finetuning there. Feel free to let us know how you perceive their behavior and how it could be made more plausible and authentic. We’ve felt for some time that your competitors go broke too quickly and could pay a little more attention to money earning and spending to make for more interesting competitions.

  • Also, the regularity and frankness with which they carelessly squandered their entire share packages seemed to us uneconomically unwise.
  • AI factions have so far been too fixated on capturing large temples, neglecting other goals and duty to do so.
  • In one of the last updates, we introduced whales as living creatures into the ecosystems. The AI considered them threatening and, as it does against pirates or insects, built noisy towers when they swam by.
  • The AI corporations are now exploiting the ruins of temples to get the valuable artifacts.

Serious vs Sci-Fi Mode

  • Sci-Fi Game Mode, which includes all game features, is always default from now on.
  • Whether Serious Mode is enabled, which restricts the game to city building and climate change, is displayed in the top right corner of each game from now on.
  • If you change the difficulty level in the game, you no longer have to reselect the game mode as well.
  • In addition, in the campaign, instead of the serious mode, it will be displayed whether you have activated the additional help dialogs.

Interface improvements

  • Display and alignment factions in game setup has become fancier.
  • When looting temples now you also get a warning if the warehouse is full or not, namely why looting artifacts was sometimes prevented in an unexplained way.
  • On-screen keyboard optimized for PC with gamepad.
  • Optimized tutorial and story on Planet Tuto.
  • Delete mode for game and save states made nicer.
  • Laser and pulse animations optimized.
  • How to store goods was not explained so comprehensibly in the 1st mission and was completely unclear with the gamepad.

World improvements

  • Space Pirates, Natives, Illumati, Xrathul, Midras Burrowers, and Assimilators now have one thing in common. They will talk to you again in endless and competitive games. We’ve written them an extensive set of greetings, some of which respond to diplomatic mood and your actions.
    [In the World Congress, the factions now vote in a jumbled fashion with sound, making it much livelier.
    [Extraterrestrial threats no longer work when the planetary shield is activated. Because then you would just waste asteroids and pirates.
  • We have reduced the basic ground pollution of nuclear power plants.
  • The NPC tribes on Rounos can now be relocated after mission completion.
  • Leen flies away on Rounos and Bora as soon as the planetary shield disappears.
  • On Omicron Persei in the Bonus Galaxy, there were mission objectives that could fail due to other circumstances. These now don’t count towards the overall score, so no one gets annoyed because they have to replay the mission.

Bug Hunt

Glitch of the month

  • In the building list, you clicked through to the planet behind it.
  • The radius of the energy shield of cities was displayed too large.
  • The shield helps against tornado again, basically it reduces the destruction by disasters, sabotages and invaders to 5%.
  • Fixed incorrect voice output when explaining research in the tutorial.
  • After completing Mission or Weekly Challenges, opponents will rave about their successes again.
  • Sometimes mission objectives hung out of the bottom right of the screen.
  • Editor crashed when removing all buildings on a planet.
  • Display of effects on buildings made whole again.
  • Licensing button with gamepad is above the other buttons again.
  • On-screen keyboard display with gamepad in PC version is no longer buggy.

Players of the month

Our very special thanks in this update go to our ultimate players of the month Matts and Phoenix Flag for their enthusiastic and merciless bug hunting, which enabled us to find and weed out the most bizarre detail bugs. Also, feel free to come to our Discord to learn and discuss the latest developments first.

Thanks for your interest & support!
Jens & Martin

Blog

IE is Ready for Steam Deck!

Hi guys. Short time ago, our Steam deck was finally delivered, and we immediately tried out how Imagine Earth runs on it. Somehow, the folks at Steam noticed it right away and promptly tested IE. Except for some text that is displayed a bit too small in the game, it was perfectly playable. One player wrote us that Valve’s powerful handheld even runs our world simulator smoothly in 3K when he connects a monitor in desktop mode. Have fun with the latest changes and enjoy playing. Jens & Martin

Improved readability

We have immediately enlarged the texts. So you can look forward to improved readability on PC as well. Then we have directly resubmitted Imagine Earth for compatibility testing and has just been verified.

Proton compatibility

I’m no expert, but this should mean that the Windows version of Imagine Earth is smoothly playable on Linux systems thanks to Proton. Because this is something that players keep asking for, we’d be very interested in your feedback.

Vital life in the oceans

Along the way, four new species of fish have been discovered swimming around the planets and providing more hustle on it. Next time I think we’ll discover birds, I’m optimistic about that.

Meteor shower defense

Since the Xrathul Palace exists, meteor showers can also be targeted. At the same time, we had to increase the destructive power and then again make sure that defense lasers and pulses can shoot them.

Indiecade Everywhere

By the way, Imagine Earth is also in the Indiecade Sale right now and can be had for a hefty 50% off. Feel free to spread the word 😉

Optimizations & Fixes

  • Button and control layout for Steam Deck integrated
  • Buttons on popups enlarged so that font fits again
  • improved placement of mountains in editor mode
  • Victory Points in the faction panel are now clickable
  • Dialogs to controls no longer play twice
  • Trade menu overlap removed
  • Fixed gamepad menu showing options that are not available

Update 1.9.5

  • Fixed bug that lead to crash in cannon logic

Update 1.9.6

  • Fixed laser cannons not destroying asteroids with one shot (e.g. on Lorian)
  • Improved visibility of tooltip for traded items and resources
Blog, Updates

1.9 – Xrathul World discovered

Greetings colony managers, welcome to our latest Imagine Earth update – it feels great to deliver once again! We have decided to bring you one of the new buildings and a new bonus mission to give you something while our main efforts still go into finalizing the Open Space DLC. Please have a look at the complete roadmap at the end of the post, everything we have already achieved since release and what we still want to create for version 2.0

Xrathul World

A new Planet has been discovered in the Udoxia Galaxy and a brand new mission awaits on Omicron Persei 9. To quote the briefing “Strange building complexes have been spotted here. Apparently they can release powerful forces. This could become even more dangerous for us if they fall into the wrong hands.

Xrathul Palace

This palace was built to worship the Xrathul. The built-in technology can summon their giant locust spaceships and lure them to a specific destination reckless opponents for example. The following forces are available in this giant building.

Xrathul bait – This device spreads Xrathul pheromones and is therefore an irresistible target for Xrathul and lures all ships on the planet. It also doubles the probability of new Xrathul coming to the planet.

Meteor shower – The Illumati developed the technology to tear down some meteors from their orbit around the planet and let them rain down purposefully.

Indoctrination – Indoctrination of the guards in towers and buoys allows you to take control of the building and radius.

Two New Gaming Modes

You can now choose between the following two game modes when starting endless and competition game rounds. This can be changed whenever you start a new game.

Sci-Fi Mode

Experience all the adventures that a future colonization of space could hold in store for us and technology we can only dream of today. Use Gaian force fields or intergalactic space trade and get ready for space pirates and alien invasions.

Serious Mode

Experience a more realistic gameplay that corresponds to the technological level of development on Earth in the 21st century. The focus is on solving the problems of economic growth and resource consumption and coping with the related environmental and climate impacts.

New Animal – Manta Ray

Another fish species has been sighted. Now the manta ray enriches the biodiversity on our planet. Once we have cultivated even more animals on our planets we will make biodiversity an important thing in the environmental climate simulation of the game.

Improvements

  • The Xrathul Palace and the Great Pyramid are now destructible giant buildings
  • Entering the bonus galaxy will now always provide two planets, to give you a choice
  • Meteor shower and Xrathul bait have become more powerful
  • City building is now cancel-able until the capsule lands
  • Supply capsules now come more often and are shown in the bookmark panel
  • Items are now cancel-able until the drone is on site and has activated them
  • You can now get up to 50 new city permits through population growth

Interface Improvements

  • We gave the main character Alia an eye surgery because some people felt she gave them an uncomfortable look
  • Only resource deposits of relevant size are now displayed
  • Gaia constructs: Active conversion is also shown in the waiting bar
  • New speech of Eko at the invitation to the world congress
  • New cursor when closing the ring
  • 8 great interface improvements that are way too hard to describe
  • Country specific subtitles in the main menu
  • Popup renamed: “Mission successful” instead of “Campaign successful”
  • Added a notification for game beginners to try the tutorial first

Fixes

  • Fixed buildings not showing up immediately when jumping between cities
  • Fixed galaxy screen layout for 4:3 resolutions
  • Fixed planet being briefly lit differently on exit
  • Joma: Fixed completion logic of “use power” goal before
  • No longer show Whales in navigation view
  • Fixed sandbox planets not working
  • Don’t show trade options for natives that are not close to your territory
  • Move tool-tips closer to ring
  • Colony value chart limit for quality of life
  • Spell-checking EN
  • Decrease audio range of ocean animals
  • Fixed bookmark buttons not correctly opening tool ring for units
  • Fixed ruins collapsing every time a generated planet is restarted.
  • Fixed navigation icons overlapping message panel




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