Hey, welcome, everybody! Finally another juicy release #60 has been finished and look what a catchy title it has! If you want to read more about the new traveling back in time laws in our “Imagine Universe” you should scroll down to “Planet Time Lines” in the Update Release Post. Eye candy of the month are the first scribbles of the brand new character redesign that has just begun. Apart from that a lot has happened under the hood again and in terms of game system optimizations and balancing. We always count on you when it comes to testing the new features in practical implementation. Try everything and tell us your opinion. We are happy to take up your wishes and ideas, what do you think Imagine Earth is missing most of all? But for now please enjoy Update #60,

Martin & Jens | Serious Bros.

Difficulty Levels

The selection of difficulty levels has been given an epic pop-up panel that clearly breaks down the characteristics of each level and also tells you what the positive effects it has on your high score.

Improved Buildings List

The new list of buildings from last update, still needed some adjustments to make it nail down its universal usability. The menu and the listing of functions, tabs and options are now rearranged and also visualized more stylishly.

Performance Optimizations

This is something that we have just started to consistently work on, until the final release of the game. With the new release we have tried to identify the biggest performance killers related to special units, e.g. like Assimilators or a lot of Xrathul ships.

Planet Time Lines

If you load an old savegame or restart the planet and then save it, all savegames who are lying in the future on that planet’s time line will be revoked as you obviously changed the past. This automatically prevents savegames with parallel time lines for the same planet from being created and cleanly breaks everthing down to one single, unique time line. No parallel universes or messy stuff like that.

If you are wondering now what this complex change is supposed to be good for at all, the following should be said. We wanted to make sure that the fate of a planet would play an important role, and that the player would always be able to return to the current state of the planet in order to develop their civilization or repair the environmental damage. At the same time, we didn’t want to trample on the luxurious freedom that a flexible savegame system provides. Don’t even try to guess how long we discussed to come up with this linear solution.

Progress Info in Campaign Screen

The new Progress completion box in the campaign galaxy map is more stylish and also contains the finished research as an achievable goal. Further exciting challenges will follow. For example, the mastered difficulty levels on the different planets will be counted from the next version on and will contribute to complete the overall score in the campaign.

Info Panel for Empty Fields

Even this feature might seem so trivial that one wonders why it is mentioned here. That’s also why it took us so long to realize that it’s missing. From now on a howered empty field gets an info panel as well as one with buildings or objects on it. Simply because there are so many interesting values that can be displayed to it. For example, raw and fossil material deposits were previously shown with field graphics, but these were never explained in words.

User Interface Optimizations

• Also rotate planet when dragging outside of the planet area
• Consistent UI back navigation
• Reworked pause visualization for icons
• Increased size of quest icons
• Display quest icons of progress icon
• Hide still active goals in quest goal overview

Character Redesign

Something is happening on this design front, I can only say. If you look at the picture above you might recognize the Midras aliens from the game and you have a look at how they might look like in the future. With the help of our new illustrator we are developing an amazingly vivid fresh style, which will be a quantum leap for the immersive look of the game.

Mechanics & Balancing

• Smoothened seismic activity of volcanoes and made it a bit more likely for some to erupt
• Forbid building city centers on asteroid impact fields
• No longer allow interaction with Illuminati camps after they have been destroyed

Coming Soon: Gamepad Support

Besides that we are currently preparing gamepad support for the game to properly support steam big picture and at some point also game consoles.

Greatings, space colony managers! We have a fine small update ready for you. Even though Martin is on parental leave at the moment and our new third man Rico is still in the getting into things, we were able to put some nice gameplay updates together for you. If you are still thinking about picking up Imagine Earth you can get it for 35% off at the Steam Summer Sale right now. As always we’d love to get your feedback on the new stuff and wanna know how the latest features work out.

Light Effects

There are now glaring light effects during spaceship landings, construction campaigns, demolition lasers and impulse cannons. But also repair actions, harvesting operations and for example rioting aliens cause colorfully illuminated buildings and areas in their vicinity. Of course, these are particularly impressive at night. Don’t worry, you can deactivate them in the options if it gets too much for your eyes.

New Storage Management

We have reorganized the organization of the stored resources. There are now clearer displays of how much storage space has been reserved for different things and how full the storage rooms actually are. The new structure of the buttons and bars also makes this much easier to understand.

Campaign Rating

To make the development of your company even more of a challenge, you will now compete in the ranking against 20 major corporations that you might know from well-known science fiction stories.
This is only a prelude to the leaderboards soon to be completely renewed. And to make them more readable. They belong to the oldest menus in the game and should be able to show even more rankings.

Improved Visualization

Improved visualization by coloring the fields for buildings with improved performance through optimal placement

Interface Redesign

Redesigned user interface with new titles a uniform position for the back button and more consitent menus.

Optimized Building Panel

An optimized building panel gives you more overview and control over all your colony buildings and enables you to bulk upgrade, clean and repair the most urgent cases.

Fixes

• Fixed fade to black transparency problems for panels and tooltips
• We fixed a rare bug that prevented you from getting a 2nd landing permission in the first mission.
• New translation for brazilian store texts
• Ingame time speed problem fixed
• Crash in stock panel
• Also many many UI fixes done

We’ve made a few tweaks for you that improve terrain, interface and shadow calculation in our global civilization builder. Read news in full detail on the Steam page of Imagine Earth. There’s also 35% off weekend sale until monday…

HBAO – Ambient Occlusion

First of all, you should notice more beautiful shadows in the game, which give the constructs, forests and objects more depth and also connect them to the environment and connect them better with the terrain. We were really looking forward to this quite classic technique called Ambient Occlusion when we switched from our homemade engine to Unity, but even they still had to integrate it into their brand new Universal Renderline.

Blueshift in the User Interface

We set out to change from the turquoise UI design to a bluer layout and to unify and standardize the colors in it. This of course serves the purpose of making the Global Colony Management Interface visually less distracting and peaceful. Some game menu elements have already been adapted, but the process is still ongoing.

Planetary Terrain Textures

Fixed severe Icon Bug

Thanks to our new, automated bug tracking system, it was quickly noticed that many players experienced a bug related to interacting with the new clickable event icons that we have thrown out in the last major update. Problem solved.

35 % Sale until this Weekend

In case you haven’t noticed we have the biggest discount sale ongoing on Steam until Monday! Time to grab a unique game about economic growth and climate crisis. If you feel like spreading the news, here is how we put it when trying to describe Imagine Earth briefly in public. Thanks for your support.

Imagine Earth puts the player in the position of a global economic player. He has to build up and supply his civilization, produce and trade goods into space and compete against other corporations. In order to preserve the environmental quality of life for his inhabitants and to avoid a global climate crisis, he has to find a balance between growth and sustainability.

Thanks for your support! We hope you enjoy the changes to Imagine Earth and let us know your ideas about them in the forums.

Enjoy playing and stay save, Jens and Martin

Dear space colonists, today we present our latest update for Imagine Earth – Planetary Colonization. Many improvements to the global management system allow you to keep track and control your complex and full-grown colonies and optimize the daily colonizing work on new planets. We would be happy if you test the latest features and give us your feedback and that you come to the forums and put your most desired features on the wishlist. Best regards, Jens and Martin.

P.S: We hope that you and your beloved ones are and stay healthy. Take care!

Great List of Constructs

The new building list represents an almost too modest revolution for total control over your global colonies. Here you get an overview of all buildings in your colony. You can sort them by productivity and condition and have them equipped with upgrades, repaired or cleaned. There is also a list of all resources that are located in your area and can be mined directly. In the city list all districts are listed and can be checked for their quality of life.

Release Date

What can I say, the veterans among you may already enjoy this as a running gag, but we have to postpone the final release of Imagine Earth 1.0 once again. We ask for your patience and understanding, as it is our main effort to make Imagine Earth really good and a smooth experience. The port to the Unity Engine went relatively well and was worth the work in every respect, but still took twice as much time as we had hoped for. As is often the case, the devil is in the details and there are a lot of game features that need to be balanced and interlinked.

Long story short: We postpone the release until September 2020. It is of course also in the true nature of this project that a global build-up game with economic strategy and authentic planet and climate simulation is a bit oversized for two developers. But we never lost motivation or faith in the core idea and the idealism that made this project so special for ourselves as well. The new date gives us a very generous amount of time to do fine tuning and add some final features. Of course you will always be able to play all finished progress immediately in early access and we will keep you informed on everything…

Remediation and Maintenance

You wished that we introduce the possibility of automatic cleaning of dirt and automatic building repair earlier in the game. The boss will always bring some construction kits for the cleaning center and the maintenance station at the end of the first missions. So they will also be better introduced by the story.

New Item: Propaganda Hack

With the new Propaganda Hack Item you can get the colonists of another faction to revolt. Using the hack will start an uprising in the selected district. This will cause a classic loss of tax revenue and spread to other parts of the city.

New Achievements

Need new challenges playing Imagine Earth? No problem, we have added three new achievements for you to earn. You can complete the mission on Udion Torix or win three competitions on Workshop Planets. One achievement can only be unlocked by building your own planet in sandbox mode.

Interact with Status Icons

This feature is a really practical thing. In the event of a fire, riot, incident or damaged building, you will now have a corresponding icon displayed above the building and you can click directly on it to perform the necessary action such as extinguish or repair. We’ve also unified how the icons above the buildings and units are displayed in the game.

Revised Gaia Graphics and Story

We have rewritten a part of the background story of Imagine Earth. Whenever you discover one of the Gaianic terraforming constructs like a temple or the citadel, the story of the Gaians continues to be told – an ancient race who were able to use and change the planetary force fields. As the game progresses, we will learn why they have left behind their advanced terraforming technology on so many newly discovered planets.
Note: In the preview version this is work in progress.

No More Research Limitations

Correctly read, we recently realized that we have long since developed our research system so comprehensively that we only need research budgets as a limiting factor in the campaign missions. From now on you can freely research what you need in freeplay and in competition mode. By building City Centers and Research Districts you can increase the efficiency of your research.

Prioritized Mining

One of those options where you wonder why they have not always been there. When all of your harvesting drones are busy, you can use this simple button to specify that the targeted resource be mined with priority, then a drone is removed from the most worthless resource that is currently being mined.

Jump to Native Twin Camps

As you probably know, the Rounosian Natives always live in twin camps. With this new button you can jump between them.

Switch Upgrades of Towers

Finally, it is also possible to convert the upgrades of towers, frontier buoys and research centers. So depending on the threat situation, energy shields, lasers or pulse cannons can be installed.

Domination Victory

You can now also win a competition when all other companies give up their colonies or are taken over.

Gameplay Improvements

• Allow to use piracy item on all opponent fields (not only warehouse)
• Allow to hack stock shares of competitors that are hold by other competitors
• Increased rocks, rare resources and deco elements for barren biome type
• Send drone to rebuild constructs
• Terraforming can make volcanoes erupt
• Allow spaceships (e.g. uplink) to land on forests
• Territory of other companies taken over by native camps is no longer considered an offensive act

Graphic Improvements

• Improved overall rendering performance (~10% FPS increase)
• Added sub meshes for big mountains that take multiple fields
• Reduced visibility of front clouds
• Custom selector visualization for ocean fields
• Improved visibility of colony borders at day

UI Improvements

• Show animation when new items are bought or received
• Increased size of bookmark and factions panels (top right and bottom right UI elements
• City bookmarks: Add icon for all your cities that have no bookmark
• Tool ring: Show which icon belongs to open sub panels
• Scan item: Show icons on top of possible fields
• Improved layout of dialogs
• Improved visibility of loading indicator

Fixes

• Fixed alignment of assimilators taking over cities
• Fixed niter-pumpkin graphics (depending on size)
• Fixed problems with too many pirates appearing in competition games

Hello lovely space colonizers, a new update had to be done. Some bugs and exotic writing problems in the documents folder of Windows didn’t want to stop appearing for some players while being not reproducible by us. We suspect hyperactive anti-virus programs behind it and the like, but now we’ve rewritten the Imagine Earth method to save your profiles and your savegames to end it once and for all!

No Savegame Left Behind

Imagine Earth will copy your populated worlds and achievements into a new folder the next time you start the game.

Savegames are now stored here: %userprofile%\AppData\Local\ImagineEarth

As always with our updates, all savegames should still work afterwards, a circumstance that is less self-evident than you might think, or so to say that causes extreme activity at our end 😉 Please try if everything still works as usual.

Steam Cloud Support

On that occasion we added steam cloud support for our game. This means savegames and scores will now be synchronized via Steam.

Depending on the amount of savegames you have and your upload speed this may take a while when starting the game the next time.

Unity Engine Beta

Of course also the new Unity Engine beta version of our game has also undergone some optimizations as we want to change to the new Universal Pipeline of the Unity Engine with the new year if all goes well. If you want to have a look at it, check in the last dev post how easy you can unlock it on Steam. Everything is already in its place and running. https://www.imagineearth.info/alpha-56-preview/

Greetings Colony Managers, surely you are wondering what happened to the monthly updates that we used to deliver all the way. The simple reason is that big changes are coming. After 5 years of early access we decided to make an engine switch to Unity before finally releasing the game.

We worked restlessly and after two month the new version is ready to be tested. So to make it short if you’re already supporting Imagine Earth in early access we wanted to give you the opportunity to join the preview of the new version.

Why all the work you might ask. Well we simply wanted to make it easier for us to provide you with great visuals and to have a better out of the box stability and compatibility than the community driven Monogame engine, we used before. It also gives us easy portability to other platforms and consoles. New opportunities await us in terms of graphics and shaders so the quality, look and the atmosphere of the game can finally meet the aspiration and complexity of its content that we have created over all the years.

Please help us getting the new baby tested!

1. Right-click Imagine Earth in your Steam Library.
2. Under “Properties…” click “Betas”
3. Enter the password “unitypreview”.

Important note: You can always leave the beta and return the the existing version of the game. All savegames will be compatible!

The current version comes with automatic crash reporting. This means that we will receive a technical error report that will help us to find and fix the problem.

List of Improvements

• A good example for these beautiful opportunities is the new ocean shader.
• See the noble metal deposits glitter in the sun.
• Experience physics based rendering for all constructs in the world.
• Improved lighting system renders the world more colorful and shining.
• Finally we have an improved solution for the 3D sounds in the world and it comes with new effects for incoming space ships.
  -Finally we have a contemporary implementation for hd video for the intro and cut-scenes.
• A new style for the planetary shield generated by the great pyramids.

Expect more exciting stuff to happen in Imagine Earth – Planetary Colonization soon as the Unity universal render pipeline is still in development we keep the game up to date of course. After all this engineering work we can’t wait to get back into game design and put some well thought-out ideas into practice. Please stay tuned for what comes next.

The title of this update blog post successfully names Update #53s uber feature. Workshop enables you to share the planets and challenges you created in the terraforming mode. While creating a planet their, you can now define Opponents, Rules and Events and they will be saved for the players of your challenge. You can then upload them to steam directly from the game. Read here how easy it is actually is. The best world creations might even make it into the game itself…

This is just the beginning. We will implement more abilities to script missions, create other factions, modding speakers and landing ships soon. What we already have is a workshop forum thread, leave your ideas on what you wanna create and mod right there.

New Quest Vizualization

All the goals in campaign missions are now grouped into quests of around 5-8 goals and their completion results in winning a central mission goals. That improves story telling and makes it much easier to recall in which context you are doing a certain goal.

New Game Options

Freeplay / Competition now offer to start a “Custom Game” which are totally self configured by you. “Workshop Games” have rules, elements and opponents predefined by the creaters of the challenge that you loaded from steam workshop. “Terraform Game” Means you start a challenge which you created in Terraforming maybe to test it before uploading to Steam Workshop.

New Languages

Lately brazilian language was added by DuH!! Thanks so much for that contribution.
Chinese translation updated to latest version.

New Epic Title Theme

New Music for Imagine Earth by Zevik Perry, thanks man!

Item Categories

Crafting menu in the workshop now has 3 item categories now Offensive items / Structures and Utilities.

Added

• Creating a challenge in the sandbox now allows you to define rules, elements and opponents and save them with the planet.
• Level 3 city expansion for City Center is available from start in Free / Competition Mode
• Destruction process is having a nice debris effect.
• Asteroid smoke column tuned, looking much better
• Description for Leens Spacebot
• Old building icons reworked. Progress ring optimized
• Improvements for Magni and Bora Mission
• builder drones are now needed to reconstruct a ruin.

Balanced

• Building orders have priority for builder drones over destruction orders. However repair and destinguish orders have top priority.
• items that are generated by certain buildings have a lower generation rate growth when you get 2x 3x 4x… units of a building.
• We got rid of item limit that was set to 8 because the places in the toolring.
• Research queue has 6 slots and shows them now no more than 6 active researchs are possible from now on.
• “Sell button” in trade menu is reconfigured to “Sell overproduction”
• Explosive device does not damage constructs on neighouring fields anymore.
• Mood Fix: Natives where too depressed, you always had to gift something before you could trade
• Exploding uplink drone balancing: Doesn’t take out all buildings around it anymore
• Warning sounds are now independent from time.

Fixed

• “Warehouses are not running” bug
• Problem with ideon maps sold by natives.
• Wrong speakers for denial dialogs.
• Remediation center does now start one cleaning process after the other instead of twenty at the same time.
• Gold storage increased endless because auto trade with Midras was activated who pay in Gold
• Levelup Bug: City Center no longer needs a drone to update itself
• Overkill Bug fixed: all connected buildings exploded ;/
• Hangup on Startup when starting Campaign
• 2 Xrathul bugs eleminated

In the first update for Imagine Earth in March you’ll find many optimizations for UI and AI that lay ground for innovative new game play features consider the next update to revolutionize core game play at several odds and ends.

Extended research menu

The research menu has a new optional viewing mode where all details are presented directly on screen instead of as tool-tips. For now the compact view still stays the default view, so you have a perfect overview for all your research processes.

We also optimized the filters in the research menu. You can highlight research options according to what their primary effect is. That makes it easy to adjust your research strategy to suit your specific needs.

Upgrades in build menu

The building descriptions in the build menu now also contain all upgrades of the building and their potential pros and cons.

Upgrades that have already been researched can be activated here to be automatically build together with the building.

Visualization of competitors

We made the visualization of competitors more compact and consistent to the rest of the user interface. Instant intuitive visibility for the ranking, diplomatic status and victory points. More over you see which incidents or catastrophes are impacting their colonies and also the resulting share price drops.

Competition rating UI reworked

We reworked the competition ratings table. The x-axis now has the different types of colony points needed to win the competition. We added more captions and explanation texts to clarify all aspects.

Faction messages in tool ring

When accessing a city center other factions are now talking to you directly – we are working on making this communication as personal as possible…

Factions have individual agendas

Factions do now have individual agendas that add character and individual tactics to the 8 different corporations you can play in competition and freeplay mode.

• Cooperative: Cooperative diplomatic sentiment.
• Aggressive: Aggressive diplomatic sentiment. Sabotages other colonies.
• Sustainable: Preserves the environment and prefers buildings with low emissions.
• Exploitative: Tries to get as many fossil and rare resources as possible. Does not care about environmental impacts.
• Expansive: Trying to own as much territory as possible. Does not like it when someone takes over territory.
• Trader: Focuses on trade. Likes to sell resources and items.
• Gaian: Tries to get as many temples as possible and generate Gaia.
• Oceanist: Prefers to build the colony on the coast and the sea.
• Scientist: Researches as many technologies as possible.

Water foam at the coast line

A decent foam line at the coast makes it easier to identify the exact sea level and whether fields are land, coast or ocean. This is an addition to the waves the are rolling in and breaking.

Building type visualization

There are several options in the build menu that help to visualize certain states and objects in the world. For example it can colorize buildings by their type to provide a better overview.

Additional changes & fixes

• You can now sell incomplete packages of rare resource to free up space in the warehouses.
• New city center sounds!
• Workshop menu got a face lift.
• Build menu buttons reworked.
• All campaign planets have decoration and environment objects like mountains suitable to their planet theme now
• Big Illuminati Pyramids can’t burn anymore
• Unified calculation of field and construct values to improve AI decisions and simulation speed
• If you loose competition you won’t get spammed by the professor commenting on that anymore .
• Build menu: you can now have a certain category activated that stays open also when you hover another for short operations. So you can keep your eye on your inventory or the forces you have ready.
• AI in sandbox is no longer saved and transferred into created planets.
• Bora: AI allies may no longer build their second colony next to the great pyramids to prevent the mission plot from getting stuck.
• Fixed problem with multi-use of temple powers
• Fixed assimilator drone explosions