Happy new year again, this time from China! As Steam has started its Lunar New Year sale “Imagine Earth” is 25% off for the first time in 5 years Early Access. Don’t wait for more until the game is finished ;). We are accompanying this sale with an update release that brings you much more than redesigned game characters and a classic strategy game styled build menu for advanced gameplay…

Please note that we are looking for beta-testers who can check on our new update releases days earlier than other players, please mail us if you happen to be that enthusiastic about getting your fingers early on new updates of Imagine Earth!

Meet the New Crew

The old avatars of the main crew members in the campaign are some years old by now and we always knew we’d have to give these guys a makeup someday. Nothing is a better way of showing how this game has grown up over the years than the evolution of Limas character. It goes all the way back when it was a casual game idea with comic characters. Maybe we should not have opened this old box 😉 but with the final release coming in 2019 this nostalgic flashback came over Jens..

The Brand New Control Menu

A new build menu on the left side of the interface will keep you informed about all your build options. Coolest thing about it is that this menu also shows your inventory and on top the craftable items. It has a category for all your gaia forces and shows if they are fully loaded. You won’t have to visit a workshop anymore to craft your stuff. It comes in addition to the classic build ring, so nothing changes, you just get more options.

World Visualizations

The control menu also offers a set of visualization tools. you can highlight fields that are threatened by rising sea-level caused by global warming. You can highlight rare resources, fertility, ground pollution, construct types and colony areas.

Standalone Diplomacy & Trade Panels

If you open a trade or a crafting panel it will be centered on screen from now on. The background is blurred out and playtime is paused, so you can concentrate on deals and negotiations with factions and traders.

Drone Reconfiguration

We are currently experimenting with how the drones are working. We decided to limit the city centers drones to one per level – so you are starting now with one instead of two. This makes it more important to level your city.

The maintenance station no longer comes with a build drone. Instead it comes with a repair drone that only does repair jobs and will automatically do this in the range of the building. As before it can be upgraded with a fire station.

Same goes for the remediation center. It now has a special remediation drones instead of a build drone

Gaia & UI Balancing

Based on feedback and the experiences we received from Wuik in the steam forums, we had another look at the Gaia balancing. The following changes have been done:

• Doubled Gaia production
• Reduced price of Gaia container
• Display correctly how much Gaia is available in a temple
• In addition display how fast Gaia is created and how this is influenced by the nearby population

Dear Colony Managers, in this update we increase the visual and gameplay diversity of our planets with the themes Jungle, Terran, Swamp, Barren, Volcanic and Frozen. Also we dedicated a lot of our time into making the Tuto and Joma mission a better experience. Read on to find out what else has changed.

Also we are the EGX in Berlin this weekend presenting Imagine Earth in hall 7 at Station Berlin, if you happen to be there come over! In addition we start a week long deal on steam with 20% off beginning on monday…

TL;DR

• • Rocks, Asteroids & Scanner
  • Gaia Forces in Build Ring
  • Drone Priorities
  • Planet Themes
  • Storytelling
  • Translation
  • UI & Graphics
  • Money Balancing

• Balancing & Fixes

Rocks, Asteroids & Scanner

Asteroids now can contain all types of rare resources. They look different and when you decide to throw one of these asteroids against an opponent you might accidentally send him a big present full of ideon or lithium.

Scanners are having an increased scan radius and an increased value in gameplay. You will now have to scan all rocks to find out if there’s any gold, titanium, lithium or ideon hidden in them.
Rare resources are automatically detected when you take over the field into your build radius. The amount of rare resources on all planets has been raised in general.

Gaia Forces in Build Ring

You can now access all the forces you have loaded in temples right from the build ring. Therefor we have thrown the forest ring out of the ring menu because you can only build forests with seed bombs from now on and the different types of forest weren’t relevant enough for gameplay to take up an own slot in the main build menu.

Drone Priorities

Drones no prioritize open tasks. Dealing with fires is most important, followed by repairing highly damaged buildings. After that they will deal with new buildings and other things. They only return to the city center when they need a package to build something.

Planet Themes

We have set up six general presets or themes for planets, so you can choose quickly under which conditions you want to play a competition round or freeplay. Choices are Terran conditions, Frozen World, Swamp, Barren, Jungle or Volcanic World.

In addition there are new mountain models on many of our planets.

Storytelling

We reworked the first three missions, so that you can play more straight through without being interrupted by dialogs and story suddenly popping up. More story elements are now clickable in form of info and mission icons. So you can start cut-scene when you are ready. On the other hand we made them auto started when nothing was happening story-wise for some time so you don’t miss important story elements.
To make the factions more personal we have individual victory messages when others win in competition mode.

Translation

• Steam store front has been translated into Spanish
• Many new Russian translations for buildings, tools and UI

UI & Graphics

• Bookmark panel on the upper right has a special section for dangers now
• New panel to display construct and upgrade details on technology screen
• New character for the Midras Miner
• Visualize fertility influence more clearly
• Districts: blue light when level-up possible
• Increased display size of warning icons
• Reduce snow intensity on streets
• Text colors on menu buttons changed so text stays more readable
• Added out of money message for multi-upgrading
• Progress ring for temple plundering
• New landing animation for Leen’s ship
• Trader Icons darker
• Spaceport launch ramp remodeled

Money Balancing

• When you take over an opponents city by buying up his shares you will no longer have to pay an extra money fee for the takeover as you paid for the shares already.
• City center takeover only costs shares (no more money)
• Rebuilding a city center with a new landing permit is now free of charge because generally you have paid for the landing permit itself or earned it otherwise.
• You will be getting more dividend payments out of shares you hold of other corporations to make the feature more relevant.
• The emission levy costs for air pollution have been reduced as it was so high that it ate up almost all of the companies profit.

Balancing

• New range upgrades for maintenance and remediation buildings
• Relocating fishing ships made cheaper
• Warehouse: Default storage for energy food and goods is smaller. Reduced price for upgrades
• Increase the amount of rare resources on planets
• AI should include pollution in field assessment
• Glass factory and solar park no longer need 45°C to reach max productivity
• Reduced native trade frequency
• Reduced Bironix trade favor to 10%
• Increased number of science level research goals

Fixes

• Activated desertification (!)
• Adjacency bonus for the stone quarry doesn’t work if rocks are in the water
• Food shortage despite reported overproduction
• Remediation does not work on ruin fields
• Negative ghost income on startup
• Radius of lasers and health districts is sometime incorrect
• Black hole on top of small planets (e.g. Tuto)
• Fixed 4:3 screen UI problems
• Research tool-tips were sometimes partly outside of the screen
• Storing mechanic of Lithium not working correct
• Midras and natives repair themselves

Dear Colony Managers, space is getting more frightening by now as a new threat is arising. Read about space pirates, special vendors, unique landing ships for all eight corporations and much more in our latest update release #45. Here’s what we got for you this time:

• Beware the Space Pirates
• New Item: Resource Piracy
• Unique Landing Ships
• Three Specialized Traders
• Resource Trading Partners and Auto-Trade
• Emission Trade and Visualization
• More New Features & Fixes

Beware the Space Pirates

These nasty creatures land a strange kind of unknown flying object right over your warehouse to plunder it with their tractor beam. Simultaneously they start firing their board cannon to vandalize your base.

You can helplessly sit back and relax until they have stolen enough and loose interest. Or, you can choose to pay a ransom or install an energy shield onto a tower to block the guys off from your warehouses. In later missions you might as well develop lasers or pulse canons to give them a warm welcome if they ever return…

New Item: Resource Piracy

These pirates are not only a threat that randomly happens. You can also craft a landing control to send them upon one of your opponents. Sweet addition: You get half of what their ship can steal.

Unique Landing Ships

We are proudly presenting individual colony landing ships for all eight corporations.

After having introduced the individual factions last update now you can tell the difference between them by looking at their landing ship, which is automatically expanded into the main city tower after landing.

Three Specialized Traders

They come around with awesome looking new space ships amazing landing animations ;-). And they are specialized to trade either wares, items and tech, or rare resources.

Resource Trading Partners and Auto-Trade

The resource panel has been split into a money and a resources part. This helps to put the four basic resource classes and their storing and trading issues directly into the middle of your attention.

It now also shows you if there is another colony or trader able and willing to sell a certain resource to you when you need it (e.g for crafting).

You can also activate the automatic purchase and sale of resources. Note that this involves trading with every potential trading partner – regardless of whether the price is fair or not.

Emission Trade and Visualization

The emission levy now always must be payed as soon, as a company on the planet has a negative emission balance. Environmentally friendly corporations get emission trade payouts if there is a company that pays in.
The global emission balance is now visualized with positive values when the world’s climate is OK. It’s represented with negative red numbers when climate balance is going bad. Much more intuitive isn’t it?

 

More New Features

• Now you get written info on all construct upgrades left to the tool ring.
• The field info panel with details on deposits, pollution and other values of a single field is now also visible in navigation mode.
• The probability of occurrence of riots and epidemics was too low. it has been increased by about 40%.
• When using the seed bomb or nitro-skirlide seeds you can now see how well the plants will grow in that area.
• There’s now a countdown for competitors coming down and landing their capsules. This puts you a bit under time pressure to find the best place for the base.
• You can buy landing permits in missions as soon as you got the second city center. Good news in case a city is burning down.
• Temples can now be repaired.
• Trading panel improvements

Fixes

• Rewritten – Hypergate Ideon Objective – the vendor states out more clearly have to find and also sell the ideon crystal to him to open hyperspace gate into Udoxia Galaxy.
• Rebalanced – Higher runtime costs for remediation centers
• Fixed – Temples are no longer charging themselves apparently by surrounding nature or stuff
• Fixed – Rocks had a shimmering on the surface as if they where rare resources
• Fixed – A city center landing is now final – no more abort and vanishing of the landing capsule
• Fixed – Background of colony value
• Changed – Loading screens animations
• Fixed – Many particle emitter problems
• Fixed – Warehouse Upgrades couldn’t be activated in the tech-panel
• Fixed – Cure goal bar looked finished after half of the task
• Fixed – Savegame buttons in sandbox mode or messed up
• Highscore background bar is reworked
• Fixes for Rounos mission: Joe story plot does not wait for clicking the quest icons anymore.
• Tornado fix – still visible in navigation when multiple tornados in one field.
• Midras Extractor Temple has model and animation fixes
• Midras Digger fixed model and particle system. Dust when drilling.
• Spaceport fixes

Thanks for your attention once again! We hope you enjoy playing Imagine Earth and share with us your ideas on development.

Dear Space Colonists, our monthly update of Imagine Earth this time adds a background story frame to the campaign and a new additional vegetation set.

TL;DR

• Mushroom Vegetation
• Epic background story
• Resource Storage
• No More Fake AI on Rounos
• New Flashy Quest Icons
• Other improvements

Mushroom Vegetation

Maybe you where one of those who perceived our planets as a bit too normal and not very alien-like. We had the same feeling for some time and saw chance to try something new in terms of vegetation. The whole set of forests (8 bioms + 1 underwater) is now being replaced on two of the six campaign planets to make their themes more diversified. It also triggered us to do another set of vegetation besides trees and mushrooms. Could be giant ferns or totally alienated, glowing crystal plants. Any ideas?

Epic Background Story

We heard it from time to time and felt the same way. The campaign was lacking a bigger context for the story. We have added this now  in the form of cut scenes told in the campaign screen. This links all the missions to a big picture and a real goal that is followed by you and the other companies.

Resource Storage

A minimum of 10% goods will always be put into storage if you prioritize a certain resource. That keeps you from waiting for a resource package you wanted to store when the production value of the resource is low.

No More Fake AI on Rounos

On the Rounos mission we had a scripted enemy which could finally be replaced by our AI. In addition we have polished the mission on planet Rounos. There were serious balancing issues that are hopefully working out much better now.

New Flashy Quest Icons

You can recognize much easier when there are important events somewhere on the planet. Quest icons have pulsing markers around themselves. In addition these quests are arranged in an own line in the bookmark panel. You can jump to these Events simply by pressing TAB.

 New Features

• New resource warning icons
• Achieved goals will be shown and highlighted in cut scenes
• AI cares about food & goods diversity
• Traders will trade craftable Icons only occasionally
• Fires won’t spread so fast anymore

Fixed Bugs

• Forest had plus on themselves
• pollution effects were to high
• Improved pest and epidemic particle effects
• AI relied too much on oil platforms
• No AI enemies where spawning in competition mode
• Natives mood and goods usage
• Native camp model had reflected surfaces
• Fishery reduced its own productivity
• Game crashes with access denied folders

Dear Space Colonists. We have released our monthly update of Imagine Earth. In the next days we will also update the Demo version to the latest state.

TL;DR

• Atmospheric scattering shader
• Hover cars add some life to cities
• More variety for assimilator battles
• Reworked and extended mission on Bora
• Outro
• Temple sacrifice logic changed
• Loads of detail improvements

Atmospheric Scattering Shader

This release is foremost a beauty and game atmosphere update.

We have implemented a new atmospheric scattering shader that puts every planet into a unique light color situation.

Hover Cars

Hover cars fly through the skyscraper canyons of your cities and show how full districts are. They bring some visual life into the so far empty city districts and the whole colony environment at all

This is only the beginning – we plan to have cars driving to all of the supply buildings as well.

Bora Mission & Assimilator

It got totally reworked to make the end boss more understandable and assailable. The robotic entity is now attackable not only with astroid strikes but also with gaian fire, volcano eruptions from the temple and bombs as well.

The companions are constantly giving you tips how to attack the assimilators.

In addition we put a lot of work into rounding up the storytelling of the mission. Plus there is now a proper outro sequence thanking you for your great efforts to make it this far 😉

Temple Changes

We also had to redesign how temples work. Spells are now available from the beginning as you have to sacrifice anyway to get the construct loaded with gaian energy.

You can now queue sacrifices and load up to four tons of gifts into it that will slowly be turned into gaia one after the other. This makes spells much more accessible and the temples therefor much more use- and powerful.

More Improvements

• Tutorial now points out the hotkeys and control hint panel that you activate by pressing F1
• Build shortcuts are working again: Q,W,E,A,D,Y,X,C will directly take you into the several building categories
• Fixed overlapping button icons in sandbox mode
• Stoniness will no longer be seen in the navigation view options as it is a thing that is changing the landscape only visually and indirectly influences the fertility of a field.
• Corals and seegras will no longer burn.
• You can again save your self-made planets from the sandbox mode.
• No more sounds looping when game is minimized
• Merchant was given more importance by letting him sell landing permits and development licenses exclusively
• Midras: Item and resource availability and food demand have been optimized in their visualization.
• Illuminati now sell gaian containers
• Claiming land costs less next to towers
• Cannons on frontier towers will no longer shoot each other
• Fixed AI behavior in case of climate change
• Smart styled mailing list form: http://eepurl.com/3w7iH
• Mission, info and housing icons reworked
• Fixed company score calculation
• Fishing boats float on the surface of the ocean again
• Editor: special field types can be overwritten again

Links

• Daily Mars – Video Preview

We wrapped up the most important changes of release 33 and 34 in a devlog clip on Youtube again.

TL;DR

• Electronic Employee is now called Assimilator and comes with a floating drone
• Laser und Pulse Cannon can now both be used against asteroids, Xrathul harvesters and Assimilator drones
• Ideon Bomb and Explosive Device can be used in new ways – even against the Assimilator
• Blow up mountains to get more rare resources
• New campaign bonus mission on ice planet Iqunox
• Wake up sleeping volcanoes with ideon bombs
• Added second main objective to Tuto mission
• Electronics Factory

Assimilator Drone

This first point is partly a spoiler. So jump right over it, if you haven’t played the Bora mission yet.

As you know the Bora mission introduces a threat that is kind of an end boss for the campaign. This “Assimilator” (previously “Electronic Employee”) spreads its cables from field to field to reach your City Center in order to assimilate it.

The assimilator now comes with a floating drone monstrosity that increases it’s territory field by field. You can use frontier towers with laser or pulse cannons to defend against it.

Be careful though – the assimilator drone will fight back with a small laser cannon and thus might destroy your defense. And your cannons will only allow you to stop the assimilator from expanding. Meanwhile costing money and your precious attention.

There are several ways to get rid of it. Use asteroid strikes or volcano eruptions. Or expand your territory and apply explosive devices or an ideon bomb.

Laser and Pulse Cannon

The laser and pulse cannon now attack all enemies and dangers that approach you. We have change the values for fire and reload duration and damage and defined how each cannon interacts with the different targets.

E.g. the laser will do triple damage to asteroids and thus destroy it with one shot – just because it is optimized for this purpose.

Towers no longer take fire when being damaged and health is over 25%. You can repair them and they go on shooting.

Ideon Bomb and Explosive Device

We have put some work into improving our blasting items. Both are now dropped by one of the drones starting from the City Center.

The Explosive Device allows the immediate blasting of mountains, rocks, buildings and ruins in your area and on all fields directly adjacent to it – the later one is especially helpful to defend yourself against Assimilator.

The Ideon Bomb has multiple times the effect of an explosive device on an area of four fields. It also disintegrates big mountains and wakes up sleeping volcanoes.

Blasting single field and big mountains will leave the fields with rocks that may contain the rare resources gold and titanium.

Ice Planet Iqunox & Sleeping Volcanoes

We have added the third bonus mission to our campaign.

Since the outbreak of the pan-galactic plaque in this sector of the Udoxia Galaxy the demand for an antidote has skyrocketed.

On planet Iqunox which was known only for its cold and miserable living conditions, giant coral deposits have been discovered.

You will be one of three contractors who are send to extract the coral antidote for the U.S.U.

Sleeping volcanoes are spread all over the planet. You can use Ideon bombs to wake them up and increase the temperate on surrounding fields a few degrees – enough to get rid of the snow and grow food more effectively.

The Iqunox mission also adds the “Emission balance” as a new victory point type: It starts tracking from 20:00 onward. The leader needs to surpass others by at least 40.

Rare Resource Goal on Tuto

Planetary colonization is foremost about making a backup of humanity and populating new worlds. But there is another important goal: Exploiting resources!

To reflect this point we have added a second main objective to the first mission on planet Tuto. It introduces all the recently added gameplay mechanisms for rare resource harvesting, item crafting and blasting mountains.

Electronics Factory

The Electronics Factory replaces the existing Mall. It produces complex electronics and needs trained staff. For that reason it is more efficient next to city parts and research districts. It features “Chemical Filters” and “Entertainment Devices” as upgrades.

The Factory has been renamed to Machine Factory to make it easier distinguishable.

Other

• Fixed a hovering problem of the bookmark panel
• Storage upgrades for warehouse have been removed from the research system
• Removed asteroid explosion graphic bugs on start of freeplay and competition matches
• Show asteroids in bookmark panel (top right of the screen)
• Reduced price for asteroid strikes to 65.000€