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, our monthly update of Imagine Earth this time focuses on improving the visualization of building productivity and quality of life for cities.

TL;DR

• Joma Extended & “Healing” for Temples
• Fusion Reactor
• Fire Station
• Money and Tax Balancing
• New UI for Details on Productivity and Quality of Life
• Other improvements

Joma Extended & “Healing” for Temples

It’s now possible to donate items and resources to other colonies. For now this has only relevance for the missions, but in the near future we will be working on a diplomacy system.

We have extended the Joma mission to make use of this feature with respect to the epidemics and Birons.  This gives you the chance to take a decision at one point that will have influence to a later part of the mission.

The cure spell that is now available in temples neutralizes pathogens that can pose a threat to more complex forms of life on site – in other words, you can use it to heal epidemics.

Fusion Reactor

This new building is introduced in the Rounos mission.

The fusion reactor generates thermonuclear energy of nuclear fusion. Lithium is needed as a raw material, which can be extracted from asteroids on most planets. There is only relatively little radioactive waste and the reaction can be aborted safely at any time.

The “divertors” upgrade improves binding of impurities from the plasma and reduce maintenance and disposal costs. The “reactor extension” upgrade expands the reactor so that additional energy can be produced.

This building most likely will need some additional balancing, since it’s the first time a building consumed rare resources.

Fire Station

The fire station is an upgrade for city districts and the logistics center. It ensures that fires in the vicinity are automatically extinguished by a drone. In addition, the probability of forest and building fires is halved.

Money and Tax Balancing

Currently you always have loads of money in the long term. We are trying to improve the balancing of this a bit. In the first step we have increased the start budget and decreased tax income. At the same time we have increased the tax bonus you receive when your people have a high quality of life.

New UI for Details on Productivity and Quality of Life

Over the course of the last years Imagine Earth has become a quite complex game. A part of this complexity is how productivity is influenced by nearby buildings and local factors like ground fertility.

With this update we are introducing a new info panel that is shown when a building is clicked. It sums up the productivity and lists all the influencing factors and their strength. This will make it a lot easier for you to understand what is going on and how to increase the production output of your colony.

The second part of this is how the quality of life in cities is influenced. A high quality of life will give you a tax bonus and a low quality will decrease your income.

Buildings like the park district, health district and campus district increase the quality of life in surrounding districts. Other factors will decrease it. The new info panel lists the details on this, so you always know what’s going on.

Finally the former building info panel in the bottom left of the UI is replaced with a minimal version that shows the building’s / object’s name for the selected field and its production value / remaining resources.

Other improvements

• You can open the build ring by right-clicking on any field now
• Added explanations for epidemics
• Bookmark panel no longer “clicks through”
• Research and development panels no longer change the planet zoom level
• Visualization for items received during the mission
• Changed influence area visualization for cannons, shield, fire stations and more
• Fixed city car animation problems

Dear Space Colonists, our (almost) monthly update of Imagine Earth this time focuses on a remake of the Joma mission that introduces new buildings, items, threats and a new race – the Birons.

TL;DR

• Birons on Joma
• Trade with other colonies
• Warehouse level 2
• Epidemics, medicine and health district
• Chemical plant
• Meteor shower (new threat)
• Worker drones
• Seed bombs
• New AI features and other improvements

Birons on Joma

The Joma mission was last mission from the old days of Imagine Earth. We decided to rework it and add some new goals and story to it, to make it more interesting. All the new features mentioned below are introduced in the mission.

The Birons are a new race that are introduced on Joma and are the first contact with another colony on a planet in the course of the campaign. They build small colonies and are focused on producing resources and items and trade these things.

Trade with other colonies

Other colonies are now ready to trade overproduced resources, harvested rare resources and items with you. They pay less than the merchant would, but are willing to trade any time.

Warehouse level 2

The warehouse can now be upgraded to level 2, after this has been unlocked in the research system. It doubles the storage for rare resources and adds a second harvester drone to the warehouse.

Epidemics, medicine and health district

Epidemics are a new threat that can occur anytime. The probability is increased by local pollution, high temperatures and buildings like the cattle breeding or chemical plant and mushroom forests.

You can cure the epidemic with the new item “Medicine”. It can either be crafted using chemicals and corals or bought from the trader.

The new health district improves the quality of life of the surrounding districts. In addition, the spread of epidemics is prevented and the probability of an outbreak is halved.

It’s medical lab doubles population growth in surrounding districts and the university hospital increases the radius of the health center in which epidemics are prevented, the quality of life is improved and medical laboratory affects population growth.

Chemical plant

The chemical plant produces all the chemicals needed in society. Production is increased by gas deposits as well as neighboring chemical plants. Inconspicuous, for example, for medicine and fertilizer production.

Fiber-reinforced plastic reduces the maintenance cost and risk of an incident by using fiber-reinforced plastic instead of metal. This avoids corrosion. Laboratory optimizes the production process and reduces quality-related production losses.

Meteor shower (new threat)

Meteor showers are a new force of nature. They come down as a burst of 3 to 6 small meteors that cause about 40% damage to normal buildings.

Single meteors can be shot by laser and pulse cannons or stopped by a city center or frontier tower with shield generator.

Worker drones

All basic maintenance and incident works are now done by worker drones. This includes shipping the construction site for a new building, relocating existing buildings, repairing damaged buildings, extinguishing fires and dropping items like explosive device or seed bomb.

To make sure you always have enough worker drones available, the logistics center comes with an additional drone.

Seed bombs

The seed bomb is a new item that grows the optimal forest on any field. This field can be located within or near your colony. The item can be crafted using nitrokirlide and timber.

New AI features and other improvements

• New outro soundtrack
• Mouse-wheel zoom now also rotates the planet towards a selected field
• Research: Frontier tower level 2
• Fixed quickload/-save (F4 and F5)
• Ocean now starts to rise at 25% global warming (previously at 50%)
• Colorize buildings by their type (navigation menu)
• New animation for constructed buildings
• Improved ideon crystal graphic
• AI: Use cannon and shield to defend against Xrathul harvesters
• AI: Craft items if needed or resources available
• AI: Buy tech license if needed

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€

We present you the greater changes of the April release #32 in a short video on YT. It’s definitely an experiment we wanted to try. Hope you like it:

TL;DR

• The sea farm is a new food producing building.
• Forest, rocks and rare resources are now harvested with drones that are stationed at your warehouses.
• Researched items can now be reset in the campaign screen.
• We have updated the official trailer. Check it out here.
• Midras and natives now trade with gold instead of money.
• Land claiming and tower claim visualizations have been optimized.
• Day & night lighting improved.
• Fixed a lot of small problems and balancing stuff in the Tuto, Magni and Bora missions

Sea Farms

Building of the month is the new construct called sea farm. It can be build on coast fields and sea fields adjacent to land (called “near-shore”). It works as port logistics for offshore fishing boats and the building can also breed shellfish to intensify food production for higher pollution values. The smokehouse upgrades makes its food production more durable, but comes with higher running costs.

Harvest Drones

Little drones that fly around and actually harvest the stuff you ordered to crop or gather. They are stationed on the warehouse and limit the number of crop actions that you can make. But most of all they are pretty good looking and the AI uses them too.

Reset Research

You can now reset your research decisions and strategy in the campaign screen.

New Official Trailer

The Trailer was reworked to show some more actual footage from the game. It has grown old as i had no time to change the video material for nearly two years. Really ;D Check it out here.

New Construction Site

The construction site model is more advanced now. In the next version we want to add individual build and landing animations, also for space ships to make everything a bit more cinematic…

Tower Range Visualization Changed

From now on if you construct, deconstruct or relocate towers you see a red visualization for the land you loose and blue marks on the field you claim. Expensive Upgrades will be relocated as well.

Planet Day & Night Lighting

The Planet was always too dark and contrast less on the night side. With the new moon light night shifts now have become much easier.

Gold Trading

Some NPCs like Natives & Midras will no longer trade for the universal currency of the galaxy. They stick to the gold standard and you can buy gold from merchants or dig it out yourself. These guys will also pay you for certain resources they’re interested in with gold, so you can gather exchange values this way as well.

Special Upgrade Items in the Shop

Laser, Pulse & Shield Upgrades Items can now be bought from traders. This is especially helpful in the Lorian and Magni missions. So if you do not research you can still defend yourself against alien threats and stuff.

Land Claims Repriced

This tool just got more cost intensive as well. It’s price depends on the distance to the outer radius of your city center. This means the price gets higher the farer away you claim land from your city.

Mission Improvements

Excessive bugfixes and roundups for the missions on Tuto, Magni and Bora.

Other stuff

• Bookmark panel shows twisters and Xrathul harvesters
• Several editor fixes
• Improved animation quality for drones
• Fixed game-speed dependent particle generation
• Improved city level up animation
• Reduced forest’s sensitivity to temperature and fertility
• Renamed meteoroid to asteroid to better reflect size relations and impact
• Cursor shows progress ring when tooltips are coming up
• Fixed sandbox menu
• Improved hyperspace gate menu

Welcome to the hyperspace! We are starting to extend the campaign with bonus planets you can access using a hyperspace gate. This gate is being build by Moax the tech trader, who will be able to complete his construction if you find and deliver him enough ideon crystals during the campaign missions.

Udoxia Galaxy

The gate leads into a new galaxy that contains new planets and missions.

Edora

Edora is the first planet in the Udoxia Galaxy. A small planet with giant icebergs at its polar caps. The low valleys of this planet will be flooded immediately by the melt of global warming.

The planet offers a predefined expansion competition against two opposing fractions. This world is also the experimental test ground to establish and improve AI battles in the game. Please give your feed back on how we could improve the interaction with other factions.

Having predefined competitions with a general comparable highscore might be the main concept of the missions in this galaxy. It adds playable content and challenging competition with some additional extra goals to master. This reduces the necessity of story filled scripted missions that need endless balancing.

New alien race: Minas

This short-lived race of typhers and diggers builds giants machines to rummage through entire solar systems searching for rare earths and noble metals. Even though they totally ignore money they are valuable trading partners. They produce rare items and exchange them for raw materials. You will meet these dudes for the first time in a reworked Lorian mission… and they will occur eventually on all following planets.

New terrain texturing algorithm

We have put some additional work into our terrain texturing algorithm to make sure the characteristics of each field are visualized in a clear way. This includes the fertility, temperature and rockiness. In addition fields that might be flooded by rising sea levels have a more sandy or stony look. The transition from one characteristic to another used to be quite blurred. The new shader uses material based alpha blending to enhance this. For example you will see little green spots on terrain, when it becomes more fertile.

Brush sizes

Choose four different brush sizes when drawing height, fertility, temperature, rockiness, forests and bioms.

Editing local temperature is now clamped between +/-20°C

Forest brush

The brandnew “Forest brush” places forests that match the local field types and ground conditions. That’s good, because the plants need certain climate conditions to prosper and grow.

Improved forests

The updated use of transparency for deciduous and acacia forests, mushrooms and palm trees shows a great way to revolutionize the overall look of Imagine Earth’s flora.

Titanite

Deposits of this new rare metalic resource can be found primarily in the dryland biom which are infertile areas with medium temperature. Titanite is so far just costly and exchangable with bombs at the Minas store.

Campaign translation possible

For those in our community who are interested in translating the game. It is finally possible to do translation of the mission scripts as well. Now it is possible to translate every single written word in Imagine Earth. All details are explained in the community translations section of the forums.

New item: Rocket kit

As rockets are now at the end of the research chain. Luckily you can buy rocket building sets from our latest alien race, the Minas.

Construction drones

We have implemented flying construction drones. They lift off and land in a new hangar at the city center tower. It’s an early version but its already fun to see them being busy to set up new constructs. Future implementations might include harvester drones for resources that start and land on warehouses or automated repair drones on the repair units. Currently the city center has one drone per city level.

Other stuff

• Traders leave when spaceport is destroyed
• Terrain height is visualized with height lines
• Fixed “no sound” problem
• Improved “white screen on startup” problem
• Big Illuminati temples are no longer destroyable
• Activating the shield on Bora needs a single completely loaded big Illuminati temple
• Free Play: Renamed threats to events and added the miner, tech trader and merchant
• Improved “earth over” messages
• Meteorite metal is now called crytanite
• Display status timer ring for crashing meteorites

PS: Thanks to all of you who voted us in the indie of the year competition. We made it into the overall top 100 and the top 4 of futuristic sims – next to Space Engineers, Empyrion and RimWorld!

• 9 different biome types to classify different areas on each planet
• Planet texturing based on biomes
• Planet generator based on biomes
• Biome editor in sandbox mode
• New forest type Acacia
• New food producing building Cultivation Unit
• First version of Spanish community translation
• Balancing of forests and buildings

Biomes

This is a fundamental new (and really awesome) gameplay element. Biomes classify the average temperature and fertility of a small planet area. Each comes with an individual type of forest and graphics for the ground, rocks and mountains.

Summed up: It’s much easier to just see how well a certain area on the planet fits the needs of your colony. Here is a short description of all 9 biomes:

• Rainforest: Hot and very fertile area where palm trees grow.
• Savanna: Hot area of medium fertility where acacia grow.
• Desert: Hot and barren area where cacti grow.
• Subtrope: Fertile area where thick bamboo forests grow.
• Temperate zone: Area with moderate fertility and temperatures, in which a lot of deciduous forest grows.
• Drylands: Infertile area in the medium temperature range.
• Mires: Cold but fertile area in which mushroom forest grows.
• Taiga: Cold area of medium fertility with a lot of coniferous forest.
• Mountain: Cold area of high elevation, which is mostly barren. Thinly populated with coniferous forest.

In addition Illuminati temples and camps are placed in the hot biomes rainforest, savanna and desert. Other temples and native camps are used in the moderate temperature areas of the subtrope biome, temperate zone and drylands.

Since this is a completely new game element we still have to figure out a few details. Please let us know what you think about the biomes!

Biome based planet generator

Those biomes are perfect to generate different types of planets.

As shown above the planet generator now allows you to define the biome distribution on the planet.

Each planet themes also come with a predefined configuration. E.g. Bora is a very fertile planet that mainly comes with the fertile biomes Rainforest, Subtrope and Mires, but also some areas of Savanna, Temperate zone and Taiga.

Biome sandbox editor

In the sandbox editor you can use the biomes to paint the planet with regions of different temperature, fertility, fossils, forests, rocks, rare resources and temples.

Cultivation Unit

This new building is made available in the Joma mission. It breeds and harvests crops that thrive in symbiosis with the local flora. Therefore, each adjacent forest piece  increases the yield of berries and herbs.

The upgrade “bio lab” reduces the costs of the cultivation program by genetic adaptation of the seedlings to local conditions.

The upgrade “external herb beds” enables the cultivation of valuable herbs and grasses on areas that can not be used for other plants.

Acacia

A new type of forest that is very robust against drought and mainly spread in the savanna biome.

Community Translation

Alpha 28 comes with the first version of a Spanish translation that has been written by Purple Sister. THANKS A LOT! In addition a french translation is in progress.

If you are also working on a translation or would like to contribute, please let us know in the community translation thread in the forums.

We have updated the Imagine Earth fonts with a few new letters (for czech). In addition the many UI elements now automatically make sure the text fits into the available space.

The next big step here for us is to make missions translatable.

Balancing

• Frontier tower is now available starting with the Joma mission
• Relocation tool now also relocated upgrades
• Explosive device now completely blasts rocks (instead of only 50%)
• Forest growth calculation has been updated based on the new biomes
• Mine produces more at lower cost
• Recycling factory produces more goods
• Sorting system no longer causes increased ground pollution
• Fishing port upgrades require less energy and money
• Cattle farm needs less energy and money
• Waterworks has greater dependence on fertility

Special thanks to Justice for writing a very detailed balancing feedback on this!

Other stuff

• Completely pause the game
• New ideon goal in Joma mission (5th bonus goal)
• Pulse cannon is available for defense against first Xrathul wave on Magni
• Orientation of particle effects for better engine exhaust graphics
• New animation for fishing port graphics
• New colorization and icons for rare resources
• Big Illuminati temple has now up to 8 gaian power slots
• Graphics setting “Shader quality” allows disabling normals maps for more performance
• New neutral smiley icon when when city is unpopulated
• Number of available items sold be the tech trader is now shown as bars

Indie of the Year Award

Help us win the Indie of the Year Award

Another month is over and Alpha 22 is ready for you. In short:

• Emission levy to balance global pollution
• New take over rules
• New preview images in tech menu
• Harvesting forests and mining rocks earns goods
• Cold temperatures reduce the harvest of your farms
• Changed savegame directory structure
• Porting to MonoGame prepared
• Bugfixes and balancing …

Emission Levy

The emission levy (as shown in the image above) is a new rule introduced to add some fairness to the aspect of global pollution. Once the climate balance of the planet falls into negative, the companies with high emissions have to pay charges to the companies whose emissions are below the average. A good incentive to reduce emissions.

New Take Over Rules

The last alpha version 21 introduced to possibility to take over opponent cities by buying 50% or more of their taxes. We have collected your feedback and added our own ideas to further refine this.

The value of a colony itself is now much higher to make sure freshly build colonies are worth more than 5-10% shares. Additionally we changed the rules for watchtowers (!):

• A watchtower that has no connection to a colony center will be lost. This can happen when (A) an opponent takes over a colony or (B) a connecting watchtower is destroyed.
• Watchtowers that have no owner and are adjacent to your colony can now be taken over by paying some money.

This makes the whole process of taking over opponent colonies a bit more interesting and challenging.

New Preview in Tech Menu

All buildings and their upgrades have received new preview images that are show when hovering them in the tech menu.

Harvesting Forests & Mining Rocks

With the new version you no longer earn money when harvesting forests. Instead you receive goods every tick until you cancel the harvest process or the forest is uprooted.

This is also the case for rocks. Mining them now also gives you goods that can be used by your population.

Important: Harvesting forests with the chainsaw tool and blasting rocks will give you only a part of the goods and you will need a storage to keep them, because everything is earned at once.

Influences of Temperature

The temperature of a planet field is shown at the bottom left of the screen in the field info panel. Farms and some forest types are affected by cold temperatures. The following screenshots shows an industrial farm that was build on a field with a temperature of -8°C. This extremely reduces the amount of food produced, as shown in the message panel.

Changes to Savegame Directory Structure

We have simplified the directory structure of savegames (left old, right new). When you start the new released version of Imagine Earth everything should be changed automatically. However, it’s always possible that something goes wrong. If savegames are missing please check the directory structure and write a support request to support@imagineearth.info.

MonoGame Portation

Imagine Earth has been developed using Microsoft XNA – an easy game framework that is no longer in active development. Luckily members of the XNA community started to develop MonoGame which now can be used as an open source replacement. This makes it a lot easier for us to find bugs and enhance the performance of Imagine Earth (e.g. by using DirectX 11). In addition it enables us to port Imagine Earth to other platforms, though this is not something we plan to do at the moment.

Long story short: During the last weeks a lot of time went into porting Imagine Earth to MonoGame – especially sounds and music. Since a new technology might also introduce new bugs we will start a public test in the next days. Stay tuned if you are interested in helping us to make sure everything runs smooth.