Greetings, Space Colony Managers!
The Universe is expanding! Because of this growing luxury of empty void we implemented much bigger planets into Imagine Earth which can be played with or against up to 6 factions. There is now technology trade to make other colonies more interesting.
There is a new trailer as well as tons of gameplay fixes and improvements to make Imagine Earth ready for the launch of early access on Humble Store on Nov 9th… – that’s right, two days ahead! đ Please share the joy about this with us and the rest of the world.
Bigger Planets
We implemented bigger Planets into the game because many of you asked for them. Let us know if you have any feature requests, ideas and stuff coming to your mind while checking out the latest version. Here are the details:
- Biggest planet has 2880 compared to previously 2000 fields
- Increased maximum competing companies to 6 (from 4)
- Maximum landmass increased to 80% of planet
- Tuto twice the size (720 fields, previously 320)
- Addition: Tuto mission has received a lot of detail improvements to make it a smoother experience
Technology Trade
Now you can buy single construction kits for buildings from other corporations. This means trading with other colonies gets more interesting.
Each building that has been licensed by the other colony will be offered in their store – given that your diplomatic status is good enough. Of course it will be much more expansive to buy these single construction kits and therefor make sense to license a construct yourself if you need it more often.
Landing animation
As you can see we started implementing epic cut-scenes to introduce all other factions, traders and invaders landing on your planet for the first time.
Planet Themes
The last update introduced planetary themes and this time we made a general and huge rework of the themes textures to make them look more diverse and individual and last be not least, much better.
Volcanic world for example has by default no polar caps (so no rising sea level)
AI Doing Research
Another important step done in order to make the AI fair and fun to play: The AI now has to research upgrades and other improvements in order to use them. So far those tricksters were able to build any upgrade without having to research it.
New Trailer Video & Subtitles
The existing trailer clearly needed a remake and has been replaced with a new one that is much more relying on in-game graphics to give you a perfect introduction into the actual game. Watch it and enjoy advanced space traveling via ideon powered hypergates!
Improvements & Balancing
- New Music Track. Tracks are now looped to a maximum of three minutes and than randomly change.
- Forests back in build ring. No longer license-able.
- Removed remediation from tool ring.
- Increased maintenance cost for forestry (the relatively low cost was basically the reason the AI most times choose to build it).
- Changed description and factors of industrial farm GM upgrade to make it less confusing
- Sleeping volcano new better visualized and explained
- Increased number of volcanoes and likelihood of erupting every once in a while
- Rare rocks are now also detected on neighboring fields
- During campaign also block fields next to rocks for first city center
- Auto saves are now done based on real time instead of in-game time
- Dead sea grass on land field is automatically removed
- Dead forests can now be removed
- Desertification can now also be canceled with temple powers (growth and fertility) and super-fertilizer
- Temple power cure can now also be used on other colonies
- Assimilator uplinks can now also be set on fire while they are building a drone. The uplink will extinguish itself after some time, though
UI Improvements
- New fertility icon
- Build process is now visualized with the icon of the building
- Influences of neighbor buildings are now visualized with the resource type icon instead of the buildings icon
- For huge buildings and mountains influence icons are now only displayed on the main field
- Harvesting resources new displays the corresponding resource icon
- Improved goal description visualization
- Improved mouse responsibility when interaction with menus
- Added separate smiley when a district is losing people due to missing food
- Added icon to build ring to clearer distinguish it from the tool ring
- Highlight in inventory when new item has been crafted
- New sound for cancel
- Dead forests and temple ruins are now properly named
- Added tooltip for fossil resources to field info panel in bottom left
- Adjusted building order in the technology panel
- Improved game over dialog
Bugfixes
- Fixed a bug where the game didn’t start at all on windows 7 systems
- Fixed graphics bug for assimilated cities and city centers level 2 and 3
- Display fires in the short-cut panel (top right)
- Fixed a bug where fires could not be extinguished
- Fixed description of the fire temple power
- When blasting mountains sometimes two rocks where placed at the same field
