What changed
1 fix3 additions1 change1 removal
- Performance
- Gameplay
- Maps
- Balance
fixedIn our previous dev update , we added the Revenant faction and talked about Temporal Rifts that can open throughout the game and spit out Revenant ships to attack. This month we activated that feature and expanded on it with a whole series of new Temporal Rift events and and an entirely new Rift Investigation mechanic that spawns the rift inside fleet combat. As part of this system, we’ve re-activated the salvage gameplay on the Fleet Combat Victory Screen and added ship crew XP to this screen. We’ve also made a number of improvements and optimisations to the Galaxy generation code and galaxy graphics, and fixed a ton of bugs and crashes . As expected, we lost some dev time recently due to boring but necessary parts of running a business such as putting together our corporation tax return and documentation for the British Film Institute to get the game accredited as a British video game. We also took a weekend out to attend the 2016 global game jam, which was a ton of fun! Now that we’re through all that, we’re ramping things up and moving on to develop victory conditions, the Revenant Planet event, the Synergies tech tree, and start on tech era 4. This will take us considerably closer to the big version 1.0 release, so we hope you like it and continue to follow our development this month. Read on for a brief breakdown of what we’ve added since the last dev update. Head over to the official Predestination blog for a more detailed summary and a preview of the victory conditions and other features we’re currently working on We’ve now implemented the salvage system and added in the crew XP system to this screen so you can see your ship captains and crew gaining XP and levelling up. When a ship or structure is blown up in fleet combat, it will be completely obliterated, disabled or shipwrecked. After each battle, the winner can salvage any ships that weren’t completely obliterated and can gain a number of things:
changedTechnology (Rare) – A weapon or ship module can sometimes survive the battle in-tact.
addedAncient Ruins (Rare) – Adds 2 ancient ruins to a planet.
addedIn patch V0.9.0.6, we deployed a new planet balancing algorithm based on your feedback. Some players pointed out that stars could generate with illogical planet setups such as Red Giants with Ice planets right next to the star. We worked out a completely new map generation algorithm that will produce more realistic results and which has been designed with game balance in mind. Each planet type was given a habitability index for each race archetype (for example, Reptiles really like Desert planets), and that was used to work out balanced planet percentages. A spreadsheet with the new data and analysis can be found here . This will also allow us to work out different star probabilities for different galaxy ages in a future update while maintaining the game balance. After overhauling planet distribution, we overhauled the galaxy map in V0.9.1.0 with a new galaxy generation algorithm that produces nicer maps. We’ve also improved the nebulas and reduced the brightness of the stellar gas, as we found it washed out the graphics a bit.
removedIn response to your feedback and some footage from let’s plays of Predestination, we tackled some problems with the Diplomacy AI in patch V0.9.0.6. The main change is that there is no longer any diminishing returns on diplomatic offers, as this often worked out to be quite confusing for people making offers in diplomacy. The scores the AI assigns to things like technologies and money have also been rebalanced, and the penalty for making an offensive offer have been reduced significantly as they were far too punishing. This is something we can potentially use in future for the harder difficulty modes.
addedA big thanks to everyone for reading this massive development update, and a special thanks to all of our new players who bought into the Early Access over the recent Steam sales, and everyone who has been putting in bug and crash reports and leaving reviews for the game on Steam. As always, please feel free to give us any feedback you have on this month’s dev update either here or on the Steam forum, or you can send your feedback directly to us in private by emailing it to brendan@brainandnerd.com Cheers, — Brendan, Lead Developer
Predestination changes
fixedIn our previous dev update , we added the Revenant faction and talked about Temporal Rifts that can open throughout the game and spit out Revenant ships to attack. This month we activated that feature and expanded on it with a whole series of new Temporal Rift events and and an entirely new Rift Investigation mechanic that spawns the rift inside fleet combat. As part of this system, we’ve re-activated the salvage gameplay on the Fleet Combat Victory Screen and added ship crew XP to this screen. We’ve also made a number of improvements and optimisations to the Galaxy generation code and galaxy graphics, and fixed a ton of bugs and crashes . As expected, we lost some dev time recently due to boring but necessary parts of running a business such as putting together our corporation tax return and documentation for the British Film Institute to get the game accredited as a British video game. We also took a weekend out to attend the 2016 global game jam, which was a ton of fun! Now that we’re through all that, we’re ramping things up and moving on to develop victory conditions, the Revenant Planet event, the Synergies tech tree, and start on tech era 4. This will take us considerably closer to the big version 1.0 release, so we hope you like it and continue to follow our development this month. Read on for a brief breakdown of what we’ve added since the last dev update. Head over to the official Predestination blog for a more detailed summary and a preview of the victory conditions and other features we’re currently working on We’ve now implemented the salvage system and added in the crew XP system to this screen so you can see your ship captains and crew gaining XP and levelling up. When a ship or structure is blown up in fleet combat, it will be completely obliterated, disabled or shipwrecked. After each battle, the winner can salvage any ships that weren’t completely obliterated and can gain a number of things:
changedTechnology (Rare) – A weapon or ship module can sometimes survive the battle in-tact.
addedAncient Ruins (Rare) – Adds 2 ancient ruins to a planet.
addedIn patch V0.9.0.6, we deployed a new planet balancing algorithm based on your feedback. Some players pointed out that stars could generate with illogical planet setups such as Red Giants with Ice planets right next to the star. We worked out a completely new map generation algorithm that will produce more realistic results and which has been designed with game balance in mind. Each planet type was given a habitability index for each race archetype (for example, Reptiles really like Desert planets), and that was used to work out balanced planet percentages. A spreadsheet with the new data and analysis can be found here . This will also allow us to work out different star probabilities for different galaxy ages in a future update while maintaining the game balance. After overhauling planet distribution, we overhauled the galaxy map in V0.9.1.0 with a new galaxy generation algorithm that produces nicer maps. We’ve also improved the nebulas and reduced the brightness of the stellar gas, as we found it washed out the graphics a bit.
removedIn response to your feedback and some footage from let’s plays of Predestination, we tackled some problems with the Diplomacy AI in patch V0.9.0.6. The main change is that there is no longer any diminishing returns on diplomatic offers, as this often worked out to be quite confusing for people making offers in diplomacy. The scores the AI assigns to things like technologies and money have also been rebalanced, and the penalty for making an offensive offer have been reduced significantly as they were far too punishing. This is something we can potentially use in future for the harder difficulty modes.
In our previous dev update , we added the Revenant faction and talked about Temporal Rifts that can open throughout the game and spit out Revenant ships to attack. This month we activated that feature and expanded on it with a whole series of new Temporal Rift events and and an entirely new Rift Investigation mechanic that spawns the rift inside fleet combat. As part of this system, we’ve re-activated the salvage gameplay on the Fleet Combat Victory Screen and added ship crew XP to this screen. We’ve also made a number of improvements and optimisations to the Galaxy generation code and galaxy graphics, and fixed a ton of bugs and crashes. As expected, we lost some dev time recently due to boring but necessary parts of running a business such as putting together our corporation tax return and documentation for the British Film Institute to get the game accredited as a British video game. We also took a weekend out to attend the 2016 global game jam, which was a ton of fun! Now that we’re through all that, we’re ramping things up and moving on to develop victory conditions, the Revenant Planet event, the Synergies tech tree, and start on tech era 4. This will take us considerably closer to the big version 1.0 release, so we hope you like it and continue to follow our development this month. Read on for a brief breakdown of what we’ve added since the last dev update. Head over to the official Predestination blog for a more detailed summary and a preview of the victory conditions and other features we’re currently working on We’ve now implemented the salvage system and added in the crew XP system to this screen so you can see your ship captains and crew gaining XP and levelling up. When a ship or structure is blown up in fleet combat, it will be completely obliterated, disabled or shipwrecked. After each battle, the winner can salvage any ships that weren’t completely obliterated and can gain a number of things:
Nothing (Common)
Money (Common) – A fraction of the BC cost of the ship.
Data Disk (Uncommon) – A data disk gives bonus research points.
Technology (Rare) – A weapon or ship module can sometimes survive the battle in-tact.
Rift Investigation
When you send ships to investigate a rift, it now spawns a Fleet Combat scenario filled with asteroids, nebular gas, ion storms, and one central temporal rift. The rift will open within 2-3 full fleet combat rounds, giving you very little time to get your ships in place to deal with whatever comes through. You can hide ships in the nebular gas to cloak them, for example, or move your ships to surround the rift.
Rift types are
Nothing – Nothing comes through.
Asteroids (Common) – A few asteroids come through.
Unexploded Mine (Common) – A space mine comes through and explodes.
Salvage (Common) – Shipwrecks to salvage for money, research, and technologies.
Commander (Uncommon) – An escape pof with a free Ship Captain or Planet Leader.
Friendly Ships (Uncommon) – Free ships for your empire.
Enemy Ships (Uncommon) – Ships belonging to another race in the game.
Computer Virus (Uncommon) – Destroys research progress.
Ancient Ruins (Rare) – Adds 2 ancient ruins to a planet.
Temporal Freeze (Rare) – A planet is frozen in time for 10-20 turns.
Temporal Acceleration (Rare) – A planet takes double turns for 10-20 turns!
Temporal Bubble (Rare) – Fast-forwards a planet in time by 100,000 years. The Civilization is wiped out, but all cities on the planet to turn into clusters of ancient ruins.
In patch V0.9.0.6, we deployed a new planet balancing algorithm based on your feedback. Some players pointed out that stars could generate with illogical planet setups such as Red Giants with Ice planets right next to the star. We worked out a completely new map generation algorithm that will produce more realistic results and which has been designed with game balance in mind. Each planet type was given a habitability index for each race archetype (for example, Reptiles really like Desert planets), and that was used to work out balanced planet percentages. A spreadsheet with the new data and analysis can be found here. This will also allow us to work out different star probabilities for different galaxy ages in a future update while maintaining the game balance. After overhauling planet distribution, we overhauled the galaxy map in V0.9.1.0 with a new galaxy generation algorithm that produces nicer maps. We’ve also improved the nebulas and reduced the brightness of the stellar gas, as we found it washed out the graphics a bit.
Head over to the official Predestination blog for a full listing of all the Galaxy changes.
In response to your feedback and some footage from let’s plays of Predestination, we tackled some problems with the Diplomacy AI in patch V0.9.0.6. The main change is that there is no longer any diminishing returns on diplomatic offers, as this often worked out to be quite confusing for people making offers in diplomacy. The scores the AI assigns to things like technologies and money have also been rebalanced, and the penalty for making an offensive offer have been reduced significantly as they were far too punishing. This is something we can potentially use in future for the harder difficulty modes.
Head over to the official Predestination blog for a full listing of all the Diplomacy AI changes.
A big thanks to everyone for reading this massive development update, and a special thanks to all of our new players who bought into the Early Access over the recent Steam sales, and everyone who has been putting in bug and crash reports and leaving reviews for the game on Steam. As always, please feel free to give us any feedback you have on this month’s dev update either here or on the Steam forum, or you can send your feedback directly to us in private by emailing it to brendan@brainandnerd.com Cheers, — Brendan, Lead Developer
