Patch Notes for Spying and War mega-patch (V0.9.6.0 to V0.9.6.2, Build ID: 1499713)

Patch Notes for Spying and War mega-patch (V0.9.6.0 to V0.9.6.2, Build ID: 1499713)

Note: This is a major update with new features and makes save game files from before V0.9.6.0 incompatible.

New Weapons and Technologies:

Plasma Storm Bomb: Reduced from 200 damage to 100 and added the secondary effect of creating Electrodynamic storms in the planet's atmosphere, making it impossible to run any factories and ore refineries for 5 turns. This can help you stop an enemy from rebuilding as you lay siege to his planet.

Empulsor Device: An Electromagnetic Pulse device powered by an anti-matter reaction and designed for planetary bombardment. The Empulsor bomb can be dropped anywhere on a planet and will immediately shut down all infrastructure and orbital structures on the planet for the next two turns. The device gives off harmful radiation and is only suitable for use on unmanned warp-capable missiles.

Disassembler Bomb: The Disassembler Bomb contains a breed of destructive nanites enclosed in a standard bomb casing. When used to bombard an enemy city, the nanites seek out and disassemble a piece of infrastructure connected to the city, turning it back into raw materials. Half of the metal used to build the structure is reclaimed by the planet's owner.

Graviton Field Emitter: By shunting high-energy plasma through a sustained graviton emitter, the Graviton Field Emitter ship weapon creates an uncontrolled graviton field on the battlefield. The field deals 20 damage to all ships in its area of effect each turn, slows all ships in its area of effect, and lasts until the end of combat.

Proto-Wormhole Generator: By interleaving two opposing graviton fields, the Proto-Wormhole Generator ship weapon causes a localised spatial displacement, sending any ship in the selected hex to a random unoccupied position on the battlefield. The weapon has to cool down for 3 combat rounds between uses.

Quantum Destabiliser: The Quantum Destabiliser uses a modified tractor beam to scramble the enemy ship at the molecular level, causing components to fuse and short circuit. The beam deals 10 damage directly to a ship's armour, bypassing any shields, and increases by 10 damage each turn until the target ship is destroyed or the beam is terminated. Each Quantum Destabiliser weapon can be active on only a single ship at a time.

Psionic Flux Phaser: The Psionic Flux Phaser is a ship weapon that uses psionic frequencies to transmit thoughts and propaganda directly into the minds of enemy crewmen, disorienting them during the battle and causing them to make mistakes. The affected ship's engines, weapons, or shields will be disabled for 3 turns.

Fleet Heart: The Fleet Heart is a power-hungry ship module that uses quantum entanglement to link together the computers of every ship in a fleet and share sensor data in realtime. Every ship in the fleet benefits from +20% damage and a +10% chance to dodge incoming attacks while a ship carrying a Fleet Heart is operational. Only one Fleet Heart can be fitted to a ship, and the effects of multiple Fleet Hearts in the same fleet don't stack.

Habitation Module: Contains living space, hydroponic farms, and facilities for 2,000 citizens. When stationed in a friendly star system, the self-contained miniature city will produce 4 BC, 50 metal for one planet in the star system, and +10 morale for all planets in the system each turn. If it ever gets destroyed then you'll suffer a -20% morale hit on all planets across your empire.

Dessication Device (Reptilian Only): The Dessication Device is a low-yield bomb that introduces a self-replicating crystalline structure into the oceans of the target world, where it absorbs water and locks it away underground to reduce the sea levels. The planet's climinate will become 10% closer to Desert status, making it more habitable for Reptilian species and less habitable Humanoid, Aquatic, and Robotic races.

Liquefaction Device (Aquatic Only): The Liquefaction Device is a low-yield bomb that spreads catalytic nanoparticles throughout the atmosphere of a habitable planet, combining free oxygen and hydrogen into water in order to raise the sea levels. The planet's climinate will become 10% closer to Ocean status, making it more habitable for Aquatic species and less habitable Humanoid, Reptilian, and Robotic races.

Weather Stabiliser (Humanoid Only): The Weather Stabiliser is a low-yield bomb that spreads biological catalysts throughout the upper thermosphere of a habitable planet to stabilise the planet's weather patterns and promote diverse ecologies. The planet's climate will become 10% closer to Terran status, making it more habitable for Humanoid species and less habitable Aquatic, Reptilian, and Robotic races.

Smogger Bomb (Robotic Only): The Smogger is a low-yield bomb that spreads light-blocking particles of carbon soot and dust throughout the atmosphere of the target planet, reducing the global temperature and attempting to trigger an early ice age. The planet's climate will become 10% closer to Ice status, making it more habitable for Robotic species and less habitable Aquatic, Reptilian, and Humanoid races.

Genesis Device: This is now a super-weapon that can be used on ANY planet type. It will wipe out all life and structures on the planet and instantly transform it into a terran world. The Genesis Device is an expensive single-use warhead that can only be fitted to warp-capable Missiles.

Plasma Mine Layer: Modified the Plasma Mine Layer to deploy small fields of mines instead of just one at a time.

Neural Training Uplink: All ships start with entirely elite crew and bonus XP

Titan Ship Hull: The titan is now the largest ship class in the game and we've activated it for players to use. The Dreadnought ship hull size has been removed from the game as it didn't fit the technology progression in the current tech trees, caused some problems in Fleet Combat, and wasn't very practical to build anyway.

Spying Gameplay:

The core spying gameplay has now been implemented, as discussed in our previous development blog. In testing, we discovered that the proposed system was very micromanagement-heavy and we had to re-design it to be more passive. Now instead of spending money to send a spy on an individual mission, you pick from a variety of ongoing missions that each cost a certain amount of money/turn and periodically attempt their missions. The default option is a free mission to hide and infiltrate the planet, raising your spy's infiltration rating over time.

Renamed "Spy and Troop Pods" technology to "Drop Pods"

Added Spy Pod module and Spy Transport default ship design.

Added "Hide" Mission. "Infiltrate the planet and lay low awaiting further orders. All spies gain +1 infiltration rating each turn, with the possibility of establishing contact with criminal and subversive elements in the target planet's society for a surprise 25% bonus once every 10 turns."

Added "Hack Computers" mission. "Hack the planet's computer systems to steal important data. Spies may steal the enemy's maps of the planet, money from the treasury, research points from the scientific network, or even complete technologies."

Added "Sabotage Computers" mission. "Introduce a virus into the planet's computer systems, disrupting planetary activities. This may destroy research points, shut down infrastructure, reduce planetary morale, reduce the planet's health rating, or reduce the planet's security rating."

Added "Plant Bombs" mission. "Attempt to plant bombs inside cities, buildings, infrastructure, starbases, and ships in orbit of the planet. This mission carries the increased risk that the spy may blow himself up in the destruction."

Added "Incite Civil Unrest" mission. "Attempt to incite civil unrest and rebellion among the population, reducing the morale and security ratings of the planet temporarily. If the planet's loyalty rating drops low enough, the planet may even defect to your empire"

Added "Assassinate Leader" mission. "Attempt to assassinate the legendary planet leader currently stationed on this planet."

Implemented spy installation mechanics and Spying tab on the planet interface. Deploying a spy costs 100 BC and requires dropping one onto a city. This can be done even while there are ships defending the planet.

Implemented spy catching mechanism. On executing a mission, the spy has a chance of being caught and causing a diplomatic incident. You can lose favour, treaties can be cancelled, and it can even lead to war being declared.

Implemented spy outcome chance rolls. Defensive score is based on the planet's security rating and technologies, plus a difficulty factor based on the mission. The offensive roll is based on the spy's infiltration rating and spy technologies.

Planet Leaders can now give bonuses to defensive rolls against spies.

Added new Atomiser Implant technology that allows spies to kill themselves and completely destroys their body when caught, leaving no evidence that can link back to your race and eliminating the diplomatic backlash of a failed mission.

Added new Computer Hacking technology that provides a +20 bonus to the Hack Computers spy mission and a +20 spy defense bonus against enemy spies hacking your computers.

Having a spy on a planet now lets you open the planet and view its current fleet defences etc.

Added the Spy Satellite technology, which unlocks a special warp-capable probe that can be installed on an enemy planet through the Spy tab. The Spy Satellite provides a +50 bonus to all spy actions on that planet and lasts for 100 turns. This tech also lets you install a second spy on all planets, but we'll likely be moving that ability to new technologies and racial traits in the future.

Improved the Neural Interface technology by adding a +10 spy bonus to it.

Implemented War AI:

War Declaration

The AI now periodically assess whether they should declare war on another race using parameters such as fleet strength, strategic weaknesses in the enemy planets, their current favour level, the difficulty setting, and the personality type of the race's randomly generated leader. The AI also now automatically declares war if you bomb their planets or attack their fleets.

Strategic Analysis

When in a war, the Strategic Analysis AI will periodically analyse the enemy planets for strategic weaknesses and compare the strength of its own fleets to the strength of your fleets and planetary defences, also taking into account all the ships that could reach the target system in time to defend against attack.

Defensive Deployment

The Defensive Deployment section of the War AI deploys an empire's ships based on an assessment of nearby threats. It works out how many enemy ships could reach each star system, assesses the threat they pose (modified by whether they are at war or have a peace treaty or alliance) and sends enough ships to defend. This naturally tends to deploy ships around the race's borders and concentrates them near other races they are at war with.

Bid For Peace

The War AI continually re-assesses how its current wars are going and can decide to bid for peace with the enemy race. It will generate an offer that it thinks the enemy will accept, which may contain technologies and money to sweeten the deal. If the race is losing the war and it's absolutely hopeless and they think they're never going to be able to secure a peace treaty, they can sometimes even surrender to another race. All assets and planets are transferred over to the new race on surrendering, and a special diplomacy event announces it.

Laid the groundwork for an extortion algorithm in the War AI that makes demands against weaker races. This will have to be activated later once we get the threats and coercions system implemented.

Laid the groundwork for player-designed starbases, which we can implement in a future update.

Galaxy AI and Diplomacy AI Changes:

The Galaxy AI has been overhauled with the addition of a new Goal system that operates in distinct phases. All races start off with the goal of expanding their empire, then later switch to different goals depending on the circumstances they find themselves in. The AI continually re-assesses its strength and empire next to the others in the game and makes its decision on what goal it should pursue based on that.

Added the Expand goal that prioritises expanding into new star systems.

Added the Consolidate goal that prioritises colonising and building up all of the planets in your existing star systems.

Added the Diplomacy goal that prioritises diplomatic contact, building military defences, and slower expansion.

Added the Defend goal that prioritises military defences and building ships, and slower expansion.

Added the Conquer goal that prioritises declaring war on and attacking other races, building military defences and building ships, and slower expansion.

Added incentive for the AI to colonise planets with strategic resources or other specials, and star systems with a wormhole connection.

The diplomacy AI now values Peace and Alliance treaties differently, based on the relative strength of each race's total military presence (planets and fleets).

The AI now uses its leader's personality type and race archetype to influence research choices. Special racial technologies are prioritised, warlord races will focus on ground combat techs etc.

Robotic races will no longer get free armour regeneration in Hard and Impossible difficulties. This was previously added because they tended to lag behind in technology, but we've since fixed this with the Robotic race overhaul.

Races will no longer automatically race for the Diplomatic Victory when on the galactic council. Instead, they'll tend to propose resolutions that will benefit them.

The AI is now able to siege planets, continually bombing them every turn until repelled by an enemy fleet.

AI missile fleets will now head home to re-arm if they run out of ammo.

The Galaxy AI now builds ships in up to 3 separate locations, rather than always picking the same location. It selects the best locations based on metal production and build capacity of the shipyards.

The AI now recognises when a planet's metal production drops so low (possibly due to bombing) that it won't complete a ship build and cancels it so the planet can use the metal to rebuild.

The AI no longer considers the defensive stats of a planet's shields etc when working out how well defended a planet is, as fleet combat now ends if the planet is the last remaining structure. Starbase defenses are also weighted lower than other ships when assessing military strength because they can't move.

Planet Generation Tweaks:

A player on the Steam forum pointed out that planets with higher mineral ratings have more deposits of Ore but that what they really need is larger deposits so you might get more clusters of 5-7 ore for your Ore Refineries. We took this feedback to heart and re-designed the resource distribution mechanics to do exactly that and also adapted the new mechanic for the distribution of coal, food, and other resources.

The number of ore veins on a planet is now determined by its size class, and the size of those veins is determined by the planet's mineral rating, leading to much larger veins of ore.

Gas clusters will no longer frequently contain ore deposits on Toxic planets. These should now be much more separate and easier to harvest.

Fish shoals now generate in larger groupings based on the planet's Organic rating on Swamp and Ocean planets.

Fertile Soil deposits now generate in larger clumps together depending on the planet's organic rating rather than being spread in small clumps across the planet.

Land Animals now spawn in small herds rather than individual deposits on Terran worlds to make them easier to harvest.

Planets with the special Ancient Civilisation will now generate two clumps of 2-3 Ancient Ruin resources.

Planets with the special Crashed Warships will now generate two clumps of 2-3 Crashed Ship resources.

Morale/Security/Health Overhaul:

Added a new part to the Loyalty Graph section of the UI to show the net change in security, morale, and health each turn and updated the warnings associated with low stats.

The tax calculation has been adjusted. City GDP is now 4BC per 1k population multiplied by any race multipliers and tax office bonuses, +1 BC per infrastructure built, and +10% if the planet has a starbase.

Population tax rate now decreases the morale per turn in each city by a certain amount. Planets with more cities will be affected more by tax, but the effect can now be more easily counteracted by building more entertainment centres in each city.

The Tax Policies technology now reduces the morale penalty from taxing citizens by -2%, and completely eliminates the penalty from having a 10% tax rate.

The Psychiatry technology now gives +1% morale per turn in cities with a hospital.

The Tax Office building now gives +25% GDP in a city and -2 morale per turn

The Entertainment Center now gives +1 morale per turn

The Genetic Enhancement: Happy technology now gives +5% morale per turn to every planet across your entire empire.

The Waste Management technology now gives +1% health per turn on all planets.

Added new planet leader Slave Driver Korn, who gives +10% metal production per turn but causes -4 morale per turn on the planet.

Planet Leaders can now have stats that increase or decrease morale per turn, health per turn, and security per turn on their home planet.

Weapons can now have effects that decrease morale, security, health, or loyalty by a fixed amount.

The Neural Scanner technology now gives +2 security per turn on all planets in addition to its +10 spy bonus.

The Universal Antidote technology now gives +5 health rating per turn on all planets and a 100% resistance to biological weapons.

The Crimewatch Network technology now gives +1 morale per turn in cities with a police station

Added new Security events for your planets: Petty Crimes when below 75 security, Rioting when below 50, and Organised Crime when below 25.

Added new Health events for your planets: Minor Virus when below 75 security, Disease Outbreak when below 50, and Epidemic when below 25.

Warlord races now get -1 morale per turn for each city without a military barracks.

Robotic Race Improvements:

Robotic races no longer require coal/food to now build new population, they can do it just with money and can now build up to the planetary maximum even if there isn't enough room for a full build load (e.g. if there's space for 750 pop and you would build 1000, you can now build the remaining 750 while you previously couldn't).

Added a new "Forge Patch: Antivirus" technology that you can activate once every 10 turns at a cost of 500 energy to increase security on the planet by a flat 20 points. This option is under Forge Services in the Services panel.

Added a new "Forge Patch: Spy Scan" technology that you can activate once every 10 turns at a cost of 500 energy to tell you how many spies are on a planet and have a 25% chance to kill one spy. This option is under Forge Services in the Services panel.

Added a new "Robot Deconstruction" technology that lets you deconstruct 1000 population in exchange for half the metal used in their construction. This option is under Forge Services in the Services panel.

Added the Nanite Engineering technology, which gives all ships an additional +10% armour regenerated per turn in addition to the standard Robotic race bonus. Also gives +10 ground troop and boarding party bonus. This has now been activated and should be working correctly.

Robotic race AI now use their lack of farming and residential city requirements to their advantage -- building more Defense cities.

Other Features and Small Changes:

Ice planets now have a much smaller equatorial region with terran and desert land. As a result, Tundra planets (50% Ice 50% Terran) also now retain most of their ice.

Race colours are now randomly selected from a list of 6 possible colours, which were chosen to be distinctive enough to avoid confusion in fleet combat. The player is always green, but colour selection will be added in a future update.

The Save Game dialog now prompts the player for a name for the save game file. The save box has been altered to fit the new name, and the confirm overwrite window is no longer needed since you have to type a name and click the button or enter key now to save.

The Auxiliary Forge now holds 1000 population and is still limited to one per city. We've been having a discussion recently on the forum about these limits, and this may change in the future.

The AI will now build propaganda transmitters on all new planets if it researches them.

The Survey Scanner now scans 100 hexes per turn, up from the previous value of 50 per turn. Probes still have one scanner and multiple scanners on a ship still stack, so a science vessel with multiple scanners will make short work of scanning a planet.

The Ambassador Module has now been changed from a flat favour generation per turn to a +10% bonus to the value of all diplomatic offers to other races as long as we have an ambassador in one of their star systems.

Added a new Solar Flare on Red Giant disaster that can happen if you colonise a planet in a Red Giant system. It's extremely rare but will wipe out everything on the planet and turn it into a molten wasteland.

Added a new Global Warming disaster

Rearranged some of the tech trees to make room for new technologies

Removed the Laser Rifle technology as you don't engage in ground combat this early and if you pick it you can be without a turret. This also caused the AI to sometimes build warships with armour plates but no weapons.

The Orbital Minefield now deploys mines on top of several enemy ships so that they explode at the start of the combat.

Fighters and Heavy Fighters now have their own modular ship designs.

A small number of kickstarter backer star names proved to be too long for the game, so we've had to split them up into multiple names.

The planetary stats should no longer appear to randomly flicker when hitting End Turn. This was caused by the game updating planetary stats while drawing from the same variables. The stats are now cached while the new ones are recalculated to prevent this.

The Revenant ships have been nerfed. The Spectre (Frigate) now has a damper field, one bomb and one particle beam. The Phantom (Cruiser) has a damper field, one armour plate, two beams, one bomb, and one fighter. The Battleship has lost a few armour plates but is otherwise unchanged, and the Titan has been added. We may increase the number of ships in revenant fleets later as part of a balance pass and may factor in the game's difficulty setting.

Temporal rifts now open in 6 to 17 turns instead of 12 to 23.

Fighters and Heavy Fighters now always contain one beam weapon with a range of 2 rather than sometimes using a projectile weapon. If the race has no beam weapon, they will instead be equipped with slightly worse "Prototype Laser Cannon" beams. This can still be modified in the weapons.txt file to make them carry other weapons (for modders). If they do ever happen to use a projectile weapon, it will deal half damage.

The map will no longer rotate when you hold the left mouse button on the End Turn button.

The Auto-Resolve option for Fleet Combat has been enabled.

When you auto-resolve a fleet combat, the game now displays the Fleet Combat Victory panel to tell you the result and let you level up crew members and salvage ships. Right now the entire battle happens instantly.

Increased the point cost of galactic council resolutions to account for new council technologies

Bug-fixes:

Solved several crashes that can happen when ending turn while on the Shipyard screen

Shipyards no longer accidentally use metal and build capacity from enemy planets in the system

Natural disasters such as the Solar Flare will no longer make you declare war on yourself (lol)

Shipyards will now pause when their owner has insufficient command points remaining to build the ship.

The GalaxyAI now correctly re-initialises after creating or loading a level. Previously it didn't start making decisions for 1-2 turns.

Robotic race AIs will no longer sometimes accidentally set a tax rate and ruin their income.

The galaxy AI is now executed before the rest of the end turn code, so races can no longer dispatch ships on the same turn that they arrive (an ability the player can't have).

Fixed a bug in the code that checks treaties between two races. This had no effect before this patch because all treaties previously came from your race, but we noticed it when we made the AI able to declare war.

Fixed several crashes that could happen when ending turn due to changing ship numbers in the system window.

Fixed potential crashes in the code that dispatches fleets.

Fixed bugs in the Merge Fleets code, previously sometimes fleets belonging to the same race didn't merge correctly when idle at the same star system.

Fixed a crash that could rarely occur when a popup appeared during the level creation process that caused the game to play a music jingle before it loaded the music.

Fixed a visual bug with one of the United Colonies ship parts

It should no longer be possible to accidentally open two fleet combats at once by responding to two attack popup boxes in a row. The popup dialog queue is now saved when you open fleet combat and restored after combat ends to prevent this problem.

Revenants now correctly attack enemy fleets, bomb enemy planets and self-destruct after the bombing run. Previously they would just arrive in the system and stay there quietly for the rest of the game.

Fixed a bug where you could get the Revenant threat message when the Revenants were dispatched to attack an enemy planet. (Note: We may actually put in a separate message when the Revenants attack another race as it's good to know when it happens)

Fixed a bug with farms sometimes getting bonuses from the wrong hexes and missing bonuses from others.

Fixed a bug where certain untradeable technologies were making their way into the trade list for diplomacy.

Fixed a bug with certain planetary disasters that caused them not to activate. That red giant you're colonising can now correctly throw off a solar flare and cook your planet. Enjoy :D

Fixed a bug with the Bio-toxin bomb that prevented it from being fired.

Fixed a bug with ships going through wormholes they hadn't discovered yet or taking shortcuts through wormholes even if they can't reach the other side normally.

Fixed a bug with ship captains that would cause anyone giving an armour HP bonus to give 100 times the expected bonus.

Fixed a bug in the shipyard window causing ship design 0 to be non-modifiable. This should never happen unless you're modding the game.

Fixed a bug preventing the "Upgrading to Blueprint" message from being drawn from the city view

Weapon stats from weapons.txt are no longer case sensitive. This fixed a small bug with one of the weapons, and ensures we don't get a repeat of that error in future, and it'll be easier for modders.

Fixed a bug with disaster immunity not applying correctly. We are going to drastically increase disaster immunity turns in a future update when we add more disasters

Fixed bug causing planets not to update after a disaster if you happen to be at the planet when it occurs.

Planetary defenses will no longer prevent you from bombing the planet on their own, as this would lead to a fleet combat that ended immediately.

The AI will no longer accidentally attack a planet even if the owners have changed since the fleet was dispatched to attack it.

Fixed a series of bugs with the planet screen code that caused various mechanics to mis-calculate areas near the planetary seam. This led to some strange behaviours all across the game, from the AI code and bombing to resource generation.

Fixed a bug where the AI wouldn't realise the planet maps wrapped around and would screw up placement on the planetary seam. This is a separate issue than the previous one.

Fixed a number of End Turn crashes when you're on the planet screen.

The Fighter Squadron Cruiser ship design will no longer have multiple augmented engines. It should only be possible to have one of these per ship.

Fixed various Fleet Combat bugs causing ships to move or fire at the wrong time or target.

Fixed a crash in Fleet Combat caused by the game thinking a ship is moving but it actually has 0 moves in its movement queue

Fixed a visual bug and related crash in Fleet Combat caused by the game using the wrong variable to draw the laser for reactive strikes

Fixed a bug with the display of star system names when multiple races colonised the same star system.

Fixed a bug with the display of the number of turns for a fleet to reach its new selected destination

Fixed a bug with auto-resolving fleet combat that caused the victory window not to have anything to salvage.

Fixed a bug with the fleet combat wrap-up code that destroys starbases etc that were knocked out during the battle. When starbases are destroyed, the star system will correctly update to reflect this immediately instead of waiting until the next time you click End Turn.

When an AI fleet attacks a planet, all combat ships belonging to that race that are stationed in the system (and may be performing a trade route blockade) will now join the fleet combat. This makes the AI-spawned fleet combats consistent with player-spawned ones when attacking a planet.

Fixed a bug with how the AI valued the military force of ships using missiles and drones. Now your best warhead damage is used in the