Update log
Full Solar Nations 2 update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello everyone. Today I am releasing the 0.16 changes into the main branch. If you have been following the main branch for a while there is nothing new, but for those who have not I have compiled everything in 0.16 into this announcement.
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
Cultural Evolution
Over time, cultures now change and evolve. This happens in 2 ways: cultural splintering and evolution. Cultural Splintering is triggered by new space colonies, and allows for new colonial nations to appear later in the game if they manage to gain their independence. As a result, space colonies on other planets are less lucrative as they will eventually leave your culture group.
Cultural Evolution happens either when you buy culture traits/ideas for your primary culture or passively for cultures with no country controlling them. This will accumulate bonuses over the course of the game, and adds a significant amount of variety to each country.
You can also replace culture traits to change out the bonuses
New culture traits are unlocked by the procession of Ages, which go from the Industrial age (ending in 2000), to the Interstellar Age (which begins in 2700). There will probably be changes to these, as most likely they will trigger after someone researches a technology in the future, but for now they are simply time based.
You can see there are some cool ages near the bottom, each one will have some special stuff for it in the future.
Planet Nine: Haphaestus
I have taken the liberty of adding Planet 9 to the game even though people still debate its existence. This is because I think it is cool. Planet 9 also currently has 2 moons, Tartarus and Lethe.
Tartarus
A frozen world with a hypersalinized ocean, Tartarus is a very cool moon for only the most ice cold of explorers. It is covered mostly a salty compound water/nitrogen ocean, but has a small continent that can be colonized, and offers some unique opportunities for the first person to make it to the very fringe of the Solar System.
Lethe
A tiny snowball that floats around Planet 9, Lethe can be easily overlooked, but has secret riches if you look hard enough!
Proxima Centauri
Being the closest Star system to the Sun, Proxima is a star system we have very good information about in real life, which unfortunately leaves me with little creative license to modify the system. Currently we know of 3 rocky planets orbiting the red dwarf, and there is a fourth, larger planet that could possibly exist, but is not currently confirmed.
Earth included for reference. Small moon possesses a nitrogen atmosphere and liquid water is plentiful within its crust thanks to tidal heating.
Sirius
Sirius is a binary system which means it does not have as many areas for planets to exist. As a result, it does not have a large planetary system in the game. It has two planets, one of which is a hot super-Jupiter with a molten moon. The aforementioned moon possesses the single most powerful iron deposit in the universe at the moment thanks to its liquid iron oceans.
The gas giant is about 1.6x the size of Jupiter, and 3x its mass
Epsilon Eridani
Epsilon Eridani is a sun-like star and the furthermost one from earth that I have currently implemented. It has a confirmed large gas giant, named Aegir, that lies near the habitable zone of the star, which makes it a very interesting world for observation.
In Solar Nations 2, it has a moon that
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