Version 0.45 released
This is a quite exciting version I would say. A lot of stuff which I was coding in the last month and which were disabled due to being incomplete became finished and enabled now. Which means two big features. The first is the battle simulator which allows you to examine how the squadron you designed performs in a real combat versus an enemy squadron. It comes in two versions, Quick one which lets you check the overall results and Full which lets you examine detailed action logs showing which ship targeted which ship in which combat round and how much damage went to shields and how much to the ship’s hull, which ship was targeted by missiles, how many guided missiles were jammed, which ship was assaulted by fighters and how many of those were fended off by point defense weapons and how many bombs hit the target. The second big feature is the ship hulls unlocked by technologies and the ships screen. The screen allows you to examine all ship hulls, promote blueprints to prototypes, speed up the prototyping period and use some monetary incentives to make the imperial designers work harder and faster without their lame excuses why the new ship hull can’t be ready for production yet. In addition there are bunch of other features and changes like auto queuing of research option, redone houses relations, more alien races, etc. This also means this version might be quite unbalanced (note you can still play the old v0.44 via the Beta branch) and also note that the new stuff might be somewhat rough (but not necessarily, the battle simulator is decently polished for example although not 100% complete).
I would also like to thank the community. This is my fourth Early Access game and I can say that the Stellar Monarch series fans are the most forgiving when it comes to my experimentation with the new versions and those who understand the most the true nature of E.A. This attitude grants me a lot of freedom during experimentation and redoing/breaking/replacing features without the fear of the community’s reaction. This really speeds up the development process and let me make a better game in the long run, for which I want to thank you very much! Appreciated.
– [feature] Military/Ships screen with ship hulls listed, filters, option to mark favorite hulls, etc.
– [feature] Ship hulls are now properly unlocked by technologies.
– [feature] Ship hulls Blueprints can be promoted to Prototypes.
– [feature] Option to buy extra Prototype promotions (quite expensive) which can be used as an alternative to scientific research.
– [feature] Battle simulator works now. Divided into “Quick” (where you see just the result vs a selected opponent) and “Full” where you can see detailed action logs describing what happened and why it happened.
– [feature] Noble Houses relations redone to 7 tiers, also rescaled opinions to 100 opinion per relation tier and simplified it a bit (now opinion directly translates to relations without a delay).
– [feature] Gameplay option to auto queue technologies (for people who are too lazy to click on those or who thinks the emperor has better things to do than deal with research). The algorithm will strive to queue it in the way that you reach the top level technologies as quickly as possible. You can toggle it on/off anytime.
– [remove] Removed armada (since this mechanic made no sense with the new wide front combat model anyway, maybe it will be back in another form later).
– [misc] Renamed Parasites to Arachnians (I plan to use parasites as a planetary feature).
– [misc] Switched naming of ship class with ship type (to make it like in the real world).
– [misc] Various ships cleanups (hull materials names, AI ship weapons compositions, removed unused Drones, etc).
– [content] More ships (all ships from all technologies unlocking ship hulls), more technologies unlocking new hulls.
– [content] Additional technologies.
– [content] Added all planned alien races (some are only defined and not activated in the game yet). Also properly divided population into biological/mechanical (later it could be used for different effects of weapons for example).
– [balance] Redone and rebalanced AI civilized offensives (now also takes into account racial luxury percentage, which means powerful but decadent races who spend most income on luxuries will not be that much of a threat).
– [interface] Load/Save tooltip with a more clear explanation of a failed load savefile due to old version save which also indicates the Beta version availability.
– [interface] Added luxury percentage value to intelligence screen.
– [interface] Improved noble houses relations tooltip (now displaying clearly how much opinion each tier of relations requires) and improved several other house tooltips.
– [interface] Intelligence screen shows the emperor’s portrait for the Empire, also rebels portrait is randomized now.
– [fix] Small bug where super hostile house was overwriting the super hostile one upon start.
– [fix] Civilized races were making no offensive plans in mid/late game making the quite passive as the game progressed.
– [fix] Parasites never woke up the entire game (note that Parasites were renamed to Arachnians).
Compatibility note: INCOMPATIBLE, this version will not work with old saves (note that each time a savefile compatibility is broken a new Beta branch with the old version is created so you can always finish your game in progress).
