v1.3 Changelog

***Released***

Overview

We are addressing issues with micromanagement of your growing empire. Here are some of the improvements we're providing:

• Planetary Governors Choose Governors to rule planets in your place, freeing you focus on grander strategic goals. These Governors decide what Planetary Improvements to build.

• Improved Ship and Fleet management We've introduced numerous UI enhancements to help manage large numbers of ships and fleets in your empire.

• Improved Ship Destination Interface  A newly redesigned Ship Destination Interface will help you organize the movement of large fleets across the galaxy.

Please note that some of following changes are only enabled if you begin a new game.

Full Patch Notes

Visual / Audio Improvements

• Added new background music track

• Added new news robot animations

• Added orbit and follow cameras to the Battle Viewer

Micromanagement Improvements

• Governors

• Governors build Colony Improvements for you. To choose a Governor, first research "Interstellar Governance".  Then choose a Colony and press the "Manage" button.  A list of available Governors appears on the right-hand side of the window.

• You may remove a Governor and take back control of a Colony at any time.  

• The Colony Window now allows you to sort the Colonies based on Name, Manufacturing, Research, Wealth, Population, Influence, and Approval.

• Ships are now grouped into Fleets under the "Ships" tab instead of being listed out individually.  You can expand the Fleets to inspect individual ships within each Fleet stack.

• Added a "Fleets" category to the Governs > Commands window.  This allows you to redirect large groups of ships all at once.

• Redesigned the Ship Destination window to add tabs for each destination type and included a minimap.  

• Shipyard and Starbases now have their own tabs to Main Game Window

Balance

• Lowered the cost of larger hulls slightly

• Fleets are more likely to dogpile on desirable targets.

• Fleets will be less timid when picking targets.

• Added a Game Settings option to disable the AI surrendering.

• AI should build more Economic Starbases

• Increased turn lifetime of strategies that were 5 turns to 10 turns

• Eliminated the free stuff bonuses gifted AI was receiving due to improved overall AI improvements

• Removed the free techs and free ideology points from Genius AI due to improved AI behavior generally

• Made Incredible difficulty level get more goodies for those who want to be punished

• Made Godlike AI difficulty get more goodies to punish the crazies

• AI only updates tax policy fully when a new AI strategy is chosen (instead of every turn)

• AI is more likely to use colony ships to explore unknown stars in the hopes of finding a planet

• AI gradually adjusts its spending ratios per turn rather than trying to do it all in one turn to give time for other civilization-wide measures to have a chance.

• Fixed bug that caused the AI to min and max its spending every other turn under certain AI strategies

• AI puts more effort into keeping its people happier

• AI does better dealing with ship maintenance and its effect on its economy

• Planet project production is now capped at 100% now.

• Changed all Planetary Projects to 5% from 10%

• Removed Ultra Transformer improvement.

• Remove all techs that give adjacency bonuses.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug that caused the graphs to appear corrupted

• Fixed broken progress bars for shipyards in colony screen

• Fixed missing ship image and ship name in the upgrade window.

• Game checks to see if Steam is online before allowing the user to register.

• AI will now pursue more specialized/expensive techs than rather than always going for the cheaper tech.

• If the network connection is slow, the game will no longer crash when trying to access the Hall of Fame.

• Fix to a bug where AI would sometimes see a planet that was outside its vision if it was close enough to another planet

• Fix to a bug (LONG overflow) that could cause the AI to not expand as quickly as it should

• Fixed bug that caused the AI to sometimes zero out its research when it felt economically weak

• The Colony Manufacturing and Influence sort buttons now sort the colony lists correctly

• Increased turn lifetime of strategies from 5 turns to 10 turns

• Adding fix to the slider code where the sliders would sometimes go negative.

• Improved general stability of games with large numbers of AI players

• Fixed a crash when assigning teams in games with a large number of AI opponents

• Fixed a crash when checking and unchecking the "add random opponents" repeatedly.

• Fixed a crash that would happen if you deleted a custom race and then immediately started a new game.

• Fixed a crash for restoring multiplayer games

• Resources at the top of the screen are no longer being trimmed

• The tech tree specialization nodes were using the wrong square background.  

• Addressed a UI problem where some drop down lists were appearing behind buttons

• Fixed minor text layout problem with Starbase Context Window

• Fixed a number overflow problem with improvements with 0 manufacturing cost.

• Updated appearance icons for custom races.  Removed some duplicate entries and updated colors for others.

• Spaces are no longer allowed for save filenames where space was the only character.

• Removed the white streaks in the Iconian faction leader movie when choosing it as your custom faction foreground movie.

• Fixing a minor issue with the Terran colony and Terran constructor ships where hyperdrive modules weren't appearing on both sides

• Removed the yellow hex ring around the Approval Relic

• Planetary defending fleets with zero attack power are no longer invulnerable to attack.

• Set the default AI difficulties to Normal instead of Easy

• Mega Events are now disabled in the Campaign and the Tutorial.

• Tutorial and Campaign will no longer hang when loading if mods are enabled

• Added a diplomacy modifier that calls out other races as warmongers when they declare war too often.

• Changed the game so anyone with a transport can invade with conventional warfare if you don't have the tech yet.  This solves a problem where a player who unlocked the "Malevolent - Dangerous " Ideology, received a transport, but couldn't use it to invade a planet because they hadn't researched the invasion tech.

• When fleets merge they now attempt to take on whatever move directive is currently issued from the incoming fleet.

• If an AI leader is busy with another player, it won't make a trade offer to a second player.

• Fixed Fog of War bug where objects in a row that goes from visible to exposed were not hidden.

• Added a Browse button to the Custom Faction Choose Picture Screen that will open an Explorer window directly to the location for copying images.

• Map Editor: fixed problems with the preview thumbnails

• Map Editor:  Do longer allow players to set a "recommended players" count of more than 100 when saving their map

• Loading a custom map screen now displays the selected map's size.

• Fixed a crash that occurred when the map editor tried to access DLC ships.

• Fixed a problem with that would cause planet icon tooltips to break and show invalid data

• Fixed a couple game-within-game lobby crashes

• Fix an issue where "Unlikable" trait causes you to actually be liked.

• Address a problem with uploading custom factions to Steam.

• Fixed a crash when moving a fleet into shipyard at the end of turn