*** Released 4/11/18 ***

Hello!

Today we are releasing v3.0 today which is a massive update to the game.  Here are some of the major new features:

Features

Taxes

You can set your tax rate on the govern screen.  Increasing the tax rate will decrease your Civilization's morale. You can decide if you want your GDP to remain in the hands of your citizens, or go toward supporting your latest war effort or infrastructure project. Note that high taxation does not effect the morale of synthetic species, feel free to give everything to government when playing the Yor.

New Tutorial

Updated tutorial and a re-worked user experience to better introduce new players to the game

Tourism

Tourism is now based on the amount of tiles you own. This is doubled if these tiles are connected to your home planet and multiplied by Tourism improvements on each colony. The more Influence you have, the more space you control, the more money you will make from Tourism. (this change requires Crusade)

Food

Arable Land has been added. Most planets have at least 1 arable land tile. Don't worry you can destroy pretty nature and build a parking lot. Farms can only be built on arable land. Cities no longer require special resources, just food. The higher the class of the planet, the more likely it is to have Arable Land. (this change requires Crusade)

Extreme Worlds

Extreme planet frequently increased substantially.

• Corrosive Worlds: Can be colonized by Carbon based life but not by Synthetic without tech
• Bacterial Worlds: Can be colonized by Synthetic but not by Carbon without tech
• Frozen worlds: Can now be colonized by Synthetic civs without tech
• Barren worlds: Can now be colonized by Synthetic civs without tech
• Radioactive worlds: Can now be colonized by Silicon civs without tech

AI

• AI is more likely to request tribute.
• AI will use larger ships for defender class vessels
• AI values trade routes based on wealth rather than pure quantity
• New AI evaluation system for deciding when to build large ships vs. small ships.
• AI now updates its ship blueprints when a tech is researched rather than every N turns reducing turn times and making the AI smarter.
• Improvements to AI research
• AI is more willing to talk to players it doesn't like.
• AI will talk more to you regarding your evil immoral ways.
• Made AI "dumber" on lower difficulty levels.
• Slight HP adjustment on genius AI.
• Improved AI researching of extreme planet techs
• AI will give extra defense coverage for its capital world.
• AI is better at stationing defenses around key worlds rather than spreading them evenly.
• AI smarter about how many ships to keep in orbit based on planet class and other factors
• AI smarter about when to build defenders
• AI slightly smarter in handling garrisons
• AI improvements in research choosing
• Better AI constructor navigation late Game
• AI a lot smarter about trading resources with player to match marketplace pacing.
• AI defends worlds a tiny bit better.
• Decreased the default AI difficulty to beginner
• Weakened AI fleets will now intelligently regroup behind the lines to reform larger fleets rather than fight to the death.  AI Supreme Commander now looks at fleets as pieces of a much larger task force.
• Reduced the AI war threshold from -5 to -3
• Proclaiming friendship with someone will make their enemies dislike you more.
• AIs that want to go to war who are running a government that can't go to war will switch to a form of government that can declare war upon their next opportunity so that they can declare war.
• Small adjustment to the weighting of transport ships so that the AI is more likely to build them if it has none of them at all.
• AI more likely to place legions on important planets.
• AI more likely to rush defensive ships if it feels it is threatened.

Balance

• Tourism buildings converted to the new system.
• Maintenance introduced for many planetary improvements to balance the new tourism money
• Galactic Capital converts 1% of tiles into tourism money
• Balance pass on ship hull maint.
• Reduced starbase maintenance on early modules.
• Reduced starbase mining output to be more balanced.
• Update Culture Traits and Improvements to be the same in Base as in Crusade.
• Adjust Biosphere Perfection description to be more generic, since the planets unlocked are now dependent on the race type.
• Space Elevator level up bonus increased from 0.5 to 1.0
• Xeno Factory cost reduced from 200 to 100
• Resistance planet traits changed to military
• Remove durational planetary projects
• Balance pass on ship designs for the AI to generate better ships.
• Combat Rating adjustment to be more accurate.
• Stellar Bomber now starts favored by default
• Cosmetic numbering changes for hull sizes (i.e. how many crew they hold)
• Smaller ships now move faster
• Reduced advanced defense costs
• Phasor effect is blue-ish instead of green-ish.
• Most improvements are now destructible
• Modest increase in cost to improvements
• General moving around of improvements in the tech tree to reduce the number of improvements early game to just ones that the player might actually use.
• Approval growth curve changed to provide more benefits and more penalties for high and low approval
• Capital World now provides 4 morale by default (instead of 2)
• Colonies now start with 3 morale (instead of 1)
• Increased the colony capital raw production default from 1 to 5 to improve early game pacing
• Increased the weighting of HP when determining starship strength.
• Move Solar Power plant to be unlocked by Advanced construction in base game.
• improvements now give a percentage of their production cost as credits when destroyed
• If a player doesn't have any ideology traits unlocked, the primary ideology is now determined by the ideology personality trait, instead of always returning neutral
• Alliances can expire.
• Added checks to diplomacy system to make sure that you can't offer non-aggression treaty to ally.
• Moved Planetary Invasion up in the technology tree so invasions can begin earlier.
• Shared borders diplomatic penalty increased but greatly decreased for certain personality types.

UI

• Added a new popup giving a brief overview of 3.0 features.
• Added suggested system specs for different map settings
• Minor tweak to music for planet window.
• Polish pass on the shipyard screen
• Renamed Jamming to Dodge.
• Fixed a case where the Bazaar button tooltip said it was not available when it is
• fixed issue with stat breakdown tooltip and tourism tooltip where it was doubling up multipliers it should've been aggregating
• Fixed several cases where UI was breaking in medium UI
  moved tactical speed to be grouped with other stats under Ship Role on the shipyard screen
• Removed Attached Starbases line from shipyard screen
• Fixed issue where the approval breakdown tooltip headers weren't accounting for the unrest and colony limit modifiers
• Added tooltip to "Set Capital" button
• Shrink queue in the Planet Window
• Added max players enforcement (controlled by cap categorized by galaxy size)
• Approval rate displays as a % on the top right instead of just an integer.
• Updated the social/military manufacturing breakdown tooltips to be more accurate to how the math is being calculated for the stats
• Fixed issue where the max num of players wasn't being updated whenever a custom map was selected
• Fixed issue where influence tooltip was sometimes showing up blank on the edges of larger influence blobs
• updated net income tooltip to be more coherent
• Tweak text in the Production window tutorial description to reflect button title change to Civilization.
• Colony income, tourism income, and commonwealth income are now always displayed on the economy screen
• Added patch notes pop up window
• Adjust size of the Anomaly Window to fit longer anomaly descriptions and bonuses.
• Extreme Planet Icons are no longer too small on 4K screens
• Radial icons were too small in larger resolutions

Performance

• Power consumption tweak for Surface Pro users.
• Broad reduction in memory requirements.

Map Sizes

Update to map sizes for better balance:

• Tiny: 20 to 28 sectors
• Small: 36 to 40 sectors
• Large: 90 to 70 sectors
• Huge: 120 to 90 sectors
• Gigantic: 180 to 120 sectors
• Immense: 250 to 150 sectors

(didn't touch the really big map sizes so the lunatics -- you know who you are -- won't murder me).

Fixes

• Typo fixes
• Fixed an issue where players with a galactic wonder queued on one planet could start building it on another
• Fixed to fix memory overruns which lead to crashes
• Fixed several crashes related to destroying planets
• Fixed a rare crash related to fighting near starbases or shipyards
• Adjust size of Anomaly window to fit longer anomaly descriptions and bonuses.
• Added checks to the invasion system to prevent a possible crash
• Crash fix for the case where a personal transport is using a ship design it can't find.
• Fixed a formatting issue with ship production on the economy screen (extra space)
• Fixed missing Nebulas in the base game
• Added a fix for galaxy starting without a planet
• Fixed several crashes related to destroying planets
• Crash fix for the case where a ship design is missing a component.
• Fixed exploit whereby the player could potentially trade an AI to an alliance no matter what else was happening
• Fixed issue where it would play the "bought" sound when using the "Build Asteroid Mining Base" hotkey, whether you could afford it or not
• Fixed issue where changing ownership of a station wasn't properly ejecting the other faction's ships from the station
• Fixed missing Artocarpus Viriles icon
• Fixed issue where trade values that evaluate to negative would screw up the pie bar display in the trade screen
• Fix missing sort descriptions on for some of the Generic Tech Specializations.
• Fix for crashing events that spawn ships in a player's territory.
• Fixed issue where the loading window was not unhiding whenever starting a multiplayer game as the client.
• Added null checks to invasion system to prevent a possible crash
• Crash fix for the case where a personal transport is using a ship design it can't find.
• Fixed a formatting issue with ship production on the economy screen
• Added code to check to see if a custom faction was loaded in intrigue without a valid tech tree (because crusade was disabled) and tries to fix the tech tree value

Mercenaries

• Happy People mercenary nerfed. Provides 3 morale instead of 5.
• Fix assorted mis-matched descriptions on the mercenary ships.

Crusade

• AI more likely to have garrisons on planets.
• Shared borders without a treaty has greater negative relations impact.
• Central Bank now provides +5 raw wealth
• Hot Springs benefit reduced from +2 to +1
• Pilgrims mission benefit increased.
• Farms no longer have a maintenance cost.
• Eliminated resource costs (other than food) from Cities
• Market Center provides +1 to approval in adjacent bonuses rather than wealth
• Entertainment Networks now provide wealth bonus to adjacent tiles rather than approval
• Reduced the mining power of starbase mining operations (this is to balance the reduced costs of resources elsewhere)
• Balance pass on starbase defense bonuses
• Snuggler Colony gives approval bonus to adjacent tiles. I mean, they're snugglers after all!
• Lots of balance changes to make the technology tree progression more responsive to the player.
• Brutal soldering benefit changed to a %.
• Ideology cost goes up equally in all categories to encourage players to pick an ideology and stick to it.
• Thalan now receive Eminence instead of Star Federation tech for free
• Xenophobic ability now has a substantial influence penalty
• General balance pass through the improvement tree to reduce the amount of resources needed to go with the recent reduction to the mining capabilities.
• Several technologies now provide a percentage bonus to growth
• Legions only require Durantium to train.
• Colony Capital now provides Approval to adjacent improvements
• Colony Capital now provides Population bonus to adjacent improvements
• Most galactic achievements or special improvements now require an exotic resource.
• Interstellar Mining brought forward into the tech tree
• Updated Planetary Defense Dome tech to give a resistance bonus instead of Planetary
• Defense since the Planetary Defense stat is no longer used in Crusade.
• Removed the pointless enhanced training specialization tech group.
• Tweaked the preference weight of the garbled text so that other garbled text options have a chance of being used.
• Manufacturing Capital now provides a +5 level to adjacent tiles instead of 3.
• Reduced growing tech cost slightly.
• Mission reward for treasure hunt max reduced from 500 to 300.
• Upgraded colony capital morale given +1 more.
• Fixed invasion crash due to not having enough swarm particles.
• Balance pass on Crusade Improvements.
• Invasion crash fix.
• Fixed a crash when trying to use a civ created in Crusade in base game
• Custom factions can now get the "Overlord"
• Fixed to fix memory overruns which lead to crashes
• Fixed an issue that caused the game to disable music if you use specified music for an event
• Updated the Espionage HUD icon to be more sneaky
• Space Elevator level up bonus increased from 0.5 to 1
• Xeno Research Lab cost reduced from 100 to 75
• Reduced the factory production bonus slightly.
• Exploration Treaty moved earlier in the tech tree.

Precursor Worlds

• Reduced credits from anomalies by about 20%
• Fixed a lot of incorrect text descs on the precursor anomaly (says it gives 500 research when it actually only gives 300, etc).

Revenge of the Snathi

Reduced the Snathi mining modifier from a flat 1 to multiplier 0.2