v28.10 Update Notes

A huge amount of gratitude to all of the Sinners who’ve joined our community! To say that we’ve been blown away by the amount of support is an understatement.

We’ve prepared a modest update from feedback we’ve gotten from the community, bug reports and more. Look for a larger update in the coming month or so.

Note: You will need to re-subscribe to all mods for this update. We apologize for the hassle; this will be a one-time thing.

This update will break save games and replays! You can still play them by using the previous version (see below).

[h3]Previous Version Instructions[/h3]
If you wish to finish up your game on the previous version, do the following:

Select ‘Sins of a Solar Empire II’ in your Steam Library.
Click the gear icon in the upper right.
Select Properties → Betas
Select 'previous_edition' from the Beta Participation dropdown.
Steam will update you to the latest files.
To switch to latest repeat step 4 and select ‘None’

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Sanity

Our fleet has arrived at a phase jump inhibitor and is now trapped!
Our fleet has arrived at a phase jump inhibitor and is now trapped!
Our fleet has arrived at a phase jump inhibitor and is now trapped!
Our fleet has arrived at a phase jump inhibitor and is now trapped!
Our fleet has arrived at a phase jump inhibitor and is now trapped!
FIXED!

Settings

Added camera rotate and pan speed settings.
Added camera zoom speed settings.
Added shadow quality setting.
Reduce this if you are having memory problems.
Added clip cursor to window setting.
Added setting to disable zooming to cursor attaching to strike craft or missiles. This is now default behavior.
Moved DPI setting to User Interface.
Updated Settings screen design.
More to come!

Gameplay

Fixed and improved auto-cast for single target burst damage abilities. They should now activate properly and favor targeting capital ships, starbases and titans (e.g., Ragnarov’s Piercing Shot).
Fixed non-unit-targeted abilities not auto-casting correctly (e.g., Sova’s Deploy Missile Battery).
Fixed point defense weapons to prevent overkill.
Fixed being able to change home planet if the planet’s home planet bonus civilian or military slots are in use.
Changed establishing a new home planet to transition after a delay, rather than instantly.
Improved Novalith Cannon auto-cast target selection.
Improved fleet factory distribution logic.
Updated Unity Recall target filter to ignore construction vessels.
Fixed units and wreckage getting instead of stars (and thus unable to claim wreckage).
Fixed estimated incoming damage with Armor points.
Fixed max linear speed possibly growing to infinity and beyond if using faster ship move speed option.
Fixed pathfinding not calculating travel time between stars properly.
Fixed starting home planet buff not always getting applied to gravity wells 2 jumps away.
Fixed Vasari carrier moving to attack logic.
Fixed units being able to ignore movement speed debuffs by being in a formation.
Unity abilities now properly handle changes to the Advent player’s home planet.
Fixed refund exotic exploit (you know who you were…).

Balance

Advent Deliverance Engine:
- Moved to Tier 4 Harmony research.
- Four new techs (2 per faction) added to unlock faction specific Deliverance abilities and upgrades.
- Deliverance Engine cooldown increased from 180 to 300 seconds.
Rebalanced excessive Psi Boost ratios: decreased Psi Power ratio for Guidance, Vertigo and Malice.
Rebalanced Minor Faction raids:
- Range increased from 25 AU to 30 AU.
- Raids no longer require line-of-sight to use.
Rebalanced Pirate Boarding Crew:
- Influence cost increased from 1 to 2.
- Charges increased from 2 to 3.
- Purchase cooldown increased from 180 to 240 seconds.
Rebalanced Point Defense:
- Point defense has been rebalanced to account for the overkill bug fix mentioned above. Point defense units will now scale far more effectively with the number of units.
Rebalanced Proselytize:
- Now required dominant culture in a gravity well to be used. This will prevent the ability from being used to trivially place Advent culture anywhere on the map if uncontested; instead temporarily augment an existing culture push. This should also remove early game Proselytize/Conversion rush strategies that were proving dominant and difficult to counter. We will continue to monitor Unity abilities for use case and power level.
Rebalanced Sanctify cooldown from 300/180/90 to 300/210/120 seconds.
Rebalanced Tempest Vessel:
- Light Swarm missile rate of fire increased from 6.5 to 8.5 seconds.
- Decreased missile salvo density from 0.3 seconds to launch all missiles to 0.75 seconds.
- Decreased range from 8000 to 7500km to make kiting slightly riskier and to ensure it never outranges defense platforms.
- Build time increased from 22 to 25 seconds to make it harder to mass-up early on and to ensure the Disciple keeps its build time advantage.
Rebalanced Temple of Pilgrimage - can now be built on all planet types as intended.
Rebalanced Vasari Mobile Rulership - this Item has been temporarily restricted to the Vorastra titan.
Fixed Vasari factions from losing planet item slots at max logistics level on Ferrous, Ice and Volcanic planets.
Rebalanced all missiles speed, grouping and lifetimes.

Numerous AI improvements.
Decreased the jump in difficulty from Hard to Unfair AI.

User Interface

Added key bindings to hold zoom in and out (simulating mouse wheel with keyboard).
Added ability to bind extra mouse buttons (but not left or right).
Fixed selection group hotkey press from focusing on hotkey group when not wanted. Now needs to be double pressed within time tolerance.
Added a second keybinding for scrub future orbits. Tilde [`] not standard on some keyboards.
Added fix for mouse movement through Remote Desktop.
Fixed inverted mouse deltas on absolute (Virtual Desktop) code path.

Tooltips

Fixed Magnetic Singularity buff tooltip rendering the incorrect slow modifier value.
Fixed buff tooltip lines in Essence Reservoir, Nanite Armor and Strength of the Fallen that did not render stack scaling correctly.
Fixed Novalith ability description.

Optimizations

Numerous optimizations for mesh, shadow, and particle rendering, etc. Some of these will be significant on certain hardware combinations.

Modding

Added scenario drop in folder. Makes authoring and playing custom scenarios much easier. No more having to create mods for them.
Fixed Mod.io list box corruption on scrolling.
Fixed Apply Mod changes not refreshing window areas.
Fixed asserts if no skybox setup in scenario.
Fixed modding Apply button always enabled on game startup. Should only be enabled when any changes have been made to be applied.
Fixed mixed mod uniform merging creating duplicates of values. For example, if a mod had a scenario of the same name, the scenario would be duplicated in the front-end scenario list.
Fixed lobby not handling scenarios from mods that only the host has.

Misc.

Added new planet name, Solon.
Updated red beacon color on the upper-right of planet icons (enemy phase jump inhibitor).
Updated numerous strings.
Updated game credits.
Updated player guide link.
Updated Vasari Subspace Rupture vfx.
Fixed larger units not being able to travel through wormholes.
Fixed duplicate phase lane crash.
Fixed Mod.io login bug.

Misc. Bug Fixes

Fixed multiplayer sync error.
Fixed multiplayer last used game settings not being saved.
Fixed polling input actions getting stuck as ‘down’ if mapped to duplicate keys.
Fixed quotes in Steam player names breaking multiplayer logins.
Fixed Trader planet item naming issue.
Fixed some Tutorial bugs.
Fixed error in Exotics tutorial - Exotic Refinery is Tier 2, not Tier 3.
Fixed Advent Culture Suppression research icon.
Fixed lobby options not being applied properly.
Fixed play point effect not showing up on newly created buff agents.

Game Windows

Added new brush for list box item hover.
Fixed popup purchase item background window not being wide enough.
Improved Escape menu layout.
Improved lobby window layout.
Improved new/load front-end screen layout.
Removed random player icons from lobby.
Added new front-end watermarks.
Fixed margins on planet window.

Misc. Crashes and Asserts

Fixed assert if Minor Faction player colonizes planet without simple planet level.
Fixed crashing issues with save games.
Removed alert on load save games with divergent frameworks.
Suppressed setting JSON read errors.