Imagine Earth News

[h3]Hey Space Cowboys,[/h3]

It's been a few weeks since we last updated anything. Time for a sign of life from the Imagine Earth Universe.

[h3]Weekly Challenge - New Game Mode[/h3]



In this brand new mode, you will receive a new mission every Monday. This colonization mission has the highest priority and must be completed by Sunday. The objective is to obtain the sole management license for a planet in a competitive process. It is advisable to familiarize yourself with the planet's conditions and opponents beforehand by checking the info panel. Loading or saving is not possible in the global competition. Measure yourself against other colonists in weekly high scores and quarterly or yearly seasons.

[h3]Beat the developers 2021[/h3]



Quarterly or annual seasons officially start at the turn of the year. But you can still win the title for 2021 by successfully completing the last 5 missions, and Martin and I will also play the weekly challenge. Let's see who comes out on top in the leaderboard!
Of course we have more ideas, soon the weekly missions will get five objectives to gain additional victory points and we want to generate certain events that will make the gameplay more varied and fun. We also rely on your experience and feedback to figure out what could make this competition more exciting for everyone.

[h3]New storage system[/h3]



It's only a small button, but it's strategically important! Now, in the warehouse panel, with another click on the "Automatically purchase" button, you can not only have the quantity purchased for which warehouse space has been reserved. With automatically fill, resources are purchased until all storage space is full. This makes scenarios possible where the supply of the population with a resource is completely controlled by the purchase. This is a possible strategy to save the construction of a lot of infrastructure.

[h3]New mountains the world needs[/h3]



We have added a new set of big and small mountains that will be used on planets with the Frozen, Swamp and Barren themes to provide even more visual variety in our universe. I don't really need any further words, just have a look.

[h3]Ambient Sound System Worldwide[/h3]



Our world sounds system is finally finished. Now you can hear the birds chirping in the forest or the traffic in cities when you run your camera over them. Enjoy the chirping of crickets in the desert and the whistling of the wind in mountains or the gentle roar of the sea. It's not entirely new but there were about half the ambient sounds in the game and the volume control, now lets the sound come in smoothly and overlap well.

[h3]AI factions more sensitive to climate change[/h3]



Balancing - AI behavior in case of Global Warming is adjusted, factions are now also more sensitive to climate change. AI also now mines rocks only when there are no valuable resources left.

[h3]Control optimization [/h3].

You can now prioritize resource mining even when the reservoir is full and redirect your drone to it.

[h3]Item display[/h3]



The number of available items is now displayed in the inventory in a decidedly snappier way.

[h3]Steam Awards nomination[/h3]

Hey, why don't you nominate Image Earth for the Labor of Love Award? After seven years in Early Access, you'd think it would do our little two man team some good ;)



[h3]Fixed Now[/h3]

• Editor - Planets that are opened in the editor will now start with the correct amount of tech licenses.
  
• Editor - Forests that get under water when terraforming, i.e. lowering terrain, finally die completely and disappear. Previously, tree stumps were still visible, and removing them from entire continents is simply annoying.
  
• Editor - The saved but not loaded settings for selected factions and more.
  
• UI - The exchange of upgrades is no longer done via the building list, this functionally clashed with the option to activate all upgrades at once.
  
• UI - New subtitles in all menu screens, so you always know which game mode you are in.
  [UI - The order of the factions in the score panel in the bottom right corner of the screen changes on the fly during the game.
  
• Sound - Too many repeated warnings when attacked by Xrathul and pirates, for example.
  [UI - The highscore screen has been extensively reworked.
  
• Graphics - The normal textures of the fossil fields is corrected, never looked nicer.
  
• Graphics - The main menu now fades in from black when flying towards the planet at the beginning.
  
• Graphic - In the meantime all planets had rings like Saturn.
  
• Graphics - In cutscenes the camera perspective is no longer distorted.
  
• UI - The slider for how much fossil resources are distributed on a planet is functional again.
  
• UI - The buttons in the game error dialog now work reliably again.
  
• UI - Game over message and completion screen still made it possible to interact with some ingame menus even though the game was over and lost.
  
• Bugs - So far there was a phenomenon of unordered factions appearing on the planet, more than you defined at the beginning of the game round.
  
• UI - 4 display bugs fixed.
  
• UI - The population counter in the planet info panel works again.
  
• Error fixed - NodeInstance.FindNode ArrayTypeMismatchException
  
• Error fixed - PlanetGraphics.UpdateUnitIcons NullReferenceException
  

Warm regards, Jens & Martin



Get the original Imagine Earth soundtrack and help plant trees in the real world!


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On Halloween, meteors and asteroids crashing down on your colony from orbit will be the least of your worries! With tremendous force and destructive power, unknown flying objects from space descend on your global cities, but they also contain precious resources worth exploiting...

Equip your towers with defensive lasers or energy shields to protect your colonists from disaster and defend your facilities and homes. But watch carefully if they hit something important, or if you can bring them down to exploit them.

So it's the same game as usually with asteroids. When you open a space rift to hurl some at your facilities of competing space corporations, you often also give them valuable gifts in the form of the minerals and metals they contain.

[h3]Dear civilization managers and do-gooders, [/h3]

Martin and I just wanted to quickly let you know today that EGX kicked off in London today and Serious Bros are happily on board. Of course, the show has a juicy event page with fat discounts for spanking new games on Steam. You can find a banner for the sale on Imagine Earth's page. Also available all weekend, the official free demo for the game and a

[h3]40% discount on Imagine Earth - Planetary Colonization.[/h3]




Treat yourselves to this, ideal for a no-obligation taster of the colony management business and immediately move up with the biggest discount the game has ever been available at.

I'll be there live and we've got a nice spot right next to the entrance, so I'll be standing around and willing to answer all your questions and take your suggestions. Come by! Cheers, Jens

As you can see, my cell phone cam is broken, otherwise I could have taken some fancier photos for you.




[h3]Get The Free Imagine Earth Demo - Playable the whole weekend.[/h3]

But it's also about the games so check out what the EGX has to offer in terms of interesting news and hits, this one I think is even more focused on small, original indie games.

And of course that's why our Green Planet Bundle is also reduced. Where you get the original soundtrack to the game and the extra revenue is put into planting new trees in the real world.





Join our Discord Community for exclusive news and access to preview versions of future updates!


Get the Original Soundtrack of Imagine Earth and help planting trees in the real world!

[h3]Honored guild of planet managers,[/h3]

our monthly update is out, this time mainly fine tunings and fixes. But at the end we're announcing the next big feature: The Daily Missions game mode. We are always amazed ourselves what can go wrong in a global simulation and where the devil hides in the details. Anyway, the bugs are also getting more and more bizarre and today's cleanup post is an amusing collection of such occurrences.



A bit of a gut-wrenching September update comes because we had a lot of bureaucratic stuff to do that kept us from generating cool new features. I had to write a colossal final report for the German federal grant that allowed us to stay independent until version 1.0, and porting the Playstation version is keeping Martin busy with some pitfalls longer than he imagined. All the more we're both looking forward to getting back to our core business and just building fancy new stuff and DLC for Imagine Earth and you, respectively. Soon we'll be sharing with the world a roadmap of what's in store for you in the galaxies of our game world. As always, thank you for your sustained interest in our climate crisis simulator project and the obligatory request to support us with a review if you haven't already. Nothing helps Indie Studios on Steam better than this support, except of course your personal feedback on the latest update, the balancing in the current game and what other wishes remain unfulfilled. But now let's get down to the nitty gritty. Have fun with it, Jens & Martin

[h3]Czech translation[/h3]



First of all, we would like to announce that Imagine Earth is now also translated into Czech! We wish all Czech players a lot of fun with the new version that was created by Jan Balek of Balek Localization.

[h3]The World Congress[/h3]



Unfortunately, the central diplomatic instance for all global factions was no longer accessible to players after successfully completing missions and competitions. The NPCs then blithely discussed tax increases and funding measures among themselves, while the humanoid player was left out in the cold and faced with a fait accompli. And on top of that, the World Congress featured the wrong representatives of their own faction, apparently the characters from past games. All history now, of course.

[h3]AI advanced training in cleverness[/h3]



The AI in Imagine Earth once again behaves a bit more logically in this update. NPC factions now actively use research licenses. Also, AIs now only mine rocks when there are no other valuable resources, which previously slowed them down mightily.
In addition, small changes to priorities have resulted in AI corporations no longer planting trees, and as soon as reforestation became necessary due to climate change, they planted exactly the most inappropriate type of tree in each of the eight different biomes on the planets. This seemingly tiny inconsistency may have led to the fact that in the case of an impending climate collapse, exactly nothing was done to counteract the catastrophe. Which let the economic strategy of the companies turn out rather kamikaze moderately.

[h3]Apply All Tool[/h3]



If you hold down the Alt key during the game you can now install all upgrades of one type on all applicable buildings at the same time again. This is exactly how it works with tools, all fields that could use a cleanup will be cleaned in one go, or all buildings that need a repair will be repaired.

[h3]The building list [/h3]



A must-have management feature for several updates once the colony reaches a global scale. This menu has now received a functional update, the header display has finally been polished in layout and the button that allows you to repair, clean or mine all affected buildings resources deactivates when no such operations are needed or all have been activated.
Also, we disabled replaceable upgrades from showing as active in this panel. Because it was easy to accidentally swap when you thought there was still something to optimize there.

[h3]Optimization for world editor[/h3]



A particularly perfidious bug had crept into the editor. Although the editor saved the values for victory points and player factions properly, it did not load them itself. So that one then accidentally saved changed conditions. And because of this, the player faction was often left undefined, whereupon the game system simply picked one at random and simply let another unwanted faction land on the planet.

[h3]Taking over towers with the hacker kit [/h3]



Lately, sometimes enemy towers wouldn't let me take them over with hacking tools. This strange bug in the game was also hard to identify, as it only occurred if you had previously loaded a game. It was similar with the planetary shield of the Great Pyramids, until today.

[h3]System voice warnings[/h3]



These helpful announcements have piled up to 3-4 times announcing pirates, storms, Xrathul and other disasters. What was actually important, strategic information thus became outright scare tactics.

[h3]Crash Fixes[/h3]

Finding the remaining occasions for crashes in the game is getting more and more difficult and tricky, all the more heartfelt thanks to all of you who report them to us so diligently. The following rare error messages are now a thing of the past: "NullReference in UpdateValue", "NullReference in UpdateTerritories" and "NullReferenceException in DroneManager.Update".

[h3]Outlook into the next update: Daily Missions[/h3]

Many of you have asked for the game to offer more long-lasting challenges. That's why we will work on a new game mode next, which I would name with the working title "Daily Missions". Players will then be able to colonize a new procedurally generated planet every day where they will have to compete against other corporations. This planetary conquest mission can then only be played for one day to create a high leaderboard ranking. For this, an online league is created in which one can gain the high score lead on a weekly, monthly or even yearly basis.

[h3] Win 1 of 5 keys. Raffle ongoing in #general on our Discord[/h3]


Join our Discord Community for exclusive news and access to preview versions of future updates!


Get the Original Soundtrack of Imagine Earth and help planting trees in the real world!

Dear all, we have been working on improvements, fine tuning and bug fixes for quite a while now. This is the basis for us to offer innovative features for Imagine Earth again from now on! We are very excited about this and hope you are too. If you scroll down to the bottom of the post, you will have the opportunity to name your own planet name in the game.

We are always looking to lower the barriers to entry into the game and gather your feedback. The most common criticism is the chattiness of characters, especially that they seem to explain too many details about buildings and tools to players, interrupting the flow of the game. This is also addressed in this update. The player can consciously choose his difficulty level at the beginning of the campaign and also determine the story mode.

[h3]Minimalist Story Mode[/h3]



Now you can choose which difficulty level you want to play at the beginning of the campaign, and we've included a reduced story mode that allows you to experience the campaign exclusively with the dialogs relevant to the story.

[h3]Building Shader[/h3]



We have added more contrast to the rendering of buildings and forests. This should make them look more vivid, stand out better against the terrain, and give them more intense color depth and shadows. To do this, we turned up the Ambient Occlusion and made it dependent on the time of day and added an exception for metallic surfaces. Sunlight was made a bit stronger overall and more Exposure was added to the night side. Well, you never think what a well-rounded look causes for work.

[h3]New vegetation[/h3]



There is a new, third vegetation in two of the planet themes. Along with the terran forest and the mushroom forest, it is something between deciduous and flower forest. It is rather slightly alien and exotic. There is not much more to say about it, you just have to see it up close.

[h3]Balance of energy production[/h3]



To some players it seemed as if Imagine Earth was virtually trying to coerce them into using renewable energy sources, yet our goal is to represent global warming authentically and keep all avenues open to the player. In fact, the fossil sources in the game were disproportionately unproductive. Now they produce more, but also the deposits in the earth last longer and allow full productivity until the failure of the unit. After all, the main problem in today's world situation on Planet Earth is not that coal and gas are all going, but that we can't burn any more of them without driving global warming to dangerous levels.

[h3]Your opinion counts[/h3]

At this point I'd like to weave in a personal note from the development department. Myself and Martin have been working on this game passionately and dedicated for many years, but currently every update has the stale aftertaste that with every improvement we somehow only create new demands. Some people don't seem to realize that Imagine Earth is an indie game and already has a lot of features under the hood. If you like it, help us with your feedback and write a review, there is nothing that helps the project more.

[h3]Rouno's optimizations[/h3]



There is now a lower start and end goal for population growth in this mission so the challenge is not too demotivating. You can now no longer form an alliance with Joe Dectow, and he no longer builds department stores almost exclusively. The landing permit you get after the challenge can now only be used to build up the destroyed colony, which prevents a potential dismantling of the whole colony. All alien NPCs now have greetings out again when you visit their camps, cities or ships. Natives respond more directly to donations.

[h3]Uprisings and pandemics limited[/h3]

We have introduced a limit on negative events, while the emergence of riots in the colony illustrates a dangerous undersupply of the population or the spread of diseases makes too high pollution noticeable, these and similar events should not dominate the gameplay and make it annoying.

[h3]Frozen worlds[/h3]



There is no longer snow on active colony buildings. This doesn't look quite as great as a completely snow-covered cities, but it's worth its weight in gold for building recognizability.

[h3]World Editor[/h3]

This goes out to everyone who has already built their own planets with our terraforming editor and shared them via Steamworks. The editor has received a new briefing tab in the setup. In the future, when you create or update new planets, you will be able to write an introduction, mission description or story that the player will see first when downloading and playing the planet via Steamworks. So far you could already upload a script for planets, but the menu structure in Competition and Freeplay could not display it yet.



[h3]Modding preview[/h3]

The briefing is the first step. Soon you will be able to add your own mission objectives, events and dialogs to this script, use characters from the game as voice actors and possibly create your own characters as well as make buildings. And ultimately combine the planets into a campaign galaxy. This will be great, we just have to ask for some patience for this feature....

[h3]AI optimization[/h3]

We also fixed a funny bug: if the planet creator didn't specify their own faction, the game would assign them an AI faction, which would then blithely mess with players. We've also fixed some of the AI's biggest quirks.

• AI was prevented from actively defending against attackers with items through repairs.
  
• AI now builds fewer special districts and more normal ones.
  
• AI now builds its City Centers not so often next to each other.
  

[h3]Improved controls[/h3]

We made small many control improvements and user interface optimizations, as many newbies were still having trouble getting to grips with managing entire planets.

[h3]Improvements[/h3]

• You can finally blast away giant mountains, just needs lots of ideon bombs and explosives.
  
• Laser cannons now let asteroids with precious metals through, if no house is damaged by them.
  
• We have been able to reduce the memory requirements per frame by at least half. Some out of memory problems should be history.
  
• We optimized the design of the faction and trade menus and threw out unnecessary buttons. Especially important for gamepad control.
  [We have reduced the size of the fossil fields so that you can see more of the landscape.
  [When you log in the Achievements will be reassigned.
  
• The icon selector was lost for a short time and is now back so you can better distinguish whether you are activating a building's option ring or a recommended quick action.
  
• Various improvements to the Tuto mission.
  
• Mining drones were too high over forests
  
• Supply pods are closed when they have been emptied.
  
• Midras speaker has been widened so it is no longer cut off.
  
• The calculation of deep ocean fields has been corrected.
  
• Reduced repair speed on uplink and similar units.
  
• Increased probability that a volcano erupted by Gaia force field will hit its target.
  
• Removed the player's faction indicator in the faction panel from Campaign and Endless because it is only interesting for competitions.
  [Hacking Tools - the radius in which you can use them has been increased and is now visualized.
  
• When too many small lights were in view due to drone processes, light irritation occurred. Hopefully we have solved this satisfactorily now.
  
• Empty models are no longer incorporated.
  

Soundtrack sales in this bundle will be donated to plant trees.



Join us on Discord for regular updates on ongoing development and to share your thoughts and ideas.

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Forest: Powers overlapped with deletion
  
• Intro was not played
  
• Field markers overlapped buildings
  
• Jungle Planet sometimes had bald spots
  
• Forest power did not show Gaia particle effect on target field
  
• Building menu: Selector was out of place
  
• Faction Speaker and Trader sometimes had truncated statements
  
• City shows radius incorrectly
  
• Sometimes placing did not work
  
• SaveEditorPlanet Illegal characters in path
  
• ArgumentException TradingOffer
  
• ArrayTypeMismatchException UpdateFactionAndLiftMeshInstance
  
• NullReferenceException Producer.GetInfluence
  
• CityCenter.Main: Could not find node 'Ufo'
  
• ".. does not exist in ..." - Unity/Xbox IL2CPP strange problem with string constants
  
• Crash: NullReferenceException CombinedString.Append ToolActionButtonRenderer.GetCaption
  [Crash: NullReferenceException Producer.GetInfluence
  
• Crash; at string_concat
  
• Crash in ResxFileResourceManager_GetString
  
• Workshop: Leaderboard not found == no score yet
  

There is a call on our Discord server right now. We invite you to suggest names for planets that we can include in Imagine Earth. We are working on a new game mode where you build a main space station while conquering procedurally generated galaxies. So we need names for all these generated planets. Can you think of names of planets from famous science fiction movies, comics and books that people would like to recognize? e.g. we already have Betelgeuse 7, Melmac, Altair, Kepler 186f.... in the game. We are looking forward to your ideas, post them in the General Channel on Discord or here in the forum!

Have fun with Update 1.02 and see you next time,
Martin and Jens

[h3]Hotfix 1.02.1[/h3]

• Fixed ArgumentNullException that appeared during missions
  
• Re-activated mass-mode for tool ring (alt key) and added it for the gamepad
  
• Moved "clear/repair/... all" buttons to top of building list columns and also introduced them for upgrades and city leveling
  
• Fixed position of "open hypergate" button
  
• Added missing alert for fires on non-colony buildings (e.g. gaian constructs) in your territory
  
• Gamepad: Added context info for fast ring selection
  
• Fixed chemical planet getting bonus from forests