Imagine Earth News

Welcome to the July update of Imagine Earth. As usual, you can expect a bunch of interesting improvements and new features. We hope you enjoy all of these goodies. Please let us know what you think about the ongoing developments. Cheers, Martin & Jens




Before going into the update details, we'd like to thank our industry friends Simulogics, who we met at an exhibition last year. They have been helping us get the word out about Imagine Earth, and we'd like to return the favor: In their space economy MMO Prosperous Universe you manage the business of your spacefaring company. Exploring the galaxy, producing, trading, designing spaceships - you name it. We like it a lot, and we think it might be right up your alley as well.




This state of the art geo engineering tech improves agriculture and quality of life in very cold and hot regions by optimizing the temperature by up to 10°. It also prevents climate based tornadoes, thunderstorms, forest fires and desertification in the vicinity. This advanced weather manipulation technology requires a lot of energy and causes emissions.


Related to this the mission on Joma got a makeup. You will find it easier to get development licenses to unlock new buildings. The mission now points to stock trading, where you can buy shares of other companies to participate in their profits. Joma has become colder, making it more difficult to grow food. In return you will receive the new building, the thermo generator…



A new planet has been discovered in the Udoxia Galaxy. A tough competition against ruthless corporations is waiting for you to master it.




The setup of a new game has been adjusted to give a more meaningful overview of what the player can expect. As the most important change we added a checkbox for sabotage. If you deselect this checkbox, you will be able to play a peaceful construction game that is limited to economic competition and environmental aspects.




You may now experience less isolated catastrophes taking place somewhere on the planet and therefor periodically occurring events during which extreme weather conditions ( Thunderstorms and Tornados ) occur very frequently or seismic activity ( earthquakes and volcanoes ) or an increased occurrence of asteroid and meteorite showers. Special vigilance is required.




We've put some fancy animations into the game when you harvest resources. Drones now use various lasers or tractor beams to demolish rocks or forests, repair buildings and clean fields. You can now also observe flying particles that match the units you are working on.



The new journal lists all previous dialogues chronologically, like in a messenger. Between the dialogues the fulfilled mission goals are listed, thus an excellent orientation in the temporal sequence of the mission is ensured.


The brand-new journal also contains a "Typo Button" with which you can post discovered spelling mistakes directly to the dedicated Steam forum.



We made editing terrain much easier in the sandbox editor. You can now level terrain to adjust it to the height of the first field that you click.




In the Steam Workshop you can now add a briefing to the planets you create.



You can now continue a competition game after winning to enlarge your civilizations and cleaning up the mess of the economic rivalry.

AI corporations do give up their colonies when they are bankrupt and out of shares. They will leave the planet and you can take over their infrastructure.



They can now be relocated. Also allied Illuminati camps now provide you with meteorite showers every now and then.



Also worth mentioning, Imagine Earth is on board of this year's @IndieArenaBooth 20.-24.8.19 at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. If you're there, please come over to our Booth! Indie Arena is located in hall 10.2 and has Booth number 021G. Line-Up out now!

• Bonus missions limited to 3 goals each
  
• Optimized zoom level for camera animations
  
• Small volcano-like mountains for "volcanic" theme
  
• Improved main menu sun animation
  
• Improved unlocking of constructs on Tuto
  
• Added better explanation for tech licenses
  
• Removed shadows for construction holograms
  
• Improved interaction of tool ring and docked panels
  
• Improved supply capsule user interface
  
• Increased number of research funds sold by merchant
  
• Start video can be deactivated in settings file
  
• Improved UI representation of trade-able items and resources
  
• Tech licenses can be sold to the merchant again
  

• Fixed rounding error in resources panel
  
• Fixed trader message "not interested" when you have nothing left to sell
  
• Fixed animation problem of profile dialog
  
• Fixed problem with research chunk highlighting
  
• Fixed color of ocean citadel powers
  

The title of this update blog post successfully names Update #53s uber feature. Workshop enables you to share the planets and challenges you created in the terraforming mode. While creating a planet their, you can now define Opponents, Rules and Events and they will be saved for the players of your challenge. You can then upload them to steam directly from the game. Read here how easy it is actually is. The best world creations might even make it into the game itself...



This is just the beginning. We will implement more abilities to script missions, create other factions, modding speakers and landing ships soon. What we already have is a workshop forum thread, leave your ideas on what you wanna create and mod right there.



All the goals in campaign missions are now grouped into quests of around 5-8 goals and their completion results in winning a central mission goals. That improves story telling and makes it much easier to recall in which context you are doing a certain goal.




Freeplay / Competition now offer to start a "Custom Game" which are totally self configured by you. "Workshop Games" have rules, elements and opponents predefined by the creaters of the challenge that you loaded from steam workshop. "Terraform Game" Means you start a challenge which you created in Terraforming maybe to test it before uploading to Steam Workshop.




Lately brazilian language was added by DuH!! Thanks so much for that contribution. Chinese translation updated to latest version.




New Music for Imagine Earth by Zevik Perry, thanks man!
https://youtu.be/-lgAt_jXBvc



Crafting menu in the workshop now has 3 item categories now Offensive items / Structures and Utilities.

• Creating a challenge in the sandbox now allows you to define rules, elements and opponents and save them with the planet.
  
• Level 3 city expansion for City Center is available from start in Free / Competition Mode
  
• Destruction process is having a nice debris effect.
  
• Asteroid smoke column tuned, looking much better
  
• Description for Leens Spacebot
  
• Old building icons reworked. Progress ring optimized
  
• Improvements for Magni and Bora Mission
  
• builder drones are now needed to reconstruct a ruin.
  

• Building orders have priority for builder drones over destruction orders. However repair and destinguish orders have top priority.
  
• items that are generated by certain buildings have a lower generation rate growth when you get 2x 3x 4x... units of a building.
  
• We got rid of item limit that was set to 8 because the places in the toolring.
  
• Research queue has 6 slots and shows them now no more than 6 active researchs are possible from now on.
  
• "Sell button" in trade menu is reconfigured to "Sell overproduction"
  
• Explosive device does not damage constructs on neighouring fields anymore.
  
• Mood Fix: Natives where too depressed, you always had to gift something before you could trade
  
• Exploding uplink drone balancing: Doesn't take out all buildings around it anymore
  
• Warning sounds are now independent from time.
  

• "Warehouses are not running" bug
  
• Problem with ideon maps sold by natives.
  
• Wrong speakers for denial dialogs.
  
• Remediation center does now start one cleaning process after the other instead of twenty at the same time.
  
• Gold storage increased endless because auto trade with Midras was activated who pay in Gold
  
• Levelup Bug: City Center no longer needs a drone to update itself
  
• Overkill Bug fixed: all connected buildings exploded ;/
  
• Hangup on Startup when starting Campaign
  
• 2 Xrathul bugs eleminated
  

Greetings, Colony Managers our latest release is ready for you. Tons of bake-fresh features sweeten the colony day. To wrap it up, making the other AI corporations your rivals is more dangerous than ever, now they attack with offensive items. Researching is now less casual and more time based. Some items are produced by districts in addition to being crafted. You can also hack the stock market in a new share panel attached to the tool ring on city centers of other colonies. We polished the new build menu and you can monitor upcoming threads much better in the reworked bookmarks panel.

We hope you'll enjoy the latest features! Please leave your feedback in our forum. We would be so happy if you're interested in supporting our project as a beta tester. Which basically means you get the new update earlier than the rest. In case send us a mail. Additionally a 25% sale is coming to Steam on April 22. Mark our words!

Cheers, Jens & Martin.



We can't party hard enough on the commitment of Victor "Lartima" who out of nothing send us a mail with the completed french translation of Imagine Earth! Thanks so many times to you and to Bouy, who got the translation started!

Actually this is a good opportunity to thank all the 30.000 supporters that helped to keep the Imagine Earth project alive and well progressing with their early access purchases.




This one is simply showing it all, all features, all threats, all items and all that we worked on over the last two and a half year - as the old trailer was kind of that old. On top it has something special, a final release date. Yes, we are hopeful to finish version 1.0 within 2019... Please share, post and tweet it as much as you can.

https://youtu.be/Cm9TYuhMN1s



From now on it takes a certain amount of time to research upgrades to make the decision of what to research first more strategic. You have a research queue that can by prioritized any time and you should pay attention to the efficiency factor which is raised by every research district you build. The city center also contributes to the factor as it has a built in research lab as well.




We almost accidentally came up with the idea of letting the various types of districts produce items over time. That gives every district a more individual and special functionality. The new build menu nicely visualizes the items that are in production and it also shows the ones that can be crafted.




The build panel is an UI element we reintegrated lately after having it replaced by the practical build ring several years ago. It allows you to permanently see your stock of items and gaia forces, also those who are actually still loading up and in production. This precious piece of user interface needed a cleanup and that's what we did recently. Also hovering buildings in the build ring or panel will show related resource icons on planet.

• Tuto: Show research icon more early
  
• Joma: Birons epidemic quest working again
  
• Lorian: Changed timing of asteroids and improved trigger for slick bay quest
  
• Rounos: Joe starts some destructive actions after losing
  
• Rounos: Gave Joe access to a temple with tornadoes
  

• Balanced generation and regeneration of pollution
  
• Districts freely convertible
  
• Victory point per 5,000 mined rare resources
  
• Fields can now be bookmarked with CTRL+number key
  
• Personalized messages by NPCs
  
• Smoother build radius
  
• Improved forestry explanation dialogs
  
• Fixed auto save naming problem (will reduce the number of created savegames)
  
• Use saw icon for rare plants like corals
  
• Fixed interaction with icons in navigation mode (space key)
  
• Sound pitch fine tuning
  
• Changed color of price text to neutral
  
• Fixed overlap of alliance confirm buttons in message panel
  
• Fixed AI selling and back-buying items all the time
  
• Improved rare resource description texts
  
• Fertile only from 90% and desert only from 10%
  
• Editor: Clustering of fossil and rare resources
  
• Editor: Distribute temples evenly and add ocean citadel
  
• Editor: Ensure that rare resources are available everywhere
  

In the first update for Imagine Earth in March you'll find many optimizations for UI and AI that lay ground for innovative new game play features consider the next update to revolutionize core game play at several odds and ends.





The research menu has a new optional viewing mode where all details are presented directly on screen instead of as tool-tips. For now the compact view still stays the default view, so you have a perfect overview for all your research processes.



We also optimized the filters in the research menu. You can highlight research options according to what their primary effect is. That makes it easy to adjust your research strategy to suit your specific needs.





The building descriptions in the build menu now also contain all upgrades of the building and their potential pros and cons.

Upgrades that have already been researched can be activated here to be automatically build together with the building.





We made the visualization of competitors more compact and consistent to the rest of the user interface. Instant intuitive visibility for the ranking, diplomatic status and victory points. More over you see which incidents or catastrophes are impacting their colonies and also the resulting share price drops.





We reworked the competition ratings table. The x-axis now has the different types of colony points needed to win the competition. We added more captions and explanation texts to clarify all aspects.





When accessing a city center other factions are now talking to you directly - we are working on making this communication as personal as possible...





Factions do now have individual agendas that add character and individual tactics to the 8 different corporations you can play in competition and freeplay mode.

• Cooperative: Cooperative diplomatic sentiment.
  
• Aggressive: Aggressive diplomatic sentiment. Sabotages other colonies.
  
• Sustainable: Preserves the environment and prefers buildings with low emissions.
  
• Exploitative: Tries to get as many fossil and rare resources as possible. Does not care about environmental impacts.
  
• Expansive: Trying to own as much territory as possible. Does not like it when someone takes over territory.
  
• Trader: Focuses on trade. Likes to sell resources and items.
  
• Gaian: Tries to get as many temples as possible and generate Gaia.
  
• Oceanist: Prefers to build the colony on the coast and the sea.
  
• Scientist: Researches as many technologies as possible.
  

A decent foam line at the coast makes it easier to identify the exact sea level and whether fields are land, coast or ocean. This is an addition to the waves the are rolling in and breaking.





There are several options in the build menu that help to visualize certain states and objects in the world. For example it can colorize buildings by their type to provide a better overview.

• You can now sell incomplete packages of rare resource to free up space in the warehouses.
  
• New city center sounds!
  
• Workshop menu got a face lift.
  
• Build menu buttons reworked.
  
• All campaign planets have decoration and environment objects like mountains suitable to their planet theme now
  
• Big Illuminati Pyramids can't burn anymore
  
• Unified calculation of field and construct values to improve AI decisions and simulation speed
  
• If you loose competition you won't get spammed by the professor commenting on that anymore .
  
• Build menu: you can now have a certain category activated that stays open also when you hover another for short operations. So you can keep your eye on your inventory or the forces you have ready.
  
• AI in sandbox is no longer saved and transferred into created planets.
  
• Bora: AI allies may no longer build their second colony next to the great pyramids to prevent the mission plot from getting stuck.
  
• Fixed problem with multi-use of temple powers
  
• Fixed assimilator drone explosions
  

Happy new year again, this time from China! As Steam has started its Lunar New Year sale "Imagine Earth" is 25% off for the first time in 5 years Early Access. Don't wait for more until the game is finished ;). We are accompanying this sale with an update release that brings you much more than redesigned game characters and a classic strategy game styled build menu for advanced gameplay...

Please note that we are looking for beta-testers who can check on our new update releases days earlier than other players, please mail us if you happen to be that enthusiastic about getting your fingers early on new updates of Imagine Earth!



The old avatars of the main crew members in the campaign are some years old by now and we always knew we'd have to give these guys a makeup someday. Nothing is a better way of showing how this game has grown up over the years than the evolution of Limas character. It goes all the way back when it was a casual game idea with comic characters. Maybe we should not have opened this old box ;) but with the final release coming in 2019 this nostalgic flashback came over Jens..




A new build menu on the left side of the interface will keep you informed about all your build options. Coolest thing about it is that this menu also shows your inventory and on top the craftable items. It has a category for all your gaia forces and shows if they are fully loaded. You won't have to visit a workshop anymore to craft your stuff. It comes in addition to the classic build ring, so nothing changes, you just get more options.





The control menu also offers a set of visualization tools. you can highlight fields that are threatened by rising sea-level caused by global warming. You can highlight rare resources, fertility, ground pollution, construct types and colony areas.





If you open a trade or a crafting panel it will be centered on screen from now on. The background is blurred out and playtime is paused, so you can concentrate on deals and negotiations with factions and traders.





We are currently experimenting with how the drones are working. We decided to limit the city centers drones to one per level - so you are starting now with one instead of two. This makes it more important to level your city.

The maintenance station no longer comes with a build drone. Instead it comes with a repair drone that only does repair jobs and will automatically do this in the range of the building. As before it can be upgraded with a fire station.

Same goes for the remediation center. It now has a special remediation drones instead of a build drone



Based on feedback and the experiences we received from Wuik in the steam forums, we had another look at the Gaia balancing. The following changes have been done:

• Doubled Gaia production
  
• Reduced price of Gaia container
  
• Display correctly how much Gaia is available in a temple
  
• In addition display how fast Gaia is created and how this is influenced by the nearby population