Lord of Rigel News

Greetings Lords of Rigel,

This update has some more fixes to user reported bugs, and AI improvements to build queues and colonization. Our next major quality of life feature for closing out EA1 is still a loading/saving system for the build queue.

Two of the larger quality of life improvements are the filters in the Empire (Image 1) and Planets (Image 2) menus. You can now filter controlled planets by if they are colonies, outposts, or have empty build queues. The top sorts do filter out outposts, but this makes it easier if you want to find a particular outpost or need to scrap them. The empty build queue filter also lets you easily manage your empire and enter into build queues or use autobuild.

The Planets menu filters include colonizable planets (removes asteroid belts and gas giants), habitable planets (ones with climates that support food production), mineral rich planets, and a gravity filter that filters out planets that would have gravity penalties based on your species traits. This should make it a lot easier for players to use filters and sorts to pick new worlds for colonies once they’ve explored the galaxy a bit.

Image 1. Empire Menu Filters
Image 2. Planets Menu Filters

For this week’s deep dive: the Yalkai!

The Yalkai play into the “blue space women” trope we see in a number of scifi franchises (Mass Effect, Master of Orion, Star Control, Star Wars). But in reality they are more starfish like predators that use telepathy and illusions (Image 3). As you’re a human player, you see the Yalkai as humans and not their true form. The Yalkai are feudal and have research penalties but gain bonuses to their ships. This is reflected in their larger, bulkier, ships and the large windows compared to Human ships hint that they are a bit different in their actual shape than what they show (Image 4). The arcs on their designs also hint at the true tentacle horrors that the Yalkai are. The Yalkai are not as great at ground combat as other species (minus the Ornithon who are terrible at it), but this is offset by their ability to use telepathy to outright take planets. From our initial concepts we wanted to keep a strong imperial vibe for them like the Centauri from Babylon 5 and an air of the Yalkai “keeping up appearances” (Image 5) to avoid them just being blue space elves.

Image 3. Yalkai true forms

Image 4. Yalkai Cruiser
Image 5. Yalkai Ambassador

Let us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email: [email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.



As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!

Greetings Lords of Rigel,

In our next update along with more bug fixes and AI tweaks, we’ll have an “Auto” button in ship designer that auto generates a design using the hull size you selected based on your species’ ship archetypes. You can build these designs, or use them as a base for your own designs. Another upcoming tweak is a new set of filters for the Planets menu to help make outpost and colony planning easier.

A loading/saving system for the build queue is still our next major quality of life feature on the docket for EA1.

This week’s deep dive is one where we want to get more feedback and comments on one of the more challenging parts of LoR to develop: the Tutorial. While an old adage is that all tutorials by nature suck, the issue is what audience is it being developed for and what does it serve.

While working on the tutorial the earliest version was the first time UI menu descriptions (like Master of Orion 1) with some very high-level goals that a player could achieve in rough order (Explore a system, Research a Technology, Colonize a planet) with the high-level goal of first contact with the Katraxi. Tester feedback, especially from those not familiar with 4x games wanted something more tailored with controls being unlocked as the tutorial progressed.

On release, we were surprised that the first thing many 4x game veterans did was beeline to the tutorial and were understandably frustrated by the restricted UI during the tutorial and emphasis on camera controls.

So out of all of this our questions are:
1) What are new players looking for in a tutorial?
Does the heavily guided tutorial work for a first time player new to these games?

2) What are more experienced players looking for in the tutorial?
Do we have other systems (first time UI help) that answer the questions that veteran players have?

Image 1. The Rigelan Probe
Image 2. Human space, Katraxi space, and Rigelan probe pulsar coordinates.
Image 3. Approaching for First Contact

Let us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email: [email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.


As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!

Greetings Lords of Rigel,

While the patch release itself has been slow we’ve been incorporating more reported issues and quality of life requests. This includes what was announced in the last roundup plus a setting to skip cutscenes and some adjustments that return you straight to the Empire or Planets menu when entering a planet from them, and returning straight to galaxy view when making a new colony.

We’re making more progress on the auto ship design generator and the save/load build queue feature.
EA2 will be focusing more on the AI and tactical. It will also be when we unlock the Tulocks, Synth, and features including the Galactic Council and diplomacy victory.

As for this week’s deep dive:

The Tharrn are a reptilian species meant for aggressive, expansionistic gameplay since they have high population growth and the sapiophage trait. This means they gain population growth and morale by consuming the population of planets they capture. The Tharrn are a religious and ritualized society that views sacrificing these captured people as an honor. These rituals came out of adapting societal solutions for overpopulation before they reached space. Female Tharrn are larger and are the priestesses and warriors, while male Tharrn are smaller and have lower status (for the Tharrn) roles like research and spying. Having a Feudal government gives them bonuses to ship building and a Rich homeworld also gives them a strong starting industrial base, so they can quickly move to take territory. While the Tharrn are aggressive, they can be reasoned with.

Tharrn ships are large and bulky with weapons focused on the front. This reflects their more crude and brute force approach to technology and ship building.

Image 1. Tharrn Diplomat

Image 2. Tharrn Spy

Image 3. Editor view of a Tharrn Destroyer

Image 4. A Tharrn Fleet in Formation

Let us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email: [email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.


As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!