Development Update: 25 July 2017

With infinite complacency, men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Work continues on our first DLC, which we will have a formal announcement for in a few weeks. In addition to some balance tweaks, today's patch includes a variety of low-level infrastructure changes. In particular, we have made modifications to the graphics engine to improve performance when loading or processing turns, so if you notice some graphical glitches, please let us know. As always, your feedback and suggestions are important to us. Keep them coming!



Changes

• Revamped the Loading and AI Turns wait animations, and made changes to the graphics library so that star/planet/map animations will continue in the background (instead of freezing) during wait times.
  
• Revamped the Load/Save dialog.
  
• Increased the base resource yields of most alien native populations.
  
• Reduced the cost of Bombers by one-third.
  
• Increased the cost of Strike Fighters and added Antimatter as a prerequisite for the Multirole Fighters tech.
  
• Increased the cost of Heavy Railguns and halved damage.
  
• Deflector screens now absorb 50% of kinetic weapons damage, while Battle shields now absorb 70%.
  
• Decreased the damage of Neutron Beams.
  
• Ashdar Colonials fighter squadrons now have one additional fighter per Hangar module.
  
• Increased the damage of Pulson Launchers from 35 to 50.
  
• The technology 'Energy Torpedoes' is now called 'Plasma Projectiles' and requires Plasma Focusing.
  
• Increased the research costs of all late game technologies.
  
• Adjusted the wording in various resource descriptions to help clarify the distinction between the resource names (Labor, Science, Coin, Metal, Food) and the associated activities (Production, Research, Trading, Mining, Farming).
  

Fixes

• Fixed a bug in the tactical weapon selection UI that prevented the first item in a ship's weapon list from being consistently selected when selecting a ship.
  
• Fixed a glitch in the planet farming/food description text.
  
• Fixed a few description text errors.
  
• Added new UI scaling rules for very high resolution monitors, and changes to avoid blurriness on high DPI monitors.
  
• Made improvements to GoG Galaxy achievement/stat error handling.
  
• Updated the Visual Studio runtime libraries to the 2017 versions.
  
• The 'simplified graphics' rendering mode is now enabled by default for all Intel HD 3000 and Radeon HD 7800 Series cards.
  

(Click here to view the complete development changelogs.)

By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.