Changes

• Upgraded the game engine to Unity 5 from Unity 4. This provides overall increased performance during combat and other sections of the game that are more demanding on your system.
• Refactored a lot of code to improve performance on the strategy map, allowing for a smoother experience when there’s a lot of stuff going on in a large galaxy and in the late game
• Added Planetary Governors to control your build queue and to manage your citizen labor allocations
• Tech Costs have been scaled up to slow down the pace of discovery in the mid-game
• Colonies with empty build queues will now automatically build trade goods when they have empty queues
• When you add something to a planetary build queue while you’re already building trade goods, the trade goods will now automatically be removed from the build queue.
• Changed the formula for calculating a ship’s accuracy to have a smoother curve as the ship levels up. Previously the early level-ups provided larger bonuses than later level-ups.
• Ships gain accuracy bonuses at very close ranges now.
• Fleet ETA and fuel UI indicators now appear next to the fleet icon rather than next to the destination point to keep things less cluttered
• Added UI indicators for situations when you have enough food to feed your empire but not enough freighters to transport it all where you need it
• Construction ships will no longer merge into orbiting fleets upon construction at a colony; likewise they can no longer be merged into combat fleets.
• Traveling through wormholes is now instantaneous; previously ships would be shown to quickly move across the galaxy, but this could cause some problems if a manual combat occurred elsewhere while a ship was in transit; this change eliminates any bugs associated with this scenario
• Ship performance bonuses for Noxium and Helium 3 are now properly reflected in the shipyard
• Changed several user interface Sound FX that were jarring when wearing headphones
• Changed the stellar backdrop on the strategy map to be more vivid, and to have some variations possible between games; i.e. you might get a red galaxy or a blue-ish or green-ish one. Purely visual.
• If an AI fleet is equipped with bombs, then it will now use all of its bombs to soften up ground defenses before landing its troops
• . The AI won’t be so quick to pull forces back from a freshly captured colony to prepare a new invasion force. They’ll hang out for a while now to re-arm and repair while guarding against a counter-attack
• . The AI won’t strictly insist upon forming an invasion force in a guaranteed safe spot; they’ll now be willing to form up in enemy territory as long as it thinks it is safe enough
• The AI will now reconsider its final attack plan before committing to a planetary assault; if it can see a better target then it will potentially alter its plan to take advantage of the weakness

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that could cause some AI ships that ran out of ammo to drift off of the screen in manual combat, preventing the player from being able to finish the combat. Ships that are truly out of ammo will now retreat.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a long hang at the end of a planetary combat session
• Fixed a bug that would cause incorrect auto-calculation results to occur in every auto combat subsequent to the the first auto combat performed in a session
• Fixed a bug in the auto-combat algorithm that would sometimes cause ordnance-based weaponry to not contribute its DPS to the simulation
• Fixed a bug where a Creative race that completed a technology by sacrificing a citizen would not gain every tech at the tech level
• Fixed a bug where the Pollop hero’s unique ship was not properly spawning to the strategy map
• Fixed a bug where leaders that cannot participate in ground combat could trigger a quest event that should require ground troops to be present
• Fixed a bug where Helium-3 was not providing its exploitation bonus to beam weapon damage
• Fixed an issue where the clickable area of a planet’s name on the strategy map could exceed the size of the actual name, leading to unintentionally accessing the planet interface
• . Fixed a similar issue where the clickable area for the item you are currently researching could exceed the size of the text

Misc:

• The Upgrade to Unity 5 may mess with some mods in unforeseen ways. In the coming weeks I will re-release the mod tools with Unity 5 support