Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy, Indie
Imagine Earth
#55 Share Trade
Welcome! The September update of Imagine Earth is ready. Our focus this time is on share trading but as usual you get lots of improvements and new features.
We hope you enjoy all of these goodies. If you haven't reviewed the game on steam yet, please do! Let us know what you think about the changes. We're so close to reclaim the 80% - Very good" rating, which would be incredibly great for the reception of the game :) Cheers, Martin & Jens
Shares Trade & AI
You can't miss the new share panel which is located among the all important panels in the middle bottom. It offers a great overview to all values and numbers that play a role in share trading.
The AI opponents are know actively buying shares. At least those who have share trading in their corporate agenda. On the right you see how many owners a corporation has and how many shares they own. This also means another important thing: AI will now actively take over cities if they have a sufficient amount of shares. The times when you could sell your own shares excessively without a risk are over!
Catastrophes and Global Warming
All possible natural catastrophes are now listed in the Global warming drop down. And the disaster risk is rising by several percentages with ongoing global warming.
You will be notified regularly about the changes in the global ecosystem.
Tools in the Build Panel
We integrated a toolbox into the build ring and the build menu. There you can activate tools for mass upgrading, cleaning and repairing. It's super handy and it come's with the new forestation tool: It always plants the best fitting forest on a piece of land. You only have to examine the type of vegetation first.
Productivity Warning Icon
We brought a permanent icon into the world that shows unmistakably when a certain production building is unproductive or misplaced. So you can optimize your colony without having to do guess work and checking each individual field.
Highscores for Steam Workshop Planets
You can now compete for global highscores on every planet that you downloaded from Steam Workshop. Just play it in competition mode and get ready to beat global scores.
Music Tracks
We have a new win theme created by Alex of William E. Audio. A good opportunity to play and win one of those workshop planets and listen to it!
Also, we changed two music tracks that where part of the game for years now. Their highest intensity level for the final state of global warming was an e-guitar melody that most people couldn't stand for long. We optimized one track to be suitably played as background music for longer time and erased the other completely. Please stay tuned until we have the funding for a full force SciFi soundtrack ;)
New Event Notifications
As you can see new event notification popups will inform you from now on when important things are happening. They popup whenever you earn landing permits, research budget or licenses. They will also show up when catastrophes are threatening your base.
Gamescom, August 20. -24th
We have been to gamescom in Cologne and showed Imagine Earth to the public in the Indie Arena Booth. Definitively the best place for innovative Indie Studios! As expected it was a so called blast to present the game to so many excited players. New ideas and balancing issues popped up by the minute. Also the prime minister of our home state was showing up to try the smartest climate crisis simulator made in Niedersachsen, Germany so far ;D
In case you're wondering, the one to my right in the first picture isn't Martin. It's Timo from Mad About Pandas who helped me out presenting Imagine Earth for almost 10 hrs over 5 days because Martin has become a father most recently and couldn't attend the show due to obvious priorities ;)
Lots of Other Things
#54 Geo Engineering
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
Shoutout to Prosperous Universe
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.
New Construct: Thermo Generator
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…
New Planet: Udion Torix
A new planet has been discovered in the Udoxia Galaxy. A tough competition against ruthless corporations is waiting for you to master it.
New Game Setup
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.
Threat waves
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.
Debris animations
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.
Message journal
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.
Sandbox Terraforming Tools
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.
Steam Workshop Briefings
In the Steam Workshop you can now add a briefing to the planets you create.
AI Gives Up - You Go On
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.
Allied native camps
They can now be relocated. Also allied Illuminati camps now provide you with meteorite showers every now and then.
Indie Arena Booth 2019
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!
Other stuff
Fixes
#53 "Steam Workshop"
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.
New Quest Vizualization
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.
New Game Options
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.
New Languages
Lately brazilian language was added by DuH!! Thanks so much for that contribution. Chinese translation updated to latest version.
New Epic Title Theme
New Music for Imagine Earth by Zevik Perry, thanks man!
https://youtu.be/-lgAt_jXBvc
Item Categories
Crafting menu in the workshop now has 3 item categories now Offensive items / Structures and Utilities.
Added
Balanced
Fixed
#52 – French Stock Market Hack
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.
French language translation
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.
Fresh gameplay trailer
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
Time based research
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.
Item production in districts
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.
Improved UI of build panel
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.
Mission improvements
Improvements and fixes
#51 - Research, AI and UI Optimizations
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.
Extended research menu
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.
Upgrades in build menu
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.
Visualization of competitors
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.
Competition rating UI reworked
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.
Faction messages in tool ring
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 have individual agendas
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.
Water foam at the coast line
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.
Building type visualization
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.
Additional changes & fixes
#50 "New Characters and a Control Menu"
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!
Meet the New Crew
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..
The Brand New Control Menu
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.
World Visualizations
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.
Standalone Diplomacy & Trade Panels
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.
Drone Reconfiguration
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
Gaia & UI Balancing
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:
#49 "Ocean Citadel and Global Warming"
The first update of Imagine Earth in 2019 brings you a new power construct which is built on the open sea with three brand new forces to unleash and a devastating catastrophe. As always there are tons of UI, AI and game balancing improvements. We reworked the first three missions intensively and enhanced the effects and visualization of global warming... We hope you enjoy the latest features and changes and send feedback and requests into our forum!
Cheers, Jens & Martin
The Ocean Citadel
The ocean citadel is a powerful construction of the Nootilas, it can convert Gaian energy into force fields which influence sea and weather conditions. It is to be found on the open sea of course.
Thunderstorms
A power of the ocean citadel provokes a thunderstorm that moves across the planet in wind direction. The storm can cause wildfires and incidents in production facilities. Thunderstorms are also natural catastrophes whose occurrence becomes more likely with increasing global warming.
Ocean vitalisation
This power of the ocean citadel generates a gaian force field that vitalises the flora on the seabed and allows sea plants and occasionally corals to grow. This is helpful to re-balance the carbon emission balance on the planet.
Land subsidence
This Gaian force field of the ocean citadel lowers the tectonic continental plates - entire regions sink into the sea. Keep the mouse button pressed to apply the power.
Land reclamation works the same way from now on.
We redesigned the Cover Image, the website, Steam and social media channel
Multi-use of powers and item
You can now reuse forces and items by holding the shift key as long as you have more items of the same kind or enough gaian energy left in the according power constructs.
Global Warming
Due to the importance of this feature we have represented Global Warming more prominently in the Interface. You get a permanent display and icon for the emission balance and the global warming in percentage. And there is a global value of sea-level and temperature rise. The population counter has moved to the left of the UI also because it is not global.
Land height shown in field info panel
For better information it displays how high a certain piece of land is above the sea-level which is of particular interest in case of global warming. Will it be flooded by the melting polar caps?
"Earth Over" quarantine deactivated
We deactivated the quarantine of the planet in case of climate collapse which ended game way too early. You can now live on a ravaged planet with maximum climate chaos and all the catastrophes arising with it and still try to make your living or win a competitive round somehow.
You can activate this quarantine when starting a new game to stop a round when it gets almost hopeless. Also we changed the visualization of high global warming which was a bit over the top with yellow coloring of the oceans and the atmosphere.
In one of the next updates we plan to further increase the effect of global warming on the local field temperature and buildings
Mission improvements
Again we had to rework many aspects of the first three missions of Tuto, Joma and Lorian to improve the experience of the campaign, make it more accessible to new players and adjust them to the lately added features.
AI improvements
UI & graphic improvements
Bugfixes & improvements
#48 "Alliances, Sabotage & Company Rating"
Again we have a big December update for you with lots of interesting features that will refresh the space colonizing business. Have a look and give us your feedback on how they work...
Of course we'd like to take the opportunity to wish you all pleasant holidays and a happy new year in advance! We plan to celebrate the final release of Imagine Earth together in mid 2019!
Sabotage Hacks
The Sabotage item hacks supply buildings within a small radius and sets them into the state of malfunction in which they stop production and are constantly damaged until the building is destroyed or the malfunction is fixed.
Supply Capsules
Supply capsules contain items, resources and building construction kits. The colony that claims the field it landed on can take the cargo. The capsule will then disassemble automatically. They will land randomly on the planet throughout gameplay.
Orbital Lift for Colonists
New orbital lifts show you when colonists are coming or leaving your colony. This animation makes the colony more lively and visualizes where the colonists come from and where they disappear to when the quality of life is too low.
Company Rating
In the campaign galaxy you will now see a completion panel that shows your overall campaign progress. More important the colony ratings on all planets are wrapped up in a company rating that is compared in a global ranking.
Visit Your Colony
You can now revisit colonies after finishing the mission to find the remaining ideon crystals and to raise your colony rating by expanding your colony.
Campaign research and unlocked buildings are permanent. So you can use the technology you gathered in later missions to advance the cities when your return to earlier colonized planets.
Diplomacy States
Other corporations now have three shared diplomatic statuses: rivalry, neutral or alliance. They define if other factions trade with you and if there will be discounts. It also influences AI behavior: An alliance partner will respect your territory - a rival will actively grab your land.
AI Behaviour
We have added brand new AI behaviors to make factions more lively and authentic actors in the game. They may contact you via the message system and to propose neutrality or an alliance. In addition they will cancel an alliance or even declare rivalry when your relation is very bad. The AI remembers when you have helped against threats like an epidemic and alien invasions by using items or temple powers
Additional changes
Fixes
#47 "Technology Trade on Giant Planets"
Greetings, Space Colony Managers!
The Universe is expanding! Because of this growing luxury of empty void we implemented much bigger planets into Imagine Earth which can be played with or against up to 6 factions. There is now technology trade to make other colonies more interesting.
There is a new trailer as well as tons of gameplay fixes and improvements to make Imagine Earth ready for the launch of early access on Humble Store on Nov 9th... - that's right, two days ahead! :D Please share the joy about this with us and the rest of the world.
Bigger Planets
We implemented bigger Planets into the game because many of you asked for them. Let us know if you have any feature requests, ideas and stuff coming to your mind while checking out the latest version. Here are the details:
Technology Trade
Now you can buy single construction kits for buildings from other corporations. This means trading with other colonies gets more interesting.
Each building that has been licensed by the other colony will be offered in their store - given that your diplomatic status is good enough. Of course it will be much more expansive to buy these single construction kits and therefor make sense to license a construct yourself if you need it more often.
Landing animation
As you can see we started implementing epic cut-scenes to introduce all other factions, traders and invaders landing on your planet for the first time.
https://youtu.be/NXtSLwv8-oQ
Planet Themes
The last update introduced planetary themes and this time we made a general and huge rework of the themes textures to make them look more diverse and individual and last be not least, much better.
Volcanic world for example has by default no polar caps (so no rising sea level)
AI Doing Research
Another important step done in order to make the AI fair and fun to play: The AI now has to research upgrades and other improvements in order to use them. So far those tricksters were able to build any upgrade without having to research it.
New Trailer Video & Subtitles
The existing trailer clearly needed a remake and has been replaced with a new one that is much more relying on in-game graphics to give you a perfect introduction into the actual game. Watch it and enjoy advanced space traveling via ideon powered hypergates!
https://youtu.be/GjwPzI1D-DE
Improvements & Balancing
UI Improvements
Bugfixes
#46 "Gaia Forces and Planet Themes"
Dear Colony Managers, in this update we increase the visual and gameplay diversity of our planets with the themes Jungle, Terran, Swamp, Barren, Volcanic and Frozen. Also we dedicated a lot of our time into making the Tuto and Joma mission a better experience. Read on to find out what else has changed.
TL;DR
Rocks, Asteroids & Scanner
Asteroids now can contain all types of rare resources. They look different and when you decide to throw one of these asteroids against an opponent you might accidentally send him a big present full of ideon or lithium.
Scanners are having an increased scan radius and an increased value in gameplay. You will now have to scan all rocks to find out if there's any gold, titanium, lithium or ideon hidden in them.
Rare resources are automatically detected when you take over the field into your build radius. The amount of rare resources on all planets has been raised in general.
Gaia Forces in Build Ring
You can now access all the forces you have loaded in temples right from the build ring. Therefor we have thrown the forest ring out of the ring menu because you can only build forests with seed bombs from now on and the different types of forest weren't relevant enough for gameplay to take up an own slot in the main build menu.
Drone Priorities
Drones no prioritize open tasks. Dealing with fires is most important, followed by repairing highly damaged buildings. After that they will deal with new buildings and other things. They only return to the city center when they need a package to build something.
Planet Themes
We have set up six general presets or themes for planets, so you can choose quickly under which conditions you want to play a competition round or freeplay. Choices are Terran conditions, Frozen World, Swamp, Barren, Jungle or Volcanic World.
In addition there are new mountain models on many of our planets.
Storytelling
We reworked the first three missions, so that you can play more straight through without being interrupted by dialogs and story suddenly popping up. More story elements are now clickable in form of info and mission icons. So you can start cut-scene when you are ready. On the other hand we made them auto started when nothing was happening story-wise for some time so you don't miss important story elements.
To make the factions more personal we have individual victory messages when others win in competition mode.
We redesigned the Cover Image, the website, Steam and social media channel
