Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy, Indie
Imagine Earth
#45 "Space Pirates and Special Vendors"
Dear Colony Managers, space is getting more frightening by now as a new threat is arising. Read about space pirates, special vendors, unique landing ships for all eight corporations and much more in our latest update release #45. Here's what we got for you this time:
Beware the Space Pirates
These nasty creatures land a strange kind of unknown flying object right over your warehouse to plunder it with their tractor beam. Simultaneously they start firing their board cannon to vandalize your base.
You can helplessly sit back and relax until they have stolen enough and loose interest. Or, you can choose to pay a ransom or install an energy shield onto a tower to block the guys off from your warehouses. In later missions you might as well develop lasers or pulse canons to give them a warm welcome if they ever return...
New Item: Resource Piracy
These pirates are not only a threat that randomly happens. You can also craft a landing control to send them upon one of your opponents. Sweet addition: You get half of what their ship can steal.
Unique Landing Ships
We are proudly presenting individual colony landing ships for all eight corporations.
After having introduced the individual factions last update now you can tell the difference between them by looking at their landing ship, which is automatically expanded into the main city tower after landing.
Three Specialized Traders
They come around with awesome looking new space ships amazing landing animations ;-). And they are specialized to trade either wares, items and tech, or rare resources.
Resource Trading Partners and Auto-Trade
The resource panel has been split into a money and a resources part. This helps to put the four basic resource classes and their storing and trading issues directly into the middle of your attention.
It now also shows you if there is another colony or trader able and willing to sell a certain resource to you when you need it (e.g for crafting).
You can also activate the automatic purchase and sale of resources. Note that this involves trading with every potential trading partner - regardless of whether the price is fair or not.
Emission Trade and Visualization
The emission levy now always must be payed as soon, as a company on the planet has a negative emission balance. Environmentally friendly corporations get emission trade payouts if there is a company that pays in.
The global emission balance is now visualized with positive values when the world's climate is OK. It's represented with negative red numbers when climate balance is going bad. Much more intuitive isn't it?
More New Features
Fixes
Thanks for your attention once again! We hope you enjoy playing Imagine Earth and share with us your ideas on development.
#44 "Individual Corporations"
Wow, this feels like the biggest game system update since ever. It comes with a Simplified Chinese translation ( many thanks to deloquac! ) and so many other changes. Good timing to invite friends: Imagine Earth is 20% off during the steam summer sale.
Please check out our brand new Discord channel for Imagine Earth where we'd love to discuss the latest features with you. But first of all check out what we got for you this time:
Items for Special Buildings
You can now craft construction kits and landing controls for special buildings like the temple, pyramid, assimilator, Midras digger and the extractor and then place these units where and when ever you need them.
The extractor can only be build on an asteroid of course. Assimilator and digger can only be build outside the base. In rare cases traders will ship these items.
New Rare Resource: Artifacts
These artifacts are parts of ancient alien technology which enable you to use the Gaian energy force fields of the planet. They are used to craft all the special constructions mentioned above.
To gain artifacts you can now plunder temple ruins and wracked assimilators using drones. In addition they are produced by natives and can by bought from them (as long as you have a friendly relationship).
Special Abilities in Research
We have thrown the standard tools like claim and clean out of the research panel ( they're all available by default now ) to make place for eleven new research options. They are very powerful general improvements for your colony management system.
Options vary from "-10% construct costs" or "-20% percent emissions" to lower consumption of food or goods and so on. Only difficulty: You need to research a whole research sector line to unlock them on the end.
Individual Corporations
There are now eight different corporations in the game with individual setup of technologies, startup icons and special abilities. In free play and competition mode you can choose one of these parties. The unlocked technologies of each faction also includes research of the upgrades. So each company has its own preset of research points to start with in the research system.
New Faction: Nootilas
Check out the two totally new factions to get a sense of how their individual possibilities are set up! We are actually still working on this and try to balance the factions. Please tell us what you experience throughout the gameplay ..
New Faction: Privateers
These corporations come with an individual background story as well which will be reflected in a kind of personal agenda as developments continues. This agenda will define how the company operates when they are you're AI controlled opponents if you chose them for a colonization match.
New Frontier Visualization
To get rid of these edgy triangle borders we made the visualization of the borders much more discreet and subtile.
New UI for Build Ring
Last update we integrated infos about a working construct into its ring so you can understand in detail what influences production and mood.
Now we have also added all the general values and information on buildings into the build ring to make the different constructs comparable. In this context the descriptions of all buildings have been revised.
Global Warehouse Storage
There is a global storage system now. The resources will be shared between all your warehouses. Whenever a warehouse gets lost, broken or taken over by an opponent, your precious resources will be shipped to other facilities through an underground tunnel system to ensure nothing gets lost.
Each warehouse now also has two slots for energy, food and goods each by default.
Translation to Simplified Chinese
Well yeah, Imagine Earth is available in Simplified Chinese now. All of a sudden deloquac popped up with a complete translation of our game. Thank you so much deloquac, this really helps us out and we'll mention you in the games credits! If anyone of you could imagine pushing this project forward with a translation into your native language please let us know: info@imagineearth.info
New Savegame Menu
We have implemented a new approach to the savegame menu as well. You can now see more structured information and a small close up screenshot to pick the right savegame.
UI & Graphics
Fixes & Improvements
Lorian Mission
Rounos Mission
Magni Mission
Thanks for your interest in the Imagine Earth Project, tell us what you think about the latest developments or get engaged in any of the games social platforms. For example you can engage in our new Imagine Earth wiki on gamepedia.
#43 "Ocean Districts & Trade Discounts"
Dear Colony Managers,
prepare yourselves to build some beautiful ocean districts for your people! In addition there are loads of detail improvements that give the overall playability a huge boost! Mostly based on testing and your highly appreciated feedback. Special thanks to Johannes for improving our german translation!
TL;DR
Colony Placement
Placing a new colony or frontier building now displays icons on the surrounding fields. The represent the quality of the area by highlighting deserts, fields with high fertility, fossil or rare resources and more.
Trade Discounts
The price of resources and items always depends on who you are trading with. Space merchants and tech traders will charge a fee that makes buying more expensive and selling less lucrative. Natives and midras on the other side don't know a lot about space market prices and often sell stuff very cheap.
Other colonists, finally, link their pricing to your diplomatic relation. This means it can be very powerful to have a good relation towards another company.
Ocean District
This new district is now made available in the Lorian mission.
The ocean district can be built on coast fields and the open sea. Districts have to be linked to others who connect with the shore.
Microplastic collectors clean the seas and recover goods by filtering floating plastic, other waste and impurities from the water.
Ocean thermal energy conversion uses the temperature difference between cooler deep sea and warmer surface water to meet part of the energy demand.
UI Improvements
Research
Colony Share Trading
Workshop
Other UI Stuff
Gameplay
Graphics & Tech
We have completely rewritten our rendering system for buildings and other world objects:
#42 "Equity Crash, Riots and Security Complex"
Attention colony managers,
you may have expected the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything" from update 42 or have you newer sheltered a passing hitchhiker in one of your outposts?
Anyways, what you get instead is of course just another bunch of problems which will make the colonizing business so much more interesting...
TL;DR
Catastrophes Let Colony Shares Drop
For example a persisting epidemic in another companie's colony is lowering their colony's stock price. Use this opportunity to buy their shares at a discount!
Riots, fires, hackings, flood, tornadoes, asteroids, meteors and other incidents have similar effects. Also threats like Assimilators or Xrathul will cause a drop.
Your ability to artificially trigger these natural catastrophes through temples and items makes price drops an interesting prelude to the next strategic equity buying spree and the takeover of other colonies. The free market makes it possible.
Riots in the Colony
Riots are now a real threat to your colony! This is what happens when your colonists are unhappy for a long time. Under-supply of resources or negative external influences lead to a poor quality of life. If these circumstances continue for too long, people's misfortune increases to anger and a riot develops. It's too late to fight the causes of the uprising as soon as it breaks out. A riot can be pacified with the use of Soma and prevented by a security complex or a frontier tower. But the easiest thing to do is to provide good colony living conditions in the first place.
Security Complex
This building stations police units to maintain order in the colony. Riots of dissatisfied colonists in the surrounding area are prevented. This ensures peace and quiet, although this is associated with additional costs.
The facility monitoring upgrade scans production facilities in the surrounding area and prevents incidents.
The cyber security upgrade monitors the information networks in surrounding buildings and prevents hacker attacks.
Soma
We could finally synthesize Soma, the famous drug from Aldous Huxley. This is what the packing slip says: "To avoid major mood swings that can lead to negative moods, people regularly take Soma, a drug that has a mood-lifting and stimulating effect and is also used as an aphrodisiac. Unlike alcohol, it has no side effects at the usual dosage and is produced synthetically."
To sum it up: it's raising the general life quality and helps against riots.
New City Center Animation
A new age of ingame animations awaits us! Starting with the colony center base which is expanding in various parts that screw, bend and turn out of the ground when the landing capsule is coming down. The worker drones are now stationed on landing pads from which they will lift off to build and repair.
Anti-Aliasing
Might sound a bit weird but we had to disable this basic graphics feature for ages due to framework issues. But what it adds to the game's look is awesomely amazing. Lovely, calm and soft edges everywhere especially when you zoom out from the planet, have a look.
Biome & Forest Diversification
Ralph sent us a very detailed feedback with improvement suggestions to make the environment and nature more realistic (Thanks!). Based on this we decided to further diversify the biomes and forests:
Fixes & Improvements
#41 "Colony Interface & Desertification"
Welcome back colony managers,
here comes a set of awesome new features improving your space colonization systems. This month we spent a lot of time into pimping the user interface of the game into it's 4th evolution and making it 4k ready by the way.
With the remediation center a very important infrastructure building made it into this release and also the logistic center got a workover enabling you to fully automate repairing and cleaning processes. And there's more...
TL;DR
New User Interface
The existing user interface clearly did not meet the demands of our colony & planet simulation. It was very clumsy and reminiscent of a casual mobile phone game.
So we rebuilt it, using the smaller and much clearer Roboto font for all text elements, while keeping our futuristic fonts for headers and elements that need highlighting.
The new interface now has become much easier to read while taking less screen space and thisway giving even more focus to the planet itself.
New:
Old:
If you are using a relatively small screen with a high resolution you can still zoom the interface up to 150% in the options.
A side effect of our work is that the new user interface has a higher resolution and thus is ready for your 4K display.
Remediation Center & Carbon Sequestration
The new building remediation center comes with an additional worker drone and uses this drone to automatically start the clean up process for nearby fields.
An powerful upgrade for the center is carbon sequestration - the technical separation and storage of CO2 emissions from surrounding buildings and power plants. Thanks to underground compression, the exhaust gases do not enter the atmosphere.
The second ugrade for this building is "Advanced Remediation Process" it halves the cost of soil clean up in the area.
Logistic Center is now Maintenance Station
The logistic center is now called "Maintenance station" and automatically repairs nearby damaged buildings by default. It's upgrades are the fire station and "Advanced Repair Process", which halves the cost of repair processes in the area.
Desertification Threat and Temple Power
In the course of global warming there will be new deserts emerging next to others. Thereby the infertile wasteland is growing. The only way to prevent this is to plant forests onto desert fields so it can't spread. Trees will effectively stop the process of desertification.
In the illuminati temple you can use gaian energy to create a field of desert anywhere around the world. Except on fields with forests on them.
Solar Panels and Wind Farms
They are aligning to the sun and the wind direction now.
Mountain Variations
Each mountain has two versions now to bring more variety into the game's look.
These two versions are now put to the three edges of big mountains as well to make it easier to see whether a field is blocked by mountains.
Fixes & Improvements
As always, have fun and give feedback!
Jens & Martin
#40 "Diplomacy"
Space colony people, may we have your attention please?
The age of diplomacy just kicked into Imagine Earth! Other corporations now have an attitude towards you. When you are being offensive they will find appropriate strategies to react to your doings. Also there's a mighty construct in this update for you as well: The Midras Extractor creates tornadoes and does terraforming.
Read your way down through all those good news to catch a glimpse of some future plans we have.
Thanks very much for being with us! If you do like the way we do things here please consider giving the game a thumps up on Steam. It would help as a lot!
Did you always want to interact more with the colonies you share the planet with? Well we did ever since. Now the other corporations have a mood set in seven levels from being allies to enemies. They react to certain events that you trigger like stealing their land by building a tower or using a hacking tool against them.
As you can see they stopped trading stuff with us because I threw an asteroid on them. There reactions go down to aggressively taking my terrain and buildings.
Note that these are our first "diplomatic steps" and will definitely need some refinement and your feedback!
Midras Extractor
The Extractor is a high tech construct of the Midras. It absorbs the power of fallen asteroids to generate force fields. It can do rare condensation to turns rocks into gold. Technically it condenses all the small metal particles so they become harvestable. A second power generates a force field in the sky to create a small-scale air vortex in the earth's atmosphere with an almost vertical axis of rotation - a tornado. Third it enables you to do terraforming.
For the next update we plan to build these and other temple structures with artifacts you can buy from the various races.
Nitro Pumpkin Seeds
Natives will sell pumpkin seeds now. You can use them to plant your own nitro-pumpkins whereever you like.
In addition they trade ideon treasure maps showing how much ideon is in the nearest ideon deposit. Of course, you will also find classic products like gaian energy containers and the universes most favorite meal drug "Spice" in their shop.
Planet Bonus Goals
The bonus competition missions in the campaign mode now have 5 goals which help to introduce the victory point systems. This will make it more of a challenge to reach full points in your game profile.
AI & Merchants
Fixes & Improvements
Future Constructs
During the holidays Jens scribbled down some ideas about the next buildings that will fill the build rings in of our game. Tell us which one feel most intriging to you or what other possible game features you would like to see. The 3 most original ideas in the comments of our blog will win a steam key for yourself or a friend: https://www.imagineearth.info/alpha-40/
Thanks for reading about Imagine Earth!
Martin & Jens
Alpha 39 "Thera"
Fellow space colony managers,
we recently discovered a new planet - say hello to Thera. In addition, our world management system needed some adjustments. All building upgrades were rebalanced and the resource simulation was revised. And of course there is so much more.....
TL;DR
Thera - a Planet Like Earth
The latest planet that you can unlock in the bonus galaxy is Thera. It might remind you of another planet you left long ago, right where you grew up before you joined the colonization business and started building a better future in space. Make sure that history wont repeat itself on this planet...
Organic Flora
We added some edge modells to forests so they look more organic and more round than triangle. As simply as this is said as astonishing it does look in the game.
Upgrade Balancing
All the upgrades in the game have been revisited and rebalanced. We mostly made them cheaper and more powerful to increase their strategic value.
Furthermore the visualization has been improved so you can see the most important numbers at a glimpse.
Resource Simulation
In order to make the upgrades more significant, we also had to adjust the complete resource simulation.
Let's have a look at the most important change: The production and consumption values of all buildings are now per space minute instead of per space second. For example the tax value of a district now represents what is collected within a full space minute. 1/60 of the amount will be added to your budget ervery space second.
If your colony makes a profit of +300€, it will take one space minute until the full amount is added to your budget. This equals +5€ per space second.
This allowed us to increase the production and consumption values of all buildings which makes them easier to read and compare.
Money related values have been increased by factor 10. Energy, food, goods and rare resources have been increased by factor 2-4. The same goes for emissions and field pollution.
In addition it allowed us to halve prices and money budget and to reduce the size of a resource cargo from from 1.000 to 100 units. These values are now easier to read and compare with the production as well.
Assimilators & Xrathul Harvester Interaction
These flying enemies are now attackable with ideon bombs and explosive devices, which will be thrown on them by your drones.
To do so you can simply hover and click the flying enemy unit and pick the item of your choice. Thisway you also get a context info about their motives and vulnerabilities.
As you can hear the game features and mechanics are now explained by a native speaker with a compelling voice. As soon as we find time to redo the intro/trailer we also want to have this voice for Lima, the leading character in the game.
More Stuff
Grafix
Alpha 38 "Mushroom Worlds"
Dear Space Colonists, our monthly update of Imagine Earth this time adds a background story frame to the campaign and a new additional vegetation set.
TL;DR
Mushroom Vegetation
Maybe you where one of those who perceived our planets as a bit too normal and not very alien-like. We had the same feeling for some time and saw chance to try something new in terms of vegetation. The whole set of forests (8 bioms + 1 underwater) is now being replaced on two of the six campaign planets to make their themes more diversified. It also triggered us to do another set of vegetation besides trees and mushrooms. Could be giant ferns or totally alienated, glowing crystal plants. Any ideas?
Epic Background Story
We heard it from time to time and felt the same way. The campaign was lacking a bigger context for the story. We have added this now in the form of cut scenes told in the campaign screen. This links all the missions to a big picture and a real goal that is followed by you and the other companies.
Resource Storage
A minimum of 10% goods will always be put into storage if you prioritize a certain resource. That keeps you from waiting for a resource package you wanted to store when the production value of the resource is low.
No More Fake AI on Rounos
On the Rounos mission we had a scripted enemy which could finally be replaced by our AI. In addition we have polished the mission on planet Rounos. There were serious balancing issues that are hopefully working out much better now.
Important note: All old savegames on Rounos wont work anymore. Sorry, but this was necessary.
New Flashy Quest Icons
You can recognize much easier when there are important events somewhere on the planet. Quest icons have pulsing markers around themselves. In addition these quests are arranged in an own line in the bookmark panel. You can jump to these Events simply by pressing TAB.
New Features
Fixed Bugs
Alpha 37 "Fusion Reaction"
Dear Space Colonists, our monthly update of Imagine Earth this time focuses on improving the visualization of building productivity and quality of life for cities.
TL;DR
Joma Extended & "Healing" for Temples
It's now possible to donate items and resources to other colonies. For now this has only relevance for the missions, but in the near future we will be working on a diplomacy system.
We have extended the Joma mission to make use of this feature with respect to the epidemics and Birons. This gives you the chance to take a decision at one point that will have influence to a later part of the mission.
The cure spell that is now available in temples neutralizes pathogens that can pose a threat to more complex forms of life on site - in other words, you can use it to heal epidemics.
Fusion Reactor
This new building is introduced in the Rounos mission.
The fusion reactor generates thermonuclear energy of nuclear fusion. Lithium is needed as a raw material, which can be extracted from asteroids on most planets. There is only relatively little radioactive waste and the reaction can be aborted safely at any time.
The "divertors" upgrade improves binding of impurities from the plasma and reduce maintenance and disposal costs. The "reactor extension" upgrade expands the reactor so that additional energy can be produced.
This building most likely will need some additional balancing, since it's the first time a building consumed rare resources.
Fire Station
The fire station is an upgrade for city districts and the logistics center. It ensures that fires in the vicinity are automatically extinguished by a drone. In addition, the probability of forest and building fires is halved.
Money and Tax Balancing
Currently you always have loads of money in the long term. We are trying to improve the balancing of this a bit. In the first step we have increased the start budget and decreased tax income. At the same time we have increased the tax bonus you receive when your people have a high quality of life.
New UI for Details on Productivity and Quality of Life
Over the course of the last years Imagine Earth has become a quite complex game. A part of this complexity is how productivity is influenced by nearby buildings and local factors like ground fertility.
With this update we are introducing a new info panel that is shown when a building is clicked. It sums up the productivity and lists all the influencing factors and their strength. This will make it a lot easier for you to understand what is going on and how to increase the production output of your colony.
The second part of this is how the quality of life in cities is influenced. A high quality of life will give you a tax bonus and a low quality will decrease your income.
Buildings like the park district, health district and campus district increase the quality of life in surrounding districts. Other factors will decrease it. The new info panel lists the details on this, so you always know what's going on.
Finally the former building info panel in the bottom left of the UI is replaced with a minimal version that shows the building's / object's name for the selected field and its production value / remaining resources.
Other improvements
Alpha 36 "Epidemic on Joma"
Dear Space Colonists, our (almost) monthly update of Imagine Earth this time focuses on a remake of the Joma mission that introduces new buildings, items, threats and a new race - the Birons.
TL;DR
Birons on Joma
The Joma mission was last mission from the old days of Imagine Earth. We decided to rework it and add some new goals and story to it, to make it more interesting. All the new features mentioned below are introduced in the mission.
The Birons are a new race that are introduced on Joma and are the first contact with another colony on a planet in the course of the campaign. They build small colonies and are focused on producing resources and items and trade these things.
Trade with other colonies
Other colonies are now ready to trade overproduced resources, harvested rare resources and items with you. They pay less than the merchant would, but are willing to trade any time.
Warehouse level 2
The warehouse can now be upgraded to level 2, after this has been unlocked in the research system. It doubles the storage for rare resources and adds a second harvester drone to the warehouse.
Epidemics, medicine and health district
Epidemics are a new threat that can occur anytime. The probability is increased by local pollution, high temperatures and buildings like the cattle breeding or chemical plant and mushroom forests.
You can cure the epidemic with the new item "Medicine". It can either be crafted using chemicals and corals or bought from the trader.
The new health district improves the quality of life of the surrounding districts. In addition, the spread of epidemics is prevented and the probability of an outbreak is halved.
It's medical lab doubles population growth in surrounding districts and the university hospital increases the radius of the health center in which epidemics are prevented, the quality of life is improved and medical laboratory affects population growth.
Chemical plant
The chemical plant produces all the chemicals needed in society. Production is increased by gas deposits as well as neighboring chemical plants. Inconspicuous, for example, for medicine and fertilizer production.
Fiber-reinforced plastic reduces the maintenance cost and risk of an incident by using fiber-reinforced plastic instead of metal. This avoids corrosion. Laboratory optimizes the production process and reduces quality-related production losses.
Meteor shower (new threat)
https://youtu.be/L05FQNedVxs
Meteor showers are a new force of nature. They come down as a burst of 3 to 6 small meteors that cause about 40% damage to normal buildings.
Single meteors can be shot by laser and pulse cannons or stopped by a city center or frontier tower with shield generator.
Worker drones
All basic maintenance and incident works are now done by worker drones. This includes shipping the construction site for a new building, relocating existing buildings, repairing damaged buildings, extinguishing fires and dropping items like explosive device or seed bomb.
To make sure you always have enough worker drones available, the logistics center comes with an additional drone.
Seed bombs
The seed bomb is a new item that grows the optimal forest on any field. This field can be located within or near your colony. The item can be crafted using nitrokirlide and timber.
