Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy, Indie
Imagine Earth
Alpha 35 „Atmosphere“
Dear Space Colonists. We have released our monthly update of Imagine Earth. In the next days we will also update the Demo version to the latest state.
TL;DR
Atmospheric Scattering Shader
This release is foremost a beauty and game atmosphere update.
We have implemented a new atmospheric scattering shader that puts every planet into a unique light color situation.
Hover Cars
Hover cars fly through the skyscraper canyons of your cities and show how full districts are. They bring some visual life into the so far empty city districts and the whole colony environment at all
This is only the beginning - we plan to have cars driving to all of the supply buildings as well.
Bora Mission & Assimilator
It got totally reworked to make the end boss more understandable and assailable. The robotic entity is now attackable not only with astroid strikes but also with gaian fire, volcano eruptions from the temple and bombs as well.
The companions are constantly giving you tips how to attack the assimilators.
In addition we put a lot of work into rounding up the storytelling of the mission. Plus there is now a proper outro sequence thanking you for your great efforts to make it this far ;-)
Temple Changes
We also had to redesign how temples work. Spells are now available from the beginning as you have to sacrifice anyway to get the construct loaded with gaian energy.
You can now queue sacrifices and load up to four tons of gifts into it that will slowly be turned into gaia one after the other. This makes spells much more accessible and the temples therefor much more use- and powerful.
More Improvements
Alpha 34 „Blow it up“
We wrapped up the most important changes of release 33 and 34 in a devlog clip on Youtube again.
https://youtu.be/NNhRtmM1WPk
TL;DR
Assimilator Drone
This first point is partly a spoiler. So jump right over it, if you haven't played the Bora mission yet.
As you know the Bora mission introduces a threat that is kind of an end boss for the campaign. This "Assimilator" (previously "Electronic Employee") spreads its cables from field to field to reach your City Center in order to assimilate it.
The assimilator now comes with a floating drone monstrosity that increases it's territory field by field. You can use frontier towers with laser or pulse cannons to defend against it.
Be careful though - the assimilator drone will fight back with a small laser cannon and thus might destroy your defense. And your cannons will only allow you to stop the assimilator from expanding. Meanwhile costing money and your precious attention.
There are several ways to get rid of it. Use asteroid strikes or volcano eruptions. Or expand your territory and apply explosive devices or an ideon bomb.
Laser and Pulse Cannon
The laser and pulse cannon now attack all enemies and dangers that approach you. We have change the values for fire and reload duration and damage and defined how each cannon interacts with the different targets.
E.g. the laser will do triple damage to asteroids and thus destroy it with one shot - just because it is optimized for this purpose.
Towers no longer take fire when being damaged and health is over 25%. You can repair them and they go on shooting.
Ideon Bomb and Explosive Device
We have put some work into improving our blasting items. Both are now dropped by one of the drones starting from the City Center.
The Explosive Device allows the immediate blasting of mountains, rocks, buildings and ruins in your area and on all fields directly adjacent to it - the later one is especially helpful to defend yourself against Assimilator.
The Ideon Bomb has multiple times the effect of an explosive device on an area of four fields. It also disintegrates big mountains and wakes up sleeping volcanoes.
Blasting single field and big mountains will leave the fields with rocks that may contain the rare resources gold and titanium.
Ice Planet Iqunox & Sleeping Volcanoes
We have added the third bonus mission to our campaign.
Since the outbreak of the pan-galactic plaque in this sector of the Udoxia Galaxy the demand for an antidote has skyrocketed.
On planet Iqunox which was known only for its cold and miserable living conditions, giant coral deposits have been discovered.
You will be one of three contractors who are send to extract the coral antidote for the U.S.U.
Sleeping volcanoes are spread all over the planet. You can use Ideon bombs to wake them up and increase the temperate on surrounding fields a few degrees - enough to get rid of the snow and grow food more effectively.
The Iqunox mission also adds the "Emission balance" as a new victory point type: It starts tracking from 20:00 onward. The leader needs to surpass others by at least 40.
Rare Resource Goal on Tuto
Planetary colonization is foremost about making a backup of humanity and populating new worlds. But there is another important goal: Exploiting resources!
To reflect this point we have added a second main objective to the first mission on planet Tuto. It introduces all the recently added gameplay mechanisms for rare resource harvesting, item crafting and blasting mountains.
Electronics Factory
The Electronics Factory replaces the existing Mall. It produces complex electronics and needs trained staff. For that reason it is more efficient next to city parts and research districts. It features "Chemical Filters" and "Entertainment Devices" as upgrades.
The Factory has been renamed to Machine Factory to make it easier distinguishable.
Other
Alpha 33 "Hacking and Crafting"
Dear Space Colonists, the Serious Brothers proudly present alpha release 33. It involves crafting and hacking and we where also present at two conferences during this update cycle - in case you are wondering what took us a bit longer this time. As usual we'd love to hear how all the new features work out for you. Please leave us your comments and ideas.
TL;DR
Crafting Items in the Workshop
One of the main new features that come with this release. In the workshop you get a list of special items that you can craft yourself instead of buying them. They are listed with up to 3 resources that you need for the generation of a certain item and it also shows if these are available or not. This will enhance the trading system as well because you can buy most needed resources from other factions. In the future it might become necessary to buy new construction plans or recipes from your trading partners. But for now we have a basic set of strategic things that we will try to balance out.
Nitro Pumpkins
This plant is a new rare resource used to craft the fertilizer and explosive device items, because it enriches nitrogen and salts. It can be found in mires and cold but fertile biomes - and was also added to the campaign planets.
Midras Resources & Resource Storage
The Midras are selling more rare resources as they are now needed for many crafting issues. For crafting it was also necessary that goods, energy and food that you particularly chose to lay in and reserve space will no longer be consumed by your personnel in times of shortage. That change was made as well because you couldn't sell stored things when they are always eaten up by hungry colonists.
Texture Size Doubled
We have lately fixed a long time overseen graphics problem concerning texture mipmapping. The whole planet with all the stuff on it should have much higher resolution by now!
Breaking Waves at the Sea Shore
Beautiful waves and a soft and organic water line on the beaches improve the look and feel off our oceans now.
Independent Frontier Towers
Towers do no longer need a field connection to the city center, the land claimed by your towers and therefor the towers them-self remain yours even when your city center is lost.
New item: The Hacking Kit
Buy this item from the tech trader to hack and take over an adjoining tower of another faction. They can defend themselves by use of such a Hacking Kit as well. so it makes sense to keep one in your inventory just for security reasons. The AI will also make use of this, once they feel like this is a good decision.
Share System & City Takeover Improvements
From now on you can always repurchase your shares for twice the price if somebody else owns them. The shares will be taken from the company owning the most of your shares.
You do no longer have to obtain over 50% off an opponents shares to take over a city that is smaller than 50%. The take over fee has been reduced to 8.000 space coins.
AI Territory Logic
Our AI companies can now use the land claim feature to obtain fields adjoining their build radius. They will eventually use the hacking tool to take over your towers - take care!
Temperatures and Global Warming
There is a new variable range of global planetary temperature that can be defined when creating a new planet for competition mode or free play. The global temperature is raising up to 10 degree until the final climate collapse happens.
This is also important for the health of local flora. Some sorts of trees and plants will not stand a chance in snowland anymore but they will regrow leaves as soon as the temperature raises to positive numbers again. Water temperature is limited down to minus 2 degree Celsius.
You will be able to experience this phenomena particularly well on the new ice planet we are currently working on.
Quo Vadis Conference and Amaze Festival
Serious Brothers where present at the international Games Week Berlin and showing Imagine Earth on several Events. Indie Game Expos at Quo vadis and Making Games Festival on Mo – We and at the A Maze Festival on Friday.
9 More Things
Alpha 32 "Sea Farms & Harvest Drones"
We present you the greater changes of the April release #32 in a short video on YT. It's definitely an experiment we wanted to try. Hope you like it:
https://youtu.be/aZbxDti8giQ
TL;DR
Sea Farms
Building of the month is the new construct called sea farm. It can be build on coast fields and sea fields adjacent to land (called "near-shore"). It works as port logistics for offshore fishing boats and the building can also breed shellfish to intensify food production for higher pollution values. The smokehouse upgrades makes its food production more durable, but comes with higher running costs.
Harvest Drones
Little drones that fly around and actually harvest the stuff you ordered to crop or gather. They are stationed on the warehouse and limit the number of crop actions that you can make. But most of all they are pretty good looking and the AI uses them too.
Reset Research
You can now reset your research decisions and strategy in the campaign screen.
New Official Trailer
The Trailer was reworked to show some more actual footage from the game. It has grown old as i had no time to change the video material for nearly two years. Really ;D Check it out here.
New Construction Site
The construction site model is more advanced now. In the next version we want to add individual build and landing animations, also for space ships to make everything a bit more cinematic...
Tower Range Visualization Changed
From now on if you construct, deconstruct or relocate towers you see a red visualization for the land you loose and blue marks on the field you claim. Expensive Upgrades will be relocated as well.
Planet Day & Night Lighting
The Planet was always too dark and contrast less on the night side. With the new moon light night shifts now have become much easier.
Gold Trading
Some NPCs like Natives & Midras will no longer trade for the universal currency of the galaxy. They stick to the gold standard and you can buy gold from merchants or dig it out yourself. These guys will also pay you for certain resources they're interested in with gold, so you can gather exchange values this way as well.
Special Upgrade Items in the Shop
Laser, Pulse & Shield Upgrades Items can now be bought from traders. This is especially helpful in the Lorian and Magni missions. So if you do not research you can still defend yourself against alien threats and stuff.
Land Claims Repriced
This tool just got more cost intensive as well. It's price depends on the distance to the outer radius of your city center. This means the price gets higher the farer away you claim land from your city.
Mission Improvements
Excessive bugfixes and roundups for the missions on Tuto, Magni and Bora.
Other stuff
Alpha 31 "Claim Land"
Dear colony managers! You have given us a lot of detailed feedback. With this release we are trying to answer a big part of it - especially the balancing of building upgrades.
TL;DR
Claim Land
A small feature that might turn out as a real game changer got implemented right now. Did you ever feel upset for having an interesting resource field, some crystals or a strategic construct directly in front of you but on the other side of the build radius border? Now you can easily claim ownership of adjacent fields.
Please be aware, that this land is not protected by city center or tower radius. It can be grabbed by other companies right away. This way of expanding your territory allows you to increase your reach onto something of interest besides the city upgrade logic. Note that you can no longer build buoys or towers outside of your build radius. The "claim land" tool must be research as well and until further testing it stays pretty expensive.
Bookmark Panel
This might not look like much at first sight, but the new bookmarks panel on the top right of the interface are a very powerful tool. It shows all your city centers and important constructs or events around them. For example the space ports you got and if there is a trader or merchant on-site at the moment. It indicates problems and events like low productivity, low building health or incidents, incoming meteorites, wildfires and other threats to your colony. Best thing is, you can directly click each icon to jump to the event immediately.
You can also create your own custom bookmarks of any field by holding a certain number key for a second while hovering the intended field.
Gaian Energy Container
The container is charged with gaian energy. This special form of power agglomeration emerges in intensive spheres of lively flora and fauna. Containers can be used to charge temples where gaian energy unleashes specific supernatural forces or they get sold as an invaluable tradable ware.
Generated gaian energy from temples can also be condensed into containers. The process is lossy and two energy charges of a temple result in only one charged container. With these containers gaian energy becomes a tradable and costly ware and can be used to charge other temples.
Balancing of Upgrades
Prices fell significantly - mostly into the range of 500 to 800€. For upgrades that increase the production we have made sure that the production to price ratio is slightly better than the one of the original building.
The efficiency (production to maintenance costs ratio) is now also slightly better than the building's original efficiency. For fossil power plants it is in the upper-mid of the "no to full fossils" range.
In addition to this some upgrades have received additional bonuses. E.g. nuclear reprocessing now gives a bonus on produced energy to reflect what is extracted from the reprocessed material.
Community Translation
This is working out much better than we expected.
We got some great fans out there who were so kind and excited to translate Imagine Earth into Italian and Spanish language. Thanks a lot to Capybara Localizations and Laura Alba for the awesome work!
In addition there's a huge rework of the English version going on as well - done by Andrew "Althis" Quadro and Arthur "Skirlasvoud" van der Burgh :-)
If you find a typo or a some mistakes in texts or dialogs it's now pretty easy to report them. Just open the "Last Message" panel (left icon at the bottom) and you can see the name of the dialog in the lower right corner of the dialog.
Mission Improvements
JOMA
LORIAN
ROUNOS
Graphics Improvements
Other stuff
Preview: Harvester Drones
To thank you for your interest in our update and reading all the way down here, we wanna give a short glimpse into future development. Here you can see harvester drones that will pick up all the stuff in the future. You can staple them on your warehouses which are used as the drone's home base.
Let us know what you think about the new stuff and if you have any feature requests. You're welcome to share your ideas for the project in the Imagine Earth forum on steam! Regards, Martin & Jens
Alpha 30 "Hyperspace Gate"
Welcome to the hyperspace! We are starting to extend the campaign with bonus planets you can access using a hyperspace gate. This gate is being build by Moax the tech trader, who will be able to complete his construction if you find and deliver him enough ideon crystals during the campaign missions.
Udoxia Galaxy
The gate leads into a new galaxy that contains new planets and missions.
Edora
Edora is the first planet in the Udoxia Galaxy. A small planet with giant icebergs at its polar caps. The low valleys of this planet will be flooded immediately by the melt of global warming.
The planet offers a predefined expansion competition against two opposing fractions. This world is also the experimental test ground to establish and improve AI battles in the game. Please give your feed back on how we could improve the interaction with other factions.
Having predefined competitions with a general comparable highscore might be the main concept of the missions in this galaxy. It adds playable content and challenging competition with some additional extra goals to master. This reduces the necessity of story filled scripted missions that need endless balancing.
New alien race: Minas
This short-lived race of typhers and diggers builds giants machines to rummage through entire solar systems searching for rare earths and noble metals. Even though they totally ignore money they are valuable trading partners. They produce rare items and exchange them for raw materials. You will meet these dudes for the first time in a reworked Lorian mission... but they will occur eventually on all following planets.
New terrain texturing algorithm
We have put some additional work into our terrain texturing algorithm to make sure the characteristics of each field are visualized in a clear way. This includes the fertility, temperature and rockiness. In addition fields that might be flooded by rising sea levels have a more sandy or stony look. The transition from one characteristic to another used to be quite blurred. The new shader uses material based alpha blending to enhance this. For example you will see little green spots on terrain, when it becomes more fertile.
New editor features
Improved forests
The updated use of transparency for deciduous and acacia forests, mushrooms and palm trees shows a great way to revolutionize the overall look of Imagine Earth's flora.
Titanite
Deposits of this new rare metalic resource can be found primarily in the dryland biom which are infertile areas with medium temperature. Titanite is so far just costly and exchangable with bombs at the Minas store.
Campaign translation possible
For those in our community who are interested in translating the game. It is finally possible to do translation of the mission scripts as well. Now it is possible to translate every single written word in Imagine Earth. All details are explained in the community translations section of the forums.
New item: Rocket kit
As rockets are now at the end of the research chain. Luckily you can buy rocket building sets from our latest alien race, the Minas.
Construction drones
We have implemented flying construction drones. They lift off and land in a new hangar at the city center tower. It's an early version but its already fun to see them being busy to set up new constructs. Future implementations might include harvester drones for resources that start and land on warehouses or automated repair drones on the repair units. Currently the city center has one drone per city level.
Other stuff
PS: Thanks to all of you who voted us in the indie of the year competition. We made it into the overall top 100 and the top 4 of futuristic sims - next to Space Engineers, Empyrion and RimWorld!
Alpha 29 "Hexa Style"
The December release brings you a little research revolution. As you can see we finally turned the research system into something that offers you freedom of choice on how to develop and enables strategic decisions.
Hexa Style Research
You can now do cross research: Licensing one research option will unlock all its neighbors. We are about to install a simple system that delivers a function to highlight groups like upgrades, tools, improvements and special functions with different colors.
We are in the Top 100 on IndieDB and one of 4 finalists in Genre "Futuristic Sim". Please support Imagine Earth for indie of the year 2016. Just follow this link and click the vote button. Thx!
Tech Menu: Auto-Build Upgrades
Upgrades that have been researched can now be selected in the development panel. When activated they are built together with the construct they belong to. This immediately rises the functionality of the building and spares you a lot of extra click-work.
The tech panel is now the perfect place to get and compare all information about the available constructs. You can click on developed buildings here to build them directly: The menu automatically closes and you place the chosen structure in your build radius.
Upgrade Balancing
The prices for installing researched upgrades on buildings are now massively discounted and rebalanced. We made it cheaper because the building space is much easier to obtain these days and it's less important that you can make one field unit produce more.
Play-On Campaign Missions
You can now play along on a campaign planet after finishing it's mission. Continue expanding your cities find all the Ideon around and finish some bonus mission goals or just go on to expand your colony as much as you like.
Other stuff
Alpha 28 "Biomes"
Biomes
This is a fundamental new (and really awesome) gameplay element. Biomes classify the average temperature and fertility of a small planet area. Each comes with an individual type of forest and graphics for the ground, rocks and mountains.
Summed up: It's much easier to just see how well a certain area on the planet fits the needs of your colony. Here is a short description of all 9 biomes:
In addition Illuminati temples and camps are placed in the hot biomes rainforest, savanna and desert. Other temples and native camps are used in the moderate temperature areas of the subtrope biome, temperate zone and drylands.
Since this is a completely new game element we still have to figure out a few details. Please let us know what you think about the biomes!
Biome based planet generator
Those biomes are perfect to generate different types of planets.
As shown above the planet generator now allows you to define the biome distribution on the planet.
Each planet themes also come with a predefined configuration. E.g. Bora is a very fertile planet that mainly comes with the fertile biomes Rainforest, Subtrope and Mires, but also some areas of Savanna, Temperate zone and Taiga.
Biome sandbox editor
In the sandbox editor you can use the biomes to paint the planet with regions of different temperature, fertility, fossils, forests, rocks, rare resources and temples.
Cultivation Unit
This new building is made available in the Joma mission. It breeds and harvests crops that thrive in symbiosis with the local flora. Therefore, each adjacent forest piece increases the yield of berries and herbs.
The upgrade "bio lab" reduces the costs of the cultivation program by genetic adaptation of the seedlings to local conditions.
The upgrade "external herb beds" enables the cultivation of valuable herbs and grasses on areas that can not be used for other plants.
Acacia
A new type of forest that is very robust against drought and mainly spread in the savanna biome.
Community Translation
Alpha 28 comes with the first version of a Spanish translation that has been written by Purple Sister. THANKS A LOT! In addition a french translation is in progress.
We have updated the Imagine Earth fonts with a few new letters (for czech). In addition the many UI elements now automatically make sure the text fits into the available space.
The next big step here for us is to make missions translatable.
Balancing
Special thanks to Justice for writing a very detailed balancing feedback on this!
We are approaching the cold time of the year - at least here in Germany. This means we have even more time to build great stuff and here is the content of our latest release:
Community translation
Imagine Earth is ready to be translated into other languages. The game now comes with a directory that contains the internationalization data. You can access it to translate Imagine Earth into your own language. Read all the details about this in the translation section of the forums.
New construct - Glassworks
The glassworks produces windows, lenses and glass containers. For this purpose particularly fine sand is used. So desert fields increase the productivity of the factory.
The glassworks is introduced in the Rounos mission.
Tech trader
A tech dealer sells special items to you. In addition, he also re-purchases unused ones and is buying rare resources.
The tech trader is introduced in the Joma mission - so this is worth being played again.
New Items
Alpha 27 comes with three new items that are sold by the Tech Trader. All items are introduced in the Joma mission.
City expansion kit
This technology enables you to expand a city district that has not reached the necessary infrastructure level in surrounding districts.
Not applicable to city centers.
Land reclamation
Let an ocean or coastal field will become land.
The field has to be adjacent to another land field.
Explosive device
Enables the blasting of buildings, forests and rocks in your area and on all fields directly adjacent to it. In buildings, the ruin can be removed with a second blast.
Sign treaty with natives
The interaction with native camps has been adjusted a bit:
You can now sign a treaty with the tribe. As the "diplomacy" tool did before, this allows you to trade with them and to use the surrounding land of all the camps of the tribe. In exchange, you provide all the camps with a small amount of goods.
Climate countdown
Once the climate balance goes into negative you can hover the climate information area to see how much time remains to rescue the planet. This is calculated based on the current level of global warming and emissions.
Time based auto-save
The game now automatically saves your state of the game every 15 minutes. In the game options you can also disable this or set it to 30, 45 or 60 minutes.
Spaceport upgrade: Rocket terminal
In order to be able to build rockets to send resources into space you now have to research and build the spaceport upgrade "rocket terminal".
Additional changes
That's it! And again: Please remember that you can take part in the community translation of Imagine Earth in the translation section of the forums.
