The Spatials: Galactology
Play NIMBY Rails @ Steam Game Festival!
You can download the NIMBY Rails demo by visiting our Steam Store page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/
Announcing NIMBY Rails | Galactology Version 3.13
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/
NIMBY Rails is still in development and it will take some time to reach the Early Access release, but we have ambitious plans for it. In the meantime you can check this epic development retrospective with screenshots and videos of the prototype and pre-alpha phases of development:
https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-retrospective/
Version 3.13
We are also switching the default branch of The Spatials: Galactology to version 3.13, finally. It has been available and finished for months in the pretest branch of Steam. The capricious gods of Steam visibility and a slowdown in the development of NIMBY Rails has made this release a year too late.
Check these news posts for the changelog of version 3.13:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/1693802787369174715
https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/1687054997724980180
https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/3408560492363069288
https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/1687054997724980180
Development update 2018-12-15
In some missions, like Making enemies, Intelligence assault or Unrequested demolition you will visit planets of a civ whose ancestral enemy wants you cause some annoyance, if by annoyance we consider leveling down entire buildings. You will get combat objectives on the planet and will have to pass several phases, depending on the difficulty rating. At insane level you will have to fight a boss level mob!
Defending friends, We got spooks and Stop them early are similar in concept, but this time the ancestral enemy is camping on the planets of your friends and you need to deal with the invaders and their constructions. Reinforcements will be called, for sure.
Both groups of missions are based on the ancestral enemy system between civs, and even civs that hate you will give you missions. This is an easy way to gain their favor (and to sink your reputation with their foes, of course).
Pesky fauna and Disease outbreak are meant to be earlier level missions for planets whose civ is friendly to you. Don't be fooled by their lack of warfare, at higher difficulty levels they are really hard, and reward just as good items and bonuses as the others.
Development update 2018-10-29
Planet missions
The big missing piece for planet gameplay now has its foundations in place. One planet per system can now get a random mission, and it will be displayed in the galaxy map with the universally familiar icon:
Hovering over the star or planet will display the full mission information, as opening the planet window:
Missions can have 4 difficulty levels, and by default, their rewards are proportional to the planet level. The player can choose to purchase a reroll of the rewards to match their unlocked tech level, but this will also increase the mission level.
Once on the ground the player will need to solve one or more objectives, and not all of them will be about killing. For example the current test mission requires to apply healing in a new way:
Now that the foundations are ready and one test mission has been implemented we will focus on adding more mission types.
Version 3.13 is now in the pretest branch!
https://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1697169163416373010/
We are using a branch for now due to the nature of some of the changes, and because 3.13 breaks saves with 3.12. This way we get more time to test 3.13 and give more time for players to keep playing the default 3.12 branch.
3.13 still has some months of development left, stay tuned for more development updates and pretest builds.
Named enemies with progression and persistence
Enemies now always have an unique name, instead of the generic names in earlier versions. The main reason is that they are also persisting. This means a given named enemy will always have the same sprite, if they manage to survive.
Survive? Yes. Just as you can install insurance cloners for your officers, enemies that reach certain notoriety fighting you will get a chance to be saved before you kill them. They will teleport out instead of dying.
Notoriety? Yes. Since enemies are persisting, they now also have a simplified leveling system. There's 30 enemy rankings, and each ranking gives the enemy more hitpoints and more weapon power. The higher rankings make them truly formidable adversaries. Rankings are a bonus on top of their level.
Ranked enemies which survive your encounters will be able to face you again in the future. Every time the game spawns a random enemy it will also consider spawning a persisted named enemy instead, allowing them to gain an even higher ranking.
This also comes with a nerf to the loot drops from enemies. Lower ranked enemies will never drop wearable items, while higher ranked ones will, and for the first time they will also be able to roll items with rare/epic/legendary bonuses, depending on their rank.
New station raids
Station raids have been greatly enhanced in 3.13. They are now able to really scale up, to create an actual danger to your station, proportional to your development and your enemies hate.
The size of the foot soldier group is now variable and can include more than 20 units. A proportional subset will always have higher rankings, even if the game has to generate fresh new higher ranked enemies.
Siege objects are now introduced, and they will spawn in higher difficulty raids. Turrets are always spawned to protect them.
Mortars are slow artillery, that fire a slow projectile, and can reach any point on the map. The explosion of the projectile is devastating, but the game will always tell you in advance where it is going to fall with a red circle area.
Docks are exactly that. Enemy shuttles will keep docking there unless you destroy them, and they will unload small enemy groups. They have a long cooldown, but more than one dock is possible.
Tombs
Fallen officers will now occupy a new object, tombs. If an officer dies the game will try first to occupy their assigned tomb, and if they have none, any non-assigned empty tomb. This happens even if the officer dies while exploring a planet. It's not mandatory to build tombs, officer corpses will still be spawned if there are no available tombs at the moment of death.
Lactians triggered by Mystery Milk
Lactians will turn into an hostile antagonist civ when you unlock the last tier of food & drinks. They will still visit you in peace (and in litter) before that .
Balance sheet
An often requested feature, now more important than ever.
Ancestral enemies for civs
Some of the civs in the galaxy now have an ancestral enemy. These enemies are other civs, and they are always paired to each other. When gain rep with the civ, you lose the same amount with their enemy, and viceversa. This applies to all possible rep changes, not just those from combat. This means you will now have to make some hard choices about which civs you will be friends with.
Player invasions with upkeep costs
Invading's not free anymore. When you invade an hostile planet so you can extract its resources in peace, you will have to pay an upkeep price per minute, which goes up the higher the planet level is. You can stop the invasion in the planet dialog:
Going bankrupt will stop the invasion automatically:
The combination of ancestral enemies and invasion upkeep will make mid to end game more interesting to play.
New ship skills: jumpdrive and insurance
Ships equipped with a jumpdrive skill can travel instantly between star systems, reducing travel time to the minimum possible amount. They still have 10 second approach time to any body inside the system. The jump drive is always available and the AI will also use it for autopilot.
The ship insurance skill will save one officer downed in battle once every 3 minutes, while exploring a planet.
Both ship skills are only available in some ships in the higher end tiers of research.
Officer demands for products
Graduate and master officers will now demand specific products for some vitals, and will refuse to consume anything else. These demands are balanced with the progression of research and planet resources in mind. They should be easy to satisfy for graduates and trickier for masters, and they are also predictable and standardized for all officers of the same spec. This change is the most speculative of the patch, so we will see if keep it or not.
3.13.1
- Add development option to re-enable the connectivity cache
Development update 2018-07-16
Tombs
Fallen officers will now occupy a new object, tombs. If an officer dies the game will try first to occupy their assigned tomb, and if they have none, any non-assigned empty tomb. This happens even if the officer dies while exploring a planet. It's not mandatory to build tombs, officer corpses will still be spawned if there are no available tombs at the moment of death.
Lactians triggered by Mystery Milk
Lactians will turn into an hostile antagonist civ when you unlock the last tier of food & drinks. They will still visit you in peace (and in litter) before that .
Balance sheet
An often requested feature, now more important than ever.
Ancestral enemies for civs
Some of the civs in the galaxy now have an ancestral enemy. These enemies are other civs, and they are always paired to each other. When gain rep with the civ, you lose the same amount with their enemy, and viceversa. This applies to all possible rep changes, not just those from combat. This means you will now have to make some hard choices about which civs you will be friends with.
Player invasions with upkeep costs
Invading's not free anymore. When you invade an hostile planet so you can extract its resources in peace, you will have to pay an upkeep price per minute, which goes up the higher the planet level is. You can stop the invasion in the planet dialog:
Going bankrupt will stop the invasion automatically:
The combination of ancestral enemies and invasion upkeep will make mid to end game more interesting to play.
Development update 2018-06-18
These notes reflect the work in progress for version 3.13, which is not public. We will keep adding new features to this new version and in the coming weeks we hope to open it up for testing in a Steam beta branch.
Named enemies with progression and persistence
Enemies now always have an unique name, instead of the generic names in earlier versions. The main reason is that they are also persisting. This means a given named enemy will always have the same sprite, if they manage to survive.
Survive? Yes. Just as you can install insurance cloners for your officers, enemies that reach certain notoriety fighting you will get a chance to be saved before you kill them. They will teleport out instead of dying.
Notoriety? Yes. Since enemies are persisting, they now also have a simplified leveling system. There's 30 enemy rankings, and each ranking gives the enemy more hitpoints and more weapon power. The higher rankings make them truly formidable adversaries. Rankings are a bonus on top of their level.
Ranked enemies which survive your encounters will be able to face you again in the future. Every time the game spawns a random enemy it will also consider spawning a persisted named enemy instead, allowing them to gain an even higher ranking.
This also comes with a nerf to the loot drops from enemies. Lower ranked enemies will never drop wearable items, while higher ranked ones will, and for the first time they will also be able to roll items with rare/epic/legendary bonuses, depending on their rank.
New station raids
Station raids have been greatly enhanced in 3.13. They are now able to really scale up, to create an actual danger to your station, proportional to your development and your enemies hate.
The size of the foot soldier group is now variable and can include more than 20 units. A proportional subset will always have higher rankings, even if the game has to generate fresh new higher ranked enemies.
Siege objects are now introduced, and they will spawn in higher difficulty raids. Turrets are always spawned to protect them.
Mortars are slow artillery, that fire a slow projectile, and can reach any point on the map. The explosion of the projectile is devastating, but the game will always tell you in advance where it is going to fall with a red circle area.
Docks are exactly that. Enemy shuttles will keep docking there unless you destroy them, and they will unload small enemy groups. They have a long cooldown, but more than one dock is possible.
Goodbye Early Access!
After nearly two years we are moving Galactology out of Early Access! The battle against bugs has been won and the frameworks for a complex and fun sim have been built and polished, along with a ton of new content and balancing. Here's an incomplete listing of all the additions:
- Colony stations built on planets
- Building system based on rooms with separate flooring and walls
- New room styles
- Combine any floor tiles together with a range of colors
- New objects to furnish the station, both decorative and functional
- New space flight system based on wormholes
- Ship construction
- Civilizations also have ships and use them to visit you
- New civilizations (Chuchus, Cucurbians and Meductians)
- Per-factory order queues
- Global mode for factory production based on stock levels
- Per-job per-officer job priorities
- Class system with task-based learning and progression and a new set of skills
- Private property and rooms for your officers – and demands related to class
- Equippable items for your officers, make them more powerful with better loot
- Security system with item progression, shields turrets and security doors
- Events and disasters, spies, monsters, and VIPs can come visit your station
- Disease system with healthcare and hospitals
- Hotel system
- Visitor archetypes with different needs and expectations
- Redesigned research system and UI
- Redesigned staff screen
- Door filters
- Room-level aesthetic score and noise levels, which can affect vital tasks
- Large optimizations and performance enhancements
- Support for languages with custom fonts
- Built-in support for Chinese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Turkish and Russian
This is just one more milestone in the development of our game and we have quite a bit of roadmap to get through this year. The plan now is to keep development versions in a Steam beta branch for those who want to test them. We will post more details when the first public beta builds of 3.13 are ready.
To our devoted translators, all the players who gave us feedback and suggestions during Early Access, and to those who bought the game and supported us: THANK YOU!
Edit: the changelog for updates to the 3.12 version is in the 3.12 announcement news post:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/1649881367332195987
Version 3.12 is now available!
Game guide
The biggest new content in this release is the game guide. It covers a lot more of the game systems and mechanics than the tutorials, without being intended to cover 100% of the game.
Delivery stations
Selling products to civ planets now requires to first build a delivery station on a planet. This delivery station will allow you to pick which product you want to deliver to this planet, from the list of products accepted by the planet civ.
Autopilot changes
The autopilot has been made more usable with some much needed improvements. The selection row in the autopilot window now behaves correctly when adding, deleting or moving orders. An icon will now display which resource will be loaded next to the planet icon, to make it much easier to figure out what a ship is doing. Notice the drag and drop orders icon is now a button? This is what it opens:
Instead of hunting around for the correct system and planet and then dropping an icon on top, a picker is now displayed, showing only the planets that have extractors installed, along with important information like how many ships are visiting them and which resource they are extracting.
Unique discoverable objects
Discoverable objects are back! The entire set from V2 is now available, plus another new batch for Galactology. Just keep your eyes open when landing on planets and if you find one, click it to unlock it.
Full Korean translation by kiironosora
kiironosora, a member of this forum, has produced a full and detailed Korean translation. Thank you very much!
Other changes
This release was much focused on smaller changes. Here's some "finally!!!":
- Delivery after production: only do if officer has delivery job enabled
- Separate menu for ship listing in officer list filter menu
- Add four sided fallback positions for some jobs, specially for construction ones
- Extra checks to not allow autopiloted ships to explore planets. Stop them first.
- Do not crash on some GUI errors
- Do not allow room marking beds (master, cryo) to be blueprinted outside of a room
- Fix: officers with multiple beds get wrong values in their demands
- NPC invaders on planets must spawn at least at raider level
- Outdoor attrition system: give the warning immediately but start the damage only after some minutes
- Add missing levels to recycler
- Fix: when forcing a delivery, if the officer is standing on a pallet of the resource kind, resources are teleported into the stack, even if the stack is far away
- Fix: floor replacing should not mark a room as outside
- Fix: manual repair orders via context menu do not work
- Fix: demands listing text does not fit for most languages
- Neutral civs do not come visiting anymore, you need friendly
- Before neutral you cannot cargo to civs, only pay tribute
- Reputation-based progressive tribute prices
- Add flagging for destruction action to objects
- Add storage area to copy-able objects
- Fix: reputation is not being added if you liberate a planet
- Fix: built walls over existing finished floors are not painted properly
3.12.1
- Better pathing for station raiders. Raiders will now ignore walls unless absolutely nothing else is available, including entities beyond their sight range. They will get flexible but persisting damage targets (like forced targets for officers) and will try to look for them inside the station in populated areas. This is not the big raiders review, but it's a first step to make them more interesting.
- Taking from a stack first splits it into two stacks, then marks one as busy. This is a subtle change with a potential big impact. For starters it should fix most or all bugs related to false job starts, failed deliveries and stampede effects on new stocks. A new system has also been introduced to unify back the stacks into one in case the job abandons the busy stack.
- New achievement, counter, and goal for discovering 10 uniques on planets. Reveal goal only when landing on a planet with a spawned unique.
- Extra ui sounds for construction
- Add icon to ship listing cell to indicate if it has dock assigned
- Fix: doctor cures counter should count cured patients, not medical actions
- Fix: some deconstruct wall flagging does not produce jobs
- Fix: direct delivery to nearby pallet after production should always work, even if the officer has no restocking job enabled
- Fix: focus officer in staff (link action) should switch to staff listing from recruit listing if required
- Fix: "Kill x enemies" goal description should not say anything about civs
- Fix: goal alert click should focus on the goal in the goals window
- Fix: Add manual recycle action to context menu
- Fix: do not allow to trigger self destroy more than once in pause mode
- Fix: manual delivery orders should respect entity max carry amount
- Fix: starting a job should stop any walking
3.12.2
- The star and planet name generator has been removed. Now names will be picked up at random from a list of real star names. The reason for this change is that the generator sometimes created real words that were offensive. To fix this a blacklist is required. But the game is now localized to half a dozen languages, and it is impossible to have a comprehensive blacklist. So now a whitelist will be used instead. Planets will now be named with the star name plus a roman numeral.
- Fix: nearby deposit on pallets for officers with no restocking job should always work
- Fix: stack split for jobs must preserve some flag components (fixes tourists picking up free products)
3.12.3
- Buff aesthetics for unique objects
- Add price to product listing when choosing a product for the delivery station
3.12.4
- Make floater builder robots so they are much faster when moving and working
- Halve required research XP for master researchers
- Update some missing translations
- Fix: medical event adds rally flag to visitors to path to a doctor desk. Make sure the way is path-able for them
- Fix: make sure auto stack pallet output for factories considers the proper 3x4 area
- Fix: when using copy mode for the object build tool make sure fields are copied and not just referenced
- Fix: Turkish guide crash
3.12.5
- Translation updates
3.12.6
- Show system level in galaxy map when civ overlay is enabled
- Higher default amounts for shops (3/10) and pallets (10/50)
- Right click on crew slots to quickly remove officers from ships, plus tooltip
- Right click on pallet resource picker button to clear selection, plus tooltip
- Right click on ownership officer picker button to clear owner, plus tooltip
- Show a warning modal when leaving a planet with a product-less delivery station
- New inspector tab for officers: owned objects
- Add selection button to portrait in the owner tab for objects
- Planetarium info in systems with no pending links should explain that all the links are unlocked
- Add default non demand price for products in the civ screen
- Button to copy autopilot from another ship
- Add filter for kind of equipped active item for all officer listings
- Add tooltip listing the entire list of recipes in resource ingredient information elipsis
- Add factory information to product information and recipe information
- Add list of recipes to factory object descriptions
- Remember staff picker sorter/filter choice
- Update some translations
- Fix: jumpy autopilot order listing should not be jumpy
- Fix: delivery station "demand" is actually "demand increase speed", fix label
- Fix: resources refunded from dismantling ships should spawn in walkable border tiles
- Fix: cancel construction button for tile building job builds the tile
- Fix: properly focus the listing selector in the staff screen when selecting an staff alert
- Fix: noisy objects should force a room noise recalc for all possible construction and destruction scenarios
- Fix: some civ objects had wrong names
- Fix: some civ boxes were not spawned as boxes
- Fix: proper sorting in build menus
- Fix: when an officer is not in the station the equipment matrix should behave the same as the per-officer equipment picker
- Fix: allow keypad enter in text modal prompts
- Fix: don't require so much aluminium for so many active and wearable item recipes
- Fix: landing on an previously player invaded planet should not trigger the retaliation event
- Fix: floating robot gets stuck after building walls or objects
Version 3.11 is now available!
3.11 is here! This version has had a shorter development cycle because we wanted to get the new translation system out as soon as possible, to make sure we get it tested. But as always you can count on a batch of small and not so small enhancements. Check the following release notes in case you missed our development updates.
Resource list in galaxy view
The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead:
Per-ship filtering in officer listings
All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship:
New planet header images
Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons:
New docks
After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try:
Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.
New reveal event for Lactians
Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.
Research screen final design
The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.
New security objects
Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door.
The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one).
We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration.
And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.
Getting serious about localization
For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG.
This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so.
We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games.
This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death).
Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. Check the details on how to contribute here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1700542332324695551/
Achievements!
Yep, another "finally" :)
Update 3.11.1
- Add some achievement translations
- Fix: selection rectangle cannot select entities on the +edge of the map
- Fix: add more active margin to selection rectangle
- Add support for non breakable spaces and fix French translation to use them
- Fix: spurious officer portraits in alerts
- Fix: crash with Chinese translation
- Fix other translations with potentially the same bug
- Fix: allow forced deliveries to any pallet under max stock, not just under min stock
- Update translations with more contributed strings
Update 3.11.2
- Big update to german translation, bringing it up-to-date
- Tweaks to other translations