V1.3

V 1.3 Update

Overview

We are addressing issues with micromanagement of your growing empire. Here are some of the improvements we're providing:

• Planetary Governors. Choose Governors to rule planets in your place, freeing you focus on grander strategic goals. These Governors decide what Planetary Improvements to build.

• Improved Ship and Fleet management. We've introduced numerous UI enhancements to help manage large numbers of ships and fleets in your empire.

• Improved Ship Destination Interface. A newly redesigned Ship Destination Interface will help you organize the movement of large fleets across the galaxy.

Full Patch Notes

Visual / Audio Improvements

• Added new background music track
• Added new news robot animations
• Added orbit and follow cameras to the Battle Viewer

Micromanagement Improvements

• Governors
  • Governors build Colony Improvements for you. To choose a Governor, first research "Interstellar Governance". Then choose a Colony and press the "Manage" button. A list of available Governors appears on the right-hand side of the window.
  • You may remove a Governor and take back control of a Colony at any time.

• The Colony Window now allows you to sort the Colonies based on Name, Manufacturing, Research, Wealth, Population, Influence, and Approval.
• Ships are now grouped into Fleets under the "Ships" tab instead of being listed out individually. You can expand the Fleets to inspect individual ships within each Fleet stack.
• Added a "Fleets" category to the Governs > Commands window. This allows you to redirect large groups of ships all at once.
• Redesigned the Ship Destination window to add tabs for each destination type and included a minimap.
• Shipyard and Starbases now have their own tabs to Main Game Window

Balance

• Lowered the cost of larger hulls slightly
• Fleets are more likely to dogpile on desirable targets.
• Fleets will be less timid when picking targets.
• Added a Game Settings option to disable the AI surrendering.
• AI should build more Economic Starbases
• Increased turn lifetime of strategies that were 5 turns to 10 turns
• Eliminated the free stuff bonuses gifted AI was receiving due to improved overall AI improvements
• Removed the free techs and free ideology points from Genius AI due to improved AI behavior generally
• Made Incredible difficulty level get more goodies for those who want to be punished
• Made Godlike AI difficulty get more goodies to punish the crazies
• AI only updates tax policy fully when a new AI strategy is chosen (instead of every turn)
• AI is more likely to use colony ships to explore unknown stars in the hopes of finding a planet
• AI gradually adjusts its spending ratios per turn rather than trying to do it all in one turn to give time for other civilization-wide measures to have a chance.
• Fixed bug that caused the AI to min and max its spending every other turn under certain AI strategies
• AI puts more effort into keeping its people happier
• AI does better dealing with ship maintenance and its effect on its economy
• Planet project production is now capped at 100% now.
• Changed all Planetary Projects to 5% from 10%
• Removed Ultra Transformer improvement.
• Remove all techs that give adjacency bonuses.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug that caused the graphs to appear corrupted
• Fixed broken progress bars for shipyards in colony screen
• Fixed missing ship image and ship name in the upgrade window.
• Game checks to see if Steam is online before allowing the user to register.
• AI will now pursue more specialized/expensive techs than rather than always going for the cheaper tech.
• If the network connection is slow, the game will no longer crash when trying to access the Hall of Fame.
• Fix to a bug where AI would sometimes see a planet that was outside its vision if it was close enough to another planet
• Fix to a bug (LONG overflow) that could cause the AI to not expand as quickly as it should
• Fixed bug that caused the AI to sometimes zero out its research when it felt economically weak
• The Colony Manufacturing and Influence sort buttons now sort the colony lists correctly
• Increased turn lifetime of strategies from 5 turns to 10 turns
• Adding fix to the slider code where the sliders would sometimes go negative.
• Improved general stability of games with large numbers of AI players
• Fixed a crash when assigning teams in games with a large number of AI opponents
• Fixed a crash when checking and unchecking the "add random opponents" repeatedly.
• Fixed a crash that would happen if you deleted a custom race and then immediately started a new game.
• Fixed a crash for restoring multiplayer games
• Resources at the top of the screen are no longer being trimmed
• The tech tree specialization nodes were using the wrong square background.
• Addressed a UI problem where some drop down lists were appearing behind buttons
• Fixed minor text layout problem with Starbase Context Window
• Fixed a number overflow problem with improvements with 0 manufacturing cost.
• Updated appearance icons for custom races. Removed some duplicate entries and updated colors for others.
• Spaces are no longer allowed for save filenames where space was the only character.
• Removed the white streaks in the Iconian faction leader movie when choosing it as your custom faction foreground movie.
• Fixing a minor issue with the Terran colony and Terran constructor ships where hyperdrive modules weren't appearing on both sides
• Removed the yellow hex ring around the Approval Relic
• Planetary defending fleets with zero attack power are no longer invulnerable to attack.
• Set the default AI difficulties to Normal instead of Easy
• Mega Events are now disabled in the Campaign and the Tutorial.
• Tutorial and Campaign will no longer hang when loading if mods are enabled
• Added a diplomacy modifier that calls out other races as warmongers when they declare war too often.
• Changed the game so anyone with a transport can invade with conventional warfare if you don't have the tech yet. This solves a problem where a player who unlocked the "Malevolent - Dangerous " Ideology, received a transport, but couldn't use it to invade a planet because they hadn't researched the invasion tech.
• When fleets merge they now attempt to take on whatever move directive is currently issued from the incoming fleet.
• If an AI leader is busy with another player, it won't make a trade offer to a second player.
• Fixed Fog of War bug where objects in a row that goes from visible to exposed were not hidden.
• Added a Browse button to the Custom Faction Choose Picture Screen that will open an Explorer window directly to the location for copying images.
• Map Editor: fixed problems with the preview thumbnails
• Map Editor: Do longer allow players to set a "recommended players" count of more than 100 when saving their map
• Loading a custom map screen now displays the selected map's size.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when the map editor tried to access DLC ships.
• Fixed a problem with that would cause planet icon tooltips to break and show invalid data
• Fixed a couple game-within-game lobby crashes
• Fix an issue where "Unlikable" trait causes you to actually be liked.
• Address a problem with uploading custom factions to Steam.
• Fixed a crash when moving a fleet into shipyard at the end of turn

Other Resources

V1.3 Forum Post