Game version 0.95.203 released

Notable changes:

• [Trade] Fixed planet selection box not working. The box lists all player planets and depending on the item type, it may display "No room" for spaceports and "No mil. spaceport" for ships and fighters. [Issue #913]

Game version 0.95.202 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed wrong subtitle text in the Hungarian win video. (Issue #910)
• Fixed the +++ button not filling up the available vehicle count with vehicles (Issues #905)
• AI ships no longer stay in one place if the player attacked a planet the enemy fleet is next to.

Launcher version 0.44 released

Notable changes:

• More Spanish translation. Thanks X22Sec! [Issue #889]
• Fixed missing translations. [Issue #906]
• Release notes are now listed in the Launcher.

Game version 0.95.201 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed crash due invalid diplomatic relation entries caused by Mission 4. [Issue #902]
• Fixed NPE caused by losing mouse status information due desktop switch/UAC.
• [AI] AI will build ground cannons without unnecessary delays.
• [AI] AI will upgrade static defenses without unnecessary delays.
• [Groundwar] Fixed unit movement sometimes not correctly rotated into the movement direction.
• [Balance] Increased ground cannon damage against fighters.

Game version 0.95.200 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed crash in Mission 4 (two pirates).
• Added hp-skirmish attribute to battle.xml settings under space-entities/tech to allow specifying the hitpoints of the entry in skirmish games.
• Added space-skirmish attribute to battle.xml settings under buildins/hitpoints to allow specifying the hitpoints of a building in skirmish games.
• Halved the hitpoints of Space station 2, Space station 3, Plasma projector, Particle Projector and Meson projector in the campaign. For example, 3 Space station 3s with 5 Meson Projectors and a Hypershield will whitstand a full strength Dargslan attack by a margin of 25%, i.e., 2 structures will survive the encounter generally while the attacker is mostly destroyed.
• [AI] Fixed AI sending ill-equipped fleets to attack.
• [Campaign] Fixed some skirmish ships to be available to alien races during the campaign.

Game version 0.95.199 released

Notable changes:

• [Spacewar] Fixed Trader AI causing some problems with 3-way space battles (crash, wrong chat).
• [AI] Increased the initial money of aliens to 100,000 cr in the campaign to to better jump-start their economy.
• [AI] AI no longer produces items on level 1 in the campaign.
• [Cheats] Switching to other races in the campaign stops the main mission timers (helps greatly when debugging).
• [Cheats] CTRL+SHIFT+W destroys all enemy structures in spacewar (except Trader ships).
• [AI] Fixed ordering of planets with issues (somehow, it was reversed and the AI operated on the planet with the best conditions, not the worst one).
• [AI] Fixed AI unable to build a power plant if the missing energy was above the capacity of available power plant types.

Game version 0.95.198 released

Notable changes:

• [Missions] Fixed mission timer warning. [Issue #897]
• [UI] Added key bindings comma (,) and dot(.) to +1 and -1 the currently selected equipment on the equipment screen. [Issue #896]
• [AI] Changed the logic how power plants are selected for build. Now it will try to match the demand instead of building the cheapest outright.
• [AI] The AI now aggressively builds morale buildings.
• [AI] AI now switches to higher tax rate more eagerly.
• [UI] The current money tooltip now displays the last day's total income.
• [Balance] Alien Police now has only two levels of upgrade and reduced police coverage.
• [Balance] Water waporators now have only two upgrade levels.
• [AI] Fixed the fleet upgrade logic incorrectly assessing medium ship strengths.
• [Balance] Reduced the research cost of the first alien battleship, fixed lab requirement to be 1 of each.
• [AI] The AI now builds the military spaceports and factories much later, freeing up money in the early game.
• [Balance] Reduced the Ychom Minelayer's movement speed by 50%.
• [Balance] Increased the carry capacity of Garthog Battleships by 20-25% to compensate for the lack of special attack unit (radar jammer is pretty useless) in skirmish games.

Game version 0.95.197 released

Notable changes:

• [Groundwar] Added the ability to retreat from ground battle if the player is the attacker. Look for the retreat button above the zoom button. You need to click twice to confirm the retreat or right click to cancel and continue the ground battle, just like in the spacewar screen. [Issue #673]
• [UI] Ability to strip the selected ship of equipment on the Equipment screen via the S key. You may need to deselect any equipment slot on the right panel.
• [UI] Show how much of each equipment needs to be produced to fully upgrade the currently selected fleet or planet by pressing the U key (toggle). The small panel is displayed on the right side below the ship image. You may need to deselect any equipment slot to see the panel (or hide the fleets listing and not transferring between two fleets). For example, your 2 of 3 Destroyers lack Shield 1. You have 1 in inventory and the panel shows you need to produce 1. Let's say you researched Shield 2; the panel now indicates you need to produce 3.
• [UI] In the planets list table, whenever the last column shows the number and upgrade level of certain building types, the text coloring (after the stars) now indicate if yellow: not all buildings are upgraded to the same level; red: buildings are nonoperational for some reason.

Official Facebook page started

I've started the game's official Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/OpenImperiumGalactica

I'll post changes here and on Facebook as well.

Game version 0.95.196 released

Notable changes:

• [Spacewar] Fixed batch fighters not having the aggregated firepower and not considered as multiple attackers.
• [Groundwar] Fixed the logic that allowed conquering a planet by disabling the power plants and thus making the barracks unpowered as well. This comes up first in the campaign against the Garthogs: since they only have fortresses, destroying them won't yield you the fortress technology before level 4.
• [Campaign] Fixed the first mission of level 4 (M22) to correctly a detect the 7 additional planets colonized/conquered. (The previous version counted the 4 planets given by the script.)
• [UI] Added the number of current and maximum allowed tanks and vehicles on a planet to the information panel on the planet screen.
  

Game version 0.95.195 released

Notable changes:

• [Spacewar] Fixed 3-way battle placement again.
• [Labels] Fixed missing tax button label.
• [Spacewar] Fixed AI ships not doing anything in certain 3-way battles.

Game version 0.95.194 released

Notable changes:

• [AI] Fixed crash due unavailable building types in the campaign. [Issue #893]
• [UI] Added Tax column to planet details listing.

Game version 0.95.193 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed auto-colonization building more than one military spaceport if the user clicked on the colonize button of a planet.
• Some adjustments to power plant construction on overfilled planets.
• [Skirmish] In skirmish, the "Allow all building types to be built by anyone" is enabled by default. If it is disabled, the buildings available to the alien races at start is taken from the players.xml configuration of the selected techonology template.
• [Tech] Fixed availability of UV Laser and Space Station 3 for alien races in skirmish.
• [AI] Modified the AI economic and factory planning to prioritize economic buildings & upgrades before constructing more than 1 factory of each factory type.
• [AI] Normal and Hard AIs now attack as soon as they have the necessary fleet strength. Easy AI's will wait about 3-7 days between attacks.
• [AI] The AI won't react to slight (5%) food, hospital and energy shortages immediately.
• [UI] If a planet has worker shortage and buildings are offline to compensate, the info panel and the colony info dialog now shows this by light-green text and a negative number representing the missing amount of workers, i.e., to show how much the population needs to grow to fix the worker shortage.
  
• [AI] The tax level is now reduced as soon as 10% worker shortage is detected (instead of 20% before).
• [AI] Fixed AI not upgrading more than one fleet.

Game version 0.95.192 released

Notable changes:

• Modified AI behavior to encourage it to attack more often. [Issue #866]
• Reduced the total amount of attack fleets to 1 for each 10 planets.
• Reduced the time between attacks to 5, 3 and 1 days depending on difficulty levels (easy -> hard)
• Changed the way fleets are upgraded by always upgrading the strongest fleets first which allows them to attack earlier.
• Changed how AI selects its next target. Based on the relation with other races, it may chose with probability 60% the most hated enemy, 15% of the second-most hated enemy and 25% any of the rest. After this, it choses the weakest known planet 60% of the time, the second weakest 15% of the time and any of the rest planets with 25% of the time.
• Fixed the mission script for meeting with Admiral Thulen at the end of level 1 triggering the Garthog attack too early and out-of-bounds if the player waited at the border. Now you need to meet with the Admiral inside the accessible area. [Issue #892]

Game version 0.95.191 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed HyperDrive 1 becoming always available on levels 1 and 2 when loading a save. This caused problems with the Pre-Hyperdrive trait in the campaign as traders were no longer slowed down by the scripting. The fix works only with a new game. For those who run into this problem, load an earlier save, produce and equip the incorrectly-available HyperDrive 1 on your fleets. [Issue #890]
• Three-way battles sometimes placed opposing units on top of each other if an attacker-owner planet was nearby. [Issue #891]

Game version 0.95.190 released

Notable changes:

• [AI] some fine tuning in the colony management.
• [Render] Added textCacheSize option to the open-ig-config.xml which enables the text rendering cache if not zero. Suggested value is between 1024 and 2048, but requires at least 1GB of memory (set via Xmx or in the launcher). When set, rendering the starmap screen when lots of planets are visible is more efficient.
• Added CTRL+F shortcut to display the times between frames (BF) and in-frames (IF) in milliseconds. The BF indicates the general refresh rate and the IF indicates how much time is spent computing/rendering a particular frame.

Why is the game barely making 30/60 frames per second? It depends on how many rendering instruction is sent to the underlying DirectX/OpenGL adaptor inside Java. There is so much overhead to cross the Java-native boundary that rendering lots of small images (i.e., each letter of a colored text) takes noticeable amount of time. The text rendering cache mentioned above helps by caching the text rendered into one image and reusing it when possible. Even though this takes more data to be trasferred to the GPU, it is far faster because now it uses only 1 instruction to do it instead of 20 or so. With the text rendering cache, the IF value on my machine fell from 12ms to 6ms, 

The second pain point is the colony screen. Although you don't see the entire surface, rendering speed is barely 30 frames per second, even lower at sunrise or sunset. One half of the cause is the radar panel. The radar needs to render the entire surface, scaled down, not just the visible part: it practically multiplies the number of rendering instructions. You can see the dramatic effect if you watch the times above (CTRL+F) and toggle the panel. The second cause is the way day-night rendering is implemented. Since Java2D doesn't offer pixel shaders, the rendering needs to create a darkened image of each building and surface tile, then upload it to the GPU. The image generation is super fast, but the upload is really slow: about 200MB image data in the worst case needs to be transferred to the GPU, but since PCIe speed is limited (250/500/1000 MB/s), it can take several hundred milliseconds to do it, which translates to 5-10 frames per second. To help this case, the game offers tile caching for some time now which can be setup outside the game in the Settings / Other... dialog.

Game version 0.95.189 released

Notable changes:

• [Crash] Fixed rare case when fleet doesn't have a name when its owner changes due the race surrendering.
• [AI] Modified the AI to not spam economic buildings an colony ships in skirmish when unlimited buildings are enabled.

Game version 0.95.188 released

Notable changes:

• [Technology] Fixed Garthog and a few other races' Destroyers to allow using Laser 1. [Issue #887]

Game version 0.95.187 released

Notable changes:

• [AI] Fixed AI not researching in certain skirmish settings.
• [Skirmish] Added the option to restart the skirmish game from the beginning. To do so, go to the Options/Load-save and click on the Restart button.

Game version 0.95.186 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed NPE when saving a game due to missing/removed technology in the inventory.

Game version 0.95.185 released

Notable changes:

• [Technology] Fixed campaign Dargslan Destroyer's hyperdrive.
• [UI] Fixed spacewar and groundwar screens to support AI vs AI battles: they skip the formation selection and deployment position selection part.
• [UI] The battle summary panel automatically closes after 15 seconds in AI vs AI battles.
• [AI] Fixed AI retreating from defensive space battles and causing the battle summary to display the wrong message.

Game version 0.95.184 released

Notable changes:

• [Technology] Fixed crash while loading a campaign save where the aliens were researching technology that is no longer available for the campaign. [Issue #885]
• [AI] Changed the attack planning to wait for full-strength fleet before attacking.

Game version 0.95.183 released

Notable changes:

• [Saves] Fixed loading earlier saves which may contain technology references no longer allowed by the campaign (such as the skirmish only additional alien ships). [Issue #884]
• [Balance] Limited the number of Barrack/Stronghold total count to 5 per planet because spamming these resulted in a unconquerable planet.
• Videos such as full screen cutscenes and bridge messages can now be unlocked. The Videos screen accessible from the main menu now lists only these unlocked videos in order they were unlocked.

Game version 0.95.182 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed Morgath Destroyer, Morgath Battleship and Sullep Fighter B having zero lab requirements.
• Fixed research getting stuck if the research requires a total of zero labs.

Game version 0.95.181 released

Notable changes:

• Due to changes in the game data, some skirmish saves might not load properly or units may disappear. The changes, however, should not affect any campaign saves.
• Minimum memory requirement increased to 832 MB.
• [Launcher] Added option to select Spanish game language. Translation is still forthcoming.
• [Translation] Thanks to X22, some Spanish images have been translated. [Issue #850]
• [UI] Fixed crash when pressing PgDown and the current planet is not owned by the player. [Issue #882]
• [UI] Fixed the swap of Russian letters T and У in 7px font. [Issue #881]
• [Balance] Reordered the extra skirmish-alien ships to better fit with the the campaign ships' hp/dps/cost values and fixed their prices. [Issue #880]
• [Tech] Fixed missing technology availability for alien ships in skirmish. [Issue #880]
• [UI] Fixed equipment screen not showing the +++ auto upgrade button if fighters were available in inventory but the current fleet had 0 of them.
• [UI] Fixed equipment screen showing medium and large ships overlapped.
• [Gameplay] The Spycenter building is now hidden by default in the main campaign and skirmish below level 6. Once the spying is implemented it will be made visible again.
• Memory optimizations for skirmish games when playing with only some of the campaign races.

Game version 0.95.180 released

Notable changes:

• [Missions] Fixed the case when defending a trader mission and destroying the virus carriers mission was active at the same time completing any of the space battles caused the other mission to glitch out. [Issue #867]
• [UI] The options screen now displays the regular cursor instead of randomly displaying the context-sensitive cursor of the underlying screen.
• [UI] Fixed bridge videos double playing in case the player clicked on the notification text in the status bar multiple times or during an ongoing animation/playback. [Issue #875]
• [UI] Fixed a memory leak in the trade screen when quitting a game. [Issue #878] 

Game version 0.95.179 released

Notable changes:

• [Translation] Thanks to X22, the russian text, subtitles and images are now way better. [Issue #863]
• [Cursors] Thanks to Bajor "Danyetz" Dániel, spacewar and groundwar cursors have been implemented. Using custom cursors is enabled by default and can be disabled in the Settings / Mouse screen. [Issue #187]
• [Spacewar] Rockets and bombs have now a default 30 ingame second time-to-live. This should help in situations where the rocket would land in a stable orbit around a target, preventing the spacewar to finish. [Issue #867]
• The trade screen has been implemented. Accessible via F12 or from the top right dropdown menu. The screen is accessible from all game modes, including the campaign. The economic model is quite simple: twice the cost of the production of the item and any equipment they hold. The list is regenerated every 3 ingame days and contains a randomized set of 75% of the available technology. Medium and capital ships have randomly generated equipment. [Issue #315]
• [Technology, Skirmish, UI] All alien races now have additional fighters, destroyers and battleships which can be utilized in skirmish games. Many related UI errors have been fixed. [Issue #865]
• [UI] Navigating between the planets via keyboard cursor keys and PgUp/PgDown on the Information / Planets screen is now working properly. [Issue #]
• [Skirmish] Banks are now limited to 1 per planet even if unlimited economic building option was selected. [Issue #860, Issue #868]
• [AI] AI no longer spends money on building upgrades when there is plenty of room to build a new building. [Issue #858]
• [Achievements] Some achievements have been modified to be only attainable in the main campaign. [Issue #870]

Developer Guide started on the project Wiki

There has been an increased interest in helping me develop the game, but in order to get things started on one's own machine, several convoluted steps need to be taken.

Therefore, I composed a small wiki page for the Developer Guide with some initial info. The page will be extended with additional details on demand.

Game version 0.95.178 released

Notable changes:

• [Skirmish] Some buildings were not available to skirmish Garthog or other races [Issue #865]
• [UI] Destroyer class alien ship miniatures were too large on the equipment/research screens.
• [UI] Added missing scaled versions of alien destroyers.
• [UI] Shortened the names of alien battleships in the Information/Inventions screen.

Game version 0.95.177 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed NPE due missing turret information for non-human races when playing in skirmish and the allow building anything is enabled [Issue #864]

Game version 0.95.176 released

Notable changes

• Thanks to a new contributor, X22, the russian graphics has been rewamped and cleaned up. In addition, X22 created the subtitles for the cutscenes. Thanks! [Issue #863]
• [Skirmish] Added the ability to scale the planet surfaces by 2-4 times. This will copy the base surface in a square pattern all over again. Surfaces are generally performance hogs so you'll probably allocate more memory to the game via the Launcher and/or run the game with a 64 bit Java runtime.
• [Settings] Added the ability to switch between the IG font and a system default monospaced vector font (i.e., Courier New). Needs application restart to take effect.

Game version 0.95.175 released

First of all, I'm sorry for the inactive period and the large backlog of features and fixes. Unfortunately, I did not have the time or the means to progress on most of the issues.

Notable changes:

• Fixed crash when trying to load a skirmish game with generated planets from different language.
• Fixed crash when trying to load a save created with a modded game and not having the necessary building availability.
• Introduced a new tab in the skirmish screen called Other settings with the following new and moved properties:
• Allow unlimited labs
• Allow unlimited factories
• New: Allow unlimited economic buildings
• New: Allow all kinds of buildings for all players. This will allow non-human races to build human buildings that were missing from their build set. Note however that the building images are the same as for the human race because the project doesn't have a graphics designer to draw something race-looking.
• Added open-ig-config.xml option aiAllowUpgrades to force the AI build new buildings instead of upgrading existing ones so it doesn't spend so much money on diminishing returns. This was especially problematic with buildings of basic colony needs.
• Fixed visual problems with open-ig-config.xml option useStandardFonts settings: text boundary should now be correctly calculated.
• Fixed radar working even if it was under construction, damaged or unpowered (Issue #848)

Game version 0.95.174 released

Notable changes:

• [Skirmish] Proper naming of planets when generating random galaxy. Due to the random nature, some names may appear only once, some might appear a lot of times (e.g., Garthog 45).

Game version 0.95.173 released

Notable changes:

• Enemy ships without weapons should flee if the rest of the fleet is destroyed. (Issue #846)
• Implemented random galaxy generator. You can override the number of planets in the galaxy and generate a seed. The number of planets may be overruled if you set less than the number of players times the initial planet count. You can select the initial planets for the players as usual, but please setup the random galaxy values beforehand. The main campaign's map can support up to 340 planets, but modded campaigns may have a larger map. Generating proper planet names has not been implemented yet (not easy to number adjacent planets properly), but you can rename any planets to your liking in game.

Game version 0.95.172 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed weather audio playing even if the weather effects are turned off
• Added more units to the Garthog Empire (available in skirmish)
• Fighter Mk1 - Mk4 to be in par with the human fighters 3-6; note that Mk1 is level 3 tech and the AI might research it in the main campaign.
• Destroyer Mk1 - Mk4 to match the Destroyers and Cruisers
• Battleship Mk1 - Mk3 available from level 4.
• Both Fighter Mk1 and Battleship Mk1 require minimal research labs to allow replacing the very low-performing default garthog fighter and battleship
• The following table shows a comparison between the various units. Numbers aren't final but require extensive testing to see if they are adequate

Ship type	Human			Garthog
	DPS	HP		DPS	HP
Fighter 1	5	200		5	200
Fighter 2	10	300		-	-
Fighter 3	20	400	Mk 1	20	420
Fighter 4	20	500	Mk 2	20	520
Fighter 5	30	600	Mk 3	30	620
Fighter 6	30	700	Mk 4	30	720
Destroyer 1	90	810		30	1000
Destroyer 2	150	1350		-	-
Cruiser 1	230	2400	Mk 1	180	3125
Destroyer 3	410	6075	Mk 2	390	6075
Cruiser 2	435	6400	Mk 3	470	7975
Cruiser 3	1120	11200	Mk 4	1080	12800
Battleship 1	440	5600		130	3500
			Mk 1	430	6400
Battleship 2	600	14400	Mk 2	680	13600
Battleship 3	1200	19200	Mk 3	1200	20800

• Since there is no multiplayer, you may test it via skirmish by pitting Garthog against other races in normal relation, build up both sides with the help of cheats (switch player by selecting a planet and pressing CTRL+P) and attack.

Game version 0.95.171 released

Notable changes:

• [Skirmish] Ability to set a base tax and tax scaling in skirmish games. Base tax is the amount each player receives on a daily basis. Tax scaling increases the planetary tax value by some percent. The total tax income is then calculated as follows: Tax = Base Tax + Tax Scale * sum(planet tax). Tip: you can hold SHIFT while clicking on the arrows to increase/decrease the value faster.
• Removed Load/Save buttons from the skirmish screen until they get implemented.
• [Skirmish] Added the ability to choose one starting planet; the other starting planets are chosen from nearby planets. Click on the planet icon to bring up the starmap panel. Left click to select a planet, right click to clear selection. If the same planet is selected by multiple players, the first one gets the planet, the others will get a random planet.
• [AI] AI space-discovery pattern has been changed to be more like a circular pattern around its empire.
• [AI] Fixed AI colonizing planets all the time.
• [Modding] Added tax-base and tax-scale to players.xml, which lets define the tax parameters mentioned above for a campaign game. Future updates may set this value in the main campaign to help with the economy balance.
• [UI] Fixed info panel showing the selected research name when switching from inventions tab to financial info tab instead of the current planet's name.

Game version 0.95.170 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed cheat key overlapping. CTRL+SHIFT+G now gives 100,000 credits, CTRL+SHIFT+J creates diplomatic money requests from all alien races.
• Minor adjustment to AI target planet selection: only defensive value is considered instead of total planet value.
• Modified satellite survival time to be proportional to its cost and reverse proportional to difficulty. This means, for example, that playing on hard grants 4x the TTL to AI satellites as to player satellites.
• Limit the rate that AI will deploy its spy satellites, reducing the money drain.
• Refinement of the AI spending behavior; now it favors cheaper buildings, produces less at once.
• Fixed AI not properly accounting building action costs when making decisions (i.e., subsequent planners thought the money is still there).
• In skirmish, choosing some initial colony ships will add basic satellites to inventory as well (helps the AI mostly).
• Enabled Trade Center for alien races affecting skirmish; since they are not allowed to build banks and spaceport, their economy is quite slow to build up in some cases.

Game version 0.95.169 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed cases when the player could receive diplomatic messages and enter the diplomacy room from lower levels, blocking regular messages and causing crashes (Issue #842)
• Reworked the automatic battle to consider rockets/bombs as one-time defense reduction option. This should help in AI vs. AI background battles. (Issue #843)
• Reworked AI attack behavior: (Issue #843, Issue #796)
• target planet selection process to choose the low valued planets instead of high valued planets 60% of the time. (The previous logic chose the most valuable enemy planet which was futile most of the time since it was likely the target had good defenses).
• AI will react to a lost planet much faster
• AI will possibly attack with multiple fleets at once and potentially multiple targets on normal or above difficulty
• AI will place tanks on newly conquered/colonized planets immediately by removing 1-1 tank from its other planets; on all difficulties.
• Further French translation fixes from Benjamin Grosjean. Thanks! (Issue #645)
• Fixed campaign start video not playing on non English/Hungarian language settings.

Game version 0.95.168 released

Notable changes:

• Audio notification when a new diplomatic offer arrives  (Issue #823)
• Fixed: mission stuck/not marked as completed if the player manages to destroy the attacking Garthog fleet's capital ships but otherwise loses the space battle. (Issue #841)

Game version 0.95.167 released

Notable changes:

• Language selection in the main menu now works better with mouse; clicking outside the panel will now hide the panel.
• Added detail listing option to Info Screen (F7) planets view. Click on the button with left or right click to toggle various options:
• Problems
• Lab
• Traders spaceport
• Banks
• Trade center (available even if you haven't yet researched/found the building, didn't bother)
• Spaceship factory
• Equipment factory
• Weapon factory
• Barracks-like buildings
• Guns
• In the building list above, red name indicates an inoperable building. The number in parenthesis shows the total count of the building; if yellow, it means there are multiple types of that building (e.g., Barrack + Fortress) and the listing shows the most advanced building name. (Issue #810)
• Fixed crash when due to planet names with multiple number segments.
• Changed how excess police affects morale on planets. Changed morale calculation to be limited to 75% on planets with alien race compared to the owner race. (Issue #840)

Game version 0.95.166 released

Notable changes

• Added options to disable weather and day-night cycle (Issue #807)
• The radar-union mode (i.e., border radar mode) is now the default.
• Fixed label issues when run in Turkish locale (Issue #835)

Game version 0.95.165 released

Notable changes

• Attempt to fix NPE due to null fleet name. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to figure out where it could have gotten null in the first place. The changes should capture this case more precisely. (Issue #837)
• Fixed rendering to not complain unnecessarily if a screen paint crashes.

Game version 0.95.164 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed label and resource lookup when run on Turkish locale settings. (Issue #835)

Game version 0.95.163 released

Notable changes:

• Added language selection panel to the main screen. The commands CTRL+1 .. CTRL+6 no longer works. You can open the panel by pressing L or clicking on the multi-flag image. Press ESC to cancel
• Fixed keyboard commands not working after toggling full-screen mode several times. (Issue #834)
• Fixed case when auto-upgrading a fleet of just fighters would delete the fleet and letting the inventory fighters disappear as well.
• Fixed mission not completing when the player destroys the battleships in the Garthog fleet trying to invade Achilles on Level 2 (captain) and either losing the space battle or the Garthogs retreat. (Issue #797)
• Added ability to rename planets (and fleets) on the starmap. You can rename every planet and fleet, including the enemy's. To do so, double click on the name in the info panel. Use ENTER, ESC complete editing. If you managed to delete a planet's name completely, press BACKSPACE again to restore it to the default planet name. Note that the campaign will still refer to the main planets such as Achilles by its original name. (Issue #801)

Game version 0.95.162 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed: aliens ask for money and don't offer money to the player (Issue #831)
• Fixed planet problem icons inconsistent with displayed numbers due to lack of rounding (Issue #833)

Game version 0.95.161 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed NPE when trying to start a new research (Issue #829)
• Fixed NPE when deleting an empty fleet manually (Issue #830)

Experiment: single lab vs many labs per planet

Introduction

One of the requested feature was the ability to build multiple labs on a single planet. The original game allowed only one per kind. Update 0.95.160 lets the player lift this restriction in a skirmish play. I wasn't sure if it would work from gameplay and AI perspective, therefore, I run a simple test.

Experiment

I started a normal skirmish with a single human player, set the objective to technology victory and turned on AI assist in-game.

Limited labs - AI

This was the classical case with 1 lab per planet. The AI spent about 1.5 years till 10th February 3429 with a total of 26 planets and labs and $66.56M money spent.

Unlimited labs - AI

The AI successfully built multiple labs on the same planet, but usually never got above 2 per planet. This is due the fact that AI first tries to fill in empty planets first, then tries to swap out existing labs based on the target research requirements. This swap is generally advisable as selling an old lab yields some money which helps in other tasks. The second thing is that AI colonizes planets from time to time so there is always some empty planets where it can build new labs.

The game run from 13th August 3427 to 27th August 3428, about 1 in-game year which is faster than the limited lab case. The AI had 14 planets colonized and 26 labs in total. $60.7M spent.

Allowing multiple labs per planet reduced the time (and cost) of colonizing and building up new planets to support a new lab (usually a 250k investment before the lab is built).

Unlimited labs - me

Again, the main difference between my gameplay and the AI gameplay was that I didn't bother building fleets and defenses but only concentrated on economy and research.

Finished on 7th April 3428, which is about 9 months. Using only 7 planets and a daily $70k income at the end, I spent $6.2M for the planets and research together.

I truly felt here the lack of two features already asked among the issues: use spare lab capacity for something (speed up current or just allow another research to progress as well) and queueing up research. The former speeds up research while the latter reduces number of clicks in the UI. I don't yet know how to deal with these things yet (due to UI and development time limits).

Conclusion

Multiple labs per planet seems to be beneficial to both human and AI players; reduces the times and costs to reach a certain technology level. Note that this might fluctuate a bit depending on the starting planet's capabilities. Still, a human player with experience may finish just under 7-9 months when the chance of battle is zero. 

I'm still thinking about whether to lift the restriction in the main campaign as well. I think a human player would gain unwanted benefits in the scripted missions (especially against the Garthogs) and would not facilitate expansion (and thus, higher tax income later). 

However, as the experiment above shows, AIs tend to work better with the settings and perhaps allowing them to build multiple labs (on Hard) while the player can't could be a good way to harden the game. Unfortunately, campaign non-human races don't really research so there isn't any benefit for them, but use it in skirmish against another human race is a possibility.

Game version 0.95.160 released

Notable changes:

• Fixed the "Continuous money" checkbox displayed on all options pages.
• Reduced earthquake probability by factor of 10.
• Fixed Mission 3: Carrier Escort message and video order. Issue #413.
• Added new characters â to the charset to support French translation (Issue #645)
• Updated German translation thanks to anonymissimus (Issue #825, Issue #722)
• Fixed sorting planet names on the info panel (Issue #822)
• Alliance against extinct/defeated races is not possible anymore (Issue #821)
• Enhancement: use CTRL+A to select all units in ground battle (Issue #820)
• Hungarian: Changed Drib Empire to Drib Protectorate (Issue #813)
• Fixed NPE in diplomacy when offering money (Issue #812)
• Equipment screen: Add button visible on enemy fleet if it was near its own planet (Issue #819)
• Conquered planets' tax level is reset to moderate (Issue #802)
• Hold SHIFT to sell 10 units on the production screen. Hold CTRL+SHIFT to sell 100. (Issue #808)
• Fixed some space battle related balance issues: (Issue #817)
• Morale reduction is less intrusive and difficulty dependent. On Easy, you'll lose 5% of the morale, on Hard, you'll lose 20%. If you defended your own colony or conquered another, you lose half of the previous values.
• Fighters defending a planet won't run towards the attackers on Hard, but remain where they are. Still, they might get lured away. Let me know if the new behavior is enough or not. Also please check if ship kamikaze still behaves as before.
• Damaged, but otherwise operational defensive buildings will participate in space battles until destroyed.
• AI won't shoot at fleeing enemies. Still, you can trigger a rocket shot and then flee and drain the AI, but at a much slower rate.
• Fixed android mission completion turning into failure on some cases (Issue #800).
• Some minor rendering changes (Issue #746)
• Fixed autosaves not working after a game over and immediate reload (Issue #798)
• Changed planet revolt to sell the original owners inventory (tanks, ships, stations) and give the new owner half the sell price (i.e., 25% of production cost). (Issue #739).
• Planets with race different than the owner will now have about 20% reduced tax morale compared to planets where the owner and race are the same. In addition, alien Police Stations will provide 30% less morale. (Issue #783)
• Added option to enforce target specific rocket/bomb usage under gameplay options. If checked, you and the AI won't be able to fire a rocket at a building, or a bomb at a ship. (Issue #722)
• Fixed diplomacy screen accessible in the campaign on level 4 (Issue #749).
• Added option to accept AI offers such as alliance, surrender and money. (Issue #766). Check out the cheat section of the guide how to trigger these manually.
• Fixed ground deployment next to impassable positions (Issue #730)
• Fixed NPE when loading certain older skirmish saves (Issue #656)
• Added options to allow unlimited labs and factories per planet during a skirmish game (Issue #675)
• Since Google Code stopped allowing uploads, I'll put the new files to my public shared Google Docs folder. The Launcher should be able to download the necessary files without problems.