One time a week or two ago I sat down and played the game in a multiplayer session with a couple of fans. One thing we found was that... well the planet view was atrocious.

So we redid it.
In this patch, we mainly focused on QOL things, instead of features (which are coming) and we ended up changing the appearance of the game massively for the better, we think. We did get time to add a few cool things, such as tracking of military strength, better tooltips, a few things involving mouse input, and so forth. But our main focus was fixing the crashes that occurred in the last patch.

• Fixed a nasty crash to desktop that happened after several hours involving OpenAL (For real this time). We thought we had fixed this before, and it turned out that what was going on was that the problem wasn't with us. OpenAL apparently has an issue where if you try to play MP3 or .wav files it will detonate randomly. OpenAL is used in a lot of games, and apparently, it's been an issue for the past three years with their audio library. So, we changed all the audio to .ogg files, and it doesn't crash anymore.
  
• Fixed a really rare issue (After pulling my hair out and punching a few doors) of turns locking up and the date endlessly spamming into the future. What was occurring here was that a bugfix had been done where the game was saved or autosaved, it would throw an error if you had a civilization that had no designated slave species at a settlement. We added a huge amount of error handling and changed how it works so that it should NEVER happen again. If an error is thrown now it will now instead shuffle through civilizations and not corrupt your save file.
  
• If you simply right click in the combat view, it will now attack whatever enemy formation is around your mouse cursor - as intended instead of having to use Ctrl+Drag to attack. How this never got fixed previously or noticed prior to this patch was beyond me, literally nobody complained about this for some reason.
  
• Pressing F to focus on the combat map now focuses properly.
  
• Unit grouping spam reduced.
  
• Message log now scrolls properly.
  
• The main menu buttons are now centered on the center of the screen.
  
• If you use the middle mouse button to drag the view you will no longer click every damned button in the process if you go over it.
  
• If you mouse over a ring, it will now become transparent.
  
• Added another more obvious button below the planet view to go back to the solar view. This is why I need feedback, people.
  
• Also fixed an issue where rings were not drawing properly to begin with, reducing lag in planet view.
  
• Asteroids are slightly less common in space combat maps, and dust clouds are now generated instead.
  
• Redid the planet map entirely. On playing this one time, I was disgusted myself at how ugly looking both the flat and the 3D planet view looked. So, I added tile blending, added a series of artwork for every settlement in the game, changed the icons for every settlement, changed the way we draw weather, and so forth. It now looks very pretty.
  
  The 3D planet view now looks very nice, with all kinds of colorful icons.
  
  
• Flat planet view was redone also and now doesn't look atrocious. Now you can see icons of your cities, your outposts, your mines/farms, and so forth.
  
  We also added a bunch of icons such as city icons, hurricanes/cyclones, and so forth for the flat planet view.
  
  
• Deserts now look different and better.
  
• Redone mountains so they don't look terrible.
  
• Instead of the generic, inaccurate "Army Division 05D" or "Battle Fleet 59D" we now autogenerate fleet and army names based on the number of troops with accurate military strength classifications. This isn't related to actual number of units be it tanks or infantry squads' size... it's based on the individual crew of every single individual in an army or fleet, be it a pilot, a co-pilot, the troops and crew aboard a transport, the amount of crew aboard a space station, etc.
  
• Troop counts now display in the tooltip.
  
• If a settlement is damaged, under construction etc - it now displays how long it will take before repaired/finished.
  
• If you drag select over the UI in the combat menu it will now select properly.
  
• infantry, the sizes of your armies, the pilot and co-pilot of a starfighter, the crew aboard a dreadnought or space station down to the individual level are now simulated accordingly.
  
• Because of this, we added the ability to read the "Military Garrison"- or actual number of soldiers stationed on a planet to the tooltips.
  
• Redid fleet and army icons to something that looks better.
  
• Army/fleet icons now scale based on the number of units in every fleet or army.
  
  
• One QOL feature that I'm not sure how it never made it into development - If you right click a planet with a fleet or army, the fleets you have selected will now automatically go into orbit around the planet, and the armies you have selected will land on random locations on the planet.
  
• Unit health bars are now much brighter and easier to see.
  
  
• Added a UI element that displays Materials, Population/Food, and Wealth a lot better with hand drawn icons.
  
• Added materials and troop counts for armies and such on the overview window.
  
• Improved a number of tooltips.
  
• Now if an army/fleet/building is selected on a planet, the planet view will automatically center in the screen on the object selected.
  
• Right clicking an already selected fleet/army on the overview window now deselects the fleet/army.
  
• Made it so that things do not spawn on the poles as often as before.
  
• Volcanic planets on generation will now come in all kinds of different colors. This does not affect savegames.
  
• Planets no longer generate with colors - IE: A blue forest planet will appear blue, not red or something.
  
• Made mouseovers take longer to activate, was taking too fast.
  
• An issue with gas giants and stars that would lag the frame rate has been fixed. This will not change for savefiles, but now if you generate a new game it will generate gas giants and stars that don't lag the planet view.
  
• Changed the level that you can zoom in and out of the galaxy view as it was reported that you couldn't zoom in far enough.
  
• If you have at least one space station in a system now it will mark it as your territory.
  
• After saving or loading it will no longer not show your borders until you end a turn.
  
• A number of other UI improvements and fixes.
  
• A number of other bugfixes.
  
• A number of other stuff I can't remember off the top of my head.

One of the most common things I've heard was "Why don't you redo it in Unity", throughout the 15 years of development. In fact, I heard it so many times that I actually tasked a developer with remaking it in Unity to see how hard it would be.

He said it would take 10 years to redo. We're not remaking it in Unity. I wouldn't recommend doing something similar either.

Regardless, we're still trying to find time to do the Linux port. It's coming. The game is written in a language that easily ports to other operating systems - but we've had other things come up that are fixed in this patch, such as the game crashing after a couple of hours. We're going to have to delay the 1.2.0 patch by a few weeks because we had to do this. Among some of the stuff in that is - again, terraforming (Might be moved to 1.1.6) and things like... Stargates.

That's pretty much the reason you haven't heard of this game yet.
We are fixing things.

Cheers,
The Developer

This is I believe the final patch before we start work on 1.2.0. If we find additional issues, we will patch in 1.1.5, but we're going to start working on adding new major features to the game soon.

• Fixed an issue with the unit icons missing in the battle map and in mouseovers.
  
• Changed generation, planets will no longer tint red if they are "Green Forest Planets" for example. (Savegames will be unchanged.)
  
• Planets with Oceans will now no longer be strange colors because of this.
  
• Expanded on Volcanic planets, updated appearance of these so they can now generate different colors.
  
• Updated the mouseover indicators in the solar/planetary view and draw much nicer now and are much less of an eyesore.
  
• Changed the planet tileset to be clearer and draw better.
  
• Fixed an issue where Space-Explorer Vessels had missing textures.
  
• Settlements on planets now draw better and will not draw over shorelines.
  
• Better texture for mountains, Mountain Planets.
  
• Temporarlly cut shapeshifters and their traits because it was causing a crash.
  
• Added the ability to spawn on Frozen planets. (We have a huge update in 1.2.0 for this planned, that will allow you to choose more specifically what kind of starting planet you are to land on.)
  
• Fixed a really odd bug where if you had no slaves on a planet, and you recruited slave units, it would replace your slaves with Abominations with zero population. Now they start out as your present species.
  
• Slave units will now draw with their respective slave portraits.
  
• Terrain on certain planets now displays a proper tooltip.
  
• Fixed an issue with certain displays showing repeated versions of the same display (According to Helz)
  
• Fixed a strange lockup where if you hit the left button on the religion view (That someone didn't report for some reason) it would crash the game.
  
• Fixed an issue where base camps would spawn 3-4 tiles away from the base if you landed on an empty tile.
  
• Fixed an odd issue where towns would transform into Capitols on unowned planets.
  
• Other bugfixes.

Cheers,
The Developer

We've now officially fixed most of the issues since launch. The next update will be 1.2.0, and will contain a number of new features, gameplay mechanics, portraits, units and so forth. That will be coming soon, and we will post an announcement when we showcase it. In this update, we've added a small taste of that, such as a small chance for shapeshifters to take control of enemy fleets. Apologies for the delay, we had an initial version of this patch on Sunday that we released to testers, but they found a few additional issues we had to fix.

- If a settlement has no population, now it will no longer draw abominations.
- Storms no longer show abominations.
- A planet will now draw the dominant species, not the species of the ruling empire.
- Fixed an issue with certain hyperdrives not unlocking.
- Now if an AI leader loses a battle, if will have a 2/5ths chance of potentially firing their leader and replacing them.
- Fixed faction leaders, they are no longer all Blasphemous Glitches.
- Logs will no longer be gigantic.
- Better error handling.
- Borders draw better.
- If two buildings somehow spawn on the same tile, it will show both icons side by side.
- Healing fleets now is fixed, and you can repair out to the distance of a nearby moon for space fleets.
- Likewise, if a planet is now within the distance of a moon, it will now move with the planet every turn.
- Made a massive optimization to storms, weather, and events.
- Debug message spam fixed.
- Fixed some missing textures on some artifacts.
- Vampire texture filenames were wrong, causing a blackscreen when one appeared. This is fixed.
- Possible fix for an issue where trap armies would spawn in space.
- If you split an army it will no longer spawn on unwalkable terrain.
- Completely fixed spamming the message log of unit grouping.
- Moons no longer have indicators unless inhabited for appearance sake.
- Scrolling with WSAD or Arrow Keys now is tied to the slider in options menu.
- Clicking a button will no longer stop the tutorial voiceover.
- On occasion, player will find Towns instead of just Base Camps on uncontrolled planets.
- TTS will now pronounce victories.
- Removed annoying police-radio sound on selecting/moving units. Will return in the future, but will sound different.
- Base Camps will not generate on top of other buildings now.
- Slightly modified "Group-Mind Religion" to more accurately reflect reality.
- All configuration options now save and will load on load, this had been redone to a different file "config.properties" but wasn't done completely, settings no longer save to "settings.cfg"
- A series of other small bugfixes I can't remember off the top of my head.

- Shapeshifters now have a small chance of spawning whenever you fire a leader in the same system as another leader. How this works is that if you fire a leader with high loyalty, ambition, motivation, or boredom, there's a small (like 1/20 chance) that the leader will attempt to find a hostile fleet, attempt to infiltrate, kill, and replace that leader in the same system, be he head of an army, construction crew, or so forth. If a shapeshifter leading an enemy army engages in combat with his own civ, tries to take a building of his own civ, or they try to fire him, he will immediately treason to his own respective civ with his entire army. In the next update, we will create a specific unit they can build that will allow the leader to spawn these directly. Right now this is extremely rare, as this wasn't intended to go into the patch, but if you see one, give the team a screenshot!

- Machine/Energy/Bioform Rebellions - If a rebellion occurs at a "Bioform", "Energy" or "Machine" building, then it will generate not one but three hostile ascended rebel armies, immediately hostile to the owner. If you wanted to fight a robot war, this is your chance.

Cheers,
The Developer

We would like to provide an update regarding our plans for Linux support and address some common inquiries we've received.


We understand there has been significant interest in the availability of our game on various platforms, including Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, zOS, DOS, ChromeOS, Android, and SteamDeck. While we are committed to expanding our support for these systems, our primary focus at this time is ensuring the game is in a long-term, playable, and enjoyable state.

The process of porting our game to different operating systems involves setting up appropriate testing environments to guarantee compatibility. While platforms like Ubuntu and Linux Mint may be more straightforward, others such as Garuda, DSL, Kanotix, and Raspbian present unique challenges. Each variant requires dedicated resources to ensure proper functionality, which diverts our attention from core game development.


To facilitate this process, we are considering hiring an additional developer who specializes in Linux. If you are a Linux developer with a vision for creating a framework that allows compiled binaries to run natively across various distributions and Windows, we would be interested in your insights.

Although we are aware that running our game using Wine is possible, we aim to provide a native Linux port. We are also exploring the feasibility of an Android version, although concerns regarding piracy and testing costs may impact this decision.


Our roadmap for platform support includes:

1. **Immediate Focus**:
- Ubuntu
- Linux Mint
- Debian
- Fedora
- Arch Linux
- Slackware Linux

2. **Subsequent Goals**:
- SteamOS
- SteamDeck (post controller support)

3. **Long-Term Objectives**:
- MacOS
- FreeBSD
- Raspberry Pi
- Consoles
- Android

We appreciate your patience as we navigate these development challenges and will provide updates as we make progress. Thank you for your continued support.

Best regards,
The Team

We created a minor patch to fix some of the issues that were reported. Please by all means if you encounter an issue or bug - do not hesitate to report it. We will attempt to fix it as soon as possible. Some of the changes for instance were pushed to 1.1.3, which we will be releasing later this week.

• Tech tree had a typo that broke it and resulted in having no technologies to research. This is now fixed.
  
• Diplomacy window should now open.
  
• Moons no longer have indicators unless inhabited or they have a mouseover for appearance purposes.
  
• Fixed a nasty issue that prevented saves with humanoids from loading.
  
• Reduced some spam from unit grouping.
  
• Increased amount you can zoom in in Solar View because some planets/moons were too far away to see.
  
  More to come soon.
  
  Cheers,
  The Developer

Some thoughts...

The more I read about UFO stuff, the more fascinating it becomes. I have had some exposure to it while working for the federal government, and quite frankly, having grown up on Carl Sagan, and space documentaries to the point that the Contact signal from the movie was my ringtone for a while, I find it highly fascinating. I didn't work for the Men in Black or Deep State, but I've met some. And they're mostly employees registered at OPM, to where I say to people who think that UFO disclosure is bogus or some sort of "Blue Beam" psyop... I probably met David Grusch at some point while living in DC, and all I have to say to that is well... if we "glowies" can go in front of congress and talk about real-reverse alien engineering programs and have to reveal some of this stuff in an Sensitive-Compartmentalized Information Chamber (or in video games), and if you're still denying disclosure and can't see that there's something actually going on the scenes and we can't outright officially disclose it outright for legal (and other) reasons, then you downright stupid and have the IQ of a chimpanzee. But on the bright side, I never had a TS-SCI and can speak legally about it, this is all stuff I was told by them. And it's just that simple. And if someone wants to come intimidate me about it, you can talk to my 12-gauge, and I'm going to start spouting "Ben Franklin" quotes because it's called the "1st Amendment", and you'd be treading upon it... so kiss my ass.

But really, I was a skeptic for a long time, and I'm kinda ticked that disclosure got buried as long as it did, probablly could have brought a number of people out of the despair of nihilism.

For example, I learned fascinating things like... a Zetan (Grey Alien) computer system works by processing data loaded from a 3D-printed crystal as a SSD where every atom in the position of the crystal is used as code to generate an algorithm or record files, using a CPU which uses quantum effects of organic chemistry to create calculations. At one point I was told that their CPU's are so efficient that one of theirs (the size of a silver dollar) could easily have the entire computing power of an entire stadium of server racks. So, if Moore's law is really dead, then I'm clearly just an imaginative science-fiction writer, and this is all bullshit. So, I plead the 5th. I'm not sure if this game would run on that system, but I'd sure as hell like to see if it could someday. Hmm... perhaps I should be working at the Department of Energy where they work on this stuff. Speaking of which, the reason you're all not riding in UFOs or starships with Warp Drive is because if you crash one, it can detonate like an atomic bomb. Food for thought.

Regarding the game and future updates, we do have a roadmap planned. A series of updates is written down, along with features. Now that the game is mostly stable with a series of updates, I do have here some of the listed roadmap planned for... eh the next 6 months.

Roadmap

The initial, broken release patch.

1.0.1

[/h3] - Small patch.

1.1.0

[/h3] - The last patch where we fixed some issues.

1.1.1

[/h3] - This patch that fixes everything.[/u]

1.1.2 - Later this week (ideally)

[/h3] - A patch for fixing any issues with this one.

1.2.0 - Sometime in August

[/h3] - A major patch where were going to add things like...

New Units (Shipyards, Motherships, Fabricators, etc.)

New Settlements (Hospitals, Universities, Highways, etc.)

Terraforming

Keybindings

Localization

More RTS options.

Stargates

1.2.1

[/h3] - Fixes for that.

1.3.0 - September

[/h3] - UI Overhaul and possibly more features and fixes.

1.4.0 - Communications Update

[/h3] - A huge update which is going to redo diplomacy entirely.

1.5.0 - Stellar Features Update

[/h3] - A huge update which is going to seriously amplify the nature of generation and graphics.

1.6.0 - Intellgence Update

[/h3] - An update which is going to add features such as spys, probe teams, etc.

1.7.0 - Subterranian Update

[/h3] - Dungeons, planets will have maps consisting of caverns to explore.

1.8.0 - Government Update

[/h3] - An update which we're going to redo government systems (May come earlier.)

1.9.0 - Extradimensional Update

[/h3] - An update where we add other dimensions and universes with different laws.

1.10.0 - Spirituality Update

[/h3] - Adding things like superstitions, having temples cast buffs, demonic/alien possession.

...And more later.

Regarding TTS and the Voice Actor Strike

One of the things we're going to improve upon sooner rather than later is, well, we're getting rid of AI Text-To-Speech. We're not doing this because of the strike going on in the game industry, we had decided this prior to that. Mainly, performance of Neural Network TTS, or Neural Networks in general - is godawful. And even with Neural Networks it comes out... robotic. Most of the framerate issues people were having are due to the text-to-speech implementation we're doing slowing down the game... because quite frankly the way that we're generating it requires having it hit the hard disk and then be loaded in the game to do effects with it... of which we can't even do that much. So what we did do is hire some voice actors, and they're going to be redoing most of the AI lines in the game. The rest we're going to render with the TTS (the ones that actually sound OK) to files and then I'll modify it with audio-engineering software to be able to make them sound... well... alien. And better. This won't be ingame until the next update at least, but it's coming. It's nice to be able to judge distance based on the read aloud text-to-speech. It's not great if it renders extremely slow, sounds awful, and kills the framerate. So if Gamasutra is paying attention - AI for video games is somewhat of a bust as long as it takes 5 minutes to render a picture or 10 minutes to render a voiceover - and not everyone has a DARPA supercomputer. If you think this has anything to do with the strike, then all I have to say about that is Earth is not the only planet in the universe with capitalism - E=MC^2 is a fuel equation that involves how much fuel/capital/energy anything in the universe has, everyone's gotta have resources or capital or food to survive, and that's the reality we all live in. But really, good luck to the strikers, there aren't nearly enough labor rights in this country regardless.

Anyway, enough spittin' facts as a ridah. Here's the changelist.

Patch Notes/Changelist:

Changed savefile loading and saving, so that now save files will be forward compataible with most updates.

Added a huge number of stability fixes for saving and loading so now savefiles won't explode.

Changed texture loading, now if we add new graphics, your savefiles will no longer screw up graphics on load.

Added a new hand drawn UI to the game, that looks way way way better than the old, draub, grey, boring, unorganized UI that we had previously. This is NOT the "UI Overhaul" that we were referring to in previous patch notes, but quite franly we determined that something had to be done about it because the old UI was utterly hideous and almost unusuable. This changes color based on your empire color.

In yellow...
...or blue... or any color, really.

Fixed a series of crashes, lockups, and errors that would do things like... accellerate a turn by 10 years instead of the one month that it should, cause blackscreens if a pandemic spawned, etc.

Fixed an issue where if you loaded a save file, it may generate a "ghost" gaia civilization hidden to users that isn't part of the regular updates.

Because of this, you will not get popups for declaring "War" on Gaia.

Because of this, anomalies/events that generate a trap will no longer just do "Nothing", they will spawn a hostile fleet right on top of the fleet that's encountering the anomaly/event that will try to attack you.

Fixed a huge number of issues with AI that was causing severe problems with hostile civilizations attempting to take planets.

Added the ability to save/load civilizations on generation, so if you like a civ you generated and don't want to have to do it again, you can load it... or alternatively, if you want to fight said civilization in your universe, you can mark it as being possible to generate, having it spawn in your galaxy as a potentially hostile NPC civilization.

Fixed some cursor display issues.

Fixed an issue where attacking a Gaia fleet and attempting to Autoresolve would always result in a draw.

Removed the ability to start with higher tech tiers - such as Superadvanced, Advanced, etc. I know this is going to cause some controversy, and we may restore it if asked, but the problem we found was for balance reasons that it didn't give proper progression into gameplay.

Fixed an issue where turn times weren't visible in Hot Swap Multiplayer, you should now be able to see (and choose) how long turns are allowed to take in Hot Swap Multiplayer.

Buttons in Combat Mode now work as intended.

Added two buttons to combat map - Focus - which will bring the camera to the location of the selected unit, and another button that allows you to swap betweeen selecting "Air", "Ground", and "All" units if you drag select.

Added hotkeys to the buttons in combat mode.

Added the ability to group units for easy selecting with Ctrl + 1-9 and you can select them later by pressing 1-9.

Added a volume control for voices, speech, and TTS, which if turned all the way down will not generate TTS, improving performance.

Probes, Missiles, Bomber Squadrons, etc. will no longer pick Blasphemous Glitches as leader, but generate with Guidance Computers or pilots as intended.

Controls are now more descriptive in tutorial view.

Way way better saving/loading algorithms that improve save/loading speed.

Fixed a really nasty crash to desktop involving the music player.

Options menu SHOULD now save setting properly to settings.cfg according to the other dev.

Storms/Cyclones will no longer prevent the creation of trade routes.

If your species is carnivores, "Farming Commmunities" will now be "Ranching Communities"

If you scroll all the way out of the planet view, it will take you to the solar view.

If you scroll all the way out of the solar view, it will take you to the galaxy view.

Autosave, hotkeys, and other settings now work as intended.

Fixed a huge series of other crashes, bugs, CTDs, and blackscreens.

Cannot throw the view way outside the bounds of the battle map, solar system, or galaxy any longer.

Unit cards in the battle map have been redone.

Fixed an issue where if you picked a Human portrait and the player changed the traits, it would cause missing textures, incompatable atmospheres, and so forth after generation.

Fixed autosave button not working in Options menu.

Autosave set to default "Off", you can reeenable in options menu.

Fixed an issue where some Energy Being units had missing textures.

Added scrolling to the message log.

Fixed display issues with the message log, changed appearance and behaviour.

The message log will now display a long, long list if you disable the Overview window.

Modified tooltips throughout the game to be more accurate.

Made it more obvious that autosave or a file has been saved, because people were thinking the game had crashed during an autosave... smh.

Fixed visible stats when selecting a single unit in the battle map.

Pathing on planets will now avoid other armies unless they're directly attacking.

If you click in the build/deploy menu it will add to a queue now.

The workshop tool for uploading mods now works, although it has display issues.

Other features.

Other bugfixes.

Known Issues:
- Collectives sometimes have Abominations as leaders.
- Bug report tool had to be cut temporally.
- We were unable to reproduce some issues such as ground combat maps not loading for some people, but these may have been caused by other issues that are now fixed.
- Trade route window still draws the same color as before. We're fixing this in the next patch.

Cheers,
The Team

Hey @everyone!

I'm here to give y'all some news about what we're up to behind the scenes and what you can expect, and if you haven't read the recent patch notes they're below:
https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/app/2363060/view/4235154200381486600?l=english

We've got some updates on things we're working on in the background:

For our biggest change, we're creating a major overhaul of the user interface (UI), art, and tiles in Universal Conquest. Our goal is to make the game not only more visually appealing but also more intuitive and user-friendly. This comprehensive UI enhancement will significantly change the look and feel of the game, ensuring that information is presented more clearly and attractively. This overhaul is set to be the main focus of our next patch, which will also include some minor bug fixes to improve overall gameplay stability.

Performance is key to a smooth gaming experience, and we are dedicated to making Universal Conquest run better than ever. Our team is working on several optimizations to improve performance and reduce loading times. Additionally, we are working on enhancing the save file system to make save files much smaller, which will help in quicker load times and better overall game management. These optimizations are designed to ensure that you can enjoy the game without unnecessary interruptions or delays.


We understand the importance of coherent and high-quality gameplay. To this end, we are making significant improvements to the real-time strategy (RTS) elements of Universal Conquest. Our aim is to refine and polish various gameplay systems so that everything feels more cohesive and satisfying. These enhancements will ensure that every aspect of the game meets our high standards of quality and correctness, providing you with a more engaging and enjoyable experience.


We appreciate your continued support and patience as we work on these updates. Your feedback is invaluable to us, and we are committed to making Universal Conquest the best it can be. Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, happy conquering!

Thanks,
Helz

The real-world simulation that exists in the dull, grey, brown world around us is rather unforgiving. For example, I had to delay this patch because I nearly burnt down my deck yesterday, and also had the past couple weeks helping a relative with Stage 4 cancer move two storage units, and two crates full of stuff into his house. Fortunately, I'm a more benevolent simulator than the one that rules our universe (so it seems), in that our imitation of the simulation that you exist in we're fortunate enough to patch up our little simulation so if you're not having fun in what's called the "video game" RL in between dashing for telephone booths to escape it to go back to La Resistance against the machines, you'll hopefully see improvements in our own simulation.

In other words, I finally got around to posting a patch after a series of disasters occurring repeatedly since I released this game that makes me wonder if The Man was angry, because I made this.

we know who you are

Anyway, here's a patch list:

• Hotkeys now work as intended and have been rebinded to other keys. Some of the labels were wrong on hotkeys.
  
• We have Widescreen and 4K support now. Originally we were scaling up the resolution by twice to compensate for the lack of UI scaling, but we removed this.
  
• Because of that, OBS should stream properly now.
  
• A serious issue where events such as "Battlefield Wreckage" was throwing errors was fixed. Events/Anomalies/Whatever should now work as intended.
  
• Adjusted some of the lines for voices in Warrior and Abominations.
  
• Attack Gunships will never be replaced with Starfighters now, which lead to balancing issues and the inability for fleets to return to planets.
  
• Removed voiceovers for events. Would take too long and lag the game.
  
• Hostile tutorial armies should no longer spawn on top of other armies.
  
• Optimizations to settlement placement.
  
• Colony ships weren't picking the right atmosphere for species, would refuse to let you land them, and were thus useless. Now they can colonize anything with the leader's species atmosphere.
  
• Starting artifacts now don't stack on merges.
  
• Added a dropdown for turn length for hotswap games, so now instead of picking 2 minutes you can pick 4 mins, 8 mins, 10 mins, 15 mins, unlimited.
  
• Fixed an issue with generation causing a black screen for several miliseconds.
  
• Hitting escape should now toggle the ingame menu.
  
• No artifacts on unwalkable poles anymore.
  
• Minimap on space combat is no longer pink, shows asteroids.
  
• You homeworld will always show an indicator now, no matter the view distance.
  
• Tutorial now checks for scrolling up and down with mousewheel.
  
• Movement in 3D for air/space units now shows a faint height indicator.
  
• Backgrounds in space combat are dimmed slightly now for QOL.
  
• Continue button has been fixed.
  
• A leader losing his personal firearm no longer triggers an armed rebellion.
  
• Fixed a "Semi-Habitable" planet generating a bugged planet with beta terrain.
  
• Better controls window in Tutorial menu.
  
• Redone "Announcer" language.
  
• Selecting the amount of collectives in a given galaxy wasn't working right, fixed.
  
• Now you don't have to double-click a unit to select it, you single click.
  
• Farms can now be constructed on any planet with the same atmosphere as the construction crew.
  
• Optimizations done to loading times, have been improved somewhat.
  
• A few small UI Fixes such as the text for the unrest description not going over the window.
  
• Cannot throw the view far outside the combat map anymore.
  
• Could not select one of the fleets in the multifleet window, this is now fixed.
  
• Removed "name" from being said by TTS repeatedly.
  
• Fixed some of the lines for TTS and changed voices slightly.
  
• Fixed a very rare crash involving if you finished research and a battle started it would freeze the game.
  
• Changed the 3D movement indicator for units to work like the indicator in solar view in 3D.
  
• Temporarlly removed a couple broken achievments, fixed a couple more.
  
• Other fixes to combat minimap.
  
• Other bugfixes.

We have another update planned in the next couple weeks with new features, but we just wanted to fix the essentials right now, as that was our focus.

Also, our new developer Helz is proving to be a wonderful member of the team. He fixed the widescreen and other things that were occurring.

Спать положи́те вы меня́,
The Developer

We're open to most criticism of the game, and we want to go into details in this post on how we as a team are going to go about to take constructively critical feedback and improve the game.

Firstly, as long as you follow the EULA you are more than welcome to give feedback, and will not get a C&D. Our team has received much feedback not only on the Steam forums, but on our Official Discord, and are actively tracking major outstanding bugs that players are seeing.

We thank all players who have bought the game, and have given positive and even negative, constructively critical, and other feedback on the game. We really want to improve the game and make it more accessible for those who have played or will play it in the future.

We will not tolerate toxicity of any kind, however. You know who you are. (And if you're going to be toxic, well get lost.) We have some evidence that there might be a coordinated effort to slander us. We will speak in detail about that in the future - and retaliate - if it doesn't cease.

We attempted to take it off sale temporally to fix some of the issues that players were having, namely UI, and a few small bugs with other things. We weren't allowed to do this.

We are aware of a series of issues that people have brought up regarding the UI, and the Tutorial. We are happy to say that we have hired another developer who will be working on these things shortly. We are also looking for another professional game tester, as it is quite clear even to us that the testing was lacking on development. If it isn't clear, this isn't entirely about the money. This is a hobby. What I need is for this game to be the best goddamn strategy game ever made.

We also encourage new players to continue to play and purchase the game. We need as much feedback as we possibly can get, so we can continue to improve the game.

But, if you are hesitant to buy the game now due to any of the issues you have seen, we completely understand, and we’ll keep posting updates as we improve the game going forward. By all means, if you have any doubt in the game - wait, we are making improvements. We originally were going to take it down temporally due to some negative feedback about it being more cooked - but we have been told this is not possible and the rest of the team decided they did not want me to do this - neither did Steam.

Our primary focus in the next several updates is fixing any critical bugs, such as any CTDs, tutorial problems, and game save issues. Then, we are going to be working on continued feature development such as improving the UI and other requests, such as Ultra-wide screens support, and even proton-compatibility for those interested in playing on the Steam Deck/Steam OS. We have other features planned, but these will be done in the future. Right now, the primary focus is bug fixing, CTD's, crashes, and so forth.

We're hiring a second developer. I will be tasking him with working on the UI and the Tutorial. We're also looking for professional game testers and want to say thank you for your help in getting the game launched. We are confident in our ability to continue.

Email us or talk to us in the forums if you are interested.

Thanks,
The Developer