​1.4.2 'Minor Civs Detected' Update Released

1.4.2 'Minor Civs Detected' Update Released

Hello everyone!

It's been about a week since we released the Evolving Empires expansion and the free 1.4 update. We hope you are enjoying the new expansion and the new free update with all the new features and improvements.

In the meantime, we've been listening to your feedback, and we released the 1.4.2 Beta update a few days ago for beta testing. Now, we're releasing the official new update for everyone! Version 1.4.2 makes significant changes to the new 'Minor Civilizations' feature of the Evolving Empires expansion. It also fixes some issues found since the release. Most changes are for the Evolving Empires expansion, some are for Natural Law and there also changes to the base-game.

We received a lot of great feedback on the new expansion, and more concretely on the new 'Minor Civilizations' feature, which helped us understand that some tweaks and balance changes were in order to unlock its full potential. We became aware some people reported not finding enough minor civs, or when they did these sometimes appeared a bit too late in the game. We also became aware the unintentional destruction of minor civs with blind colonization (not having full scan over a system) was an issue for some people. We acknowledged the situation was not ideal, so 1.4.2 addresses that.

Please enjoy the new update, and let us know if you find any issues.

Level up your Galactic Empire with Evolving Empires today!

The Dev Team
Praxis Games

Version 1.4.2

Compatibility note: Saves from previous versions are not compatible with 1.4.2.  If you want to finish your current game with the previous version (1.4.1) please download the "Previous version" build attached to this post.

GAMEPLAY
Evolving Empires

• New 'Detected' state for 'Minor Civilizations' allows minors to be revealed with 'Basic' scan level (e.g. normal ship visit or basic remote exploration level), where before 'Full' scan was required to reveal the minor. This new state doesn't reveal the minors' type nor allows access to its relationship bonuses. For that, 'Full' scan is still required. In the 'Detect' state, you only know a minor is there (intelligent life signals detected) but you do not know who they are nor what bonuses they may provide. This resolves the unintentional destruction of minor civs with blind colonization issue, and will allow for more minors to be revealed early, although with no detailed information yet.

BALANCE
Evolving Empires

• The game offers a bit more minor civilizations at the start now. The minor civs slider tooltip now states that 5 to 12% of star systems will contain a minor, depending on the minors abundance set (none, few, average, many).
• Minor civilizations are now distributed more evenly throughout the galaxy map. Before, minor civs could appear in clusters too near each other, and not enough could be found near homeworlds. That is now fixed.
• The Cerixx affinity's evolution perk 'Technophiles', which allows buying techs with cash, now only requires 0.75 BC for each remaining RP a tech requires to be researched, where before the conversion was 1 BC to 1 RP. This balance change was also done to make them more competitive and to ease the buying of techs with money, which is a lot of fun by the way.

Natural Law

• The Cerixx race now has the '+1 BC per POP' racial modifier bonus. This race needed this money bonus to be more inline with its strengths as a race and to stay competitive.
• The Cerixx race now has the 'Easily Seen' special ability. They are small, but they ride big mechs after all  This compensates the added money of the item above and it makes sense for them to be more spied on, due to their love for shiny new tech and somewhat careless behavior. They do have the 'Investigation' unique ability though, which catches spies currently undertaking espionage, so it's a gamble for who decides to spy on them.

AI
Evolving Empires

• The AI now surveys minor civilizations quicker and more efficiently. Before, the AI could interrupt surveying minors and lose progress too often, and would start surveying minors a bit too late. So, expect more competition from the AI on the minor civs department now!

UI / GRAPHICS
Natural Law

• Cerixx ships' Frigate A and Cruiser A now have a bigger engine trail effect to make these ships easier to tell which part is the front and the back.

Base-game

• The images of buildings, planet specials and ships displayed on tooltips were increased a bit.

BUG FIXES
Evolving Empires

• Fixed a bug that would cause duplicate leaders to appear and accept working for different empires, which could lead to additional issues when influencing those leaders when a "copy" of the leader already present in the influencing empire. This was caused when all leaders were dismissed when the Kaek empire chose their 'Hub and Spoke' evolution perk, which was accounting for all leaders the Kaek knew about, and not just the ones that were actually working for them at that time.
• Fixed an issue that was not allowing for new scanner technology to take effect immediately when bought with money using the Cerixx affinity 'Technophiles' evolution.
• Fixed an issue that was not allowing the access state of known 'Minor Civilizations' to update upon picking the 'Empire Patrols' evolution perk of the Cerixx affinity evolution. Now minors' access state (e.g. exclusive access), updates immediate and not just in the next turn. [Evolving Empires expansion] Fixed a bug that would cause a blocking issue with remote exploration when playing with the Palacean affinity when a monster offspring would join the empire on a system (Natural Allies' evolution perk) without a fleet being present.
• Fixed a typo on the Android leaders' description. 'Creatores' is now 'Creators'.

Natural Law

• Fixed a bug that would cause the Cerixx's 'Containment' unique ability to become permanently in effect, and blocking fleets in a system forever, after the Cerixx were vanquished, as the containment field would never be lifted after that point. Now it is lifted when the Cerixx empire is eliminated from the game.

Base-game

• Fixed a bug that was allowing all empires to receive the benefit of the 'Neutronium Armor Coating' tech (bonus to armor) with available sources of the 'Neutronium' strategic resource, even without having researched the tech.
• Fixed a bug that was causing upgradeable buildings (e.g. Airspace Support Facility, Marine Garrison) to not automatically upgrade upon conquering a colony. Now these upgrade to the newest available technology.
• Fixed a bug that would cause the 'Delicate Delicacies' event action notification to disappear upon resetting or reordering the tech queue.
• Fixed an issue that was causing some lag in the planetary view for 4K resolutions, especially noticeable on the Terran terrain, but also others.
• Fixed a bug that was allowing for the function keys (e.g. F1) to be pressable on the main menu and new game screens.
• Fixed an issue in the ships' overview panel with the stationed status filter for ships. Some ships could be listed as being stationed when in fact they were traveling.