Official Update - The "Strategy" Update v1.2.6.7

[MaximKI]

You can download the update HERE or the File Downloads section on your MyPage part of the website.

Changes in 1.2.6.7 (October 20th, 2024)

The “Strategy” update includes months of improvements done to support the Return of the Shakturi feature expansion, with a focus toward improvements related to player and AI management of mid to late game conflicts.

CRASH FIXES
- fixed crash when starting a new game using Chinese language mod (could also fix issues with some other localization mods)
- updated encryption tool to version 6.9.8.0 which has better support for .Net 8 and may resolve issues with localization mods
- fixed crash when opening message
- fixed rare crash when merging exploration maps
- fixed rare crash after destroying planet
- fixed crash when loading game
- fixed crash when fleet evaluates threats
- fixed crash when finding nearest capital
- fixed crash when processing character counters
- fixed crash when processing ship mission
- fixed rare crash when component definition cannot be found
- fixed rare crash when changing empire of ship or base
- fixed crash when rendering some scenes with weapon effects disabled
- fixed rare crash when drawing colony badge

ENGINE CHANGES
- upgraded to Stride 4.2.0.28 which now uses .Net 8

PERFORMANCE
- utilized some new .NET 8 features to improve general performance
- significantly improved performance when viewing Enemy Targets list
- general performance improvements

GRAPHICS AND EFFECTS
- fixed bug where particle effects would often not be removed when complete (e.g. weapon muzzle flash)
- fixed billboard texture arrays (weapon effects, etc) to always consolidate all individual textures into the same pixel format (BGRA instead of RGBA), thus removing need to color tint effects and thus improving appearance
- extended weapon firing and chargeup effect logic to support more complex multi-part effects
- extended weapon effect scaling to allow hull-conforming effects (scales with ship)

MESSAGE SYSTEM
This update includes an overhaul of the message and notification system, focused on the addition of Message Centers and Galaxy Indicators to help especially with late game message volume and situational awareness. Further improvements to message handling will be in future updates.
1. Message Centers
You will now see 5 tabs relating to major message-type groups below the game menu UI: All Messages, General, Combat, Galaxy News, and Advisors. These are Message Centers, most of which will show you a sub-set of your available messages to allow for better focus when necessary. The All Messages tab will act as the messages did before, but with the addition of higher resolution message filters. We recommend starting with All Messages as your toggled message center, then switching to others when you need to reduce message spam.
Each message center stores its own set of message filter settings and all message centers have more filter options than in previous versions. There are also several filter presets for you to try out. The empire message filters are now available through the message log rather than the normal filters. Each message center also has its own message log, which shows messages based on the filters set in that message center.
In each message center, you will be able to see currently stored active messages. If you are not in All Messages, a number will overlay the message center button for any message center indicating the number of messages waiting for you.
Advisor messages will now only appear in All Messages or the Advisor message center. The Advisor message center does not have filters or a log. Also, if you have the advisors turned off in your policies, you should not be getting messages in the advisor message center.
Some message types which require player input, such as meeting a new empire, pirates, or story-related events, will continue operating as they have in the past regardless of your other choices.
2. Galaxy Map Indicators
There are now enhanced map indicators for combat and plagues when viewing the galaxy.
When combat occurs in a system, or is about to occur, you will see a symbol indicating that there's combat occurring in the relevant system. Incoming enemy fleets will also be more obvious now. The size of the combat symbol indicates the strength of the forces involved. You must have the fleet overlay enabled to see this additional combat visualization.
For plagues, you will now see a highlighted plague icon hovering over a system indicating a currently active plague in that system.
Please note that this notification overhaul should take effect on older saves; however, any currently displayed and active messages will not be found in the message centers. New messages should start accumulating in these centers. We still recommend you start a new game to use the system fully.
We have also added configurable key press options for each message category (currently set to None)

COLONY PREVALENCE, SUITABILITY, ECONOMY REBALANCE
We’ve rebalanced these areas with the goal of improving scaling through the mid-game and late-game economies, to avoid situations where there is so much income that it effectively removes economic choices. We also wanted to address the issue of some factions having far more available suitable planets than others. The result overall should be fewer initially suitable planets for colonization, a better balance between factions, and terraforming which is initially less expensive, but may require ongoing maintenance.

- rebalanced planet quality levels to reduce number of suitable planets. While nearly all races have a reduced number of suitable colonies, this especially affects some races more, e.g. fewer for Mortalen, but an increase of suitable planets for Boskara (who were previously a bit starved)
- reduced maximum population levels for colonies to about 63% of previous
- reduced empire research output from colony population by 33% from previous
- reduced suitability boosts from colonization techs
- reduced Quality Improvement Amounts from Terraforming facilities
- Terraforming facilities can now only be built on colonies where base suitability is -10 or better
- Terraforming facilities must now be retained to keep Quality Improvement Amount when base suitability is below +20. If the Terraforming facility is removed/destroyed then the Quality Improvement Amount will be lost for colonies where base suitability is below +20
- reworked colony quality and starting levels for colony population and development in pre-expanded empires
- empire homeworld now starts with additional +10 suitability to assist with early-game income and growth
- empire capital always has additional +10% colony corruption reduction bonus

COLONIZATION
- ensure clear internal colonization target for Colony Ship if colonization fails (avoid retrying with same target, e.g. when independent colony rejects colonization)
- fixed Colony Ships sometimes getting stuck in population load/unload loop
- now indicate when a colonization or outpost target has dangerous location effects (e.g. storm) in New Colonies list

TERRAFORMING
- fixed incorrect advisor suggestions to prematurely scrap Terraforming facilities
- fixed tooltip for Terraforming facilities in Selection Panel incorrectly indicating that the facility must be retained to keep quality improvements when colony quality is above 20
- fixed Terraforming facilities with Quality Improvement Amount so that cap total Quality at 100%, thus suggesting scrapping the expensive facility in all appropriate situations (e.g. when planet base quality + terraforming improvement would otherwise total more than 100%)

MIGRATION
- ensure criteria for Passenger Ship selection of migration source colony aligns precisely with load population command so that correct race is loaded for migration missions, especially when population policy for the race is Resettle now indicate when a colonization or outpost target has dangerous location effects (e.g. storm) in New Colonies list

FLEET ATTACK COORDINATION AND ENEMY TARGETS LIST
The Enemy Targets list and the Fleet AI logic has been completely overhauled, to the point that this is effectively a new feature. AI fleets are now much more intelligent about coordinating their operations to make sure they can effectively prosecute wars. You also now have much more control over your possible fleet target orders at a high level and fleets are much more responsive to queued player targets.

- Enemy Targets list now always contains ALL known targets (colonies + bases) of empires you are at war with
- upgraded Enemy Targets list to allow queuing all attack mission types for a given target. These can now include Clear Defenses, Attack, Bombard, Invade, Raid, Capture, Blockade.
- attack target queue buttons in Enemy Targets list are now more precise when evaluating available fleets for each attack mission type. Must have fleets within fuel and engagement range of the target, and these fleets must have adequate strength and troops for the target. Otherwise relevant button is disabled
- added 'Queue Attack' action buttons under Selection Panel for all relevant attack mission types for selected target
- see tooltips in the Enemy Targets list section for additional information on how to set targets, attack points and staging points.
- added Staging Points to attack targets, allowing multiple fleets to coordinate attacks on the same target
- added Clear Staging Point option for attack targets
- added Clear Attack Point option for fleets
- altered fleet logic so that they consider queued attack targets before assigned fleet Attack Point, thus making fleets more responsive to manually-queued attack targets
- empires now can also pick from their allies’ enemy targets list and support attacks with their own fleets
- automated invasion fleets may occasionally coordinate for multi-fleet attacks against well-defended colony (i.e. need more than one fleet to prevail). This may even include fleets from allied empires (Defense Treaty)
- Invasion fleets will now take on Capture missions against enemy bases when they have no other more important targets
- ensure that fleets that are assigned an attack mission against a colony, base or fleet always show up in Enemy Targets list for that target
- automated fleets now check empire bombardment policy when determining whether to bombard enemy colony from attack target (queued or not). This avoids situations where bombardment mission is assigned but fleet cancels mission when arrives at target
- improved willingness of fleets to take on manually-queued attack targets even when have nearby threats (targets of opportunity)
- individual ships in fleet no longer trigger investigate dangerous location missions, instead they leave these for the parent fleet to handle, thus improving the ability of fleets to select from queued targets
- fixed invasion fleets being incorrectly assigned to invade colonies without adequate troops
- fixed fleets sometimes not responding to attackers when have guard mission
- improved automated fleet Attack Point selection to ensure not over-focusing on same enemy attack points
- automated fleet attack assignment now gives more consideration to colony weapon facilities, planetary shields and fighter bases when determining whether to attack a colony, and how much strength will be required
- manually assigned bombard missions will now attempt to bombard even when target colony has an impenetrable planetary shield, automated fleets will not attempt to bombard if they cannot penetrate the shield

FLEET BEHAVIOR
- automated fleet management now properly includes fuel range as an important factor when determining which ships to add to fleet (attempt to avoid ships with low fuel ranges, which thus drag down fleet engagement range)
- retreating fleets are now better at selecting escape point (extra checks for enemy threat strength at escape points), thus avoiding cycling retreats between two escape points in the same system
- ships added to manually-controlled fleet now also set to manually-controlled (e.g. Topup Fleet) to avoid corner cases behaviors this could otherwise cause

SHIP BEHAVIOR
- fixed ships sometimes getting very far above or below horizontal plane
- improved jump pathing for ships in deep space (outside a system) so that more willing to take direct single-jump route to destination instead of first traveling to a system, even when direct route will pass through nebulae
- improved jump exit coordinates for fleets so that better able to honor jump accuracy values for hyperdrives (i.e. do not jump directly on top of target)

BOARDING
- boarding assaults for ships and bases now progress much faster than previously and should generally resolve while the ships that launched them are still in the area
- increased interval between launched for each assault pod when capturing or raiding. There are now separate values for launch rate for invasions and boarding. This should prevent frequent raids and boarding actions in short periods of time.

STARFIGHTERS
- fixed fighters sometimes not launching from carrier or base
- fixed fighters at colonies often not able to land at colony, thus interfering with ship/colony selection

SHIP DESIGNS
- added new ScannerRange bonus to some ship hulls (Monitoring Stations, Medium + Large Spaceports); note that Monitoring Stations are now much better than any other station at long range detection
- improved fuel range for auto-generated ship designs, more emphasis on fuel tanks

SHIP COMPONENTS
- adjustments to some component values (ranges of Tractor Beams and Long Range Scanners, small increase to crew levels in Crew Systems)

BOMBARDMENT
- damage to troops from bombardment now directly affected by their existing level of damage, i.e. as troops become more damaged (lower readiness) they take less damage from bombardment, thus making troops harder to completely eliminate via bombardment
- colony facilities damaged by bombardment are now immediately deactivated (e.g. planetary shield, weapons)
- colony bombardment now applies quality damage up to 20%, but with decreasing damage rate above 10%

GROUND COMBAT
- reduced rate of damage to planetary facilities and enemy troops from invading special forces troops
- slowed rate of experience increase for invading special forces troops
- fixed bug where invading special forces troops could sometimes be effectively invulnerable

WAR MISSIONS
This new feature activates whenever you are in a war. During war, your advisors will periodically suggest or assign War Missions for your empire which can help with your War Score and War Weariness as well as sometimes offering other rewards. These represent time-sensitive opportunities your military has identified for strategic benefits. In the Return of the Shakturi expansion, there are also additional unique Shakturi story-related War Missions.
- war missions appear as advisor messages on recommended targets during war, with related rewards for completion of the mission
- double-clicking on a war mission in the header bar will now move the view to the target
- war mission targets are at the top of Enemy Targets list (immediately below queued or assigned targets) and have a special target marker
- when a war ends, all war missions related to that war will also immediately expire
- added separate automation setting for War Missions to Empire Policy screen.
– Automated setting will auto-assign war missions with a non-blocking notification message.
– Suggest settings will send advisor suggestion message which you can accept or decline.
– Manual setting will turn war missions off for your empire (none assigned or suggested)
- war missions can include the following types of tasks: research key tech, defend a base or colony for a specified time, destroy or capture an enemy base or flag ship, conquer a colony, sign a new treaty, capture a character, and many others
- war missions are introduced with a message when assigned, and show up in the header bar at the top of the screen
- war missions must be completed within a set time before they expire to gain the reward
- when completed, you receive a message outlining the rewards

WARSCORE
- extended War Tracking descriptions in header bar to show value of captured items (colonies, bases, etc) so that can more easily see change in war score when value of captured items change (e.g. bombarding captured colony)

PLAGUES
Plagues were not working as intended. Per the lore, the early galaxy should still have a great many challenges with plagues. These changes to how plagues work and the expanded Medical Research tree that accompanies them now mean that you should want to research Plague Curing and Plague Containment and build spaceports with medical facilities to transition away from serious plague outbreaks to a more healthy later game.

- rebalanced all plague values so that generally longer duration with lower virulence
- random plague initiation now much more likely to happen on large colonies instead of smaller ones
- the intended answer for plagues is as follows:
1. Higher medical rating on the affected planet to reduce yearly losses
2. Higher Plague Curing to increase the chance of an early cure (if cured, the cure will immediately apply to all of your planets)
3. Higher Plague Containment to reduce the chance of spread to additional planets. Building the Advanced Medicomplex is a good idea if you are being hit hard by plagues.
- now have plague curing difficulty per plague, so some plagues are typically harder to cure and will often completely run their course unless you have researched plague curing mechanisms
- fixed bug where plagues could prematurely end at colonies. However note that medical facilities and plague curing and containment bonuses can shorten the expected duration of plagues
- plague population loss rate shown for a colony in Selection Panel and Population screen now includes loss reduction from medical facilities at colony and all other factors; increase your medical rating to reduce the loss rate and hover over the plague icon with your mouse to see your early cure chance at each location
- included minimum interval for plagues at the same colony in all cases, thus preventing colonies from experiencing plagues too often
- fixed bug with plague initiation so that properly considers per-race plague factors
- expanded the medical research tree to include more plague curing and containment bonuses as well as cures for all the common plagues
- plague initiation chance is now also reduced by Plague Curing bonus (empires with 100%+ Plague Curing for specific plague will not have them randomly start, though they can still spread to your empire from other empires)

GALAXY GENERATION
- improved distribution of starting locations for empires in new galaxies
- improved galaxy generation for pre-expanded empires so that have more realistic starting situation: more exploration, more mining stations and civilian ships
- reduced the suitability and increased the damage on many of the “ancient” worlds now in storm-wracked systems; these can be repaired to be more suitable but given all they have been through will never be the most suitable worlds

EXPLORATION
- fixed bug where exploration ships could sometimes get stuck attempting to investigate ruins with special game event conditions
- ensure Exploration ships explore map pings or investigate ruins with triggerable game events even when in another empire's territory and do not have Exploration Treaty
- fixed missing map pings when hovering over messages

DIPLOMACY
- now always exclude empire capital from colonies that empire may be willing to trade, even when in another faction's territory
- ensure empire that rejects alliance peace offer always sends a response explaining rejection
- fixed First Contact Wars sometimes starting when empires are too far away from each other for viable war
- increased decay rate for general negative incidents (i.e. unclassified types: 'General Incidents'), e.g. Gizurean Scouring of conquered colonies

ESPIONAGE
- new intelligence mission types:
-- Defect Character: switch a character from another empire to your own. Must know the target character's location
-- Destroy Facility: destroy an enemy planetary facility. Must know about the target planet and facility
- reduced acceptable difficulty level for intelligence missions based on empire policy settings for Intelligence Mission Caution. Default level is now 70% instead of 80%. This makes spies more willing to take on more difficult intelligence missions

RESEARCH
- "All Research" bonuses have been made smaller and more rare across the board
- fixed some research projects being incorrectly accessible earlier than they should be due to various reasons
- reduced research breakthroughs from salvage

CHARACTERS
- reduced frequency of All Research character bonus
- altered how Ultra Genius character trait is applied: now uses diminishing returns so that each additional character with the trait adds half the bonus amount of the previous character
- removed Damage Control skill bonus from characters to minimize chance of excessively high damage reduction in an empire
- colony invasions now properly apply character bonuses with diminishing returns for both attacking and defending sides (each additional general adds half bonuses of previous)

FACILITIES
- manually upgrading planetary facilities no longer honors reserved spending (e.g. saving up money for colony ship) thus fixing situations where players could not upgrade and did not understand why
- added additional planetary defense facility projects across TL3, providing earlier access to planetary defenses
- planetary defense facilities, especially when combined with planetary shields, are now quite effective as part of an overall planetary defense strategy
- most troop recruitment facilities now also have a colony defense bonus
- added Bombardment Resistance value to all planetary facilities, allowing modification of damage to the facility from bombardment
- added Ground Attack Resistance value to all planetary facilities, allowing modification of damage to the facility from enemy troops during invasions
- ensure non-Ruin facilities are removed from colony when wiped out
- increased location strength evaluation of colony weapon facilities because these are harder to destroy than ships or bases
- planetary defense weapon facilities will now properly attack pirates, the Hive, and any other unusual threats
- Terraforming facilities now have the same build and maintenance cost for all levels
- typo correction to set the FacilityFamilyLevel properly for the Planetary Shield Generator Mk2

SENSORS
- Long Range scanners have longer range than they did previously. Combined with the new scanner range bonuses for Monitoring Stations, this means you can have much better sensor coverage earlier than before

NATURAL DISASTERS
- Natural disasters were boosted a bit in terms of quality and population damage and are a bit more common on less hospitable worlds like desert, ice and volcanic.

SPACE CREATURES
- Gravillex and Ardilus Space Creatures have been slightly buffed.

PIRATES
- improved handling of Outlaw ships (firing on another empire when not at war) so that ships and bases do not attack each other when not meant to

ARTIFACTS
- fixed Artifacts sometimes not showing up at their designated location (e.g. colony)

AI IMPROVEMENTS
- fixed bug where construction ships would sometimes get stuck trying to build bases at black holes
- prevent AI empires from attempting to repair special abandoned ships that are unrepairable
- fixed bug with planetary facility construction automation settings when set to Suggest (was instead automatically building facilities without player approval)
- improved troop transport behavior to be better at reinforcing colonies/outposts with defensive garrison troops
- slightly increased number of Exploration Ships that automated construction will build
- adjusted automated research project selection to more heavily prioritize the following projects: exploration and survey scanners, colonization techs, governance facilities

UI IMPROVEMENTS
- added a new separate Combat overlay: shows system combat markers, turns off civilian ship symbols, fades other map elements
- ensure Fleet Overlay enabled by default, note that Fleet Overlay also shows Combat markers in galaxy view (like Combat Overlay) but does not fade out other map elements
- hovering mouse over header bar items that have related galaxy locations (e.g. planets, bases, etc) pings their location on galaxy map. This is in addition to existing behavior where you can click to select these locations. This expanded hover behavior specifically applies to war missions and colony events
- now indicate critical resource shortages for a resource when very low excess supply at spaceports (not available to meet demand throughout empire)
- now immediately refresh resource cargo capacities in Resource Stocks screen for colonies (never -1)
- can no longer close message dialog screen using Escape key when message requires a user response
- reworked button layout in top-right
- ensure Exploration Ship is at same location as ruins before giving right-click popup menu option to 'Investigate Ruins'
- improved right-click popup ship mission assignment menu to properly include/exclude manual ruins investigation based on whether contained events can be triggered by player (based on event conditions)

NOTIFICATIONS
- fixed missing text for successful raid against a base
- fixed Advisor Suggestion display in Message List for Build Facility messages to properly show red cross icon for 'Suggest and Wait' setting

POLICIES
- added new policy settings to control when ships and fleets use bombardment. See Empire Policy screen, Military section for details
- added more fine-grained automation settings for planetary facility construction and upgrades. See Empire Policy screen, Colonies section for details
- added new Bombard policy options: Eliminate Enemy Troops And Facilities, Eliminate Colony
- lowered the default population threshhold for building small spaceports at colonies (empire policy)

GALACTOPEDIA
- added new Galactopedia topics for Outposts and Alliances

MODDING SUPPORT
- return of Harmony support for modding with version 2.3.3, which supports .Net 8
- added new Game Event Condition types: CheckEventNotTriggered, AllianceExists, AllianceNotExists
- added some new Game Event Location Hints: VeryNearbySystem, NearbySystem, MediumSystem, DistantSystem. These work exactly the same way as their 'EmptySystem' counterparts (NearbyEmptySystem, etc), but do not require the system to be empty
- added Bombardment Resistance value for planetary facilities
- added Ground Attack Resistance value for planetary facilities

LOCALIZATION SUPPORT
- added Chinese font bundle to game (may need further work to reenable Chinese text)
- combined with the fix for Harmony support, we expect this will allow many localization mods that previously worked to work again

FACTION UPDATES
- ensure Human New Worlds events from colony conquest or colonization no longer give Colonization research breakthroughs beyond tech level 4
- adjusted some incorrect values in Path of the Ancients and Way of the Ancients governments

IKKURO AND DHAYUT DLC
- updated missing assault pod launch rate values for Ikkuro Splinter Pod component, thus fixing some Boarding/Raid issues

QUAMENO AND GIZUREAN DLC
- fixed Quameno Integration Studies event so that values in tooltip properly reflect ratio of unassimilated population in your empire
- fixed display bug with Quameno Integration Studies event so that properly includes correct ratio of unassimilated population when showing penalty value (was previously applying the correct value, but was displaying full value in tooltip)
- reduced amounts of tech progress from Gizurean Waste Nothing event so that fewer research breakthroughs
- reduced quality of Gizurean event planet 'Nazareno' so that not so desirable
- fixed Facility Family Levels of Fighter Bases to account for a situation where a non-Gizurean player steals Gizurean fighter base techs at an early tech level

[fruitgnome]

...
GALAXY GENERATION
- improved distribution of starting locations for empires in new galaxies
...

Not fixed yet. Although I select center at starting location in the galaxy generation steps, I have to start at edge.