Version 1.603 is refinement on a major scale, once again. First of all, there are a variety of miscellaneous bugfixes and balance tweaks.

One cool new feature is to be able to make notes for yourself to come back to between sessions.

Another big balance piece is that if races wind up hating each other or you past the point of -1000, they’ll never recover their esteem of the other race or you. This prevents situations where you absolutely screw someone over and then spend a lot of time grinding to get them to like you again. If someone hates you -1000, you guys are blood enemies and you’ll have to figure out some other way to deal with them.

The big big big thing this time around is lots of refinement and adjustments to births and deaths. A number of things have been corrected, improved, and in particular clarified. There are a lot of notes in there, but basically it acts more like you would think it should. And you can see exactly why it is working the way it works, via tooltips, like the other various numbers of late.

Lastly, some of the RCI values were giving seemingly-wrong stats because they were combining planetary compatibility and the RCI value, which was confusing as heck. The way that the economic RCI affects manufacturing is now much better, and science gets improved by medical scores, too, now.

Overall, the changes to the births/deaths and the RCI stuff make it so that you have more tools in your arsenal to mess with the races on a planetary level rather than via space combat. Sometimes that’s really the sticking point, after all — you dominate in space, but just can’t break through the lines on the surface no matter what.

Let us know how things are looking, if you have suggestions or bug reports, etc!

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

Click here for the official forum discussion about this release.