The Starforged Update (V1.4.0.0) has now gone live on Steam, adding the next step in the singleplayer storyline and bringing some much-needed improvements for our favourite Robotic race. We’ve improved the AI under the hood of Predestination to address balance and fairness issues players reported in the late game, and started work on some diplomacy AI improvements. This update also adds commander portraits and improvements to ship captains and planet leaders, a lot of small improvements, and a ton of bug and crash fixes.
(Starforged Mission concept art by Travis Morrow[www.artstation.com])

At the end of Mission 4, we got our first taste of the robotic Starforged race as they barged into a secure communication channel in search of their creators. We’ve now released Mission 5 of the Before the War story arc, telling the tale of the emergence of the Starforged as a sentient species and what led them to join the galactic discourse. As the sole survivor of the crashed United Colonies Starliner Prometheus, cyberneticist Dr Elias Breen finds himself stranded alone on an icy planet with only the robotic soldiers of the United Colonies 5th Mechanised Infantry for company and a whole lot of time.
We hope you love playing through this mission and learning about the history of the Starforged as much as we loved making it! As part of this mission, we’ve made a few improvements to the Starforged as a race as they felt a bit underpowered in some circumstances:

• We gave the Starforged an additional +25% metal production bonus. In exchange, their base research rate is now -15% (previously -5%). Since percentage stat bonuses are additive, this penalty isn’t as harsh as it seems as adding one ancient ruin to the city will still bump it up to +85%. This also makes it less effective to brute-force build research cities on planets without ruins, which was a viable tactic since the Starforged don’t need farming colonies.
• The Antivirus Tower is no longer limited to 1 per city. This makes it far more feasible to have large populations for those who use the distributed bytecoin mining or research forge patches.
• Robotic races now require only 400 base staff per infrastructure to run them, down from 500. This helps counteract the fact that they have to spend metal to build new citizens and don’t get a tax benefit. This can still be reduced further with technologies.

We’ve added some cool new portraits to the lost ship captains and former planet leaders who periodically appear and offer their services to your empire. We took a little time to flesh these out, buffing most of their stats upward to reflect the late stage of the game they appear at and ensuring each one has backstory that fits their style.

We’ve also adjusted how the AI uses commanders, and improved some of the endgame commanders that can appear after 600 turns. We plan to add more commanders in a future update, so expect them to start having a bigger impact on the game.
We’ve overhauled the AI research system in response to your feedback. The old system often had races sneakily trade techs in the background as a way to maintain game balance against a powerful player, which felt cheap. AI races will now naturally prioritise research when they’re far behind in tech, and other things when further ahead.

The difficulty setting will now influence AI behaviour, with higher bonuses making them more ruthless when it comes to acquisition of technologies. Expect enemies in higher difficulties to try to outpace you in tech, while easy mode enemies may focus less on keeping up with you. The AI will also now be more discriminating with what Legendary Commanders it selects. You may see some commanders remain in the pool for a longer time in some games before they are snatched up.

The strategic Galaxy AI has been significantly improved and can now strategically manage its command points. It will scrap underpowered ships and use the command points to build more powerful ships or colony ships, and will now always prioritise colony ships if it’s in an expansion or consolidation goal phase. Previously the AI would wait for its old ships to be destroyed in a war before upgrading, so now they will stay up to date more easily. Certain races still prefer frigates over larger ships.

• The game will now automatically adjust to your screen resolution on startup, so you can change resolution within your PC and it’ll end up fullscreen at that resolution.
• The game will now automatically centre itself on the screen on any resolution.
• Added a new “keepScreenSize” flag to the ini file. Default is false, and if set to true it will not automatically adjust screen resolution within your pc.
• The game now supports one race owning an orbital that uses a ship design belonging to another race. We could use this for example to have an orbital Revenant cannon as one of the techs you can uncover.
• Reduced the time before the first Legendary Commander appears.
• Building files for missions now support a simple way of replacing one building with another.
• Rearranged some of the tech trees to make certain techs available earlier, as in small maps you will need them when meeting other races.
• Technologies can now be given UniqueIDs so that two techs that do the exact same thing can be recognised as separate techs, or two completely different techs will be recognised as the same thing.
• Elite crew now start with higher XP and level, increasing their bonuses.
• Slowed down the text chirp rate in the mission dialogue for slower readers. You can still click to skip.
• Added Autosave at the start of each mission stage.
• Autosave now kicks in on the Planet Screen as well as the Galaxy Screen. Previously it waited for you to open the Galaxy Screen.

• Fixed a MAJOR bug causing the AI to get far ahead of you in tech if you start in the Pre-Warp stage. The AI now correctly enters space at the same time as you and with roughly the equivalent tech level.
• Fixed an infinite loop bug that could stall the EndTurn code on 2D maps when no valid Temporal Rift locations are possible.
• Fixed a crash with commanders that could happen if the Revenants tried to recruit a commander after recapturing their homeworld.
• Ships destroyed, scrapped, or otherwise deleted that had a captain on them at the time will now always recover the captain.
• Fixed a crash that could happen if a race didn’t have a homeworld when the Galactic Council was formed.
• Fixed a bug where mission-specific buildings and technologies could accidentally be retained when starting a sandbox game.
• Starbase global scan range reduced from 15ly to 5ly. This is increased to 25ly with Space Sensors anyway as you get space sensors before starbase but it interfered with the latest mission.
• Building, Weapon, and Module lists are now correctly re-loaded from scratch when starting any new mission, creating a sandbox game, or loading a saved game.
• Fixed a bug with the Music system that would cause race music to play for a few seconds after the research jingle.
• Race music no longer stops and re-starts from the beginning when in the conversation screen in a mission. This makes it much less repetitive when conversations go back and forth.
• Fixed a rare crash with UpdateFleetLinesSubConstructLines when fleets incorrectly calculate zero or infinite speed to the target destination.
• Fixed a bug where two races couldn’t find a commander on the same turn.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes allowed you to select the Synergies trigger technologies. These are supposed to just unlock when you get the associated tech.
• Fixed a number of small graphical issues throughout the game
• Fixed a number of tutorial and timing bugs
• Fixed a rare technology loading crash
• Fixed a bug where the AI could get stuck in its home system because it built too many warships too early and can’t build any colony ships. The AI will now always prioritise colony ships if it needs them.
• The “Skip” button is no longer present when a mission is loading. This confused a few people, as this part can’t be skipped.
• Fixed a rare conversation screen crash when you clicked the button to skip dialogue
• Mission technologies now correctly unlock if they are Synergies, previously they would not unlock in the tech tree.
• Fixed a graphical bug in the popup for hiring commanders in some resolutions

V1.4 is now live on Steam, so if you’ve sent in a key request recently we’ll be processing that ASAP. If you have any issues with it or feedback, please feel free to send it to us directly at support@brainandnerd.com . If you supported our crowdfunding campaign and didn't get your key, reach out to us at earlyaccessrequest@brainandnerd.com and we'll send it over.
Cheers,

— Brendan, Lead Developer

This was just a quick patch ahead of the next story mission to implement a few fixes and tweaks we made while creating and testing the mission. The Renegades mission is undergoing final testing now and will be released on July 1st, thanks so much for your patience while we ironed out the kinks in this one. This update contains mostly bug-fixes for crashes reported recently and tweaks to the AI and diplomacy.

• Fixed a PlanetScreen null pointer crash that could happen if you clicked on a piece of infrastructure while the mouse was over the demolish button.
  
• Fixed a Fleet Combat crash that could happen if a ship had no crew left alive.
  
• Updated the Coming Soon text on the singleplayer missions based on enw estimates. The Renegade mission is now just waiting for our tester to work through it this week and will be released July 1st.
  
• Tweaked how the Diplomacy AI values money and certain technologies to make it more difficult to bribe some races.
  
• Fixed a number of small UI bugs with misaligned images and text.
  
• Fixed an issue with the 3D Ship Designer where files saved under certain language sets could have invalid characters. This should no longer lead to a crash when loading the game.

Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer

Hey everyone!

I posted this update a few weeks ago with the V1.3 patch but it didn't seem to go live, so I'm re-issuing it. Apologies for the inconvenience to anyone left wondering about what was in the update.

The V1.2 update has been in people’s hands for a while now and we’ve deployed 7 follow-up patches with bug fixes and small changes since then. We’ve also just released V1.3 and want to get everyone caught up with the latest developments.

These updates contained the final 3D ship part models for all races, huge optimisations in the map generation and End Turn code, two new story missions (with two more coming this month), Ancient Ruins improvements, AI improvements, some Diplomacy changes, and a series of small features and bug fixes.

The biggest feature in V1.2 was the release of all the 3D ship parts for all races. The Sauros have gold and sand coloured components with ornate wings, the Starforged have huge utilitarian blocks with pipes and grills, and the Kazzir have brightly coloured racers with floating cameras and completely unnecessary wings and spoilers. We’ve also added a default Dreadnought ship design for each race, and unique new models for the Revenant ships. Check out the screenshots below for more:

The V1.2 launch update included a series of major optimisations to speed up the game. We added a Planet cache system with hundreds of pre-generated planets of all types and sizes, drastically speeding up planet generation times in exchange for the game taking up 2gb more hard drive space. This completely eliminated the delay when opening a planet for the first time, and cut down Space Exploration and Space Colonisation era map generation times by over 70%.

We also extended this to add a Homeworld Cache for each race, with a collection of pre-generated homeworlds for each race. This reduces sandbox game generation times by up to 90% depending on settings as the most resource-intensive part of generating a new map is colonising the AI homeworlds. It used to do that completely from scratch every time even though the outcome is always about the same, and now it just uses one of 100 pre-generated planets and makes small changes.

A series of AI optimisations reduced AI processing time down from 200-500ms per turn to 0-10ms, which in turn allowed us to run the AI code on every race each turn to make them smarter. Previously the AI took turns executing some of their more complex tasks, and this could delay their response to a threat. Multithreading the planet End Turn code also yielded 25-50% performance increases, but we have disabled this feature temporarily as it prompted a number of unusual edge case crashes.

Story Mission: The Z’loq Emerge: “Having conquered the oceans of its homeworld, the Z’loq empire is now facing overpopulation in the Coral Spire. The legendary Z’loq Chieftain Grizn’q has demanded that additional spires be built and the planet’s oceans be exploited to their fullest potential. As the population grows, the Z’loq now look for new territories to explore … or to conquer.” This story mission is complete and released.

Story Mission: The Colonies Unite: “The colonies of Earth have united under a single banner and begun an era of space exploration and colonisation. Mysterious ancient ruins found on Earth have given hints of powerful technology scattered throughout the galaxy, and the new United Colonies Technocracy aims to find them all.” This story mission is complete and released.

Upcoming Story Mission: Renegade Republic: “The United Colonies of Earth have plundered ancient ruins throughout the star cluster and unwittingly awoken the ancient Revenant threat. As word of the United Colonies’ part in the disaster spreads, support for a new Renegade political faction is growing and the colonies are fracturing.” This story mission is complete and releasing in the next few days.

Upcoming Story Mission: We Are Starforged: “Abandoned on an icy world, a United Colonies troop transport filled with Robotic AI soldiers has become the seed of new race: The Starforged. Trapped on the planet, these robots have adapted themselves to run on fossil fuels and are now emerging into sentience.” This story mission has taken a bit longer than usual to test but will be releasing as soon as possible.

We improved the ancient ruin excavations system. Ruins on the homeworld now always give you a piece of ancient infrastructure when excavated, and ancient ruins or crashed ships further from homeworlds get more powerful technologies. We’ve added some more powerful pieces of ancient infrastructure such as the Ancient Robotic Lab, Ancient Robotic Factory, and Ancient Robotic Farm.

Crashed Ships can now yield Ancient Ionising Beam (beam weapon), Ancient Ionic Missile (missile weapon), or Ancient Ion Cannon (projectile cannon) techs. They can also give Ancient Alloy Design (+10% armour HP), Ancient Shield Design (+25% shield regen), or Ancient Thruster Design (+1 combat speed). More powerful crashed ships can give +25% beam, projectile, missile, or drone damage.

In V1.30 we also fixed a major bug causing ancient ruins and crashed ships to be deleted when colonising the planet in some circumstances, and made them more likely to spawn on uninhabitable planets (Barren, Molten, and Toxic).

When you reach the First Contact tech era and haven’t met another race yet, you used to get a popup saying you received a transmission from deep space, but nothing actually happened. Now you will automatically make contact with the closest alien race when the transmission is received. When the Galactic Council is formed by any race, all races who haven’t made diplomatic contact with each other will also automatically meet each other.

This helps maintain the diplomatic pacing throughout the game, especially in large maps where you might not meet everyone quickly enough. We’ve also sped up the council voting animations based on feedback and the vote now takes place on the planet of the person who proposed the vote as that made more sense.

We made some big improvements to the AI in order to make them create better empires. The AI will now colonise non-habitable planets using biospheres and can set up trade routes between planets to supply them with food, which in turn allows you to passively harm their empire by sending ships to blockade the trade route.

The AI also now explores temporal rifts for bonuses, and it can now rush production on ships for money just like the player when it comes under threat. The value the AI places on money in diplomacy will now depend on how much money you have, and money is now traded in increments of 100 as the previous increment of 10 was insignificant and could still trigger the “gift” response from AI.

Portable switch: Adding a portable.txt file to the Content folder will enable a new portable mode where the ini file and save game files are relocated to within the game folder rather than in your AppData folders. This would be useful if you wanted to run the game off a pen drive and keep your saves with the drive so you can bring them to any PC. If you disable the portable switch, the game will automatically try to copy your local save games into your appdata the next time you launch the game.

Technology Tree changes: We realised that the pacing was off for players who wanted to conquer alien worlds more than colonise heavily, so we moved the Troop Pod technology to the start of the Space Colonisation tech era. This let us expand the First Contact tech era with a series of spying technologies.

Left Handed Mouse: We added left-handed mouse support to the game, which works automatically depending on your system settings. Before this version, left handed mouse users would have broken radial menus and some buttons wouldn’t click properly.

Tax Changes: The default tax rates are now automatically set to 30% Citizen Tax and 30% Industrial Tax when you start a new game.

Ship Shaders: Each race now has its own ship shader and shader variables, which are loaded in from moddable files. They allow us to add some animated effects etc to the ships, for example the blue parts on the United Colonies ships now pulse with light and the red crystals on Sauros ships now glow with a cloudy burnt orange light.

Star/Fleet Selector: When clicking on a Star or a Fleet on the Galaxy Screen, the game now opens whichever is physically closest to your mouse pointer on the screen. This should help you sellect fleets that are near stars more easily and stop the UI from getting stuck.

Text Updates: We’ve added the credits screen and dedication, final crew names for all races, star names, and nebula names.

The number of bugfixes we made in V1.2, V.13 and all the intervening patches is too long to list, but a few headline fixes include:

• Ship Designs will now save correctly in computer systems that use commas as thousands separators.
  
• We implemented a new music fade system to combat a problem where the game could rarely end up with two pieces of music playing at the same time.
  
• Singleplayer missions now correctly update their progress when you close the Score screen at the end of the mission. You no longer have to quit and restart the game to see your rating appear in the mission list.
  
• The Singleplayer Mission UI will no longer be drawn on top of the Fleet Combat or Diplomacy screens.
  
• Fixed a large number of crashes. Thanks to everyone sending in those crash reports, please keep them coming any time the game crashes.
  
• Fixed a SlimDX DLL problem that happened on some people’s games where the game would just crash on launching when trying to load the ship 3D models.

Cheers,
— Brendan, Lead Developer

Hey everyone!

It's Tina here from Brain and Nerd with some exciting news for you all this week: Predestination has officially launched as of V1.2 (available now)!

In brief, this means that the game is feature-complete, we're happy that the worst bugs are squished and feedback is good, and beta can be called completed. This doesn't mean that we're stopping development, far from it in fact. It means we're ready for the world to play the game and we don't want to hide behind the "Early Access" label while we continue to expand on the game, release patches, and work on free content updates and DLC.

We plan to deliver all of that throughout 2019, by which point we will commence work on the expansion we promised, hoping to deliver it in 2020 or 2021. We expect a long shelf life for Predestination and hope to deliver consistent content drops throughout that lifespan. The cadence for that is yet to be determined, but we'll keep you lot posted about all updates first, as ever.

The first major updates you can expect will be the next few episodic storyline missions (the first several will be in on launch day and we'll roll the rest out regularly), diplomacy voices, and more quality of life improvements and bugfixes.

We have had a whirlwind few months of positive change and rapid development here at Brain and Nerd that has shifted our internal goalposts significantly. We were accepted into an NI game dev accelerator scheme in Belfast called the Pixel Mill, which has given us access to further resources and fantastic UK mentors who are an excellent source of support and advice. Predestination was shown on the BBC News website in a piece about the launch, and we were also astounded to recently win the NI Game Awards Game of the Year 2018 for the Predestination V1.0 build that took us into beta last year.

(left to right) Craig, Brendan, Steven and Tina at the NI Game Awards 2018


Once we push the button, we're jumping straight into future updates including new story missions, races, and other content. We'll also be hotfixing like demons and planning DLC and free patches, the first major update of which will add more ships for the 3D ship designer and voicing for all races for the diplomacy system.

We want to thank all of you so very much for all the love, support, and belief you placed on our shoulders: This has been more than a marathon and we know that no Kickstarted and Early Access games go exactly to plan, but we're happy to say we made it! This would have been impossible without each and every one of you, you're the real driving force behind our wee studio and have given us the chance to get to where we are today.


(Brain and Nerd in its new location in the Pixel Mill accelerator)
If you've any questions, comments, or words of encouragement to send our way, please reach out either here or by email to support@brainandnerd.com

-- Tina, Project Manager

Predestination V1.10 has now gone live on Steam! This is the first major gameplay iteration since we officially entered beta and it revamps a large number of gameplay systems, so this is going to be a massive dev update article. The 3D ship designer has been improved with the promised Simple Editor Mode, and shield, armour, and engine modules have been rebalanced across all ship classes. We’ve also implemented ship refitting, ship crew bonuses, and the ability to rush ship production by spending BC.

The Star Claims system has been completely revamped into a much more useful version and a new galaxy map option will let you see claimed star systems. Asteroid Belts can now be found in star systems across the game, and the economy gameplay has been completely rebalanced to give players plenty of options for generating wealth to spend on ships. All races have now been rebalanced, each one has been given two unique technologies that tie into its play style, each now has a useful special trait, and new AI Behaviours will modify how each AI plays.

The user interface has been pretty high priority for this update, with the Fleet Combat user interface being completely redesigned and the City Stat and Planet Stat tabs on the Planet Screen being graphically overhauled. New right click Radial menus on the Galaxy and Fleet Combat parts of the game now let you quickly toggle various visual options, and new scrollbar and smooth highlight systems have improved the UI all across the game. The few remaining building models are now in-game, new building base graphics add some visual polish to cities, and several buildings have been rebalanced.

Read on for a full breakdown of everything in this enormous update, screenshots of new or changed gameplay, and details of other changes and major bugs fixed as part of the update.



One of the features we promised as part of our 3D ship designer was an advanced editor mode with a set of tools to make it easy to design custom ships, and we implemented these tools some time ago as part of a major overhaul of the 3D ship designer. Some players have said that they aren’t really interested in designing cosmetic ships in that kind of detail, and would prefer something simpler that lets them pick weapons and modules without meddling with cosmetic designs.

That’s where the Simple Editor comes in! When you start a new ship design, you now select either the Simple or Advanced editor. The Advanced editor is the same one you’ve seen before with all of the cosmetic design tools, while the Simple editor presents you with a list of weapons and modules and you can drag them into a simple list to add them to the ship. The fitted modules and weapons will be invisible on the ship.

• Engine Overhaul: The Augmented Engines module has now been separated into variants for each class of ship, each of which provides the same +1 speed bonus but uses a different amount of power grid (20MW for Frigate, 40MW for Cruiser, 120MW for Battleship, and 360MW for Dreadnought). This allowed us to keep the module balanced while making it stackable, so you can make fast versions of any size class of ship.
• Armour Overhaul: The different Armour Plating modules have been removed and replaced with a new stackable “Heavy Armour” module that increases a ship’s armour by 25% of its base value. There are different versions of each module for each size class of ship that use different amounts of power grid (20MW for Frigate, 40MW for Cruiser, 120MW for Battleship, and 360MW for Dreadnought).
• Shield Overhaul: Each type of shield (Electron, Magnetic, Graviton Flux, and Temporal) is now separated into variants for each class of ship. These variants combine multiple emitters into a single module for simplicity (1 for Frigate, 2 for Cruiser, 4 for Battleship, 8 for Dreadnought, and 4 for Structure), making it easier to design ships. It also allows us to tweak the numbers in the future if we want to rebalance shields for different ship types.
• Balance Tweaks: As part of this update, we made a number of balance tweaks that may not have been documented elsewhere. This includes changes to ship speed, hull costs, ship damage, ammo replenishment, etc.

You can now click on any ship in the build queue tab at a starbase to outsource its production to the open market in order to rush its production. This is an expensive option at a cost of 1BC for every unit of metal still remaining in the ship’s build cost, but that pays for both the metal and the production time needed. The ship will be completed instantly and can be used the same turn. This update also overhauled the economics of the game to provide a lot of extra money, so this is a great way to spend those gains.

Another promised feature for the 3D ship designer was the ability to refit ships, but this was surprisingly difficult to implement due to the way ships are implemented in our game engine. We had to change how and when ship stats are re-calculated and redesign how ship crews and captains are stored, but we’ve now managed to implement ship refitting. You can access this option from the Shipyard screen, where you’ll now see a “Refit Ships” tab at the top of the screen next to the “Build Queue” tab.

You can pick a ship from a list of all of your ships in that star system and it will show you any designs fitting that ship class. You then pick a design and your ship will be placed into the shipyard’s build queue for refitting into the new design. Refitting a ship will reclaim 50% of the money and metal spent on its construction and apply that to the new ship. All crew on a ship will also stay on board during a refit, and any captain assigned will stay on board during the refit unless you re-assign him to another ship. This means you can hold onto those highly trained crews rather than scrapping obsolete ships and starting again.
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The first iteration of the Star Claims feature required you to contact each race individually and request that they agree to your claim. This was clumsy, so we’ve completely redesigned the system. You can now claim any star system you’ve visited just by clicking a button on the System window, and that claim will be transmitted to all other races automatically without needing to get them to agree to anything (See image below).

Every race has enough claim beacon bandwidth to claim up to 2 stars at a time, and a new Claim Beacon Design technology in the Construction tech tree adds 1 additional claim. The first race to colonise a star system automatically gets a claim to that system that doesn’t count against their claim limit, so you can have 2-3 active claims on uninhabited star systems and free claims on all systems you have colonised.

As part of the Star Claims overhaul, we’ve written a new territorial AI that picks star systems for colonisation and pre-claims them. It can also decide to use a claim just to try to stop another race from colonising a star system with strategic value near its borders. In designing this AI, we added several new behavioural options to the race AI files to indicate how seriously they take enemy claims. The Z’loq, for example, are aggressively territorial and will ignore all star claims, and The Starforged may sometimes colonise a claimed star system if one of the planets has resources it needs.
With the Race overhauls, we have ensured that every race now has at least one fleet combat related bonus. To complement this, we’ve added several new behavioural options to the race AI files to indicate a preference for weapon types, ship sizes, and strategies. This will affect both their choice of technologies to research and how they decide to design their ships and fleets. Certain races now prefer to bomb planets while others prefer ground combat, and certain races (like the Sauros) prefer larger ships while others (like the Kazzir) prefer larger numbers of small ships. This should add some much-needed variation to ship combat.

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We previously had no asteroid belts in the game, and the Asteroid Miner module used to just produce 25 metal/turn automatically. We’ve now implemented asteroid fields and adjusted the Asteroid Miner to produce 25 metal/turn for each Asteroid Belt in a system. This means it does nothing in a system with no asteroid belts, but has much higher output if you find a system with multiple belts.

All home star systems now start with 1 Asteroid Belt and any empty orbits after generating planets now have a chance to be filled with asteroids. When a planet is destroyed by the Stellar Convertor or siesmic disaster, it now turns into a debris field that functions like an asteroid field rather than becoming a molten planet. The Revenant home system can now no longer be colonised as all of its planets are shattered into debris fields.

When you make a new sandbox game, you can currently start in either the Pre-Warp or Space Exploration tech era. If you pick Space Exploration, the game will select a random path through the tech trees until it gets to the space exploration era, offering limited control over which techs you end up getting. The only way to get techs you missed would be to hope another race got them and will make a trade.

We’ve now added a third Empire Era option to resolve this: the Space Colonisation era. This option is like an optimum Space Exploration start and grants all races ALL of the technologies in the pre-warp era even if they don’t have the Creative racial trait (the one the United Colonies has). This has relatively few balance implications, and I’ve found it makes for a much more even start to the game.
We had several options in the game that were accessible only from the Options dropdown menu or couldn’t be toggled at all, and decided to solve this using the Radial Menu tool that we use extensively on the planet screen. Right clicking on the galaxy map will now bring up a variety of options to change the map view:

• Show Star Claims: (Toggle) Shows icons on the galaxy map over any star that has been claimed indicating which race claims it. This is very useful for quickly seeing which systems are off-limits for colonisation (without causing a diplomatic incident) or which direction a species is expanding in.
• Show Friendly Sensor Area: (Toggle) Shows your race’s sensor area and any sensor areas you can access due to Sensor treaties. This is useful for seeing the areas of space that you can send ships into.
• Show Enemy Sensor Area: (Toggle) Shows the sensor areas for all of the other races in their colours. This is useful for quickly seeing which enemy races can reach a certain star system and so which systems may need to be more heavily defended.
• Show Friendly Trade Routes: (Toggle) Shows all of your trade routes between star systems as lines on the map, with the colour indicating the state of the trade route. This is useful for quickly seeing whether there are any problems with your current trade route setups or any weak points that could be blockaded if you don’t keep military ships there.
• Show Enemy Trade Routes: (Toggle) Shows all trade routes between enemy star systems, marked out with their race’s colour. This can help you find weak points that could be blockaded to disrupt their empire. AI trade routes have been disabled while we work out some bugs with them, so this button won’t show anything until we fix those bugs.
• Show All Star System Names: (Toggle) Shows the names of every star system you’ve visited. Toggling this off will show only colonised star systems, so if you want to hide the sea of names of systems you don’t care about, this option will be useful.

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Previous updates improved the Fleet Combat gameplay and resolved most of its bugs with the introduction of the Fleet Combat State system, but the UI was still badly in need of an overhaul. We took the extra time in this update to tackle this task, and I think you’ll be pleased with the results. The new UI consists of new side-windows styled the same as the rest of the game, and some new buttons on the UI:

• Weapon / Module Window: The old Weapon / Module window was terrible, so we’ve replaced it with a completely new one styled after the Ship Info window. It has a section with buttons to activate each individual weapon on your ship, and a section showing all active modules the ship has that can be activated and their active/cooldown status. We’ve also added a separate section for Special Abilities, which now contains things such as the retreat option and the new self-destruct option.
• Initiative Window: The initiative window on the left hand side of the screen has been replaced with a new one that looks a lot cleaner and has more functionality. The buggy dropdown menus are gone, each ship now has its own section and shows its shield and armour indicators at all times. Each ship also indicates its owner, and we’ve a button to centre the map onto a particular ship so you can quickly find a particular enemy or friendly ship on the battlefield.
• Feature: Scan Ship: One final addition to the Initiative window is a button on each ship’s panel that lets you scan the ship. This will open a Ship Info window just as you’ve seen in the rest of the game (if you right click a ship in the System window on the galaxy screen, for example), showing you the ship’s weapons, active and passive modules, ship captain, and full crew complement. This will help you find priority targets in fleet combat.
• Forward / Rotate Controls: We’ve added three new buttons to the middle panel in the Fleet Combat screen, allowing you to move forward one hex or rotate clockwise or anticlockwise by 30 degrees. Previously you could only rotate your ship as part of a movement, and now you’ll have fine control over it.
• Minor Feature: Self-Destruct: We have added a new option to the weapon window that allows you to self-destruct a ship as a last resort. This will instantly blow the ship up, dealing an area-effect damage in a certain radius that scales with ship size.

Up until now, ship crews could accumulate experience and gain levels but those levels didn’t actually affect combat at all. With the Fleet Combat UI overhauled, we’ve now got a spot on the Weapon / Module window to display a ship’s crew bonus and have now implemented this feature. Ships now get a +1% offensive bonus to all damage output for each combined level among its crew. A Frigate with two level 5 crew members, for example, will get a +10% bonus.

Elite Ship Crew count double toward this bonus, giving +2% per level. Elite crew also have a 60% chance to be specialised Engineers or Scientists who instead give a defensive bonus that reduces all incoming damage before it hits the shields or armour. As the combined level of all crew is used, larger ships with larger crew complements can accrue much higher total bonuses. These bonuses will encourage players to keep their ships in one piece and build Training Facilities to max out their crew levels quickly.

We had a few stray buttons on the top right of the screen during fleet combat and really didn’t have a good place to put them, so we decided to re-use our right click Radial Menu tool to add these options to a nice clean menu. Right clicking will now being up a radial menu with the six options below:

• Show Friendly Weapon Arcs: (Toggle) Shows your race’s weapon arcs as coloured areas on the map, which will help you figure out how far you have to move to get in range of something.
• Show Enemy Weapon Arcs: (Toggle) Shows the enemy race’s weapon arcs, which will help you stay out of the firing line.
• Show Friendly Reactive Strike: (Toggle) Shows the weapon arcs from all of your race’s weapons that have the Reactive Strike property and haven’t fired yet. Weapons like Beams and projectiles will automatically get a free shot against an enemy moving into its reactive strike area if that weapon wasn’t fired last round. This option lets you quickly see your reactive strike areas, which the enemy will naturally try to avoid entering.
• Show Enemy Reactive Strike: (Toggle) Shows the enemy race’s reactive strike areas on the map, which is extremely useful if you want to move closer to the enemy but avoid giving them a free shot against you.
• Auto Centre Map: (Toggle) This option automatically centres the map on a ship when it begins its turn, which helps people not get lost when the AI is taking its turn.
• Show Grid: (Toggle) Shows or hides the hex grid representing the playable fleet combat area. If it’s turned off, hexes will only be shown if they’re lit up by being in your ship’s movement area or if a weapon arc is drawn to the map.

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Of all the ways to generate income in Predestination, the one we’ve heard the most feedback on is the three Market buildings. People really seemed to like the idea of designing a planet just to produce produce for sale (Agricultural Market for food, Industrial Market for metal, and Energy Market for energy), but they were really difficult to balance.

Markets weren’t worth building on most planets, but on the extreme scale you could build things like huge geothermal energy farms on molten worlds for crazy income. The Markets also only kicked in when a planet’s food/metal/energy stores were full, so your income from them could be unpredictable, and we didn’t like that they were large buildings limited to one per planet as it doesn’t fit with the rest of the game.

• Building Redesign: Our solution was to completely redesign the market buildings to be small one-per-city service buildings that affect only the city they’re built in. They now sell 100% of the city’s Food/Metal/Energy output all of the time, so you can build a farming city with an Agricultural Market or a big Geothermal Energy farm if you like.
• Economic Rebalance: To balance the new markets, we calculated the maximum amount of food/turn, metal/turn, and energy/turn that it’s reasonable for one city to produce and then ensured that this would produce around 25BC/turn per city. The new rates are 1BC for every 750 food (Agricultural Market), 1BC for every 8 metal sold (Industrial Market), and 1BC for every 35MW sold (Energy Market).
• Black Market Trait: To make this a much more viable strategy for your main source of income, we’ve added a new Black Market racial trait to the Renegades that increases all income from Market buildings by 100%. We may tone this down to a 50% increase in a later update if this is too powerful, but wanted to see how it played out first.
• Tech Tree Changes: With the new markets being so important, it no longer feels right to ask the player to select just one of the three in the pre-warp tech era. We’ve swapped the three market technologies to the end of the Pre-Warp Sociology tree and made it so that branching techs at the end of an era no longer lock other branches. Any race can now research all three market buildings.

The Citizen Tax rates have been adjusted upward, and we’ve modified the formula used to calculate a planet’s GDP. GDP is now 10 BC per 1,000 population in each city, with a 25% bonus if the city has a starbase (so attach your starbase to a residential city for a nice boost!). The GDP is also reduced by your security percentage if it’s below 100%. Industrial Tax rates have also been adjusted upward to 1BC per 10 metal sold, keeping it useful but less efficient than using a dedicated Industrial Market building.
Our old economic model had cities and infrastructure cost extra money per turn in maintenance if they required a biosphere, but this could lead to unsustainable planets that are negative in net tax. We’ve changed biospheres instead to increase the power requirements of infrastructure by 15MW and the number of staff required to run it by 100. This makes it still more advantageous to build infrastructure in your race’s preferred environment when possible, a bottleneck that drops later in the game as you acquire technologies that reduce staff requirements. We think this strikes a pretty good balance while still ensuring that you don’t need to go back to planets later once they’re fully set up.

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We made a major iteration and balance pass on all races in this update to meet a specific set of design goals. We made sure that each race has a preferred economic option and is designed for a specific play style, and that each race has a significant enough bonus to both the galaxy-level gameplay and the fleet combat gameplay. Each race now has at least one special trait that influences its play style and two unique technologies that integrate well with its play style, and we’ve added several new AI behaviour mutators to make each race AI behave a little differently.

Full details of the race update are available on the official devblog[predestinationgame.com].
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The stats tabs on the Planet Screen used to display a boring-looking list of gray bars with some pretty dry stats on them. We improved this window by adding more colourful new graphics (see below) and dividing it up into sections with more useful stats. It now has an Economic Stats header showing a breakdown of all financial stats, and a General Stats tab showing things such as research points, ground combat, and planetary bonuses to morale, security and health.

When zoomed into a city, the information on the City Stats tab also now uses the same new graphics (see below). It now shows the city’s core percentage bonuses to food production from food processors, metal production from factories, and research from Artifact Excavations. These figures also take racial bonuses into account so you get a more accurate picture. The City Stats section shows the city’s research output, population, ground combat troops, city shield stats, etc.

We’ve improved all three of the services that you can use to improve resources on a planet (soil enrichment, oil drilling, and seismic excavation). Each one now costs 2000BC from your stores to activate and instantly has effects planet-wide. Soil enrichment increases the planet’s organic rating by 1 and grows all food resource patches by several hexes, and oil drilling expands fossil fuel deposits on the planet if there are fewer than 6 present (very useful for the Starforged). Seismic Excavation is limited to Barren planets and increases the planet’s mineral rating by 1, expanding all ore patches by several hexes but with a 5% chance of blowing up the planet.

Minor Feature: Scrollbar System: One of the most common bugs we get reported is that parts of the UI sometimes don’t allow you to scroll down far enough to access something, or that they sometimes let you scroll down way past the actual content in the window. We have also had some inconsistent behaviour from scroll bars across the game, some allowing click and drag and others not. We took the time to overhaul the scrollbars across most of the game by creating a Scrollbar system that can be applied to any in-game window. The new scrollbar automatically resizes to fit the content drawn in the window, and should eliminate those pesky scroll bar bugs across the game for good. Please continue to report any bugs of this nature if they do happen again, as they will be much easier to fix now with a single centralised system.

Minor Feature: Smooth Highlight System: Various buttons and UI elements across the game display a highlight when moused over to let the player know that it’s clickable, but this was inconsistent across the game and the highlight was quite jarring in some cases and made the UI seem unpolished. Some highlights were also hidden by some UI elements, while others weren’t. We’ve overhauled this to create a dedicated Highlight system that provides consistency across the game. The main things you’ll notice are that mouseovers and highlights are brighter and more obvious, and that they now smoothly fade in and out as you move the mouse over an item. We think this adds some much-needed polish to many parts of the user interface.

Minor Feature: Music System Improvement: We noticed that the Ship Designer and Fleet Combat music were broken by a previous update and weren’t playing, and also that some bugs could cause the game to play two pieces of music at the same time under some circumstances. We took some time to improve the Music system to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and now the correct music plays when in the Shipyard and Fleet Combat screens.

Minor Feature: Training Facility: The Training Facility used to be a large building that was limited to one per planet, which was out of line with the rest of the game. Now that the Market buildings have become standard one-per-city Service buildings, we’ve done the same to the Training Facility. We’ve removed its bonus to ground combat and reduced its ship XP per turn bonus from 2% to 1% in order to compensate for the fact that you can now put one in every city. This means you could build a ship training star system with multiple training facilities across several planets, and the bonuses will all stack.

Minor Feature: New Building Bases: The old city buildings were placed on top of these odd hex shaped flat planes that didn’t look very good. We’ve replaced them with a new more solid base that looks better and has groove cut into its edges with a road for transporting civilians around inside the city. This was a minor feature that didn’t take a significant amount of extra time, and it adds to the polish of the game.

Minor Feature: Final Building Models: We’ve added the final textured models for a few remaining buildings that were missing from the game. These include the Tier 3 Factory, Fossil Fuel Plant, Research Lab (Tier 2), Research Lab (Tier 3), and The Forge.

This update also contains a huge number of smaller features, updates, changes, and bug fixes. A listing of the most important changes is available on the official devblog[predestinationgame.com].

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This update has been a long time coming, so I hope everyone is happy with how it has turned out. V1.10 has cleaned up a lot of old issues that had been lying in the codebase and tackled a number of recurring pieces of feedback from fans, and we think it puts us in a good position leading up to final release. Our next step will be to finish all of the remaining content such as singleplayer missions and get the ball rolling on the remaining creative rewards from backers, and once that’s implemented we can get ready for full release and start planning for free post-release updates.

We welcome any feedback on this update and the game in general, and if you have any specific suggestions then we would ask that you get them to us as soon as possible. The game is now officially in feature-freeze while we work on the remaining content, so we will have very limited time to iterate on existing features or add new ones. Get your suggestions and feedback to us as quickly as possible (over the next week or so if possible) to maximise the chance that we’ll be able to act on it before release. You can leave your feedback or suggestions on all the usual places or contact us directly at brendan@brainandnerd.com with them. Thanks again to everyone who has supported us this far!

Note for Kickstarter backers: We’ll be sending out another round of Steam keys and DRM-free updates this week to anyone who has requested one recently. If you haven’t requested your key yet, please send us an email to earlyaccessrequest@brainandnerd.com with the email address you used on Kickstarter and we’ll send over a Steam key or DRM-free download of the latest version, whichever you prefer.

Cheers,

— Brendan, Lead Developer

It’s been some time since the last major dev update article, so this is going to be a big one as we have a lot to catch everyone up on! First I’d like to say thanks to all the people who offered words of support recently when I mentioned on Steam that my dad had passed away. We’ve been working hard on the game since then and the big news is of course that we hit a major milestone with the release of V1.0, which marked the point at which Predestination officially left alpha and entered the beta release stage.

All of the gameplay is complete in V1.0, and we began a series of iterations and overhauls touching on almost every part of the game using your feedback. We’ve already deployed several hotfixes and our first gameplay iteration on the Resource system, and have started a whole series of other iterations across the game that should make it a lot more fun and cohesive. The upcoming V1.1 major iteration update will contain a total economy balance overhaul, new economic options, a sweeping rebalance of race bonuses, an overhaul to the Star Claims diplomacy gameplay, random event improvements, asteroid mining, planet gameplay improvements, a ship design overhaul, major AI improvements, and more.

In this dev update, we’ll briefly break down the improvements made in the V1.01 to v1.03 hotfixes and delve into the details of major iterative improvements we’re working on or considering for each area of the game.

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Most of the work since the V1.0 release has been fixing bugs and crashes as reports come in, but we’ve also made some general improvements based on feedback:

Resource Spawning: In our first significant iteration, we tackled a number of issues with resources and how they spawn on planets. On rare occasions, resources such as Coal, ancient ruins, or rare Coffee Beans could spawn completely surrounded by ore deposits, making them completely inaccessible. We revamped the placement code to group resources that can be harvested by the same structures together, and generate a border around dissimilar deposits so that they don’t overlap and become inaccessible. It’s possible to find Coffee Beans next to Fertile Soil deposits, for example, but not next to Ore. Resources are also now spread out more evenly across a planet and are more strictly limited to certain environments (fertile soil on Terran environment hexes etc).

Farming Improvements: We made a few changes to level the playing field in farming gameplay for different race archetypes. We added a new Cactus Plot resource that generates food in Desert environments and can only be harvested by the new Cactus Farm, a specialised Reptilian replacement for the standard Farm. The humanoid Farm has been renamed to AutoFarm and can harvest Fertile Soil and Land Animals but not Cactus or Fish. Humanoids can now research the Fishery structure to farm for fish on Ocean planets with very little Terran environment land. And Aquatic races can finally harvest Coffee Beans and grow food on ice or desert worlds with a new Algae Farm infrastructure, giving them a way to colonise those planets before terraforming them.

Ocean Planet Generation: We iterated on how planets are generated in the engine, with the specific goal of making sure that Aquatic races can never start with land under their starting city. This persistent bug had been squashed 3 or 4 times previously but always somehow managed to return, so we took the time to investigate exactly how it was happening and added special rules for Ocean planets to prevent it in the future. We’re confident that this bug should now never return.

Dynamic Descriptions: The descriptions on buildings and infrastructure can now contain variables and they will update to reflect changes due to new technologies etc. For example, Ore Refineries will now correctly update to state that they generate 3 metal per ore deposit in range when you research Carbonide Drills. This was reported as a bug by a few confused players who expected the tooltip to update, so we considered it an important quality of life improvement.

Starbase Improvement: When you start designing your own starbases, you can quickly find that the metal costs get way out of hand and it can be difficult to build them simply because a planet doesn’t have enough metal storage space. We also wanted updates to custom starbase designs to be automatically rolled out across a player’s empire, which again posed a problem due to the difference in metal cost. We quickly settled on a solution: All starbases now cost only 5,000 metal, and the BC cost of all modules and weapons added to a design have been doubled to compensate. We may revisit these costs when we do the upcoming economy iteration.

Optimisations: After the first round of optimations in V1.0, we released a number of other improvements in further patches. The planet generator’s procedural seed textures are now automatically pre-loaded and kept in memory throughout the game rather than being loaded only when generating a planet, for example. This increased memory usage by about 100mb (eating into some of the V1.0 memory savings), but reduced planet generation times significantly and solved a number of reported crashes.

Quality of Life Improvements: In addition to a dizzying array of bug and crash fixes, we’ve been implementing small quality of life improvements to parts of the game to make the game easier to play. Researched technologies are now unlocked as the first step in the End Turn code, for example, so the effects will apply on the turn that you get them and the user interfaces will all update automatically to reflect that (previously it took 1 turn for some effects to apply). We also fixed the problem with clicking on a star or fleet on the galaxy map when two stars or fleets were very close together, the game now works out which is closest to your mouse pointer and clicks on that one. Build New City buttons are correctly grayed out when you’re at the planetary maximum, and a number of issues with the city blueprint system have been fixed. A full listing of the bugs fixed in these updates can be found in the V1.0.0.1, V1.0.0.2, and V1.0.0.3 patch notes.

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All of the core gameplay that will be in the final release version of Predestination is now in the game, but some of it will need improvements before it’s ready for release. We’ve been collecting your feedback for some time and compiling a list of areas of the game that could use improvements, and this is all being rolled into V1.1, our first major iteration. Work on this update is already well underway, several features have been completed and we plan to deliver them all as one big update as some of them are interdependent. I’d like to break down each aspect of the iteration now, and if you have any thoughts on these changes then we’d love to hear them.

A discussion thread started some time ago on the Steam forums about Predestination’s economy gameplay, and we discussed various changes that could be made to improve it. In addition to doing a balance pass on the economic gameplay, we plan to both improve the different ways of generating money and add new outlets for spending it. BC should be a universal currency that lets you cut corners throughout the game, something that you save up when you can so that it’s there when you need it.

The primary goal of this iteration is to make it very easy to make enough money to support a planet and run an expanding empire while giving advanced players a benefit for figuring out more efficient setups. The secondary objective is to make multiple viable strategies for generating money, which will vary between races and depending on what types of planets you find and races you meet. The plan to achieve this breaks down into the following major changes:

Purchasing Ship Production: We’re going to add a new feature that will let you pay BC to purchase ship production on the private market, so you could pick any ship that’s currently in your build queue and pay BC to immediately complete construction. Not only would this skip lengthy build times but it would also give you a way to build a ship even when there’s already something earlier in the build queue. You could rush-build a colony ship or survey probe to take advantage of a nice find, or combat ships to defend against an impending attack. Rushing ship production won’t be cheap though, as you’re not only paying for the metal but also the extra construction work.

Markets: One of the parts of the economic gameplay that we’ve had a hard time balancing is the Industrial, Agricultural and Energy Market buildings. These sell the excess metal, food, and energy produced by a planet on the open market for BC, but only once the planet’s stores are full. These used to be the best way to generate income as you could turn habitable planets into profitable farm worlds and molten planets into giant geothermal money-factories, but they were a bit too strong so we nerfed them. We plan to rebalance these so that they’re viable again, and provide a new Black Market racial bonus (for the Renegades) that makes them more effective.

Citizen Tax Rebalance: Citizen tax is intended to be the main way that non-robotic races generate the income needed to run their empire. Cities and infrastructure all cost upkeep in BC/turn, and taxing your citizens a reasonable amount should pay for that in practically every case. Right now you can break even at about 50% tax, but that feels too much compared to real life tax systems. We plan to just tweak all of these numbers so that tax is now optimal at 20-30%, that penalties will make 40-50% tax work in the short term but punishing for long term use, and that 60% or more tax rates can generate significant money but will start causing serious problems with escalating civil unrest. New racial bonuses to planetary economy size will also make certain races generate a lot more citizen tax, and the morale penalties from tax will be rebalanced.

Industrial Tax Rebalance: Industrial tax is intended to be a way to temporarily trade off your industrial growth and ship production capabilities for extra income, something that you do occasionally in order to save up for something big like a large ship. This is in a good place right now, but we’ll have to rebalance the numbers after we rebalance citizen tax and markets. Industrial Markets should pay a better rate than 100% industrial tax, for example, as they take up a large building slot.

Trade Routes: Trade routes currently cost 1BC/turn per route, and they are limited in range but not in capacity. We plan to experiment with adding capacity limits or scaling costs to make it more expensive to send huge amounts between planets. The goal should be that trade routes give you a way to make more efficient empires (e.g. have dedicated farming worlds) but to make it cost enough to make it a meaningful choice. We’re also considering having set up times for trade routes to simulate ships travelling with supplies, as right now it happens instantly. This would not only make trade routes more interesting but also make blockades a more destructive tactic. This feature will rely on us make the AI set up its own trade routes so you can disrupt their empires without direct combat.

Biosphere Change: All cities and infrastructure in environments outside your race’s primary environment are automatically enclosed in biospheres, which currently just add 1 or 2 bc per turn to maintenance costs. This was intended to encourage players to colonise their own race’s environment preferentially and be picky about planet selections, but that’s not always in your control as resource placement and planet rolls are pretty random. We plan to try removing these additional maintenance costs and exploring a few more options such as increased staff requirements or energy consumption. This should ensure that all planets are tax positive once they are up and running regardless of what types of planet you’ve found, and so should help you scale your empire up.

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The racial bonuses in Predestination haven’t changed since race stats were first implemented, and we’ve noticed that some of them are unbalanced. The United Colonies’ Creative trait that allows them to research all branches of the tech trees can be super powerful, for example, while the Renegades’ Hardy ability that lets them live on Ice, Desert, and Ocean environments without biospheres is a bit crap. Now that the final gameplay is in place, bonuses such as +10% to food or metal production also feel pretty weak and will need to be buffed.

With this update we are giving each of the races an iteration pass. A full breakdown of each race’s new profile will be released in another article once the details are finalised, but the goal is that each race should feel like it plays differently and has one or more optimum strategies. Each race will have:

• Archetype: Each race has a core archetype (Humanoid, Reptilian, Aquatic, or Robotic), which determines the technologies the race has access to, its native environment, and major gameplay differences such as Robotic races having no tax gameplay and generating income via ByteCoin Miners. This isn’t changing, we’re happy with the archetypes as they are.
• Special Traits: Each race has one or more special traits, such as the United Colonies’ Creative feature or the Z’loq’s Warlord and Transdimensional traits. We’ll be looking at how powerful these traits are, adding some new ones, and changing some races’ special traits. The Renegades will get a new Black Market trait that makes markets more effective, for example, and the Kazzir will finally get a decent trait.
• Economy/Planet bonus: Each race gets at least one bonus to an empire-wide stat or planet-based stat, such as bonus research or metal production. In order to make each race play more uniquely, we’ll be revisiting all of these bonuses and making them much larger. 10% bonus food production may not make much of a difference to the strategies you employ, for example, but a huge 25-50% bonus definitely would! Races should get either one big bonus or two smaller ones.
• Ship bonus: Each race gets one bonus to some ship function, such as a bonus to beam weapons or armour hitpoints. We will also be making the AI take these bonuses into consideration when designing its ships and selecting research options, which should lead to each race being more unique on the battlefield.
• Penalties: Some races have penalties to balance out their positive traits and ensure that they play in a unique manner. For example, the United Colonies may get a lot of technologies to trade in diplomacy but they also get a diplomacy penalty that affects the value other races give to those techs, so you’re encouraged not to share. We’ll give each race a look over to see if any penalties are appropriate.
• Special Technologies: In addition to archetype-restricted technologies, we plan to give each race two unique pieces of technology that replace existing tech in the tech tree. These are big iconic technologies that races will want to hold onto and not trade away, as they will give big advantages to that race’s play style. For example, the Kazzir will get the Broadcast Tower from the singleplayer mission in place of the Entertainment Center, and the Holographic Decoy ship module in place of another tech. We’ll have more information on these in the upcoming article on the race overhauls, but we’d welcome your ideas and input in this area as we’re still designing these changes.

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We recently added the Star Claims feature that lets you negotiate with the other races for exclusive ownership of uncolonised star systems. We’ve collected solid feedback on the feature and done a lot of internal testing and have now come up with a plan to improve it. We’re going to flip the Star Claims on their heads. Instead of individually negotiating the same claim with every race you’ve met, you will issue a global claim and races that don’t like you may choose to disrespect it. The design we have right now is as such:

• Universal Claims: Rather than being an agreement between two races, Star Claims will now be issued universally. A new Claim icon will be visible on the System window showing who claims it, and you can claim an uninhabited star system by clicking that button. The first race to colonise a star system will also gain the official claim to it, so AI races will know that you have an implicit claim on your star systems.
• Claim Limits: Each race will be limited to 1 or 2 star claims on uninhabited star systems, and we may give Warlord races 1 additional claim slot so they can claim a little more. When a claimed star system is colonised, the claim flag remains but no longer counts toward the claim limit, so you can claim another uninhabited star system.
• Diplomacy penalties: The AI will recognise when you’re trying to annex strategically valuable stars near its space and respond with suspicion. Each Star Claim you have issued on an uninhabited system within another race’s borders will decrease their diplomatic rating with you by 10-20, possibly more based on the empire’s leader personality.
• Territorial AI: The AI currently sends a claim request to any other race in range of a star system it wants to colonise, so with the new system it’ll just issue a global claim to the system if it has a claim slot left. Each AI will also have a rating for how much it respects the sovereignty of another race’s claims, so the Zloq for example would colonise your star systems without a second thought but the Renegades would be more cautious.
• Claim Violation: Violating a territorial claim by colonising someone else’s star system or an uninhabited system that has been claimed will result in a diplomatic penalty. This will work similarly to how breaking treaties or being caught spying works currently, with penalties ranging from a small favour adjustments and threats all the way up to cancelled treaties and war declarations if they hate you enough.
• Star Claim View: To make it easier to visualise Star Claims, we’ll be adding a new map control button to the galaxy screen that toggles Star Claim views on and off. This will display flags on claimed star systems to let you see which ones have been claimed at a glance when exploring the galaxy, and who they have been claimed by. We will probably take this opportunity to add a few more controls, such as displaying enemy Sensor areas.

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Random events are a core feature in any 4X game, and in Predestination they take the form of Planetary Disasters, Revenant Attacks, and Temporal Rifts that can be investigated to find anything from free ships to bonus research. We recently changed Revenant Attacks to happen on a turn-based timer to keep tighter control over how often they appear and to use as part of the difficulty system, and now we plan to do the same with other random events. At the same time, we plan to iterate on the planet disasters, add positive planet events, add more random events, and improve temporal rifts:

Temporal Rift Improvements: Temporal rifts take several turns to open and then have an effect, some of which only occur if you investigate the rift (such as getting a free commander) and some of which happen anyway (such as ancient ruins appearing on a planet). We’d like to clean this up, so temporal rifts will only produce something if you investigate them and the other random events will be in a separate system like we did with the Revenant Attacks. We also plan to just improve the rewards from Temporal Rifts so that they always give something useful.

Positive Planet Events: Right now planets can experience disasters, such as acid rain or global warming if you have too many fossil fuel power plants. We plan to augment this system with more positive random events, some of which will be random and others that will act as rewards for good planet management. Examples include unearthing ancient ruins, finding more ore deposits, population booms, and permanent bonuses to morale or other stats. We will be using this as part of the difficulty rating system and the race designs if we decide to add a Lucky race trait.

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The Asteroid Miner module currently just produces 25 metal/turn for a planet in the system, and there are no actual asteroid belts in the game. We plan to add asteroid belts as a type of planet and spawn them into some of the empty spots in generated star systems, and then Asteroid Miners will produce 25 metal/turn for each asteroid belt in the system.

This will make Asteroid Miners useless in systems with no asteroid belts, but extremely useful if you happen to find a system with several asteroid belts. We can also then make the Stellar Converter superweapon destroy a planet into asteroids rather than into a molten planet as currently happens. The Strip Miner module will be changed to produce 50 metal/turn for each uninhabited planet in the system. Mockup below (it won’t actually look like this, but something similar):

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Infrastructure Build Queue: We’ve been investigating the idea of adding an Infrastructure Build Queue the same way we have for city buildings. If you place an infrastructure that you can’t afford the metal cost for, it would be added to the queue and appear as scaffolding while its cost is slowly accumulated. This would also solve the issue where a Tiny planet still needs a minimum of 5,000 metal storage to build a starbase. There are some problems relating to staffing infrastructure and which ones it should build first, but we’ll implement this and do some tests to see if it performs well.

[Complete] Soil Enrichment Iteration: The Soil Enrichment planet service currently lets you place new Fertile Soil deposits on the planet in exchange for some money and energy from the planet’s reserves. We plan to completely overhaul this, replacing it with a new option that lets you spend a large sum of money to boost the planet’s Organic rating. All food deposits on the planet (Fertile Soil, Cactus, and Fish) will be expanded by several hexes so that they become the size that they would have been if the planet had started with that organic rating.

[Complete] Seismic Excavation Iteration: Similar to the Soil Enrichment iteration, we’re changing Seismic Excavation to do the same thing with the planet’s mineral rating. This will probably still be limited to Barren planets, and we might add a small chance that planets excavated in this manner will blow up in a random event, turning it into a Molten planet or Asteroid Field.

[Complete] Oil Drilling Iteration: The Oil Drilling service currently lets you excavate a small area for underground oil deposits, but it feels clunky. We’ll change this instead to something where you can spend a large sum of money to excavate the whole planet at once, generating a number of fossil fuel deposits depending on planet size. This will of course only be possible on habitable planets, and we will be reducing natural oil deposits on several planet types to make this more necessary for robotic races.

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[Complete] Simple Mode Editor: Last time we overhauled the ship designer, we added advanced editor tools for placing items on the ship hull, scaling, rotating etc. In the next update we’ll add a simple mode editor that lets you design a ship quickly by picking a hull size, selecting one of the pre-designed visual designs, and then dragging weapons and modules into a simple list. When creating a ship design, you will now choose between using the Simple Editor or Advanced Editor.

[Complete] Engine/Speed Improvements: Right now it’s not possible to design a very fast ship because all ships are limited to one Augmented Engine, but if we let you to add a large number of them then larger ships with their huge power cores would become faster than small ships. Instead, we’ll allow these to stack but create different sized versions for each ship that each use different amounts of power core and cost different amounts. This allows all ship sizes to have high speed, but balances that speed against losing more weapons on larger ships.

[Complete] Ship Armour Plating Changes: You can currently add individual standalone armour plate modules to your ship that increase hitpoints by a flat amount (e.g. Bytanium Armour Plating). On large ships, you can end up placing dozens of these on your ship. Instead we’ll replace these with a single stacking “Heavy Armour” module that increases your ship’s armour by +25% and with different versions for each class of ship to balance armour across all ship sizes just as we’re doing with Augmented Engines.

[Complete] Shield Emitter Changes: Shield emitters are currently individual modules of varying grades (Electron, Magnetic, etc) that block a certain amount of damage, then absorb the rest to a pool of hitpoints that regenerate 10% each combat round, and stacking multiple emitters adds their hitpoints together. We’ll follow the engine change model with this and create different sized shield emitters for each ship class, which use more power but also give more hitpoints. This essentially just makes larger emitters work the same as groups of them, but lets us tweak shield balance differently for different ship sizes. For example, we can give larger ships slightly more shield HP/MW or different recharge rates if we want to.

Ship Refitting: We plan to add a new Refit option to the build panel in the shipyard that lets you select a ship in the system and then pick a ship design of the same hull size to refit it into. This will immediately cost the money difference between the two ships, salvage all modules and weapons for 50% build cost in metal, and then put the ship into the build queue with the new design. Once it’s in the queue, you can let it build normally or buy it using the new ship purchasing mechanic. All ship crew and captains will be transferred onto the new ship when it’s complete, so you’ll keep their XP and bonuses.

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Every feature in Predestination has an associated AI that knows how to use the feature about as competently as a human player, and we’ve kept these up to date with each update. Once all of these iterations are complete, we’ll have to revisit every aspect of the AI to ensure it’s still able to play competently, and build new AI routines for all the new gameplay. This includes but is not limited to:

• Asteroid Miner AI that decides when to build them and where to put them.
• Trade Route AI that figures out reasonable trade routes, sending food to harsh environment worlds etc.
• Ship Purchasing added into the War AI so they can buy some ships when under extreme threat and have a fighting chance.
• Temporal Rift Exploration AI, since all rewards will now require exploration.
• Updated ship designer AI to work with the new mechanics.
• Updated Star Claim AI to use the new mechanics.

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Thanks for reading this enormous dev update, and I hope you enjoy the upcoming V1.1 Iteration update when it’s finished. This update should add some much-needed cohesion to the game and put us in a good position leading up to final release. As always, we welcome your feedback on anything in this dev update in the comments or you can email me at brendan@brainandnerd.com with your thoughts or any problems.

Cheers,

— Brendan, Lead Developer

This hotfix solves a number of reported crashes that didn't make it into the previous hotfix, and fixes a lot of bugs that have been recently reported or in the backlog for some time. The patch also adds an Exit Tutorial button to the Tutorial and adds a new diagnostic suite to the crash reporter that gathers basic information on your CPU adn GPU to help diagnose complex and unusual faults.

Note: This update includes changes to the planet generation code to fix a problem with the Aquatic homeworld. We've chosen not to invalidate any V1.0.0.1 or V1.0.0.2 save game files in case you're in the middle of the game and because the risk of disruption is extremely low on all planets but the Z'loq homeworld. If you see a previously explored planet's continents rearranged compared to where they were in the previous version, it's nothing to worry about and the resources should remain where they were before the patch.

• Any technology you research now applies immediately on the turn that you get it, so any bonuses are applied to that turn's output.
  
• The planet UI will now correctly update immediately after researching a new technology that affects it such as Advanced City Planning.
  
• The Waste Management Tech will now correctly stack with improved road techs and applies immediately when researched.
  
• The Zloq will no longer accidentally start on land. For real this time!
  
• Deep Core Coral deposits will now correctly be revealed on planets you have already explored. We may be removing Deep Core Coral in a future update though as it doesn't make much sense.
  
• All Deposit descriptions now automatically update to reflect new technologies, such as Carbonide Drills increasing Ore Deposit yield from +2 to +3.
  
• All building and infrastructure descriptions now automatically update to reflect new technologies and changes based on environment. For example, Fossil Fuel Power Plants will now update from 50 to 100
  
• Fertile Soil and Land Animals can no longer spawn in desert environments.
  
• The recycling plant technology's description now correctly states that it produces 1 metal per thousand population in the city, not across the entire planet. It now correctly matches up with the building description on the tooltip.
  
• It's no longer possible to select the same city blueprint that's already in use at the current city, triggering a popup asking if you want to upgrade even though it's the same blueprint. The current blueprint is now grayed out. This interface is due for a revamp soon too.
  
• The game will no longer autosave every time you load a save game file. It now correctly autosaves when you create a new game or start a mission.
  
• All ships in the build queue of starbases are now automatically regenerated when you load the game. Previously they were only regenerated when you hit the end turn button.
  
• The debug keys for Show Sensor Area (b) and Show Star Chart Plane (c) on the Galaxy Screen are now correctly disabled in non-debug mode. The player could accidentally press these keys and get confused.
  
• It's no longer possible to click the blueprints on the blueprint screen multiple times.
  
• Cities no longer mark themselves as not built when Updating a player-made blueprint.
  
• Cities now correctly update to the latest version of their blueprint when it's modified, taking a number of turns based on the build time of the new buildings.
  
• The game should no longer black-screen on rare occasions when moving from the planet view to the galaxy view. This was caused by the game accidentally opening two versions of the same screen.
  
• Fixed a rare Predestination.DialogPopup.AddDisaster crash that could happen if the planet's colonies are destroyed before a disaster happens there.
  
• Attempted a fix for a rare Predestination.PlanetScreen.RenderBiospheres crash that we can't replicate but is most likely due to thread timings.
  
  
  Minor Changes:
• Added a button to let players quit the Tutorial early at any point. The tutorial must currently be restarted from the beginning if you want to continue it.
  
• Enemy planetary shields will now be a minimum of 50% opaque even if they have almost 0 energy reserves, so you can see that there are still shields wwhen dropping troops etc.
  
• Attached a new diagnostic suite to the crash reporter. This will now send us generic information on the system's CPU and GPU, which will help us diagnose whether a crash is in our code, a driver fault, or a hardware incompatibility that we can look into. Please keep sending in those crash reports!
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer
  
  

This hotfix patch fixes a number of critical crashes and bugs afflicting players since V1.0.0.1 went live. As this update needs to correct a bug in people's settings, we have set the game to reset everyone's settings. Old save games from V1.0.0.1 should still work. See below for a complete listing of the crashes and bugs fixed:

• Fixed SharpDX.Result.CheckError crash caused by people's graphics cards to reset periodically during play. This only affected a small number of users with certain GPUs but happened to them persistently, so we got over a hundred crash reports on this one and were able to find a fix.
  
• Fixed the Kazzir mission launch crash (Predestination.Building.Fetch). This was caused by a mistake in the mission attempting to load the "Farm" building when we have renamed it to AutoFarm.
  
• Fixed the Predestination.PlanetScreenHostileWindow.BuildSpyActiveList crash that would happen after the Kazzir mission crash when you launched the game. This was caused by the galaxy settings being inadvertantly set to 0 enemy races, and should no longer be possible.
  
• Fixed a variety of bugs caused by the game accidentally loading multiple copies of the ShipyardScreen if you double-clicked the button. It is no longer possible for the game to accidentally load two copies of the same screen.
  
• Fixed a bug where you could break the game by repeatedly clicking on the "Intro" button on the main menu.
  
• Fixed a bug where clicking on the "Next" button on the Sandbox map creation page would cause it to reset the screen transition. Now nothing happens if you click during the transition, and repeatedly clicking this button was hit the Start Game button once it appears as expected.
  
• Issued a full settings reset that will take place once when your game starts up and will fix a number of bugs from V1.0.0.1
  
• Slightly optimised the star rendering on the main screen
  
• It is no longer possible to accidentally click on something on a screen that is still fading in from black and so isn't fully visible yet.
  
• Fixed a rendering bug with the lines between stars and the galactic plane. They now draw the correct brightness and correctly fade out when outside the sensor area when you are selecting a ship.
  
• Implemented a fix for an unusual null Fleet crash that has been reported. We haven't been able to identify the root cause of the crash or replicate it, but have added additional checks in the code that should fix the problem any time it happens.
  
  Apologies to anyone who was affected by these crashes, and thanks to everyone who sent in crash reports! They helped us hunt down these critical bugs and get them fixed as quickly as possible.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

This is the first bugfixing and iteration update since the recent V1.0 update when we officially started the Beta phase. It fixes a number of serious crashes players reported via the crash report tool in-game and several major bugs reported in the bug reporting thread in the forum. While fixing some bugs in the resource deposiy distribution algorithm, we also took the opportunity to iterate on that part of the game.

I'd like to quickly apologise for not getting this update out sooner and not catching up on all the forum posts and emails right now, unfortunately my dad has just passed away and I won't be back to work until next week at the earliest. Until then, please keep sending in your bug reports and suggestions on the forum and know that I will get around to all of them as soon as possible. Remember that all feedback is useful at this point ad we are going back to iterate on old gameplay we may not have changed in a while.

- Solved an out of memory crash during the "Initialising Planet Generator" step. Turns out that MonoGame may be handling disposing of textures differently, so now we do it explicitly in this code.
- Modified the PlanetGenerator to pre-load all of the continent, mountain, crater, and terraform data at the start of the game. This uses about 100mb extra memory, but reduces video memory usage and significantly reduces planet generation times. It solves a video memory crash that was being reported by a few players.
- Added forced texture memory cleanup after unloading ship textures. Combined with the asynchronous texture loader, this should improve video memory usage a bit in most of the game and may fix a few crashes reported by players.
- Solved a problem where the graphics generated for a planet could change after the first time they're generated.

- Resource Borders: The resource deposit generation algorithm has been significantly improved. There is now always at least a 1-hex border between resources that can't be farmed together (e.g. there's not necessarily a border between Fertile Soil and Land Animals, but there will be one between Ore and Fertile Soil). This ensures they are more usable and should prevent deposits such as Coffee or Uranium from generating inside an existing deposit seam where they can't be reached.
- Tighter Seams: Seams of deposits such as Fertile Soil or Ore will now slightly prefer tiles that are next to two or more of the same resource. This means they now generate in bigger blobs with less empty space, allowing you to get more 4, 5, and 6-hex filled ore refineries and farms.
- Improved Distribution: To help stop resource seams of the same kind from sticking together (which happened sometimes under the old distribution but more with the new distribution), the game now preferrentially selects starting hexes a distance of at least 3 from existing deposits. The seams can still grow toward each other and merge, but it's less likely to happen now.
- Cactus Resource: Added a new Cactus Plot resource, restricted to Desert environment hexes. It provides a +100 food bonus just like Fertile Soil.
- Cactus Farm: Reptilian races now start with the Cactus Farm infrastructure, which provides 200 food per Desert hex / 100 per non-desert hex, +100 per Cactus Plot, +100 per Fertile Soil, and can harvest Coffee Beans. It can't harvest Land Animals (appears on Terran planets) or Fish (appears on Ocean planets).
- Algae Farm: Aquatic races can now researvh the Algae Farm infrastructure. This compact but very inefficient single-hex infrastructure provides a flat 1000 food/turn and can be built on Ice, Terran, and Desert hexes. It can harvest Fertile Soil and Cactus for a small +100 bonus and can harvest the rare Coffee Bean strategic resource for a global research bonus. This gives Aquatic races a way to finally harvest Coffee Beans, and to colonise Desert planets prior to terraforming.
- AutoFarm: The Humanoid's Farm infrastructure is now called the AutoFarm. It still provides 200 food per terran hex / 100 per non-terran hex, +100 per Fertile Soil deposit, and can harvest Coffee Beans. It can't harvest Cactus (appears on Desert planets) or Fish (appears on Ocean planets).
- Fishery Infrastructure: Humanoid and Reptilian races can now research the new Fishery infrastructure, which can only be built in the ocean. This provides 200 food per hex and gets a bonus of +50 from any Fish deposits that are in range for a minimum of 1400 and a maximum of 1750. This makes it more efficient than a Cactus Farm or AutoFarm on planets with very few Desert or Terran hexes or few Fertile Soil / Cactus Deposits but lots of fish.
- Fertile Soil: Fertile Soil hexes are now restricted to Terran environment hexes. We've also rebalanced how many Fertile Soil deposits appear on non-Terran worlds (e.g. Ocean planet food resources are about 75% fish and 25% fertile soil).
- Fishing Coral Reefs: Increased base food output from Fishing Coral Reefs from 50 per ocean hex to 60. This gives them 1140 food/turn if completely empty building up to 2090/turn if filled with Fish.
- Growing Deposits: Deposits grown in Coral Reefs etc are no longer deleted when the infrastructure is destroyed. This allows you to demolish and rebuild new infrastructure to switch priorities if needed without having to wait for new deposits to spawn.

- Starbases now always cost 5,000 metal to build regardless of what is attached to the design. This ensures that all planets can build a starbase even with only a nominal amount of metal storage such as 1 or 2 industrial cities. It's also important on tiny planets as they can only get one city.
- To compensate for the removed metal cost and make upgrading simpler, all weapons and modules fitted to Starbases cost double BC.
- Made the loading screen display progress for loading each race's ship models individually rather than just displaying one message for all of them.
- When you click the "Open Planet" button on a notification about finding a rare resource, the game now rotates the planet around to that resource upon opening the planet.
- The Build a New City buttons are now correctly grayed out when you have reached the planetary maximum.
- When the mouse is over both a Fleet in space and Star at the same time, clicking will now open the Fleet window or System window depending on which is closest to the mouse pointer on the screen. Previously it was difficult to click on.
- Improved memory management code and activated compaction of the Large Object Heap in several places in the saving and loading code.

- Fixed slow-down when the Planets >> Exploration panel is open with a large number of planets available. The game was not correctly culling off-screen text, and rendering that much text caused some slowdown.
- Fixed the size of the fleet container boxes on the Fleet >> Manage Fleets menu when you had a lot of ships in one fleet. It wasn't taking into account the tiny gap between each ship image.
- Fixed a bug in the Diplomacy >> Galactic Council panel where the scrollable list wasn't restricted to within the bottom part of the screen.
- Fixed a bug in the Diplomacy >> Galactic Council panel where you could click on council resolutions outside the viewable area.
- Fixed bug where the revenants could destroy your homeworld early in the game. Homeworlds are now off-limits to Revenant attacks.
- Fixed the Spying tab tooltip saying "SPYING NOT IMPLEMENTED" when it actually is.
- Fixed an odd visual bug and crash that could happen when clicking the "Open Planet" button on a notification about finding a rare resource. The new planet would open but the map would be using data from the previous planet you visited, and you could end up with big white hexes and an index bounds error at Predestination.PlanetScreen.HandleRadialMenu.
- Fixed a bug where explosions on the planet screen were appearing 2-4 times for each explosion.
- Fixed incorrect delays on some explosion graphics.
- Fixed a ship designer bug where it would say "1 planet using this design" etc if you create a new design and haven't even saved it yet. It was mistakenly checking how many of the default Starbase you had in your empire.
- Fixed a crash in the ship designer when updating a starbase design you've just created.
- Fixed a number of bugs in the ship designer that could happen if you had the Fleets >> Ship Design tab open while in the Shipyard Screen and selected different tabs on each of the two Ship Design windows. Now all ship data and tab selection data is shared between these two tabs automatically so if you change to the Starbase tab on one, the other will also switch to the same tab.
- Fixed a bug that could happen in the ship designer if you seleted a ship design while it was open in the editor. The fix for this was simply to disable clicking on the Fleets >> Ship Design tab while you're editing a ship.
- Fixed a big where the planet graphics could change if the AI explored a planet.
- Fixed several bugs that could cause the roads to flash and the AI to not colonise if you create and then load a game in a specific order.
- Fixed a bug causing the Reptilian Hatchery selector highlight and building model to be drawn over the UI when the UI is scrolled down. Also fixed the buttons being off-centre.
- Fixed a bug causing part of the Infrastructure Info panel to be drawn over the UI when the UI is scrolled down.
- Fixed visual bug with the Metallic Coral icon
- Fixed a bug on the Infrastructure Info panel when viewing farms etc that don't use any power. There was a weird red line next to the Power reading.
- Fixed a bug where the Planet AI would demolish an Artifact Excavation or Farm or Power Plant in order to build a Starbase. This resulted in sub-optimal starts if you selected the Space Exploration era start, and made the AI sometimes accidentally harm its tiny planets.
- Fixed a bug causing the highlighted technologies in the Trade panel on the Diplomacy screen to be drawn over the UI when they are outside the window.
- Fixed a bug with terraforming where the planet would suddenly disappear. Like what? How? What?
- Fixed various bugs with resources like Land Animals spawning in the sea or Fish on land.

Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer