Star Ruler 2 Update - September 18th

It's been a long few weeks of back-end work and mechanics tweaks, but it's finally time for another Star Ruler 2 update. In addition to some preliminary updates to the research and ship design UI, there's a couple of new goodies to show off here. Scroll down for the full detailed changelog.

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Bulkheads

The first of many subsystem modifiers to come, you can now equip the subsystems on your ship designs with bulkheads to increase their health.

Engagement Behaviour Controls

Fleet engagement behaviour has been tweaked, and can now be configured from the action bar on the bottom left.

Donations

Empires can now freely make material donations to other empires, provided they aren't at war.

Full Changelog

Added:

• Empires can now make donations to each other, similar to how offers in votes work.
• Placing an orbital shows the labor cost / ETA of building in that location.
• Vassal empires now have their master's color stippled into their territory borders.
• Added the ability to send pings to allies. Defaults to 'v.' Hold control to send an alternate ping, and shift to ping to everyone.
• Added achievements for scanning an anomaly, using an artifact, and terraforming a planet.
• Added controls for changing fleet engagement range and behaviour.
• Added a color picker for choosing empire colors.
• Added menu option to end the current game.
• Added simple descriptions about what each pressure does.
• Masters receive 10% of their Vassal's money, influence, energy and research generation rates (the Vassal does not lose this portion).
• Masters can establish a conquer edict to reward vassals for taking the target's planets, or killing their ships.
• Added some more variety in the types of pickups protected by remnant groups.
• Added the Bulkhead module. Can be equipped to a flagship subsystem to add 100% of its base HP, while doubling the cost.

Changed:

• Reduce repair rate in combat to 25% of normal instead of 33%.
• Additional bridges no longer give extra repair, only secondary crew facility hexes do.
• Orbital scaffolding now starts at 1% of total hp, instead of 25%.
• More things, notably research, grant points.
• Fleets can now do some limited re-pathing when new gates/tears are created while en-route.
• Any ships you have selected when ordering a slipstream tear to be generated now move to the other end of the slipstream tear automatically, after it is created.
• Vassals add 20% of their total points to their master's point total.
• Added smaller speed steps near 1x.
• Stations cannot capture planets, but can still prevent capture.
• Auto-colonize orders execute in the order they were given.
• Teams go to war and make peace as a group.
• Food resource bonuses no longer transfer on native resource export.
• FTL Jammer orbital now only needs 0.15/s FTL upkeep (down from 0.25).
• Level 1 planets now only have up to 1 base pressure cap.
• Level 2+ planets now have increased population growth.
• Remove 'Enhance' card from Communism start.
• Improve object hover prioritization.
• Expand and improve the Tutorial's economy section.

Fixed:

• Fixed a bug in the mover code that was causing support ships to desync from their fleet formation, especially at high time acceleration.
• Fixed flagship acceleration being half of what it was intended to be.
• Completing construction of a station now does not fully heal it, but starts it at the scaffolding's hitpoints.
• In-game IRC chat would sometimes cut off the first letter of a message in the textbox.
• Planets not fully colonized could drop to 0 loyalty permanently if captured.
• Fixed a bug that could cause ships to fly far away from the galaxy.
• Fixed a few AI bugs related to wasting resources.
• Fixed a few fog of war leaks.
• Fixed empire military strengths being wrong after a load.
• The starting Fling Beacon should not cost maintenance.
• Fix being unable to fling stations.
• Fix being able to shift-queue fling orders that would work outside beacon range.
• Victory conditions now work in team games.
• Fixed some situations that prevented support ships from engaging in combat.
• Improved performance in loaded saves (only new saves).
• Fix a few situations where the tutorial could get stuck.

AI:

• The AI will import labor resources to improve its construction speed.
• Expanded the AI's influence capabilities.
• The AI better understands how teams work, and is able to work with allies somewhat.
• Slightly improved early AI colonization.
• Improved how the AI handles its fleets.
• Fixed AIs sometimes surrendering in situations they shouldn't be able to.
• Fix AI not being able to see pickups.
• The AI will now order support ships into the queue for new flagships.