Hi everyone, this update is almost entirely about supply: supply, resources and ammunition now travel by drone and freighter to where you need them. There's also a reworked UI and a whole bunch of bug fixes.
🖥️ UI & Controls:
- New selection panel at the bottom of the screen: it shows all objects on a tile or your selected ships as tiles with status bars. Commands now sit right on the tiles, and planets open the colony screen from there.
- The selection panel now matches the rest of the UI and shows the actual planet images. Status bars in the ship view are vertical and colored, with exact values in the tooltip.
- Ships can be sent to any wormhole in the system and jump automatically. The target system is revealed on the galaxy map.
- Switching between the strategy map and combat now clears your current selection.
- New system overview on the right side of the strategy map: all planets and ships of the system in a collapsible list. Colonies show whether they have a shipyard, are building or are idle. One click jumps to the object, a double click opens the colony.
- New layer bar on the strategy map. The logistics layer shows all supply runs color-coded by cargo (supply, resources, ammunition), your colonies' stock levels against their targets, and warns about ships running out of fuel or ammo. Targets that can't be supplied are marked with the reason. Flights to neighboring systems are visible too, with the name of the destination or origin system.
- Ships now show their supply stock and range. When fuel runs low, the display turns red.
- The "P" button gives a ship high supply priority. Drones then serve it before all others, ideal for your attack fleet.
- Supply can now be controlled directly: in the colony screen you set how full storage should be kept and whether a colony is served first. For ships you set the cargo hold target level, and for supply units the network, role (supply only or resources only) and target filter (planets or ships). Settings are shown as icons, with explanations in the tooltip.
- The colony screen shows the planet's supply stock, and storage values are readable even when storage is full. Supply and ordnance each have their own row. Build orders show when a delivery is on the way.
- Double-clicking one of your planets opens its colony screen directly.
- The galaxy minimap has a proper frame and shows system ownership with a colored ring, including contested systems.
- The ship designer checks designs before saving and shows missing required modules. Blueprints a planet can't build are marked red, with the reason in the tooltip.
⚙️ Gameplay:
- New: Supply Depot and Supply Storage. Planets build up their own supply stock and refuel your ships standing directly at the planet. Home worlds start with one depot and one storage each.
- Supply no longer refills by itself at the end of the round. Ships refuel at a planet or get supplied by drones.
- New: supply drones. With the "Resupply" research you equip a drone hull in the ship designer with its own small modules: drone core, economy or thrust engine, small cargo hold and solar module.
- Drones fly on their own: they pick up supply at depots and storages, bring it to your ships and forward storages, and then return to the nearest depot.
- From drone core level 2, drones can make one jump across warp lanes, and one more every two levels. With storages in neighboring systems you can build supply chains all the way to the front.
- Drones also transport resources: colonies without their own mines receive ore, bio and radio for their build orders, and surpluses from mining worlds are distributed according to target levels.
- Logistics plans more efficiently: drones fill up and serve multiple targets per trip. Large deliveries go to a freighter if it arrives just as fast, and urgent amounts are split among several nearby drones.
- New: the "Freighter" hull. It's as big as the colony ship but needs no colony module, just at least one cargo hold.
- New: the "Mobile Ship Yard" module. A carrier equipped with it builds ships and drones right at the front. Logistics supplies mobile yards with ore, bio and radio.
- New: Ordnance Factory and Ordnance Storage, both part of your home planet's starting setup. Ships above your colony reload automatically at the end of the round, emptiest first. The building list shows production and capacity.
- Drones also bring ammunition to the front, to ships and forward ordnance storages. Supply takes precedence unless you set a higher priority.
- ⚠️ Ammunition is now scarce: your ships no longer start combat with full magazines automatically. Pirates are exempt. In combat you're told immediately when a ship has run dry.
- Drones no longer take part in combat. Without armed escort they are shot down immediately by enemy warships, so secure your supply routes.
- Combat no longer refills your ships' supply.
- The build queue now builds in order, leftover build points go to the next order, and orders no longer lose progress. You pay round by round according to build progress. If resources are missing, the order waits, and buildings can be queued even when resources are still missing.
- Freshly founded colonies can build drones even without a shipyard. All other ships still need a shipyard.
- The makeshift shipyard now offers a small base storage (5,000 each of ore, bio and radio).
- Movement orders work across system borders: activate movement, switch to the target system via the minimap and set the target with a right click. The ship flies via warp lanes, over multiple rounds if necessary.
🎨 Graphics:
- Supply drones and freighters have their own graphics in all ship styles and no longer look like frigates or colony ships. Colony ships are recognizable by their colony sphere.
- Ordnance Factory, Ordnance Storage and the logistics icons use preliminary graphics. They're marked with a pink dashed frame and will be replaced step by step.
- A new panel in the main menu lists all AI-generated graphics. They are placeholders so new features are playable already.
🐛 Bug Fixes:
- Newly founded colonies no longer lose their starting resources at the end of the first round.
- Resources in ships' cargo holds no longer vanish at the end of the round.
- Combat no longer resets your ships' movement points on the strategy map.
- Ships destroyed in combat now also disappear from the strategy map and the fleet list, for you and for pirates.
- Ships no longer forget their destination when it's out of range and keep flying in the following rounds.
- Clicking a star system on the galaxy map switches to that system again.
- A save game can be loaded after returning to the main menu, with planets, buildings and resources fully intact. Loading also works from the Esc menu.
- A ship's supply display updates immediately when a drone delivers.
- Drones arriving via wormhole in the displayed system are visible immediately. Newly built or loaded ships no longer wrongly appear in the displayed system.
- A started movement order is canceled when you click another ship or a planet, so the old ship no longer flies off by accident.
- The buttons on the right edge of the strategy map are the same size and aligned. The supply layer button shows whether the layer is on or off.
- A new blueprint no longer overwrites the name and modules of earlier blueprints on the same hull. Blueprints and built ships show the assigned name instead of the hull type, and the name resets when you switch hulls.
- In the ship designer, the hull silhouette is centered in the grid and no longer distorted.
-Bradley