Marsyclopedia improvements
The community has long requested to have a way to see when a project was unlocked. The Marsyclopedia will now display a small number next to the name to indicate at what Mars level it was unlocked. Thus, we also added the current Mars Level and points required to reach the next level in this screen.
In addition to this, we have categorised content which is only accessible through events or leaders in their own category, so it is clear how you can access that content in-game.
And finally, we have added all the content for which we were previously not sure how best to display. Now you will be able to see every project, including the location-specific ones like landmark upgrades and city mines. All the DLC content has been added to the Marsyclopedia, as it was missing until now.
Favorite locations
Another highly requested feature was a way to “tag” future city locations as favourites to help plan ahead and find a good location back easily. You’re now able to do just that in all unsettled cities. You can now mark landmarks as favourites too. You can choose a colour for them so you can plan different future cities with their expansions, and when you finally settle the city, it will automatically pick the colour you chose.
The “favourite” star icon will be visible on the map and in the overview popup. In the overview popup in the cities tab, you will now see all city locations which you have discovered. For convenience, at the top will be your cities, then your favourite locations and then all other locations. To further improve, we have added all the slots and their contents in the city locations in the overview popup, so now you can see at a glance if a city has rocks or special slots.
Shortcuts and Improvements
Continuing with community requests, we’ve added that if you hold the import/export button, you can now quickly form multiple trade routes (also works on gamepad). You can also click and drag in the region between the export and import buttons to change the amount even faster!
While expanding your city, it’s now possible to expand to multiple locations without needing to re-select the expand-button.
We’ve also added a “build all dikes” button on the flood warning popup so you don’t have to go around and look for the important ones to build if you are far in the game and can afford them all at once.
Another change is the way that projects’ special abilities display how much they are currently providing. Previously, this was a line in a project’s details popup, which was often confused with the default production of the building, and thus, we would get a lot of bug reports of buildings not working. Now this production will be displayed directly after the special ability’s description.
Weekly challenge additions and other content
To keep the game fresh and even more replayable, we have added 17 new modifiers to the weekly challenge, which will test your wits. A community request we saw was to propose longer weekly challenges (challenges in which the goal is set higher), and we’ve added just this! Now a challenge has a chance to be “long” and will have its goal increased. These new effects will start with the next challenge (on the 26th of May).
We have also added 6 new projects and a new surprise game event, which we hope you’ll find as fun as we did (hint is in the artwork of this devlog!).
And of course, we also did other polishing and solved bugs. You can find the full list of changes below. Some of the important ones are a fix to the fullscreen crash for some, and a fix to the volcano spawning (often there would spawn fewer volcanoes than we intended).
Community members
Finally, we would like to take the opportunity of this update to thank the many members of the community who have been commenting, theory crafting, bug hunting, idea sharing, new player helping … Your participation has been invaluable to us and helped both with motivation and improving the game. There are too many of you to mention all, but we extend a special thanks to gussmed, chic.aeon, Petera1289 and exintc97, Najy76 on Steam; as well as EchoMirage, Red Fox, Rorshach, Jctheluddite, Ravage_mk2, Seinbeisser, bmij, Velhida, on Discord.
And with this, on to making the 3rd DLC! We’re happy with its design, but there’s a lot of work to add it all to the game, hopefully, we’ll have more to share in a few months!
Love you all!
Asteroid Lab team
Patch notes
Base game
New features and content
- Weekly challenge upgrade! Adding 17 New challenge mode modifiers as well as “Long Challenges” where the goal will be much higher but the difficulty adjusted down so it remains achievable.
- New secret event
- 6 New projects
- Major update to Marsyclopedia displaying all content which was missing (landmark upgrades, megastructures, celestial upgrades, some event or skill projects). The marsyclopedia will also now show if a project is event based, leader based or dlc based as well as show the level it was unlocked on.
- New feature to “tag” a city location or a landmark with a star and a color to plan your expansions better.
- Quality of life: in the trade panel, hold the export / import buttons to quickly change traded amounts (also on gamepad). Click and drag in the region between the export and import buttons to change the amount even faster.
- Quality of life: hold shift or left trigger to expand to multiple regions at once.
- Quality of life: Added “build all dikes” button on the flood warning popup.
Bug fixes and improvements
- Abilities will now display their bonus below the ability description instead of their own line to improve clarity.
- Added an animation to the victory bar when close to winning
- The game will pulsate more relevant elements (trade, building actions…) when hovering end-turn to help not forget about them.
- Improved warnings on the end turn button for remaining exploration, lifeforms and other.
- Improved navigating between cities.
- Added that resources details popup will show the current total amount in addition to the production amount.
- Fixed the "Improved Robotics" tech effect so it takes into account the megastructure stage we are upgrading from when calculating gained robots
- Fixed that the zoom was tied to the framerate instead of taking a specific amount of time.
- Fixed a bug where skills or projects providing extra research past the total number of proposed cards would be ignored. You will now have the possibility to get science of the extra points instead.
- Fixed an issue where the space-ui element next to the resource would block the destroy button of a building in a city layout.
- Fixed a bug with the “Occupational Accident Insurance” specialisation where it was counting twice every mines.
- Fixed a bug with selecting the skills of Camille Williams on gamepad.
- Fixed bugs related to teh game crashing on certain monitor resolution.
- Fixed a bug with the “expansive” challenge modifier which was increasing negative support instead of reducing it.
- Fixed an error message when opening the display settings.
- Fixed a bug where a “free building skill” would let you build megastructure and other stuff for free.
- Fixed a bug where volcanoes where not spawning correctly
- Fixed missing house hover for population details in city tab of overview popup.
- Fixed a bug when relocating a city which has a mine.
- Fixed a bug where it was possible to win a game, chose to continue, cancel the last action and win again.
- Fixed a bug where you could interact with the new game popup during the loading fadeout (delete, new game...)
- Fixed a bug where megastructures were not triggering the mars enthusiasm
- Fixed a bug preventing winning when the armageddon crisis happens sometimes
- Added that dej'as space dev skill will be greyed out if there are no valid projects
- Fixed a bug with the celestial explorations which could prevent many event from triggering (leaders, expectation, megastructures...)
- Fixed 3rd DLC popup welcome popup draft appearing already
- Many small improvement and polish.
Balance changes
- The Marsolympics event will now be proposed less often and slightly later in the game.
- The increase of athletes required between Marsolympics is reduced.
- Changed Léna’s specialization from “+1 project proposal and +1 project research if you have 700+ stored support.” to “+1 project research if you have 400+ stored support.”
- Increased the probability of volcanoes to spawn.
- Changed the late game version of skill “Mine Resources” to cost twice the power to the explored distance (instead of equal to the distance).
New Frontiers DLC
- Reduced the cooldown of the Extra-Martian Development Center from 15 to 14 turns.
- Fixed a bug where Tatiana skill would provide the 2nd level of mercury as 4th level instead of the 3rd level.
