Get the Galactic Civilizations II v1.1 Retail Patch off WP (27mb)

Highlights:

• New Option: No tech trading.
• New Option: Blind exploration (players can't see the spheres of influence on the mini map)
• New Option: Random intelligence (Players select a general difficulty level and the game can randomize the indvidiaul intelligences of each player.
• New Option: Random number of players (Players can elect to have the game decide how many players they're going up against)
• New Option: Random opponents (Players can elect to have the game choose which players they are up against)
• New OPtion: Random galaxy size (Players can elect to have the game randomly pick a galaxy size)
• Computer AI *significantly* enhanced.
• Computer AI updated to work together with other players (including human player) to thwart a common foe.
• New Alien dialog: (ex: Drengin: "You complete me." ack!). Another Ex: Computer players grovel dialog more satisfying.
• Fleet Manager Screen added to manage stacks of ships and fleets that are on the same tile more easily
• Rally points can be moved
• Lots of UI tweaks
• Game will tell you when someone else is paying off, manipulating things behind the scenes to go to war with you (but won't tell you precisely who is doing it).
• Players can choose to upgrade ships and either have the functional components removed by default or have them stay.
• Unused Social Production now transferred automatically to military production rather than "wasted".
• Economic System overhauled to be more transparent and intuitive.
• Production that is the result of abililities is only charged at 50%. (that is, if player is getting 10 more industrial units of production per turn because of starbases, player abilities, etc. they only have to pay for 5 of it).
• Population growth revamped to put more emphasis on population growth ability and morale.
• Lots of new hot keys.
• Metaverse Scoring revamped.
• Ship Designer revamped to be easier to use, more powerful.
• Ship Designer now allows players to rotate ship pieces on the fly.
• Ship Destination markers also display how many weeks until ship arrives there.
• Selected ship displays an animated line showing where its destination is.
• Constructors will display what area of effect a starbase would have it one were built in the constructor's current position.
• Lots of new balancing of technologies, planetary improvements, starbase modules, etc. based on the feedback from players.
• Lots of new options added to the options screen
• Better support for modding (full-blown mod UI coming in v1.2).
• New Music playing
• Lots of tweaks to improve pacing, balance, etc.
• Removed a lot of player discovered "exploits"
• Performance and memory optimizations
• New hot keys
• Lots of bug and glitch fixes

# # #

The detailed list of changes:

What's new in v1.1 over 1.0X:

• NEW FEATURE: You can select a planet on the main map and then use Z and X keys to cycle through your planets
• NEW SCREEN: The Fleet Manager. Players can now easily manage multiple fleets and stacks of ships in a single UI.
• Optimized fleet manager screen for faster response times Implemented
• New Option: "Hide Nebulae and Stars in Ship Preview Windows". This option fixed some compatibility/crash issues some users ran into (video card related).
• Only thumbnails for ships your civ can use are pre-loaded Fixed bug where UP would vote to change to Democracy, but would changeto Federation instead
• AI now factors "Fear" into relations. If someone is going around conquering others, they'll begin to get nervous about them.
• AI will tend to band together to try to stop someone who is going around conquering them (whether that be human or another AI player who is mopping everyone up).
• AI players will evaluate threats and put together coalitions against aggressive players or at the very least take a more active role in thwarting aggression from the sidelines. (LOTS involved in implementing this).
• Computer players weigh risk of being ganged up on if they start a war of aggression before starting said war of aggression.
• AI Much more effective at evaluating threats and discarding false positives.
• Some AI players will be more aggressive at secretly paying someone else off to go to war with another player.
• Many new messages to human player to let them know if someone has gone to war with them because they've been paid off or some other reason.
• Some new AI upgrading code to ships to prevent it from trying to upgrade Precursor light cruisers (aka Rangers).
• Torian and related AIs now adjust what they are building/researching based on the status of the galaxy. If the galaxy is on fire with war, it begins to rearm.
• Lots of tweaks on which ships are built.
• AI much better at focusing on tech researched based on its own strategy. Previously it tended to over focus on how much a tech cost so it would tend to research techs that weren't central to its strategy simply because they were "Cheap". Such distractions really add up.
• A LOT of work on the tactical AI, picking out which ships to go after, how to focus power and project it in a focused way.
• AI will move offensive ships into defensive positions in orbit of a planet if it feels threatened.
• If the galactic atmosphere gets dangerous (i.e. lots of wars) AI will start fortifying its planets more to prevent sneak attacks.
• Starting spend rate changed to 67. "New" users will hence see the game pace improved (i.e. the "I just keep having to hit the turn button over and over" issue where people who don't increase their spend rate end up waiting a long time should be helped a bit).
• Game now keeps track of how many civilizations a given race has conquered. pCiv->ulCivsConquered.
• New API: FindBestFriend. Returns a player's best friend that they can reasonably trust. Takes into account if said friend is going around conquering everyone and is not allied.
• Saved game and load game format changed to support new features.
• Saved game makes use of new weapon and defense focus features.
• Planets under alien influence defect faster.
• Tweaked planet seeding so that there's a bit more difference between rare and uncommon.
• Fixed rare crash where a ship has been destroyed but the bad pointer is left in the orbit list. Now it will NULL it out if the ship's been destroyed.
• Cleaned up the way influence ability affects the map. Much better.
• AI will tend to use space on a ship design more optimally.
• AI: If you're playing on Impossible (or whatever the most difficult level) the AI gets a free miniaturization ability. At this difficulty level, our focus is to provide god-like players with a challenge. (besides, if you're beating it at genius or higher, you're probably doing something similarly cheesy ).
• Report screen on foreign relations screen tweaked to show fear as a negative (or positive) effect on relations.
• Influence on the map tends to spread further into empty areas.
• AI somewhat more shrewed in negotiations.
• AI takes into account how many wars the player has started before making peace.
• Iconian home world nerfed to 14.
• Lots of new alien dialog.
• Various tweaks to costs and benefits to planetary improvements based on player feedback.
• Iconians are now good (were neutral).
• Torians made slightly nicer ("more gooder" ).
• Influence modules made more powerful at the high end.
• AIs consider hulls more important.
• Saved games now load MUCH MUCH faster on new saves
• Changed saved game version because saved games no longer save influence data - speeds up saved game load time
• Added support for loading older saved games that still have influence data
• Implemented Cari's change to prevent AutoSave crashing
• Improved stability in various places by checking process pointers before appending them to other processes
• Added debug messages when memory allocation fails
• Influence updates immediately after loading a game (No need to wait a turn for the influence to correct itself)
• Fixed a bug where saved games from older versions that had orbital fleet managers in them did not allow the player to attack ships in a planet
• Ship Design Screen deletes an old design if the new design has the same name
• Fixed bug where if you pressed ESC in election window, you would never get any more elections from then on
• Updated AI rally point code to adjust to it being blocked by opponents.
• AI rally points are now closer to friendly planets so that they're nearer to reinforce
• New Ship Design and Adaption system implemented based on experiences from (ahem) "after hours play testing".
• Alien ship names are better. I.e. Drengin Fighter instead of just "fighter".
• Tightened AI tech trading so that weapons are rarely traded.
• Torians much better at managing planets.
• AI treats home planet differently than other planets when it comes to deciding how to build improvements.
• Lots of tweaks to how the AI determines which technology to research.
• Updates several of the AI modules to support an improved starbase handling algorithm (didn't update all because "better" is subjective).
• AI better at upgrading their ships
• Lots of tweaks to the tactical battle AI
• AI will tend not to send combat ships out of orbit if doing so would leave the planet vulnerable to an invasion.
• Normal and Bright AI intelligence levels made a bit easier
• Trade route value increased based on population of source/destination planets.
• Fixed bug where display name was used to find ships (can't assume English names!)
• Updated AI ability picking based on new values.
• Optimized AI usage of space on a ship.
• AI will now create sub-fleets that will go after enemy starbases.
• Technologies 20% cheaper by default (use technology rate to adjust this).
• AI wont' "help" you by giving you starbases to fight wars.
• AI is much less likely to trade away mining starbases.
• Nano Ripper costs more, does 5 damage instead of 6 (it's still a very potent weapon).
• Drengin loyalty removed from abilities.
• Fixed bug where AI ships would build mining starbases without resources. It was allowing them to do this as long as the starbase limit had not been met. Now, if they try it, it will abort before building the starbase and leave a message in debug.err
• Planet Context window will now update the planet stats as you change the sliders in the Domestic Policy Economy window
• Fixed upgrade overlay for AI fleets to not display time to upgrade (Release Mode only)
• Fixed "Auto-obsolete" bug when upgrading a ship design
• More balancing on what techs AIs should research
• Tighter controls over tech trading
• AI won't lower relations with a player for military reasons unless it has a distinct military advantage
• Good civilizations now get an outright + to their relations from neutral civs.
• Torians better at making use of constructors
• AIs will tend to have much different sets of technologies based on race.
• AIs will make a priority out of terraforming their tiles
• Terran Alliance AI ship designs more flexible with galaxy size (other civs already using this)
• Terran Alliance will use economic bases to extend their range
• AIs will accelerate military production if they fall behind enough on military spending.
• New API FindClosestLocalUnfriendShip(). AIs will use this to put ships near potentially hostile ships that are somewhat near its worlds.
• New APIs: CalcFullAttack(), CalcFullDefense(). These APIs allow the AI to quickly (CPU wise) determine if a potential target is getting benefits from military starbases and make decisions based on this information.
• Military Might makes use of the new CalcFullAttack and CalcFullDefense APIs
• Precursor Rangers don’t show up until after game year 5 (was 3).
• Some Civs put more emphasis on increasing food production
• Tech research slightly faster at default tech rate
• Cleaned up planet economy display so that ()’s only show up if you’re not spending.
• Tool tip for military spending now shows up if you mouse over the actual number. It will explain where that number comes from.
• AI better at valuing the worth of planets.
• AI more wary about attacking fortified starbases (this is harder to balance than it might seem, you want the AI to sacrifice units if necessary to wear down a starbase but you don’t want it mindlessly throwing ships at them, it’s a fine line).
• Start-up abilities made cheaper but less powerful too. More opportunity to spread ones Civ out.
• Political Parties re-balanced based on new values.
• Updated graphics for some planetary improvements.
• Some planetary improvements made less expensive
• Spin Control Center now requires Majesty
• Neutrality Learning Center added
• Attack Assist Modules now cost typically $300 per module. The reason for this is that these modules essentially give the same benefit as building several small ships when used correctly. $300 may even be too cheap. Late in the game, these costs won’t be significant but it prevents a player from b-lining to these techs and eliminating opponents before the game has really started.
• Attack and Defense assist modules will require that the starbase have battle stations on them at the very least.
• Starbase militarization techs cost more to research.
• Terran Alliance AI focuses more on self-defense of planets Drengin
• AI now uses experimental weapons focus technology system Scoring system tweaks. See Link for details
• Music playing tweaks
• Update the influence borders when an influence module is added
• Drengin racial morale increased to 25%, Soldiering racial bonus decreased to 20%.
• fixed bugs reading in height map mods
• added ability to read in .str files from the modsdata folder
• added support for modded star types
• added support for replacing the custom planets and race config files with copies in the mods folder (but not adding new or partial mods)
• added support for replacing the abilities xml file with a copy in the mods folder
• tweaked code that sets the star type so that we get more variety, and made it so that yellow stars only appear for systems with habitable planets and purple stars for systems with class 20+ planets
• made it so that if you want to mod the AbilityBonuses.xml file it will use additional entries which were previously excluded like Logistics.
• Implemented “Disable Point Sprites” option. This option will force the game to not use point sprites whether or not the hardware supports them or not. It can be used to speed up performance for cards that do not support point sprites, because point sprites will not need to be emulated with software. The option has the following effects:
• a) Stars will not be rendered ( no appropriate substitute without point sprites )
• b) Engine exhaust will not be rendered ( no appropriate substitute without point sprites )
• c) Ship damage will show as electricity whenever it would normally appear as a fire, smoke, sparks, or any effect that uses point sprites
• Fixed bug where all class 0 planets have the same texture after reloading a saved game
• Fixed bug/exploit where if you use a fleet with both transports and attack ships to attack a defended planet that belongs to a civ you are not at war with, and you vote to declare war, you skip fighting the ships in orbit and go straight to a land invasion
• Fixed glitch where some components on core ships could not be removed because they said there was something attached to them
• Planet Context window now takes into account bonuses for ships in orbit
• Fleets have their own version of CalcFullAttack and CalcFullDefense to add up the full attack and defense of each ship in the fleet
• added code to make nosprites option read in from prefs.ini file
• fixed bug where setup appearance screen didn't have the correct style selected in the lisbox
• added function to galaxy to return the correct directory for the shipcfg file based on the shiptype
• adding code to be able to upgrade but not overwrite core designs and mods
• added code to track if a data type is a mod or not
• now if the anti-aliasing is set to an invalid value, it's just disabled
• added code so that it will always try to create at least 11 stars (1 for each major race) to keep the code that picks the starting locations for civs from breaking down
• added code to delete ship cfg files when galciv2 is loaded if there is no definition for it
• updated shipcfg files for the pre-canned ships so that they save the component name as well as the model name
• FOW tweaks to remove cases where FOW is permanently unhidden
• Hardpoints on ships tweaked to be more symetrical
• Torian population growth changed to 20 from 30
• Torian Morale ability increased to 25
• Torian luck increased to 10
• Diplomacy ability slightly more potent in determining diplomatic relations
• Being a good civilization gives you more bonuses with neutral and good civilizations in terms of relations
• AI will generally not trade weapons technologies back and forth to other players unless they're very good friends.
• AI more aggressive about upgrading ships
• AI escort ships less likely to be converted into attack ships
• Rewrote CalcMilitaryMight() to be more intelligent. If someone has a higher military might than you now, you better take it seriously.
• Population Growth tweaked so that abilities are taken into account BEFORE morale bonuses. Net effect is that population growth ability not quite as powerful.
• Fixed cosmetic glitch where military might factors always displayed "--" in the report screen instead of "-".
• AI is less rigid about trading weapons and techs with human player, it will trade low level techs even if the player is very powerful but not high level ones unless they are allied.
• AI much smarter about taking bribes. If you're weak or they really hate you, it takes a much MUCH bigger bribe to move relations back up. Moreover, how often you can bribe and get an effect has been increased (previously you could bribe them every few turns and maintain high relations in perpetuity). Now if you're bribing more than a couple times a year it will ignore subsequent bribes. In short, you can still use gifts and such to increase your relations with other players but you can no longer rely on gifts as the sole means of staying out of war unless you're willing to spend a LOT of money/tech on it.
• If AI is at war and is losing that war, it will value gifts and help farmore than normal and be much more appreciative.
• Double-Clicking entries on the Stacked Ship Window will bring up the Ship Details or Fleet Management window for that ship/fleet
• PaulB's Random Icons showing up on the Galaxy Setup Screen
• Fixed bug in Options screen where some options that required restart would pop up the message that the game needed restarting, but not list which options required it.
• Fixed bug where ships built in an off-screen port that had a rally point assign would be invisible next to the planet until they were selected or moved.
• Implemented graphical <<<< on planet screen to indicate when social production is being added to military production
• rally point context window enhanced
• can now move rally points using the MOVE btn on the context area
• Formatted Text boxes will now allow you to use the mouse wheel to scroll when hovering over the text ( used to have to hover over the scroll bar )
• End Game Summary Graphs screen now shows up to 10 civs (instead of 8)
• When a new game is started, the Global Resource Manager now unloads all textures and surfaces that are no longer being used
• Implemented new MOVE button in Ship Designer:
  a) Select a component
  b) Click move button (or press M)
  c) Click where you want to move the component
  NOTE: You cannot move a component if something is attached to it
• Implemented Hot Keys in Ship Designer:
  New hotkeys:
  Delete - deletes selected component
  M - Moves the selected component
  1,2,3,4 - Default, Front, Side, Top views
  Pre-existing hotkeys:
  H to toggle hardpoints on/off
  [+] and [-] to zoom in and out
• Fixed bug where "Cannot Remove Component" popup would get stuck behind the ship design window
• More balancing of Arcean and Altarian AIs in terms of researching technologies.
• More emphasis on creating escorts
• More work on the simulated intuition engine to make better guesses as to whether an area is unprotected. (avoided temptation to simply put in code to have it look to see if there's attack ships in the FOW and escort transports - it's easy to create a perfectly effective AI, it's harder to make an AI that plays like people)
• Terran Alliance AI more focus on defensive technologies
• Torian AI better at building up planets.
• AI better at building up planets at the very start (bias towards factories early on)
• AI more concerned about the health of its troops in evading trouble with transports.
• New API: AITakeEvasiveAction(X,Y). Give coordinates of threats and it will attempt to stay away from them. Using this only a bit right now to see effect. Combined with faster ships, it should be harder to take out enemy ships at higher levels. This API only works at Bright or higher.
• Defensive technologies cost less.
• Fixed crash when trade ship arrives at a planet and the trade routeaborts because it is too long
• Added "Remove Functional Components When Upgrading a Ship Design" option to the option screen. This is ON by default. Turning it off will leave the functional parts on a ship when you upgrade it. You will have to remove parts manually.
• Fixed FogBugz 8471: Upgrading a ship design sets all ports building nothing to build the upgraded design
• Updated map scrolling in message popup window. If coordinates are passed to message box, the map will now scroll to those coordinates when the message pops up
• "Do you want to upgrade starbase" popup will now display the name of the starbase and scroll to the location of the starbase
• Fixed FogBugz 8014: Bottom-most sector displays at top of game screen as 2863311-2863311
• Updated the tool tips in the camera controls for the ship designer to say "Rotate" instead of pan, since that is what they do now
• Implemented Details/Manage button in stacked ships list. Players can now easily access the new Fleet Manager interface. Joy!
• Ship Details window can now display data on a ship type as well as a specific instance of the ship
• Ship Details will no longer allow you to decommission a ship that is currently involved in a battle
• Implemented info buttons in the Civ Manager Governor screen. You can now use the info button to get information on ship types or change/disband rally points
• Fixed bug where "Component will not fit dialog" would get stuck behind the Ship Designer window
• techs now appear in the foreign report window as espionage is done on alien races (fixing problem of not knowing enemy techs when tech trading is turned off)
• Fixed graphical bug where some components attached to a ship would scale to a HUGE size when trying to resize them
• Random opponents and num of races will now randomize on Ctrl+N. (let us know if this is what you want)
• Humans will now be randomly picked when playing another race.
• Civ Manager Governor now only lists rally points that are being used for "Ships Going To" list
• Prevent Cheese: Cannot disband a fleet in fleet manager while the fleet is involved in a battle
• Race Legend Window will now only show civs the player has met if Blind Exploration is enabled
• Fixed rare glitch where hardpoints reappear on the ship if you have them turned off, and select a component on the ship or from the list
• Destroying a fleet will destroy the ships in the fleet. Disband works as it used to. These are now two different things.
• New Option: No tech Trading. Players can prevent any tech trading by anyone.
• New Option: Blind Exploration. Players can now start out not knowing where the other civilizations are located.
• New Option: Disable Minor races. No minor races.
• New Option: Randomize player intelligence. This will scramble opponent intelligence by around +/- 10 points to have more variance.
• New Option: Randomly pick opponents. Players can simply choose to play against N opponents and it will pick them out.
• Ship Design Screen re-designed to allow far more visible space for designing.
• Ship Design Screen supports panning with left-mouse button held down.
• Ship Design Screen displays installed components in a grid list. Right click to remove a component.
• Ship Design Screen supports rotation of components. See options screen to control how much you can rotate them.
• Ship Design Screen supports copy/pasting behavior with ship size/rotation. If you select an existing component and then select a new component, the new component will automatically take on the size and rotation of the installed component you had just selected.
• Ship Design Screen supports symmetry in rotation. Select an existing component, then select a new component to add on and then RIGHT-CLICK on the appropriate rotation dial and it will mirror the rotation automatically.
• Ship level doesn't add as much to max HP.
• Option now to display an animated dotted line showing where your selected ship is going.
• How many turns it will take to reach a destination can be displayed at the destination target for selected ship. Note that you can hold down the Shift key and drag select multiple units.
• If low-level espionage achieved, you can see the destination of selected enemy ships.
• AI values range technologies more
• Sensor techs increase sensor ability
• Lots of little AI tweaks not worth mentioning but together will make a substantial difference to making the AI more enjoyable at low levels and more challenging at higher levels.
• AI's more aggressive about expanding range with starbases. (some of them anyway)
• Uncommon habitable planets tweaked to make them slightly more likely to have habitable planets.
• Fixed AI bug where it would sometimes put its rally points on planets when it didn't mean to.
• AI takes distance more into account than it used to for determining relations.
• AI more sensitive to cultural and military build up using new APIs that do fewer false positives.
• AI gives more effort towards researching propulsion technologies.
• AI puts more effort into logistics techs.
• AI puts more effort into miniaturization techs. In all 3 cases it does an evaluation of the galaxy state to determine whether it should be doing this.
• Some AI personalities focus on significantly different techs.
• AI will design faster or longer range ships depending on its needs
• AI tech trading rewritten so that it doesn't do sweetheart deals. Tech trading somewhat rarer now as a practical matter. May need to be balanced so that human player doesn't get too much of an advantage.
• AI can upgrade ships if it has enough money and thinks it's worth it.
• AI manages colony improvements more effectively.
• AI adapts economic strategy based on whether the new "disable tech trading" option is on.
• AI generally better at picking techs based on new algorithm for evaluating galactic state.
• Some AIs smarter about building constructors/freighters/defense.
• Terran Alliance AI will not allow it to fall behind militarily beyond all hope.
• Most AIs now will try to upgrade existing starbases more so than building new ones.
• Most AIs will tend not to upgrade starbases that exist just to extend range.
• Terran Alliance AI builds helper starbases closer to home.
• Terran Alliance experimental strategy: Very focuses research - will ignore other weapons techs other than its main strategy. If you're not playing against the humans, you're missing out.
• Terran Alliance has a whole new ship design sub-module for having its very own types of ships.
• Terran Alliance will build defenders with no weapons (not needed to keep invaders out).
• Drengin AI planetary management substantially different from others.
• AIs take into account wasted social production (which is no longer wasted) into account when deciding what to build.
• Drengin more likely to escort transports.
• Drengin will focus more on trying to have the strongest military at all times.
• Terran Alliance focuses on diplomacy techs, gifting, etc. to keep relations up so that it can pursue technology.
• Drengin and Terran AIs now very much focused on controlling all nearby galactic resources.
• Drengin focus more on extending their range of their ships and getting more morale building techs than previously.
• Drengin tend to focus more on their primary weapon and defense techs. We'll see how it works.
• Drengin AI a LOT smarter about what they research.
• Yor AI now derivative of new Drengin AI.
• AI, in general, values research more than it did previously.
• First attempt, but probably not last, for AI to try to take out resource starbases of enemies where it can find them (as a reminder to players, the AI doesn't necessarily know the existence of a resource starbase, it has to "see" them. So if you have some resource in the corner of the galaxy, don't wonder why it's not getting attacked any more than why you don't see their resource starbases tucked into some corner).
• Trade revenue increased on larger galaxies, decreased on smaller galaxies.
• Starbase factories improve the production of factories and labs on planets by X%. Half of that increased bonus is "free" and the other half is charged for.
• The -2000 ceiling on debt has been eliminated for players playing at higher difficulty levels.
• Last vestiges of aborted feature "Propaganda" eliminated. Expansion pack will have "agents" that players and AI can assign to do mischief and counter-mischief instead.
• ECONONOMIC ENGINE CLEANED UP! Production and research now works as follows: Labs and Factories produce N production of their kind. How much of their capacity is used is based on the domestic policy sliders (spend rate X what % on each of the 3 sliders is used).
  
  That amount is then multiplied by 3 types of bonuses:
  • (1) Your Civ Ability (which you set at start and can enhance by mining special resources).
  • (2) Economic starbases with factories on them.
  • (3) Planetary bonuses that comes from random events, UP issues, etc.
  
  50% of this bonus you get for free -- not charged for it. The other half you pay for out of your treasury.
• 
  
  Example: If I have factories producing 100 units and my spend rate is 50% from domestic policy and my military spending is set to 100% then that factory's base production is 50 (50% of 100).
  
  If my Civilization ability on military production is 10% and I have an economic starbase doing 5% bonus and I had an event that increase planet production by 5% then I would have 50 + 20% bonus = 60 production. I would only be charged 55 however -- 10 bonus production, 5 free, 5 paid for.
• Tax rate angers citizens less (a bit).
• Your Morale ability is taken to the .90 power and then added to morale (was .80 power).
• Population growth fixed dramatically. This is going to have a significant game play result that we're still having to fix in the AI. Before, on a class 10 planet with a morale of 70 your population would increase at 20% per turn. Now is would change at 3%.
  
  The "population growth ability bug" wasn't a bug but rather a problem with having populations in billions rather than millions. The population growth was previously capped at 200 million per turn. 20% of say 1 billion (or
  higher) reached that cap. So all those bonuses meant nothing.
  
  Now, at 3%, if you have a population of 1 billion then you're looking at an increase of 30 million per turn X your population bonus. If your morale is 100%, that gets doubled again.
  
  Here's the thing: If you drain a population down to only a few billion, it'll take you a very long time to recover. Say goodbye to mass colony rush. You'll need to be very careful or else you could end up with a vast empire of tiny populations producing no money while smaller empires grow beyond you and conquer your weak but large empire.
  
  Population Growth = CurrentMorale X Government Level X PlanetQuality Factory X GrowthFactor.
• If your morale is > 75% you now get a 25% extra bonus to population growth. If it's at 100% you get a 100% extra bonus.
• Population growth ability taken into account at the very end of this process for maximium effect.
• Research Ability used wholesale (previously it was chopped in half).
• Base taxes collected now is the square root of the population of a planet. This may be tweaked based on play testing.
• New clean APIs: CalcTotalMilitaryProduction() and social and research equivs that just give you how much a planet is producing (for AI use later).
• Social Production that is not being used anymore is transferred to military. So you're no longer being charged for social production. However, only the BASE social production is transferred and that amount is not subject to bonuses and so forth (lest there be a lot of cheese tactics and gaming of the social production bonus). So you still need to manage your economy decently but you're no longer being charged for production you're not using.
• AI at lower levels gets less money to account for improvements in overall AI.
• AI now "adds noise" to its decisions based on difficulty level.
  
  Essentially, on things that are prioritized, AI that is playing as a "dumb"
  level will have injected into its calculations a noise factor that will result in it coming to wrong conclusions about what it should do and hence do stupid things. It's random
• Planets on the verge of defecting are more likely to defect.
• AI updated to use its points differently based on new ability costs.
• AI Ship design looks at the galaxy size and then decides based on that whether it needs to focus on range or speed more. Before it was one size fits all.
• Cost to upgrade ships now cheaper.
• Lockup fix: AI could get confused on where to put a starbase and get into an endless loop.
• Player and AI on same starbase rules: 4 friendly starbases per sector.
• AI more likely to target starbases.
• New function: FindClosestEnemyStarbase()
• AI will send its ships to guard nearby planets rather than cluster them in hordes.
• AI will target military support starbases more so.
• Bonus production now displayed in various displays).
• Updates to the various screens to display the correct economic data based on the new economic engine (involved 9 different .cpp files).
• Planet Abilities decreased in player start-up. Before someone yells (or if someone can answer them on various forums): Before the abilities would then get nerfed in game. For instance, a research ability of 20 was treated as a 10 when calculated. Now, the research ability is half as much in the player setup window but multiplied directly. There's no net change, it's just a display change.
• Message changed to tell players they can only build 4 friendly starbases in a given sector.
• Most defense modules are now slightly smaller
• Logistics change: Large ships now use 6 logistics (was 5). Huge ships use 8 (was 6).
• HP change: Large ships get 30HP base (was 28).
• HP change: Huge ships get 50HP base (was 48).
• Nano Rippper damage changed from 8 to 6.
• Capitals no longer provide a morale bonus.
• Maintenance on labs and factories increased slightly (1 to 2) to compensate for higher tax income and easier morale.
• Factories and labs produce slightly less base production (because the new bonus system provides more bonus production).
• Cost of some high level buildings substantially decreased.
• Slight tweaks to racial abilities.
• Eliminated Galactic Mall and Concert Hall starbase modules. Since influence victory strategies have been strengthened, we require players to have to go for the cultural domination tech path.
• Put cost to upgrade an influence starbase at the beginning, subsequent modules are free.
• Mining modules have been significantly nerfed since abilities are now directly multiplied rather than modified.
• If you have the cultural domination techs, you can build directly to those upper cultural influence modules bypassing the wimpier lower level ones.
• Influence modules are less powerful (since you can now go directly to them) but still very powerful.
• Fixed some tech tree bugs where the category was wrong. The AI relies on category to determine what type of tech it is since the AI isn't scripted.
• Lots of tweaks to technology costs based on play testing and user feedback.
• AI values tweaked. Miniaturization was valued very low. So the AI tended to have lots of cheap and ineffective ships compared to expert players.
• AI less aggressive at lower levels.
• Fixed typo in UP issue.
• Prevent Cheese: Do not allow player to open fleet manager for a ship that is fighting. They could disband or change the ships in the fleet.
• If a component on the ship is selected, size and rotation will remain the same as the selected component when a new component is chosen
• You can click a slot at the top of the window to select a component on the ship. Clicking the slot again, de-selects the component.
• Clicking a component on the ship, high-lights its slot in the component list
• Fixed bug where if you choose a filter, and then add a component that should be filtered out, it would still show in the list
• Size and rotation settings are no longer reset when selecting a new component type
• Fixed bug where Clear button did not restore modules ( like colony, trade, etc) in the list of available components if they had been added to the ship before clearing it.
• Fixed an exploit where players could add several modules of different types on the same ship by using auto-place.
• Fixed not being able to select slots Slots now tint to the correct color
• Took out the old component "slots" code and replaced it with new code using a grid list control.
• Implemented the filter controls for choosing function or structural parts, or all parts. Known bug: if you choose a filter then add a component of diff type it will show in the list.
• Added support for mouse wheel to the rotation dials. They will use whatever increment you have set in the options screen for rotations.
• Made the constructor highlight slightly less transparent to make it more visible
• Random ?'s turn on and off on the Opponent screen Polished
• Functionality on the Opponent Screen added funciton to
• "OverrideTextDisplay" of Spinners
• added code to make civ save extra research points when it has more needs for the current tech
• changed code to save ship designs as .xml files blind exploration now works
• Changed "Enable Minor Races" option to "Disable Minor Races"
• Changing any of the Game Options in Galaxy setup will now trigger the galaxy thread to be recreated if it is already running
• Random Number of Races option working
• Random Selection of Races option working (PaulB will be cheking in a screen to fix the clipping)
• Random Intel option working (PaulB will be cheking in a screen to fix the clipping)
• Added Stat in "Foreign Stats">"Misc" that gives the intelligence of the race.
• NEW FEATURE: Auto-Pilot Lines checked in NEW FEATURE: "Show Auto Pilot
• Lines" option added to Options screen NEW FEATURE: Resource icons on
• tactical map are now color-coded NEW FEATURE: Number of weeks to move
• to destination appears on the destination cursor
• Tweak: Made dial needles thinner in ship designer
• Fix: Bug where adding a ship with moves to a fleet with 0 moves restores the fleet's moves
• added code to FindPath to allow AI ships to get a new destination when they don't have one
• added code to CanRaceBuildShip to check for an existing model file if it's a user defined ship
• added code to classShipTypes to save out an XML file for its def. If a ship is user defined and this function can't find a .shipcfg file for it, it will now return FALSE. This fixes the bug that Brad found where he was playing as a custom race and he changed what style of ship he was using.
• +Fixed length of the Zombie Army event to make it fit nicer in the box
• +Added ability to pan and rotate main map with the Keyboard:
  -CTRL and Arrow keys to rotate (with snapback working if activated)
  -SHIFT and Arrowkeys to pan main map
• Old "hardpoint modifiers" that rotated and flipped hardpoints have been marked as "hidden." This removes them from the components the players can choose, and also allows them to keep using the designs they have previously made that use them.
• Improvement Summary window now shows tile improvements and their effects on the improvement and planet
• Fixed bug where obsoleting a ship that had been purchased prevents the star port that purchased it from ever building anything else again
• Improvement Summary Window: Fixed spacing of units
• removed some references to humanity in the Tech Tree (but only where it made sense to remove, most places it worked well)
• Fleet Manager: Now displays number representing ship's logistic value in ship thumbnail
• Fleet Manager: Implemented the command buttons
• Ship Designer: Implemented "Reset Component" button
• Ship Designer: Added tool-tips to the new design UI controls
• Ship Designer: Fix: Scaling selected part now scales ONLY that part
• Dbl-click a fleet or click on Details in the fleet context window to open it. Use it to add ships to your fleet. Use it to move ships from one fleet to another. It still needs a few graphical tweaks: Some things don't tint Will be adding a number next to the ship icons to show their logistics (like the stacked ships window does)
• You can no longer multi-select dead ships or ships hidden by FOW (This fixes bug where multi-select highlights empty spaces)
• You can not cycle through fleets in the ship details window anymore (This is to make way for the new Fleet Manager screen)
• Action buttons in ship details screen are now disabled if the ship cannot perform that action
• Fixed bug where text in trade screen would display green when using the money slider even if the AI would refuse to trade a military tech because the civ was too powerful.
• Fixed bug in Tutorials window where pressing ESC key would hang the game
• MiraclePlanets Event: Now updates the overlay icons for the planets. (They used to have "uninhabitable" icons even though they were upgraded by the event)
• Fixed exploit where you could get around UP starbase module limit using a fleet of constructors
• AIUpgradeShip will not allow you to use it on a fleet (it will abort gracefully) “Fleets” themselves cannot be upgraded, but the ships in them can
• Fixed UP Law bug where starfaring tax was applied even if the civ in question was dead
• Fixed UP Law bug where war tax was applied even if the civ you were at war with was dead
• Fixed UP Law bug where Starbase tax was applied even on starbases that were destroyed
• Changed starship::GetFleet function to return a pointer to itself if the ship is a fleet.
• Found and fixed source of “Influence Flooding” bug. If the invader used the “Use unhappy citizens” tactic, these citizens could be counted as casualties and the casualties would exceed the number of troops on the transports, thus giving a negative population.
• Trade Screen, if you right-click a starbase, it will now show the correct data based on what modules your starbase has.
• Fixed a typo in conversations
• Fixed colors in a few end game summary screens to use race color instead of interface color
• Optimized Civ Manager Colonies List when changing ships to build (better reaction time for larger galaxy sizes)
• Game will warn you if you're running low on system memory
• AI focuses on fewer sectors to conquer
• AI better at escorting transports
• Fixed bug where planet quality bonuses would increase the quality of a planet but not add extra tiles to the planet
• Added warning message if minor races do not get assigned a home planet when they are created
• Fixed bug where planets were not having there homeworld flag reset if the colony was destroyed