Stellar Monarch 2 version 0.51

Version 0.51 released

This version focuses on ministries and character statistics. The character stats were explained so poorly that even I could not make heads and tails out of them sometimes, so I reviewed all those tooltips and stats rules, clarified them and simplified. In addition extra modifiers to stats were added. Now it should be much more clear what affects courtiers and what ministers. The second big thing is bonuses from ministries. Now each ministry provides a bonus each turn, listed conveniently on the ministry tab. The calculations of ministry efficiency were redesigned and simplified (now everything is just a bonus or a penalty to competence of the minister making it all more logical). The last thing was redesign of the high command screen with a clear separation of support staff and line admirals.

– [feature] Ministries now provide additional bonuses based on the ministry level like savings, rebels control, corruption reduction, etc in addition to adjusting the chance for a good/bad audience event. Those bonuses are quite powerful (for example a very competent Minister of Treasury can provide savings equal up to half of the bureaucracy costs), so now competent Ministers can be very valuable. Note that Foreign Affairs ministry provide no bonus yet.
– [feature] House relations affect loyalty of the character supporting that house (as explained in Loyalty stat tooltip).
– [feature] House with Old Aristocracy tradition grants +1 Charisma bonus to all characters that are their supporters.
– [feature] Officer Corps reform increases all officers salaries.
– [feature] Added Colonels and Political officers to Fleets.
– [feature] All military personnel (High Command and Fleet officers) can be interacted with (they have just one option right now).
– [feature] Able to fire officers from the royal house fleet or from any fleet if the officer’s corps reform has been passed. Also political officers can always be fired from any fleet.

– [misc] High command redesign (portraits moved to right, simplified, removed unused Ground forces tab).
– [misc] No traits for high command staff and political officers.
– [misc] High command staff ranks renamed to “Staff” (which make it more clear who is the staff in the high command dealing with military plans and logistics and who is the line admiral leading a fleet to battle).
– [misc] As of this version all reforms are finished (they might be fine-tuned later but all their existing effects work).

– [content] Some reports got new art.

– [interface] Ministers got special hats, color coded to their ministry, to make them more prominent on the screen.
– [interface] Greatly improved characters tooltips (more intuitive, more informative, more colorful, more beautiful).
– [interface] Beautified and improved all tooltips on the Ministry screen.

Compatibility note: NO CHANGE, this version works with v0.50+ savefiles (note that each time a savefile compatibility is broken a new Beta branch with the old version is created so you can always finish your game in progress).