Stellar Monarch 2 version 0.82

Version 0.82 released

This version is one big rebalance. Overall, now economy is easier to handle at the beginning and more tricky later. When you load an old save with a well established Empire expect to immediately adjust your finances (bankruptcy danger). The overall goal was to get rid of mid-late game excess money and manufacturing. There is also a new feature some of you requested a lot. Now you can give a directive to the Imperial High Command to retake lost planets. This is done by marking a planet as claimed by the Empire. In addition more forces were allocated to strategic reserves, which combined with shipyards output rebalance, makes the imperial forces being utilized at a much higher pace. The last thing is experimental orders priority which let you control which planets should be conquered first.

– [feature] Claim/Unclaim planet button on planet screen. It marks the planet as target for auto conquest/reconquest/outpost construction. It can be set/unset manually or automatically (if such directive is given to the Imperial High Command). Withdraw order overrides claims. Claims on non owned planets are shown on the starmap (similarly to orders).
– [feature] Experimental feature (first needs to be enabled via Options) High Priority conquest order. It allows you to control which planets should be conquered first. Note that it does not fit well with interface (that’s why it’s marked as experimental feature), so if you have ideas how to rearrange that part of UI let me know.

– [balance] Homeworld gets +100% to cities output for being Capital of the Empire and additional +30 max cities.
– [balance] Salaries doubled.
– [balance] Trade value halved.
– [balance] Bureaucracy upkeep adjusted.
– [balance] Taxable economy points are now non linear (which means relatively higher taxes per economy point when fewer economy points but still it’s better to have more economy points). Also increased base taxes.
– [balance] Shipyards output is now non linear (effective manufacturing output being lower than nominal value). Made to reduce massive stockpiles of squadrons in storage for very economically potent Empires.
– [balance] Forces allocation percentages adjusted (more forces allocated for strategic reserves at the expense of fleets forces).
– [balance] Space combat made faster (especially vs weaker enemy).

– [misc] Noble fiefs income simplified (now just a % of total economy, not just from core worlds). It’s a minor thing, intended more to make it simpler to explain, since most economy comes from core planets anyway.
– [misc] “Bureaucracy” renamed to “Bureaucracy upkeep” for clarity.
– [misc] “Squadrons in reserve” renamed to “Squadrons in storage” to make it more distinctive from strategic reserves.

– [fix] Missing level 8 electronics technology on Total Control ruleset.

Compatibility note: NO CHANGE, this version works with v0.80+ 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).