Version 0.83 released

Another step on the quest to the feature complete version. We are almost there. Civilized races can declare war or ask for peace, scenarios enabled, etc. The big change is redesign of planetary infrastructure, which now makes infrastructure points quite valuable and useful even at the late game. A lot of changes aimed at rebalancing the game on a more fundamental level (like no more free Opinion of noble houses from taxes, tools to fight off bureaucracy via courtiers traits, etc). Note that due to mechanics redesign this version might have wrecked the existing balance and it most likely will need to be readjusted in the next version. Same for civilized races which might declare wars quite chaotically since it’s the first version which introduced this feature for them.

As usual, I count on your comments and feedback on Steam forums or Discord.

– [feature] Game Scenarios (Conqueror of Stars and Unifier of the Empire) for people to control if they prefer to focus on external or internal threats.
– [feature] Planetary development level and infrastructure redesigned. Now infrastructure of a certain level is constructed using infrastructure points (maximum level can be increased by researching infrastructure technologies). Infrastructure is then used to calculate planetary development level. Strategic weapons and xenos devastate infrastructure instead of development level. This change made infrastructure points relevant through the whole game (since you will be gradually unlocking new infrastructure levels which need to be constructed) and therefore made infrastructure bonuses/penalties from tax/budget quite important.
– [feature] Civilized races declare war/ask for peace.

– [remove] Removed Public Works since it made no sense with the new infrastructure system (plus, I never liked it in the first place).

– [balance] Slightly fewer sources of rare resources.
– [balance] Tax effects flattened slightly (lower tax giving decent income), also overall base tax increased.
– [balance] Tax effects rescaled, now “Low” is considered neutral and “Average” starts to give penalties.
– [balance] Aristocracy Tax effect on opinion adjusted, now it is a “percent chance of Opinion -1” (so it has a much smaller impact and can not be used to improve opinion anymore). Previous numbers very way too high here so using anything below Very low was unsustainable.
– [balance] Totally changed how infrastructure points are being generated (flattened greatly, now huge population does give a boost but is not enough, so tax setting affecting infrastructure points is important).
– [balance] Trait: Professional bureaucrat impact increased drastically, also made the trait more common (to give you more tools to fight off bureaucracy upkeep).
– [balance] Banquet cost is now based on the average income of noble houses.
– [balance] Noble Houses impact on legislation points gain (positive and negative) halved.
– [balance] Laws cost is no longer affected by in which row the law is (all laws now have the same cost, increased only by the number of laws passed and not by their position).

– [content] Additional technologies to unlock maximum infrastructure levels (8 technologies total).

– [fix] Rare resources availability was not cleared between games (so if you started a new game several times you could have extreme rare resources abundance).
– [fix] Fixed slightly incorrect taxes display.
– [fix] Rebel points gain using illogical modifiers when rebel points are negative (now modifiers get reversed in such situation to make it work as intended. Note it still displays the usual non reversed % values in a tooltip for simplicity).

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).