Balance & Bug Fixes: April 2024 Update

Release Status: *** AVAILABLE ***

Our April update is a bit modest, with a focus on bug fixes and balance changes. Players will also find more updated graphics, UI refinements, and updated sound FX for our existing systems.

April marks the last major update for Sins of a Solar Empire II until August 2024. We’ll still be working hard on the game and have a lot in store for everyone; but we need to batten down and focus to get everything done. In the meantime, you’ll start seeing more dev diaries, news, live streams and other coverage as we lead up to the August update.

As a small preview of what to expect later this summer:

• The Advent Unity returns with a vengeance!

• New planet types and special gravity wells.

• New damage FX for ships and structures.

• Custom UI skins per race.

• New maps and victory conditions.

• New dynamic music system and many more tracks.

• More minor factions.

• Diplomacy and primary AI improvements.

• Modding tools

Thank you to all our players for taking this journey with us. We hope you’ll stay with us a bit longer while we prep the massive Advent update for later this year!

Version 1.21.12 Changelog (5/10/24)

The final ‘spit and polish’ update for real (until the summer update):

• Added progress bar to research window buttons on the top bar.

• Added available civilian slots indicator to open structure window button.

• Added research tier column background highlight on mouseover.

• Fixed Steam Deck crash bug.

  • Note: We are not officially supporting Steam Deck at this time.

• Fixed “Apply Mod” crash.

• Added Advent summer teaser loading screen. 😄

• Added lots more 2D artwork.

• Updated a few strings.

Version 1.21.9 Hotfix Changelog (4/29/24)

• Added even more 2D icon and button artwork.

• Various string updates (English).

• v1.21.10.1 - Fix for an insanely rare crash that was 50 years in the making (seriously).

• v1.21.10.2 - Added more 2D icon and button artwork.

• v1.21.11 (5/1/24)

  • Fixed another super rare crash bug we found.

  • Fixed some incorrectly hooked up 2D assets.

Version 1.21.6 Hotfix Changelog (4/27/24)

• LAN mode is now enabled!

• Added more 2D icon/button/background artwork.

• v1.21.7 - Fixes not being able to load recent save games and recordings.

Version 1.21.5 Hotfix Changelog (4/26/24)

HUD

• Updated load screen key art.

• Improved front-end background scene lighting.

• Improved lighting on player theme selection mesh.

• Improved colonized planets window layout.

• Fixed diplomacy window watermark layout.

• Fixed exotic factory watermark.

• Fixed various HUD watermark layouts.

• Improved empire units window layout.

• Improved player theme picker window when random race is selected.

• Improved trade window layout.

• Updated front-end to use glowing dialog frame for all backdrops.

• Added a variety of other Vasari research icons and pictures.

  • Added Vasari beam research pictures.

  • Added pulse and wave research pictures.

• Added improved placeholder HUD icons for Vasari ships.

Audio

• Added new SFX for Vasari Heavy and Medium beam weapons.

• Added new SFX for Vasari Disintegration beam ultimate.

• Added new SFX for Vasari anti-armor beam SFX.

Crashes

• Fixed crash when opening HUD keybindings group.

Version 1.21.4 Changelog

Balance:

• Rebalanced capital ship resource costs: Capital Ships are extremely potent units, so much so that ‘mass capital ship’ has become a dominant strategy in the early game for all factions. This is partially due to their excellent cost efficiency and survivability. We like how they perform in combat, and still want to support capital ship heavy fleet compositions, but they need to become a less economically efficient option, especially early in the game. Therefore, their resource costs have been increased.

  • TEC capital ship cost increased to 2500/850/600 (from 2500/770/480)

  • Vasari capital ship cost increased to 0/1800/1320 (from 0/1400/1100).

• Rebalanced civilian structure costs.

• Rebalanced corvette vs light frigate interactions.

• Rebalanced early game research progression.

• Rebalanced frigate and cruiser costs: Frigates and cruisers were quite expensive for what they provided, especially in comparison to capital ships. Their prices have been reduced in almost every case in order to ensure they are worth building when compared to the more versatile capital ships.

• Rebalanced Influence recharge rate from Culture.

• Rebalanced Influence to come from tech research instead of the home planet bonus.

• Rebalanced Vasari Kortul abilities: The Kortul has a highly versatile and powerful ability set and was becoming dominant in Vasari fleets. It has had its first three abilities reduced in power somewhat, especially at the lower levels, while receiving an increase to the AOE damage and pierce of Volatile Nanites. This should provide more choice between spamming many low level Kortuls and trying to level one or two Kortuls to higher levels.

• Rebalanced light missile and light phase missile Pierce from 250 to 300. This will increase bomber (both TEC and Vasari) and Tosurak Raider effectiveness against heavy cruisers and capital ships.

• Rebalanced Minor Faction abilities for Viturak and Jiskun. The Jiskun Expedition has had its Scout Vision ability moved to level 3 to make it more accessible. Meanwhile, it loses Tachyon Boost and gains Phase Space Raid at level 4. The Viturak Cabal gains Tachyon Boost at level 3, with Phase Space Raid moved to the Jiskun.

• Rebalanced Minor Faction rebuild potential.

• Rebalanced Minor Faction reveal and level up costs.

• Rebalanced TEC Rebel titan rail gun: Cooldown decreased from 12 to 10; damage decreased from 960 to 800.

• Rebalanced Vasari titan phase cannons: Range increased from 8,000 to 10,000; cooldown decreased from 12 to 9; damage decreased from 1200 to 900.

• Rebalanced Pranast United Minor Faction. Pranast United rewards have been re-ordered based on a more practical assessment of their value. Notably, the Protection Fleet now requires level 4 with the Minor Faction, meaning it needs 6 Influence and takes 480 seconds to cooldown. This should prevent egregious early game spamming by players not investing in any Influence boosting items.

• Rebalanced pursuit criteria.

• Updated Radiation Bomb: The requirement for the ship to face its target in order to use the Radiation Bomb has been removed in order to help the TEC deal with swarms of light units.

• Rebalanced ship speed and gravity well size. A small increase to gravity well size and the speed of many ships should give a little more room to maneuver, especially as fleets get large in the late game. Scouts see the most drastic increase to speed, which should help them live a little longer and do their job more effectively.

• Rebalanced Skirantra elite bombers and Vasari bomber Armor item. This ability and item combination could result in Vasari bombers having an absurd 500 hull, rendering them almost invulnerable to their counters. Both required significant value reductions to bring Vasari bombers back into line as units counterable by fighters and point defense.

• Rebalanced titan armor strength and shield proportions: Titans had excessively high Armor strength, resulting in an uneven feeling damage curve in big fights. In order to smooth this curve, Armor strength has been reduced, allowing Shield Points to be increased without changing the total effective survivability of titans.

• Rebalanced Trade income: Trade has been under-performing quite a bit compared to other sources of economy. In particular, the credit income from Trade is often relatively meager compared to a reasonably sized TEC Commerce economy. Trade credit income has been increased from 1.6 to 2.5, while metal and crystal have both been increased from 0.8 to 1.0. Trade tech upgrades now heavily favor increasing credits from trade instead of equally increasing all resource types. This should help ensure that the TEC can quickly and consistently solve credit shortages through the use of trade.

• Rebalanced Trader and Vasari planet upgrade cost scaling.

• Rebalanced Trader and Vasari research cost scaling.

• Rebalanced Trader frigate and cruiser shields: Increased Shield hit points for smaller TEC ships makes the upgrade techs more meaningful and giving more time for the shields to be seen during combat.

• Rebalanced Vasari bombers: The Vasari bomber has been reduced from 4 missiles per salvo back to 2. They have also had their HP reduced by a third. These changes should help point defense more effectively suppress them.

• Vasari carrier capital squadrons reduced by 1.

• Rebalanced Vorastra Phase Tunneling to use AU (astronomical unit) range.

• Rebalanced weapon burst counts for Vasari pulse guns.

• Changed Viturak’s Deploy Phase Gate to max out at 3 within an empire.

• Units told to move to a specific position will not attempt to move back to the fleet unless the fleet is issued new orders or the unit is told to move to the fleet.

Gameplay:

• Added auto-join fleet to actions that change player ownership. Makes Pirate Boarding Crews not so clunky to use.

• Disabled research starting and updating if research points have been lost. Previously, once the tier was acquired you could lose all research points and still research within that tier. This is no longer possible.

• Disabled research tier bonus modifiers if research points are lost.

• Fixed allocated trade points being lost when upgrading tech colony capital ship ability.

• Fixed being on the same team as Vasari Alliance player not giving initial access to friendly minor factions and trade points.

• Fixed Phase Resonance bonus time items not working properly.

• Fixed Vasari Alliance initial detection of all friendly minor factions being broken.

• Fixed units being added to other player’s fleets if rallying to another player's units.

• Fixed units rallying to fleet losing their follow orders.

• Prevented roaming minor factions from killing player home planets. Aluxians should no longer be wiping out pirates and human players due to bad luck on galaxy generation.

• Improved raid retreat conditions. Siege frigates will now stick around to keep attacking the planet.

• Fixed minor factions not able to start with starbases.

• Changed minor faction level up Influence point cost to be per-level within the minor faction.

• Added infinite alliance locks. This is necessary for research that gives minor faction alliances so that the reputation system doesn't break them on its update (Truce Amongst Rogues was broken).

• Fixed Reveal Minor Faction not working properly if minor faction is dead.

AI:

• Improved AI logic around if it should attack other gravity wells. Will now consider allied fleets as well.

• Improved AI siege frigate building. Was building too many under certain circumstances.

• Added unit pursue target definition and logic.

• Disabled AI fleets from being active when player has lost.

• Fixed unit AI not attacking if stuck in a gravity well due to Phase Inhibitor AND the fleet leader is in a different gravity well.

• Added player AI building research structures to improve research rates.

• Fixed AI building multiple titan factories when only one needed.

• Fixed AI building too many of one capital ship type based on exotics it might have received.

• Fixed AI sometimes stranding some remote fleet units.

• Fixed fleet AI stuck in an attack/defend feedback loop when trying to defend a different planet.

• Fixed player AI not attacking other players as it should.

• Fixed player AI not spreading Culture.

• Improved unit AI target picking when no targets within weapon range.

• Improved unit auto-cast target picking distribution.

• Increased priority of AI explorer ship building so Jiskun ability doesn't become useless.

User Interface:

• Added focus fire input modifier by holding ALT. Will enable the old behavior of focus firing an entire stack one-by-one instead of spreading out and attacking closest targets.

• Advanced Fleet Menu:

  • Added Retreat command (ships told to retreat will not instantly attempt to move back to the fleet).

  • Added toggle "Threat Avoidance Pathing." Default is "No Threat Avoidance Pathing" which is equivalent to the shortest path.

• Added slow pan with keyboard when holding Shift.

• Right-click to join a fleet will now also move to that fleet leader.

• Fixed camera detaching from ship if it is last to leave a gravity well.

GUI:

• Added new Influence window art and layout.

• Added new Influence points icon.

• Added damage and pierce to torpedo tooltips.

• Added dynamic resizing to the minor factions window based on UI scaling and number of rows.

• Added map details to lobby window.

• Added new auction bid amount notification backdrop.

• Added planet counts to front-end scenario picker.

• Added unit constraint specifics to failed is target valid error messages. For example, "Target must be in your dominant culture".

• Changed click to reveal text to be all uppercase.

• Changed team picker to be a grid of buttons instead of a drop box.

• Compressed Influence points text in Minor Faction window.

• Converted research_time modifiers to research_rate. This aligns the display of research_rate to the user; previously needed a hack to reinterpret time scalar as a research rate bonus (invert the scalar).

• Fixed modding window not clipping long names.

• Fixed planet bonus discovered notification not focusing on the planet when clicked.

• Hid auto-cast indicator of ship abilities for other players.

• Improved drag and drop UI in lobby window. Makes it more obvious how to move players to other teams.

• Improved fleet tooltip of aggregated deliverables. Will now aggregate counts to named capital ships.

• Improved player slot dragging tooltip to describe how to make uneven teams.

• Improved research required tooltip on abilities.

• Invert slot count in join game list - show closed instead of open.

• Made default fleet names uppercase. To match rename forcing uppercase as well (like ships).

• Fixed hyperspace color of order lines not being used if fleet destination is destroyed in-transit.

• Changed research rate scalar in tooltip to be a positive value. Due to it being labeled as rate bonus even though the modifier is a time scalar.

• Fixed horizontal tiling brush rendering.

• Fixed item buttons in planet/fleet windows not working properly. Would be using the current selection instead of the actual items under the cursor.

• Fixed right-click no longer dismissing notification cards. Was broken due to change in logic to get auction notification working (right-click for it will change bid amount backward).

• Fixed attack user interface giving target not detected error when explicitly attacking targets.

Models:

• Added more mesh point stubs for center/aura/above.

Effects:

• Added new effect visibility system. Particularly important for weapons fire visuals and gameplay signaling. You can now see the glorious pew pew from a distance!

• Added siege beam for siege platform and other assets.

• Increased beam effect count.

• Updated TEC explosion effects.

• Reduced length of missile trails.

• Reduced planet elevator counts now that planet levels are higher.

• Added settings for particle effect scaling.

Audio:

• Added unit dialogue sound throttling. No longer able to spam infinite voice events over one another with certain user interface actions like giving orders.

• Added sound FX for colony shuttle launches.

  • Added sound FX for TEC and Vasari colony capital ship Colonize abilities.

  • Added sound FX for TEC colony frigate ability.

• Added sound_group to various sound files. This limits the number of simultaneous SFX that can play within a group.

• Added/Updated Vasari Medium Pulse Gun/Wave Cannons SFX.

• Fixed attenuation and loop on Jam Weapons.

• TEC SFX Naming Refactor: Refactored SFX naming scheme to be consistent across the board.

• Added new Raze Planet muzzle SFX.

• Updated Nanite Swarm SFX.

• Updated TEC capital ships and titans to use new SFX (i.e., missed some hookups).

• Added customized Physical Point Defense alt SFX.

• Created new sound for Vasari strikecraft engines.

• Adjusted phase space charge SFX to be shorter (so it doesn't audibly play longer than intended). Slightly shortened phase space exit SFX, so there's no apparent delay on exit.

• Made Vasari phase missile muzzle SFX a touch more oomphy.

• Added new sound FX for Nanite Armor ambient.

• Added new sound FX for Nanite Hull Repair ambient.

• Fixed some dropouts and looping issues with phase space sound FX.

• Added new phase missile muzzle sound FX.

• Added new pulse gun sound FX.

• Added new wave cannon sound FX.

• Hooked up all missing impact sound FX to Vasari carrier and colony caps.

• Removed charge sound FX from light wave cannons; reserving it for medium/heavy only.

• Fixed player notification dialogue not using dialogue volume. Previously, there was no distinction between UI and dialogue for custom player sounds (they were all considered UI).

Localization:

• Fixed Missing Characters in Chinese. Thanks to ansker for letting us know.

• Localization formatting fixes.

• Spanish localization update. Thanks to SrtaBurner for the fixes!

• Updated Simplified Chinese Translation. Thanks to ansker for the fixes!

• Fixed language code not being converted to lowercase and dashes changed to underscores.

• Added localized text reloads when the language setting is changed while the game is running.

Modding:

• Added empire limits to Minor Faction reputation spawn unit abilities.

• Added empire modifiers to buffs.

• Added random skybox filling uniforms. This allows making skybox only mods without mutating galaxy generator uniforms, because by doing so these mods would be marked as NON-cosmetic and not usable in multiplayer.

• Added support for child meshes to be visible based on unit item levels (not just existence of an item). Needed for new design of titan armor which is upgradable through research.

• Changed scenario_scene to use random_fixture_filling instead of a raw list of entities. Makes it easier to mod the front end background scenario look.

• Changed scenario_scenes to use random_skybox_filling instead of a raw vector of skybox names. This indirection allows skybox mods that don't need to overwrite the front end scenario (background scene).

• Fixed modding changes not fully applying all changes until exe restarts.

• Fixed subscribers total using downloads total in mod.io tooltip.

• Added unit_constraint_value_source to improve constraint authoring readability.

Misc:

• Fixed planet counts for Annulus.

• Adjusted collision to reduce units getting too packed together.

• Fixed flip-flopping of collision avoidance.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed crash when changing the name of fleet when the game is paused in single-player.

• Fixed Excavation track button assert when excavated planet changes ownership.

• Fixed Phase Resonance crash involving strikecraft and player ownership changes.

• Fixed recorded game crash due to player and skin issues. The wrong planet skin was being preloaded when jumping around recorded games causing the planet_mesh to be unloaded (because later in the recorded game a planet became owned).

• * Fixed server crash if toggle fleet rally threat avoidance button is pressed.

• Fixed scuttling starbases spawning capturable loot exploit.

• Fixed being able to use Influence when game is lost.

• Fixed future orbits tooltip crash with German language.