[Update] Rise of the Automatons - New Trade Route Panel

Hello everyone,

We are all working hard on the upcoming release of our first add-on.



Like AmpliMat stated on his “Endless Space update plan” blog post, we will soon be releasing the "Rise of the Automatons" add-on which will include:

Features / Improvements:

• The Automatons Custom Faction
• Custom Faction Affinity, so you can differentiate the visual affinity (look and ships) from the gameplay affinity
• Diplomacy Improvement on alliances, to be aware of allies decisions
• Trade Routes Sum-up : special panel to summarize and sort your active trade routes
• AI : improved tax rate management
• Hero management improvement: navigation, selection, leveling and undo
• Empire Wide factors more readable in a special panel
• Multiplayer version consistency check

Balancing:

• Economic victory possible in Endless Victory (difficulty tuning)
• Bushido trait balancing (Hissho)
• Industry cost balancing for repair and tonnage modules

Modding:

• Ability to mod ship meshes and textures

Throughout the upcoming days, we will start revealing some crunchy details on the add-on via articles, screenshots of the new features and other surprises.

So let’s start with the Trade Routes Sum-Up!



Trade Routes are actually awesome!

The new panel
We added a panel that summarizes a lot of trade route data in order to help the player understand these mechanics.
Trade routes may be confusing for some players, and we would like to explain more clearly how they work. Understanding the trade routes also helps in understanding the links between economic power and diplomacy. Declaring a war can cause a huge loss of Dust and Science income, and not everyone realizes that. This panel is useful for them (and for the others, too ) and highlights important info.

The data inside
The panel is divided in two parts:

[LIST=1]

The top part regroups overall information on an empire’s trades with other factions in 4 columns:

• Outgoing route: This shows the number of active trade routes with a specific empire. It also helps the player decide if a cooperation agreement is worth the investment.
• Income: This sums up the income generated by all trade routes with another faction.
• Cooperation Agreement: This column gives the state of cooperation agreements (which bonus is applied). The number of turns before the next step (X turns / Y turns) in the agreement will also be displayed here.
• Incoming route: This shows the number of trade routes the other faction has with the player, which indicates how important the player is for that specific faction’s trade income.

The bottom part is an individual list of all the player’s trade routes, and provides information on the active ones. Thanks to that, the player can clearly see which systems are important for their trade income and thus identify which friendly systems might be worth protecting. In addition, it helps to give an overview of the player’s trade routes, which helps them understand the impact of their heroes.

[/LIST]

Stay tuned for more info on the Rise of the Automatons add-on