Galactic Dominion — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| [Major Update] 2.0.0 - UI Overhaul, Global Resources, Ship Designer, and more! | 2020-05-18 | I'm happy to announce a major update to Galactic Dominion bringing to you much needed improvements to the UI, quality of life controls, tutorial, gameplay balance, and new features. Here are some highlights. Hope you guys enjoy it! UI Overhaul Global Resources, Balance & Optimization First Time User Experience Full Changelist UI Overhaul One of the biggest complaint was the game's controls. I've gone through each of the menus and controls in the game and re-implemented and expanded on quite a number of them. The new UI is more streamlined and efficient for fast gameplay. All the menu animation has been sped up to not waste precious time on me |
| [Update] 1.1.0.a - Fix starvation issue on larger galaxies | 2018-10-24 | Release Notes: - Fix potential starvation issue on large galaxies when Food Supply consumption exceeds the (previous) max of 10k --- Previously, the maximum amount of Food Supply was 10k. This meant that on larger galaxies you can have population consumption that exceed this amount, even when all technologies are maxed out - and if you are prevented to produce more than 10k this essentially means that your empire was starving. This limit has been increased to 100k. For existing games, loading a save file will automatically update the max Food Supply to the new value. However, if you were previously producing more than 10k, your Food Supply ma |
| Galactic Dominion - Version 1.1.0 is Now Live! | 2018-09-30 | https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/33473594/349e81076776131ae0761634c143cb82a675c5c5.png We've finally incremented the build to Version 1.1.0 with a brand new Steam logo. Since 1.0 the game has come a long way and been patched 12 times. I want to take this opportunity to summarize all the changes that has gone in since 1.0. 1.1.0 Focus on Unit Hotkey: If you have a Star, Star Fortress, or Fleet selected you can hit by default to pan to it. If you hold the key it will follow the Unit. You can change this key in the Input Mapper. The Unit selection circle is now thicker and green for easier visibility. Fixed an i |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.l - Research tweaks, Speed Control, and other Quality of Life changes | 2018-09-28 | Release Notes: Game Speeds: x0.5, x1.0, x1.5, and x2.0 Research Game Settings: Randomized Effort Factor Research Tree Zoom In/Out and Middle Mouse pan Research In-Progress is now an different color Fleets can now be Split while In Dock Fleets will now move to an offset location if the dock is occupied/full Fixed issue where the Objectives button disappears in Turn-Based Mode --- Game Speeds You can now toggle the speed with the "-" and "=" keys. These are customizable in the Input Mapper. Unfortunately, if they are not map you will have to reset to default first. During early game you can speed up the game to get things moving and then if it |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.k - Hotkeys and Input Mapping | 2018-09-23 | Been working on this update the last couple days. There's now an input system that can be customized to your liking. By default the keys are laid out as follows: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/33473594/e3c10e17d98b7779f695b44923b217d0140b3359.png --- Customization of your hotkeys is done through the Control Mapper button in the Options Menu. Clicking on this will open the mapper where you can set the General keys or the specific Star and Fleet Panel keys: Star Industry Star Drydock Fleet Actions Fleet Tactics https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/33473594/e010d514e3791834fcdcacd |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.j3 - Zoom to Mouse position and other tweaks! | 2018-09-19 | --------------------- Release Notes: --------------------- 1. Zoom In to Mouse position 2. Tweak thresholds for Camera panning near the screen edges 3. Slider panel lock distribution ToolTip --------------------- Finally - You can now zoom in to the Mouse position! However, if you prefer the old way (i.e. zoom to Camera center) you can toggle it back the Options menu. 'nuff said. The thresholds for the screen edge pan have been decreased so it does not overlap the zones of the Minimize/Close buttons of the Star/Fleet Control. This way you should not accidently pan when trying to close these panels. There's now a little text in the ToolTip whe |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.j2 - Camera Pan Sensitivity slider | 2018-09-18 | Small update today! In the Game Options you can now adjust the sensitivity slider for the Camera Pan. Previously, the value was around 20, now it's default to 10. Also, this should be the last update that will reset your Game Options. Under the hood i've done some refactoring of the code to make it more scalable so going forward if we need to add new options it will perserve your existing option values. ːsteamhappyː |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.j - Research Update and Quality of Life changes | 2018-09-17 | --------------------- Release Notes: --------------------- 1. Research now has a small chance of a Scientist boost 2. Quick Play now has Extended Research setting 3. Options Menu now has Screen Edge Pan 4. Fix Star Spectral Type not showing the proper Star type --------------------- Research should have a bit more randomness to it as there's a lot of uncertainty involved when doing research. So now every "tick" there's a small chance that your Scientist, or Scientists if you have multiple assigned, will have some deep insight in the topic increasing the amount of progress they contribute in that tick. With this, no two topics will progress at |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.i2 - Fix Achievements not unlocked for some players | 2018-09-16 | For players who won some Quick Play games before Tuesday's 1.0.2018.08.18.h2 update there's a chance that the Achievements did not unlock. If that happened then the opportunity to unlock them became lost for certain achievements - (e.g. Galactic Solider, Leader, Commander, etc set of Achievements). The reason is that the condition to unlock the achievement was very precise, for example, to unlock the Galactic Leader you need to win exactly 5 QP games, less than 5 and more than 5 will not work - and if you won exactly 5 before .h2 you might not have unlocked the achievement - so even if you keep playing and won more games it would not go back |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.i - Star Info ToolTips and Game Styles! | 2018-09-16 | I've been experimenting and working on some bigger updates in the last few days. Here's a rollout of what's new with 1.0.2018.08.18.i (I'll talk about the versioning numbers in a future post). --------------------- Release Notes: --------------------- 1. Star Info ToolTip will now show up if you Mouse over a Star 2. ToolTips now show up slightly faster in general 3. Star Influence border is now highlighted in the Empire color 4. Game Style (Palette and Pattern) can now be changed from Options Menu --------------------- Star Info ToolTips https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/33473594/311a4152b4ec588a508eefbc55a03d |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.h2 - Fix Chapter End Outro Not Showing Up! | 2018-09-12 | I got sidetracked from working on some new features to investigate this issue ːsteamsadː A number of people have reported that they did not get the Chapter end game popup and saw strange things happen at the end of the game (e.g. Troop counts were jumping erratically, etc). The Campaign progression still progressed as the end objectives were met. The issue was actually related the Steam Stats being updated upon completing the Chapter. Your achievements and stats are incremented and synchronized with Steam but there was a possibility that it could not synchronized correctly with Steam causing the game to "soft" hang. Today, being Steam's regul |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.h - Remove the Pause Menu Transition Anim | 2018-09-10 | Small quality of life improvement here. Previously, in the game scene, every time you went into the menus the game would play a small transition animation to pan the camera to the side before the content loaded. While this was cool at first (at least I thought so) - it broke the pacing after extended play. Particularly if you needed to jump in and out as you macro your Empire. This animation took about 1 second to pan in and another 1 second to pan out. It meant that you were losing 2 seconds every time you went into the pause menu. This has been removed completely so the transition is now near instantaneous! I've also started working on some |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.g - Balance Campaign Chapter 3 | 2018-09-09 | I've been hearing that Chapter 3 was a bit too hard so took a look into the balancing more. Since I've played each Chapter so much I knew exactly what had to be done in each one so it is a bit difficult to balance - perhaps even more so than Quick Play mode since in the Chapters there are some scripted events. In any case - Spoilers warning - don't read if you haven't tried to play Chapter 3 at least once. You will have to start Chapter 3 from the start for the update to take effect. Changes: --- - The time before the Machines spawn has been increased. - The number of Fighters they spawn each click has been reduced. - The time before they aut |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.f - Disabling Unity Analytics & Big Font Mode for ToolTips | 2018-09-09 | Release Notes: --- - Unity Analytics is now disabled - Added Big Font Mode for ToolTips --- First, I want to address the issue of data collection and why I decided to disable it altogether. There's a lot of misconception surrounding data collection particularly in recent months with what happened to Facebook and all the horror stories we hear about data privacy. In the software industry, particularly in gamining, there's a lot of collection of user data going on. Companies want to know the patterns and things we do in-game so that they can either serve ads and purchase offers or reduce risk and design game modes that from data they can be mor |
| [Update] 1.0.2018.08.18.e - Changing Star Names & Showing them while Zoomed Out | 2018-09-08 | Release Notes: --- - Added the ability to change Star Names you own - Star Names will now be shown while Zoomed Out if your Scanner Verbosity is set to at least Low (default value) --- https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/33473594/7456c2dc83e5f2e20c38ec0727d46a0a858a5019.png Thanks SnottyGremlin for the original idea - i.e. to be able to see the Star Names while you're zoomed out as it helped to give positional context. Very true - and not too difficult to add. The biggest challenge was resizing the text when you zoom out out - The font size differs depending on the Galaxy Size your playing in since you can zoom |
| Post-Launch - Product Backlog and Ideas! | 2018-09-08 | We want to give you guys a quick update post-launch. We're getting some great feedback (and criticism) on the user interface and controls. All feedback is appreciated so we want to get all the ideas organized and prioritized so we can start improving the base game immediately. To help with this we started 2 Discussion threads: Product Backlog & Updates We'll be providing you guys visibility on what we're working on currently and any changes that goes into the game. Product Ideas & Feature Request Here you can pitch your ideas and feature requests and we can see how we can get it into the game. |
| Galactic Dominion is Now Live! | 2018-09-07 | Hi Everyone! We're excited to announce that Galactic Dominion has officially gone live. In celebration of the launch of our first game we're offering a 15% launch discount on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/871710/Galactic_Dominion/ Enjoy! Forever Years http://foreveryears.com |
| Combat Mechanics and Research | 2018-09-06 | Tomorrow, Galactic Dominion will go live! But before that we will go into a bit more details about a couple more mechnics. 1. Combat a. Fleet Combat b. Fleet Tactics c. Star Fortresses d. Planetary Bombardment e. Ground Invasion 2. Research --- 1. Combat Combat can either take place in space or on the ground so we'll go into a bit more details here. 1.a Fleet Combat Fleets are composed of Ships. And Ships can come in a few types. Colony Ships, Transports, Fighters, Bombers, and Battleships. Colony Ships and Transports are non-combative and used mainly to colonize and invade enemy Star systems respectively. (More on the invasion further down) |
| User Interface and Controls | 2018-09-03 | Hope you're all having a good weekend! User Experience has always been a challenging area and it's no different for Galactic Dominion. There are so many things a player can do in the game we were afraid that it would be too overwhelming when it came to controls. Furthermore, the design goal is to make sure that players experienced a quick-paced action strategy so we wanted to try to keep the player in as few screens as possible. --- With that said, a lot of information that had to be cramped into the game scene so we divided it into essentially 2 sections. We will go over them at a high level and revisit them in details in future entries. 1. |
| Quick Play Mode | 2018-08-31 | The Quick Play mode is designed so you can have a lot of replayability. These are the settings you can change: Galaxy Size Number of Stars Empire Race Opponents Difficulty Empire AI Assitance Total War Star Lanes Turn-Based Mode https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/33473594/19258964fe7cc88c4285529b601f1d941872cdab.png The first couple is pretty straightforward. You can customize the size of the galaxy and the number of Star systems in it. Essentially on large galaxies, the travel time will be longer if the density of the Stars are reduced. So a Huge Galaxy with only 5 Stars will take much longer to travel between |
| The Galactic Campaign | 2018-08-29 | Today, I want to go over the design of the Campaign. Without spoiling the story too much, the campaign will take place in the not so distant future where Humans have started their colonization of deep space. Along the way, the Commander of the frontier (you the player) will be thrown into many unexpected twists and turns forcing you to stay on your toes and act quickly to keep the Human Dominion alive. The campaign will span 9 Chapters. Each Chapter will consist of very specific and different objectives that will have to be completed to continue. The difficulty of each Chapter varies greatly and this is marked by the stars in the Campaign men |
| Galactic Dominion and other 4X games | 2018-08-27 | Yesterday, a reddit user asked me a a good question that I wanted to repost my answers here to share with everyone. --- The question was: reminds me of Stellaris. What about your game really sets the two apart? My answer was: I'm a big fan of Stellaris so I'm happy to hear that it reminds you of it. :) They are quite different though. Stellaris is a grand strategy game with many mechanics and can easily run for 40+ hours for a single game. In Galactic Dominion, I wanted something much faster paced so designed it around getting players into the action as soon as possible. A typical game can last anywhere from 20 minutes to 1.5 hours (depending |
| The Story Behind Galactic Dominon | 2018-08-25 | Today, I want to share with you the history behind Galactic Dominion but first I'd like to thank everyone for the support and patience throughout these countless evenings and weekends. We finally made it! So the game goes back to six years ago. At the time, it was a small pet project that I worked on to learn about mobile development. The scope was small and it took about 3 months to complete and release. After that, the project was shelved for many years...until these past few years. It was time for a modern remake, technology has evolved dramatically making it much easier to focus on the content rather than the tool. Or so I thought... It w |