Strategy Informer  

Amplitude Studios has announced their third free major update to Endless Space, their 4X spacer where fleet battles are decided by card decks. Light of Polaris adds new features and Steam Cloud support.

This content update brings a little festive cheer, alongside new achievements, as well as balancing from community feedback. Tell those pirates to go space themselves with new options.

No longer do you need fear those unclaimed star systems as we can turn pirates off for a more gentle game, or until you lock horns with other empires anyway.

"There is a strange stillness in the galaxy, a hushed moment when denizens of the many worlds seem to be taking a breath. Perhaps they are preparing themselves for the next phase of work or war, perhaps they are simply relaxing after long toil. As the galactic year comes to an end living beings take stock of where they are and what they want to achieve; mechanicals recoup their strength and prepare their future tasks."

"And in this interlude of unexpected peace, somewhere, far in the northern hemisphere of a great arctic planet, beneath the cold snow and the wailing winds, there has been a discovery. Rumbling forever below the glaciers, an old installation of the Endless, still tended by descendants of the original workers, churns tirelessly throughout the frozen nights."

We're given a new wonder and hero character. This free Light of Polaris update comes with a more traditional changelog of tweaks, bringing the game to 1.0.45:

CHANGES AND ADDITIONS
• New balance of Factions traits (first pass).
• Blockade breaker doesn't work with empire at war
• Added abilities tree pictures for each hero class in "inspect" panel.
• Added Steam cloud management system for saves.
• New game introduction panel.
• Added a new hero from minor faction.
• Added a new natural Wonder with associated FX on planet.
• Some additional texts translated in RUS/POL/ITA/GER.

STEAM ACHIEVEMENTS
• Added new Steam achievements including (G2G) Votes:
- Marco Polo with Tentacles / Have a Trade Route with every other system in the galaxy
- Alien and Eve / Colonize a Garden of Eden
- Cake² / Clone Galdos AI
- There's no Place like Home / Terraform a planet to your home planet type
- There can only be One / Be the only remaining empire in a game with 8 starting empires
- Cultural Assimilation / Envelop another empire's system in your Influence Area

EVENTS
• Added exploration events flag option to remove the visual feedback in the galaxy view.
• Removed exploration and random events making spawn pirates when the "no pirates" options is enabled.

BATTLES
• New pre-battle cards selection system with adapted GUI and report panel (G2G vote)
• AI can use retreat cards now (not allowed to pirates however).
• New weight-balance of battle cards for AI use.
• Added a new option in game options to enable or not the manual battles.

MULTIPLAYER
• Players (including host) now forward orders to themselves instead of treating these locally.
• Fixed wrong construction gets canceled/bought out leading to desync.
• Fixed construction UID mismatch leading to desync.
• Fixed fleet's orbit assert.
• Fixed an issue where AI tries to buy out infinite improvements.
• Fixed loading issue to MP session when pressing cancel after "Connecting to server" message appeared.
• Fixed an issue when a client quits a session in progress then he will not be able to rejoin from the server list, since the session will no longer be displayed.

FIXES
• Fixed an issue where Dust miser and co-opetition corporate hero abbilities effects were mixed-up.
• Fixed an issue where debug could be noticed on the battle notification.
• Fixed an issue where the selfish dust bonus of the dust rain event was not displayed in the dust income summary tooltip.
• Fixed an issue where the effects from exploration and random events were not properly applied after reloading a save.
• Fixed some issues of GUI and localization.

The Endless Space update should be available now via Steam.

Source: VG247

Related games: Endless Space (PC)