New version of Open Realm of Stars is available.

Biggest changes are that game now has rare technology. This can be acquired mostly from space anomalies or special events. There are new weapons in rare tech: Ion cannon and plasma cannon. New defensive components: Organic armor, solar armor and distortion shields. Tractor beam can be found when exploring the black hole. Deadly virus is learned when deadly virus random event happens. Now this deadly virus can spread when trading with another realm or even on purpose by using espionage mission.

For diplomacy there is possibility to gain casus belli against another realm. This can be achieved if another realm makes border crossings, demands or war declarations. There is also new espionage mission where, your leader explodes his/her own ship and claims that another realm exploded that. This may grant you also casus belli against that realm.

Combat has got new feature where previously passive components can be overload if ship has extra energy. Shields can regenerate faster, engines allows ships move faster, cloaking devices prevents enemy locking on your ship. In one of the test games I was able to beat more powerful fleet by using cloaking devices and destroying one ship per turn and then running away from the combat just to get back energy reserves before attacking again.

There are also couple of new ship bridge images done:

One cool idea for tractor beam would be that maybe in future versions it could be used for stealing other's ships during combat. Full change list and new release is available here:

https://github.com/tuomount/Open-Realms-of-Stars/releases/tag/rel-0-16-0

New version of Open Realm of Stars is available.

Open Realm of Stars could be the very first game direct support with Philips Hue lights. I did not implement light support so that what colors are visible on game screen would be visible in lights too, but instead lights give out the game mood or state. For example each race has their own light which tries to emulate lights on their ship's bridge. If there war declared during diplomatic screen lights start blinking red. Also during combat lights are blink red alert. On map screen light cycle through calm blue, purple and green colors.

Most of light effects I did by using sin and cosine waves for hue coloring and light's brightness. Since it is using sin and cosine intensity level can be also adjust. For example that red alert with highest intensity it goes almost pitch black to bright red and on lower levels it keeps pulsating the between two red levels.

Second biggest changes is the AI. AI wasn't earlier that good, and reason was that it did not do well on colonizing new planets. There were two issues it exploring routine was not good enough and it spent too many moves on sectors that were already visited. Second problem was that AI tried to look new planets from upper left corner of the map. This was due that I use for loops looking for new planets. I changed this that AI now calculates center of it's realm and selects planets which are closer to that point.

During test games AI(Single AI realm) was able to colonize up to 11 or 12 planets where it previously might get 3 or 4. This is major difference. First test game after these changes I actually lost the game for AI. Teuthidae Horde conquered half of the home world in the galaxy and won the game. I had no way to stop that realm. Their technology was much higher than I had. When game ends it now has new sub page which show statistics for different ship design.

That screen shot shows my best design had 45 of military value where Teuthidae had 79 which is quite much more than I had. That particular game there were two ancient realms Teuthidae Horde and Centaur Democracy. These two had best ships. Other AIs had regular start as I did have and those designs seem to be quite in line with each others.

Another game I started with settings where each realm was ancient so it means that galaxy will end up in certain situation which is being played by AI till there. Then the actual game starts. I was playing with Greyans and I was in war with Sporks. I only had corvettes as war ships. People was getting tired for war. I tried to persuade Sporks to make peace with me but it did not work out. So I need to start research more military equipment and skip all non essential technology like scanners.

This caused problems later in the game where two of my planets had cloaked ships orbiting. This prevents building new space ships from that planet. Since I did not see them I couldn't hail them and ask them to leave. Couple of turns later one of those cloaked ships did this:

So some realm was doing terrorist attacks from orbit towards my planet. I had to study and built for scanners and turn out one those ships was actually from Spork realm. Another one was spy from Centaurs, which left after I was able to hail them and ask them to leave my space.

If you are interested to try it out it is available from here:
https://github.com/tuomount/Open-Realms-of-Stars/releases