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

New version of Open Realm of Stars is available.

If previous version was fixing the AI, now this one is for the content. This will contain two new space races: Reborgians and Lithorians. 

Reborgians are cyborg race which can synthesize other beings into their own race when conquering planets. They also gain some technology when conquering other realm's planets.They also get huge negative diplomatic bonuses. These probably work best when these are assigned as ancient realm and in that case they are real threat.

Lithorians are metal eating creatures. They don't need to spend resources on food growing but some of the mined metals on planets are eating by population. This will actually give more production to planets, since no food production is required. Population growth is slower than other races, but it will start grown on starting planet since it has some metal production already.

Then there are new government types: Regime, Technocracy, Collective and Utopia. Regime is tyrant government without the heirs. Technocracy is a bit like democracy but more focused on research. This is very good choice for example Greyans. Collective is mining and mining focused governmment. Utopia government is peaceful government with lots of bonus for culture and food production. Also I changed some of the old goverments so that each of them is some how unique now. Also Alliance goverment is now called Union. Reason for this was that Alliance could be misunderstood when two realms were making alliances.

Then there are limits how many times planets can be conquered during conquer screen and this depends on how fast attacking ships are in combat. Big planet with lot's of population might not be conquered any longer with single turn. Also regular weapons can cause suppression bonus for attacking forces or very rarely destroy buildings.

Leaders have flavor text which are now generated based on what leaders have done during the game play. Both Lithorian and Reborgian screen shot contains example of these flavor texts. Leaders can be also prison if they are caught during espionage mission. 

New release is available from here if you are interested:

https://github.com/tuomount/Open-Realms-of-Stars/releases

OROS 0.19.0Beta is now available and it comes with trailer. 

In this version there can be 12 realms in the galaxy. This actually changed the game quite much. First is that galaxy size needs to be medium or larger. This causes that nuclear engines are not that good when travelling big distances. Another is that winning is more difficult. This is simple since most of the victory conditions have relations how many realms there are in game. For cultural victory one needs to get half of the realms - 1 to admire one's culture, conquest victory require conquering half of the home planets, population victory is even more difficult since one must gain half of the galaxy population. So getting any of those victory conditions is hard than comparing to 8 realm game.

Another new things are orbitals. Planets can have orbital which do not take building slot. Orbitals are designed in ship designer and components are selected from available technology. These can contain starbase modules, so these can boost planet's research, cultural or credit production. If orbitals contain scanner these scanner can replace planetary scanners. Orbitals are also used for defending planet against attackers.

Planets now have suiteability which varies on each space race. Some of the space race might be more suitable for water worlds, while some like carbon worlds or even iron worlds. Suiteability of planet can be increased researching new technology. This suiteability limits the maximum amount of population on planet. For example planet size of 12 and suiteabiltity of 50% could only hold 6 population.

Tractor beam can now use for stealing other realm's ships in combat. First target ship needs to be immobilized and all military weapons need to be offline. After this ship can be steal during combat.

There are couple of graphical changes. First game can be now run in full-screen mode, which is great for immersion. I also added minor movement of nebulae in quite many views to make it feel more lively. Reborgians also have space ship bridge interor:

There are also some minor changes like that all realms can be AI controlled. This is for me to see how AI is actually playing and hopefully I can make AI more smarter in future versions. Two second minor changes auto exploring and AI controller combat. Both of these were requests. Both auto exploring and AI control in combat both uses same standard AI which is used also in regular AI turns. Turns out that exploring AI is quite bad and needs to be rewritten in next version.

Next version is probably contain quite much AI improvements. One them could be difficulty levels for AI. I am wondering if players generally hate or love challeging AI or even losing for AI. I like to lose in my own game, but I kind of hate it in other games so I might need to do AI difficulty levels. But I am not going to give bonuses or negative bonuses, I am just going make it more stupid on lower difficulty levels.

Any way if you are interested about the game source files and/or binaries are available in Github. Binaries are also available in Itchio.

Thanks for trying my game and giving feedback.

There are quite much news I agree with that. It shows news about each leader doing something or get killed, which can happen often. Reason why it shows even from empires you have not met is because it is being broadcasted by Galactic Broadcast Network Company, which is indepent from all the realms. Elections happen at same time since most of the governments have reign time 20 turns. (Some governments have 40, 100 turns or even life time) If ruler dies before then elections can happen different time. For news there could be settings or choice that it would only show your local news, or news from realms you have met or show all.

Rulers are pretty much like governor but they giver bonuses for whole realm. What ruler/governor/commander actually benefits it depends on his/her/its perks. Scientific gives research bonus if leader is working as ruler or governor. Diplomatic only gives diplomacy bonus if it is on ruler and so on. For the moment only way differentiate leaders are their names. It would be nice to have different leader pictures but since I am working without budget it is very difficult to obtain multiple faces for multiple alien races. Reason why dead ones stay on the list I am planning to make somekind family tree or similar at somepoint, but not sure if that's a good idea.

Hey, that marking route for normal movement is great idea. I could try to implement that on next version.

Hmm, that sounds really bad. Did Alt+tab or similar work either? I have tried game with FullHD resolution and with that it should work. Almost full screen you should be able to get first resize it big as possible and then change to borderless mode. Borderless mode requires restart to be working. What kind of graphical glitches you experienced?

Yes, true building advanced factory/mine/lab and so one could replace basic factory/mine/lab automatically. This is a good suggestion.

Yes, there are quite many clicking in combat, but it matters in which order those weapons are used, if ship has multiple different types of weapons. Do you mean that weapons could cycled for example mouse wheel or with keys?

Bordless does not affect anyway if you have selected full-screen. I meant that without full screen mode, bordless is the next thing almost full screen if screen is resized for maximum size. Fixing this will be challenging since I don't have Windows 10. I'll try to look if someone else has encounter similar issue with Java. Pressing alt+F4 should still close the game if it is running on top even its not being shown.

Okay, I think I now understood what you mean with auto-cicle. Left-clicking enemy ship would always shoot it with next available when. One whould need to click that many times ship has guns. This sounds like a good feature.

I was able to reproduce drawing issue with full-screen mode with Windows 7. It wasn't blocking the alt+tab but otherwise it was just showing the white screen. If Windows had scaling set to 150% drawing worked but some of the UI buttons went offscreen and game isn't playable at then. However I was able to get this working with full-screen in Windows 7 with following: Full-screen mode on, disable OpenGL hardware support and set scaling from Windows to 100%. Danimal, could you try if these would work with Windows 10?

Hmm, so there is probably something different in Windows 7 and Windows 10. It seems there some people has issue with Windows 10 and Minecraft, but that's probably different since Minecraft does not use Swing but something else for rendering the screen. This could be difficult to fix since fullscreen mode is done with three lines and there isn't much to change.