Planetary Annihilation adds Galactic War single player mode

That’s no moon …

You can now conquer the stars on your lonesome, as Planetary Annihilation has added the first iteration of its Galactic War single player mode. Build 66516 has been released today, so if you own a copy of the Early Access game on Steam it should have automatically updated itself. Try restarting the Steam client if it didn’t.

In Galactic War, the player is given the task of taking over a dynamic Planetary Annihilation galaxy while searching for technology and special perks. Starting with a limited tech tree, you’ll come across random upgrades that can boost your fighting and manufacturing possibilities. Uber say that Galactic War is intended to be replayable, so it sounds like there’s some player control over setting the size and scale of the dynamic galaxy they’re planning to tackle.

The update doesn’t just add a single player option though, it also makes some changes to AI, general gameplay and server stability. You can read the full set of changes, below.

Build 66516 fixes some server crashes and other problems found today.

AI: Updated AI neural net data.
AI: Neural platoons wil now seek to attack things it can actually attack.
AI: Will build nukes and anti-nukes in response to system threat, instead of grav well threat.
AI: Will build nuke silos to attack other planets that do not share a grav well.
AI: Added some AI immediate threat response stuff. In the event you decide to keep a fighter or bomber over the AIs base forever.
AI: AI econ adjustments.
AI: Will spread out attacks a lot more.
AI: can use Grenadiers.
AI: platoons can have a min and/or max unit count.
AI: Improved AI attack location choice.
AI: Improved AI raiding ability and later game platoon sizes.
AI: Improved AI scouting.
AI: AI will no longer wig out when you take away its bot factory.
AI: Fix for when the AI believes a base is under attack.

Art: added a thruster effect to the orbital_fighter

Audio: html ui: fix for defeated music not playing.

Balance: Lower cost of T2 by 1/3
Balance: double laser turret fire rate 1.5->2.0 (reverting)

Chronocam: hooked up seek forward/back buttons.

Gameplay: Bombers don’t slow down to a near hault near bomb targets anymore; When air units are running the ‘line through goal’ behavior it won’t slow down more than 40% of their max speed to reduce their turn radius to reach the goal any more. Instead they will fly past the goal and make another attempt. In this way they will always be 60% of their max speed or higher near the enemy target. Which is prefered over slowing down (to a near hault) making the bomber vunerable to anti air etc.
Gameplay: Fixed units ‘not assisting’ or building a bit, then not, then building a bit, then not.
Gameplay: Removed the Attack command cap from the air scout.
Gameplay: Making Astreus go to air layer when it unloads also fixes a rare bug where commanders, when unloaded from a transport, would moonwalk across the planet. This was due to the attachable taking the transporter’s velocity when it was unloaded and that affecting its interpretation of up which would cause the snapToGeom to continually move the unit.
Gameplay: fix for units not moving into range to assist large factories. They were using the focus entity as the target for the move task, whch would be unreachable for units on large factories. Now the move task targets the factory when it is a factory and the focus entity otherwise. The buildarm still targets the focus entity.
Gameplay: Advanced Fabbers build basic buildings
Gameplay: Advanced Factories build basic units within their class
Gameplay: Fixed commanders getting stuck when moving out of the way to build a structure.
Gameplay: Allies no longer trigger alerts for enemy units detected.
Gameplay: Updated visuals for landing zones. Now uses recon lights to highlight the landing zones instead of a particle. Landing zone labels now offset from the planet in screen space so they’re easier to read at a distance.

Graphics: Fix a bug with SAO shader causing it to fail silently on some video cards. Was doing a float = vec4 which is undefined behavior.
Graphics: Refactor how unit ambient color is done. Had changed emissive glows from lighting or emissive to lighting and emissive for direct lighting, but hadn’t made that change for ambient light. Also removes extra glow of team color … which may or may not be a good thing.

Linux: [main] Integrate SDL updates for Linux from proto/sdl. This switches away from Xlib usage in the Linux platform backend, to make it (mostly?) pure SDL2.
Linux: [main] Check in GLSL shader validation script.
Linux: [main] Add official glslang binaries.
Linux: [main:Linux] Explictly request a 3.2 OpenGL context.
Linux: [main] Set the “don’t minimize on focus loss” hint for SDL.
Linux: [main] Switch back to libboost-regex for Linux.

Network: Client/Server is more selective about the data it sends to clients. This should reduce bandwidth a lot for players, but should also help casters not get all the data all the time.

Observation: Math is hard.

UI: Support for launching YouTube in browser
UI: move pip to q key. Move select commander to b key. Both to avoid conflicts with build bar.
UI: Fixed bug where YouTube tutorial video wouldn’t load
UI: html ui / server js: the game creator can now set the color for AIs.
UI: Turned off autoplay for YouTube videos from start page
UI: Updated UI on settings page.
UI: html ui: adding separate toggles for hiding ui (ctrl+u) and hiding ar (ctrl+y).
UI: Various changes to strategic icons and mouse hover feedback. * When the cursor is hovering over a unit, units now displays a white icon on the ground around them and their strategic icon is slightly larger. * Ghost units no longer show additional information in their hover pop up (like if they’re building or not). * Radar blips with matched ghosts now do show their type and last seen health, just like a non-radar blip ghost unit would. * Selection now represented in unit icons. Unit icons now have a black border by default instead of white. White now denotes selected. * Change “black” team to less black, more charcoal to accomidate default black border.
UI: Improved area build for torpedos & anchors.
UI: Normalize spacing for laser and aa towers to 18 (adv was 17).
UI: Fix ambient occlusion settings to properly use OFF and ON;
UI: Changes to volume levels are changed immediately (though still on retain if users click Save);
UI: Changes to volume levels and resolution scaling now take effect when clicking Save, thus allowing them to be changed in-game (before only got applied when returning to start page);
UI: Added new game icon.