ALRIGHT ENOUGH PROCRASTINATING IT'S TIME TO WORK ON WHAT MAKES A GAME A GAME AND THAT MEANS WORKING ON GAMEPLAY INSTEAD OF GRAPHICS WHO CARES ABOUT GRAPHICS GAMEPLAY IS WHAT MATTERS HELL I MIGHT JUST CONVERT THIS GAME INTO AN ASCII GAME BECAUSE THAT'S HOW MUCH I CARE ABOUT GAMEPLAY OVER GRAPHICS RIGHT. YEAH THAT'S RIGHT I'M TURNING THIS GAME INTO AN ASCII ROGUELIKE. I'M NOT INSANE.

Anyway, to the point, the most significant change in this update is the new map view for planets. Planets now have a map of their surface and an 8x8 grid overlayed on it. Colony population is now located on these grid tiles instead of just being a number. Now you can see cities on your planets. And the city textures change based on how many people are in the tile. Populations on grid tiles spread out to neighboring tiles over time to simulate outwards urban development like real life. Colonizing a planet now involves dropping 1000 people off on a random grid tile. And space buses dropping off immigrants always drop them off in the most populated grid tile to simulate a capital city. Also on the planet map you can send expeditions to explore anomalies. Exploring an anomaly involves sending 500 people from the most populated tile on the planet to move to the anomaly tile to simulate the founding of new cities. Without these there would only be one city on each planet. There's not much to this new planet grid system yet but the possibilities for new features involving this system are immense. I plan on making it so that colony buildings are built on tiles and then provide adjacency bonuses to their neighboring tiles. For example, building farms could give a population growth rate bonus to all neighboring tiles. There could also be an interesting ground combat system for planets with empires fighting over tiles, invasions of planets can be more interesting, building military bases can increase the defense score of neighboring tiles and they can also send out armies to defend the nation, etc.

Also another big gameplay feature added in this update is mineable asteroids and mining ships. There are now asteroids orbiting stars that contain resources that you can mine with your mining ships. Before I added this feature, I noticed that the AI would have serious trouble gathering resources, and having a lack of resources seems to be the main cause of the AI being dumb, because it tends to spend its limited resources on stupid stuff like building more ships that will just die anyway instead of actually trying to improve their resource gathering rate. That's not a simple AI problem to fix. But having an easy way for the AI to gather resources made the AI's performance much better. Now the AI will kick your ass handily. However, this new resource fountain doesn't last forever, for each asteroid has a limited amount of resources that can be mined from it. And the more mining ships you have out mining, the faster you will run out of resources. So relying on these asteroids is not a good idea unless you are constantly taking territory from your enemies. I want the early game to be jam packed with action due to the abundant resources, losing many ships is not a big deal, it is forgiving, but mid game, things start slowing down as resources begin to dwindle and more strategic thinking is required, by end game, things are tense as resources are scarce and losing a bunch of ships could mean game over.