FreeOrion

FreeOrion is an open source turn-based epic space strategy game heavily inspired by Master of Orion.

FreeOrion builds on the classic '4X' model by incorporating the nation-building elements of games such as Europa Universalis 2, as well as a versatile tactical combat engine.

What is new in this release:

• Shields now reduce damage, and all new shield & armor content
• Many fixes and improvements to the AI
• Detailed combat log display
• Numerous GUI tweaks and improvements
• Galaxy Generation is now based on a editable random seed
• New clouds and nebulae on empty systems and moving around the galaxy.

What is new in version 0.4.2:

• New Features / Improvements:
• Very much improved AI.
• Added an AI aggression setting during game setup.
• Keyboard presses should now account for the operating system language setting, and it should be possible to type non-Latin characters in-game as long as the appropriate character set is used in the selected stringtable file.
• Added an objects list window, with collapsable rows showing objects containing other objects
• Objects list has an incomplete filtering function to control what objects are shown.
• Right clicking an object in the objects list give a command to data dump about that object to the messages window. (For debug purposes)
• Added ion storms moving around the map. Ships and planets in storms have reduced stealth and detection.
• Improved Sitrep
• Added type filters.
• Old sitrep entries are kept on later turns, and may be reviewed.
• Different icons for different event types
• Added droplists to items on production queue to produce multiple items before being removed from the queue.
• All ships produced by an empire on a single turn are now put into a single fleet, rather than a separate fleet for each ship.
• Added a happiness meter to planets.
• Disabled production of duplicate buildings when one already has been produced.
• Various turn-processing and GUI speed improvements.
• Added a Protection Focus
• Reworked combat:
• An attacking ship will fire each of its weapons separately at independently-selected targets.
• A ship that is not visible on the map to an empire cannot be fired at by that empire's ships in battle until the ship fires on one of that empire's ships.
• Reworked autosaving
• Autosaves are in a separate directory from regular saves
• There is a customizable limit on the number of autosaves to keep
• Balancing:
• Unified resource and fleet supply into a single meter: the Supply meter. Infrastructure is not involved.
• Outpost now provide 0 jump supply, and colonies 1 jump supply. Techs and buildings can extend that.
• Removed infrastructure from having any effect on producing Industry or Research.
• Greatly reduced the number of Theory techs that have no direct effect.
• Adjusted price and research time of many techs.
• Recallibrated Stealth & Detection Strength numbers
• to max around 100
• to work with the new mechanics
• Reduced detection ranges for ships and planets by roughly half.
• Loosened requirements for Asteroid hulls/parts
• Asteroid processors are no longer shipyards, but must be built on a belt for a shipyard anywhere in the system to build asteroid hulls.
• Rock/Crystallized Armor Plating now requires an Asteroid Reformation Processor somewhere in the empire.
• Rebalancing of weapons, ship hulls, armour, and shield parts.
• Made Terraforming more expensive, and made it get more expensive for repeatedly terraforming the same planet.
• Made colony ships more expensive.
• Disable production of shipyards at outposts.
• Adjusted Microgravity Industry to "Increases Industry by +5 on all Industry-focused colonies in system with an asteroid belt outposts. Additional asteriod outposts do not provide additional benefit."
• Removed loophole that made Exobot Origin buildings cheaper than building Exobot colony ships on Exobot worlds.
• Some rough species balancing:
• Weakened Trith with Narrow EP
• Strengthened Egassem with Ultimate Industry
• Strengthened Laenfa with Average Industry
• Strengthened Gyisache with Great Research
• Species with a starting weapons bonus now also start with more ships
• Major Redo of Ground Troops:
• Protection focus now increases max troops to 200%
• Species Bonus/Malus is now multiplied
• Native planets and homeworlds now have a bonus to troops
• Outposts have weaker defenses
• Increased cost of Garrison Techs, and decreased capacity of Troop Pods
• Increased penalties to population on poor and hostile planets.
• Planet meters, such as population, can now be negative, which can lead to faster loss of population on uninhabitable planets.
• Redstricted production of imperial palaces if an empire already has one that it produced.
• Some buildings deduct from their planet's infrastructure, reducing benefits from having high infrastructure on those planets.
• Added increasing cost to some ship hulls depending on the number of ships an empire owns.
• Incrased amount of information players are sent about other empires, including capitals and their supply network.
• Content:
• More Game Concepts 'pedia entries.
• Russian & French translation update.
• Added Dampening Cloud monster
• Added Planetary Evacuation
• New ultimate detection strenght tech "Omni-scanners"
• New detction strength booster special, Panopticon Complex
• Added Philosopher Planet special
• Added Furthest species
• Added a ship speed boost effect to lighthouses
• New engine ship parts
• Added planetary shield and defense boosting techs.
• Reworked stargate mechanics.
• Made three of the indigenous species telepathic
• Graphics:
• New Focus & Planet meter icons with matching chart colors.
• Sitrep icons.
• More unique icons, especially fo ship parts.
• Added scanlines to more places in GUI to indicate objects the player previously saw but can't see on the current turn.
• Added multi-turn expanding ring effect for supernovae.
• GUI:
• Added one-click colonize and invade buttons to sidepanel. Selecting ships in the FleetWnd will override the default selection of ships to use for these actions.
• Added cumulative weapon, structure, and sheild, information to fleets so it is easy to gauge a fleet's chance of winning.
• Numpad keypresses now enter numbers when numlock is on, and act as arrow navigation keys in text edit widgets.
• Added option to swap left and right mouse buttons, for left-handed players.
• Added line to producible item tooltips to indicate that items must be unlocked.
• Added key remapping function for hotkeys, via the file keymaps.txt
• Recoloured most planet meters.
• Added right-click popup menu commands to:
• set map / misc options (enabled in options screen).
• split damaged ships from a fleet.
• split unfueled ships from a fleet.
• scrap a whole fleet.
• have a fleet automatically explore.
• look up special icons in the 'pedia.
• look up ship designs in the 'pedia.
• generate planet-species suitability report
• New Census tootlip that shows the species breakdown of the player's empire's population
• Other empire resource icons have simple tooltips.
• Adjusted contrast of progress bars.
• Hid some details of projects on production queue when there is insufficient screen space.
• Added red/green colour coding of colony predicted target populations on colonize button.
• Added ! indicators on top of screen to indicate if PP or RP are going unspent.
• These indicators may be clicked to open the appropriate production / research screen.
• Added thick starlane indicators in empire colour to show connected systems that can share production.
• The colour of these indicators is altered conspicuously when the group of systems has unspent PP available.
• Alphabetized entries in most encyclopedia lists.
• Added fleet summary statistics (number of ships, weapon strength, etc.) to fleet data panels in fleets window.
• Added somewhat unsightly text indicator of star colour to system sidepanel.
• Made popup menus less transparent by default.
• Changed how names are shown for enemy ships and fleets.
• Added Can Produce Ships and Can Colonize conditions to popups for ship designs in the production screen, to better indicate why they can / can't be produced at a location.
• Added links to techs that can unlock buildings, ship hulls, and ship parts in their 'pedia entries.
• Added empire summary icons for empire detection and a count of ships owned.
• Removed mineral and trade icons.
• Added a plain-text stealth indicator to the building tooltip.
• Bugs:
• Disabled building shipyards at outposts.
• Disabled the construction of any duplicate buildings at the same location. It is still possible to double-queue a building and get multiples.
• Fixed longstanding font corruption with non-Latin text.
• Partial fix for a crash with font text colours wrapping over line ending in the encyclopedia window. May still result in glitchy text colouring, but hopefully won't crash.
• Fixed issue where some producible items would be replaced by empty space on their list.
• Fixed issue where in-game options taking text would be saved as "1" instad of blank text.
• Hopefully fixed crashes when manipulating fleets.
• Fixed miscalculation of number of production projects in progress.
• Fixed building indicator progress bar
• Prevented ships from engaging in combat with planets of which they have only basic visibility.

What is new in version 0.3.17:

• Major changes include multiple improvements to make the game more playable.
• The game now has space monsters, neutral natives on planets, and a very basic ground combat system for capturing planets.
• A lot of little balancing tweaks were also made to enhance playability.
• New building and binary star variant star graphics.
• New sitrep messages.
• The game will now ignore old config.xml files, preventing some crashes after updating.

What is new in version 0.3.14:

• Progress on the 3D interactive combat system. This can be tested during regular games by running "freeorion --test-3d-combat" or directly by running "freeorion --tech-demo". This is not yet meant to be playable, however.
• Transitioned to CMake from SCons build system (Visual Studio and XCode projects are also still available)
• Tweaked planet population growth dependence on health
• Misc. content / effect fixes
• Various rendering tweaks and configurable options
• Made the expected locations of binary and data directories more flexible
• Fixed issue where running "freeorion -h" would still start the program after outputting help text for command-line options
• Added indicator to system resource summary to indicate when there is no import or export of a resource
• *Added location indicator to production queue items
• Various AI script improvements
• Fixed bug where planets weren't properly autoselected on production screen, preventing production items from being enqueued in certain situations
• Fixed issue where fleet buttons were rendered over top of sitrep or sidepanel
• Moved "Moving To Unknown System" or "Holding at System" text to fleet panels, rather than a separate text box below the fleets list on the fleets window
• Changed resource meter growth to +1/turn from a much more complicated formula
• Fixed issues with meter growth prediction
• Made ships regenerate 0.1 fuel/turn when not moving
• Fixed issue where previous effectsgroups's target set were being used for subsequent effectsgroups, leading to problems with techs or buildings acting on the wrong objects
• Fixed issues with Number, NumberOf, WithinDistance, and Affiliation conditions
• Fixed issues with SetTechAvailability effect
• Added minimum population requirements, below which population of planets is set to 0, to prevent very small numbers being tracked
• Made buildings on a planet become owned by empires that colonize the planet
• Added missing TradeStockpile property for effect definitions
• Tweaked part tooltips on the design screen
• Expanded part encyclopedia entry text
• Added or fixed CreateBuilding and CreateShip effects and parsing
• Allowed full effectsgroup definitions to be added to ship parts and hulls, rather than just stat-setting effects
• Fixed issue with UI number rendering showing wrong numbers of digits
• Made systems with resource sharing connections provide fleet supply
• Completely reworked the visibility system to take into account stealth, detection and distance, and to have empire remember previously-seen but not-currently-visible objects and include these in displayed systems in GUI
• Added fog-of-war indicator on systems and planets that aren't currently visible to player, but which the player previously had visibility of
• Fixed issue with unreadable text on research queue
• Added Stationary condition, that matches non-moving objects (for effects definitions)
• Added right-click popup command to split fleets
• Added the ability to right-click command buildings or ships to be scrapped or cancel scrapping. Ordered-scrapped ships aren't included in fleet fuel and speed calculations. Ordered scrapped ships and buildings have a large red X over their icons.
• Added an optional coloured disc around objects to show thier visibility radius, and an additional optional slider to set the "assumed stealth level" that is deducted from visibility ring radius, to show how far away objects of the indicated stealth could be seen by ships, planets or buildngs
• Added a check for OpenGL version and automatic setting of some rendering options at first startup to hopefully prevent some crashes on systems without OpenGL 2.0 support
• Made default mouse mode non-exclusive on Win32, to avoid issues with disappearing mouse pointer
• Reworked planet panel rendering
• Changed UI default colour scheme
• Fixed issue with sidepanel scrollbar not showing up when needed
• Stored empire name and server address be remembered from game to game
• Disabled deleting of old autosaves when loading a save, to aide debugging
• Added safety / sanity checks to order execution to prevent AIs from crashing the game
• Removed MSVC 2005 project files
• Made resource distribution and fleet supply use known systems, rather than only currently-visible systems.
• Fixed issues with fleet arrival sitreps on turns when those fleets were also destroyed
• Fixed fleet window layout issues
• Fixed issue with inconsistency between expanded or collapsed panels on sidepanel in or out of production mode
• Fixed crash where dragging a fleet onto the ships list would crash
• Various translation updates
• Fixed some issues with old gamestate flashing on the screen briefly when loading another game, or with old galaxy map appearing over the intro screen after resigning or being disconnected.
• Fixed issue where meter accounting estimates were wrong when loading games
• Hid autogenerated effect / condition descriptions by default, since many people were complaining about how hard they were to understand. Showing nothing is probably better in most cases, but they can be turned back on if desired.
• Fixed starvation sitrep generation
• Fixed code that determine the directory where the running binary is located on various operating systems
• Reworked automatic combat resolution so that combats can occur over several turns, and ships and planets can be damaged (see ship health indicator and planet construction dropping).
• Added a planet captured sitrep message
• Disabled system name multi-empire colouring due to issue it was causing when interacting with underlining or bolding of system names to indicate presence of a shipyard or homeworld
• Added option to specify player's name in single player
• Fixed missing close X on FleetWnd
• Fixed issue with "byte order mark" in stringtable files
• Improved credits scroll rendering
• Added an optional zoom slider to the map
• Added utility variable "Value" to set meter effects, to allow modifying the existing value that's being set without needing cumbersome variables like "Target.MaxFarming"
• Separated full screen and windowed resolution options
• Made clicking on a tech on the queue show that tech in the encyclopedia
• Made players joining multiplayer lobbies for new games be assigned different colours from any other players in the lobby, and be assigned empire name equal to their player names
• Added meters to ships to store / determine their part stat values (range, ROF, damage), and effects to modify these meters
• Added backup stringtable lookup in the English table. This means that missing strings in translated stringtables will be shown as English text, rather than an error message in game.
• Tweaked layout of multiplayer lobby screen
• Added --load and --auto-advance-first-turn console commands to load a single player save with the specified name and to autmatically advance the turn once, which are useful for debugging.
• Fixed issue with SitRep being stuck under other windows on the map screen.
• Fixed issue where button text on intro screen would overflow available space
• Fixed up FreeOrion icon file to have multiple resolutions, and to be used for the Win32 window and executable file.
• Fixed some issues with Win32 installer and uninstaller.

Requirements:

• Python
• GiGi
• SCons
• FreeType2
• Boost
• log4cpp
• DevIL
• SDL
• FMOD
• Graphviz