FreeOrion Changelog

What's new in FreeOrion 0.4.8

Sep 3, 2018

Game rules options which can be modified or enabled to affect balance, content, and game mechanics
Unallocated research points are automatically allocated to the cheapest available tech
Extensive AI improvements
Imperial stockpile:
Unallocated production is stored, and can be used on colonies even if they are are disconnected from the empire supply network
Withdrawal limits are empire wide, based on planet stockpile meters and indicated on map and production screen
Techs, species, and planet focus settings affect stockpiling withdrawal limits
Stockpiling-focused species added: the Sly
UI Improvements:
Fleet icon representation on the map
Blockade indicators
Ship designs, hulls, and parts can be edited, saved, obsoleted, and reordered
Multiplayer improvements:
Server run in hostless mode, with server-determined rules
Password-based player authentication
Observers and moderators can join ongoing games
Option to concede a game, subject to conditions
Allied victory rules

New in FreeOrion 0.4.5 (Sep 15, 2015)

Replaced Ogre3D with SDL based windowing for human client
Improved mouse rendering and responsiveness and keyboard behaviour, particularly when switching between windows
Interface and turn processing time improvements, tech tree rendering speed especially improved
Extensive AI updates
New pedia content including introductory articles on game concepts and the interface
Revised colonization mechanics to allow producing a building that will convert an outpost to a colony; species added must have a supply connection from a already-populated planet with sufficient happiness; production time depends on distance from the production location to the already-species-populated planet
New graphical combat summary
Improvements to the object list window: additional object list column types and filter conditions; added right-click commands to object list to set planet focus (this works for multiple planets at once); made the objectlist update when a planet changes focus; fixed layout placement of buttons in object filter window; fixed object list column sorting of numbers (as numbers instead of as text)
Graphics / GUI:
Added a pin toggle to most UI windows, which fixes them in place
Added a Pedia text search box and adjusted Pedia layout
Adjusted default window positioning
Made some window positions be saved between sessions
Various new/updated icons, including building and sitrep icons
New graphics for several hulls of the asteroid and organic line
Increased default sitrep icon size to 24
Added an option to save games in an XML text format, which should be readable on any OS, although is a larger file than the binary serialization (default)
Adjusted the size of the planet focus droplist
Changed layout of sitreps to be multi-line
Tweaked ship design description part list to show multiple copies of a part with a number, instead of repeating the part name
Changed allowed hotkey bindings, so most printable character hotkeys need to have a modifier key (CTRL, SHIFT, ALT) held, to prevent hotkeys from firing while typing text.
Removed some unused sound options
Added popup menu command to save ship designs as a file, and list of saved designs that can be used when designing ships
Added monster designs tab to ship design screen
Tweaked layout in the generic file load/save dialog
Made mousewheel scrolling pan the tabs in a tabbed window widget
Made colonization suitability report always include Exobots
Added an option to toggle whether the pedia in the design screen will instantly update as a designs text is edited
Removed various unused properties from ship designs in the pedia (and internally)
Added some helper sitreps informing of a planet having sufficient population / happiness to be used for recolonization
These helpers are easily customizable by players
Changed default player empire colour
Added combat assessment to ship designs' pedia pages
Made cycling through sitrep turns skip turns with no sitreps
Made display of moving fleet ETA controllable with a config option
Add "does not stack" information to building descriptions
Removed unimplemented statistics about empires from pedia
Added tooltips to auto/manual turn advance toggle
Made copy and paste functions in GUI work with OS clipboard
Added right-click command on icons to look up building types
Added an optional mapscale circle overlay to MapWnd, centered on the currently selected system
Added (yellow, 3-flanged) mouseover indicator for unexplored systems
Made some of the darkest empire colors slightly less dark
Made pressing return to map hotkey close the fleet window, if open, and if not, the sidepanel, if open, if no other subscreens were open
Ensured that if a planet has nonzero max defenses (or shields or troops) the SidePanel PlanetPanel will display the military panel regardless of whether the planet is populated or owned
Troop ships and fleets will now show their total troops value
Adjusted sitrep font size to be the greater of the client UI standard font size or 75% of the size for sitrep icons
Added several new hotkey commands
Made most interface windows be constrained to within their parent window, or the application window
Added support for an optional "persistent_config.xml" settings file which may contain a subset of settings from config.xml, which will override config.xml
Made double-clicking planets on the sidepanel open the production screen
Enabled "snoozing" (dismissing from display) of a sitrep by double-clicking or right-clicking
Removed max size from options window
Made the DesignWnd Redundancy check be applied to all part types, not just weapons
Enabled customization of the DesignWnd redundant part filtering criteria via common_user_customizations.txt
Removed (most of) the extra space in ListBoxes after the end of the content
Made sitrep panel remember which sitrep it was showing first, when it is resized
Cleaned up the massive list of sitreps on turn 1
Changed "Next Turn" meter growth tooltip label to "Predicted Next Turn"
Content:
Translation updates, most notably an (almost) complete French translation
Extensive pedia content reorganization and additions, including introductory articles
Transpatial drive part
Improved randomness of random empire species selection
Exobot colony origin building replaced by new-standard add-species-to-planet style building, but without a standard species requirement of having a source of that species supply connected to the production location
Made AIs occasionally respond to chat messages (not meaningfully)
Added three new specials: World Tree, Honeycomb and Fortress
Added two variants of Artificial Planets: Artificial Paradise World and Artificial Factory World
Made high tech natives special produce one or more buildings on planets
"Primitive" natives can't get this special
Added a higher-capacity advance ground troops pod
More empire statistic tracking
Added sitreps, including nebula collapse, dyson forest birth
Expanded Nebula collapse to create random combinations of asteroid fields and planets
Added colony buildings for natives that can colonize but can't build ships
Added the Maintenance Ship as an alternative to the Sentry monster type
New native species: Happybirthday
Added Species Homeworlds page to Pedia
Improved slot positions of ship hulls
Changes to fields: Ion Storms and Molecular Clouds now start very small, but grow large before shrinking again
Improved species traits listing in game setup window
Adjusted/fixed ion storm effects and description
Reworked Spatial Distortion Generator to push ships back along their route by a fixed amount, and generate sitreps explaining what has happened
Renamed Garrison techs and adjusted their description accordingly
Added sitreps to Planetary Starlane Drive (upon arrival/destruction of the planet)
Made Neutronium Forge only be buildable at locations with a Basic Shipyard (like all other shipyard upgrade buildings)
Balance:
Tweaked galaxy special distributions to lessen frequency of multiple specials on one object
Concentration camps require a population of at least 3 to be produced, and set planet happiness to 0
Hull production and research cost rebalancing
Adjusted artificial planet cost
Adjusted cost of tech victory
Reworked troop level calculations from various techs and buildings, including being more population-dependent
Adjusted timing and results of Experimentors doing things, tweaked their shields and defense
Made mines work on monsters
Made the requirement for attacking during combat be having partial visibility of the target, to be consistent with the criteria for starting a battle
Added requirements for a minimum number of planets and systems near home system locations
Reduced shield part strengths and costs
Tweaked monster maturation to depend on the game turn
Added shields to the Bloated Juggernaut and reduced its damage value
Adjusted the Krill Spawner part (from Ancient Ruins) so that when in an unarmed ship it provides a stealth bonus
Removed biospores from level 1 Kraken and Juggernauts. For level 3 of same, changed biospores to bioterminators
Phototrophic natives can now be found in systems with bright or dim stars (not only orange/yellow ones)
Changed time to build Phinnert colonies to 75%
Removed Large Planet trait from Scylior and Hhhoh (natives) and added it to the Etty (playable)
Self Sustaining Xenophobes (ie Trith) should have more stable population problems as it's based on explored systems not visible systems
Adjusted monster nest special monster spawn rate to be sensitive to GalaxyMonsterFrequency; left the domesticated spawn rates alone
Ancient Ruins will have a location condition of at least 3 jumps from empire homes
Dyson Forests will have a location condition of at least 3 jumps from empire homes
Dyson Forest's regeneration effect will receive a no-combat-last-turn-here condition.
Homeworlds and capitals get +5 happiness
Rebalanced planetary stealth and detection modifiers
Standardised modifiers as multiples of 20
Each stealth special can be penetrated by the same level detection
All planets given base stealth 5
Made the megalith producible only on planets with an imperial palace, and provide a troop bonus to nearby systems
Added ProductionQueue support for frontloading and/or topping-up, controlled by default/global_settings.txt
Planetary Ecology will now grant a flat + 1 bonus to Good and Adequate that expires with Symbiotic Biology
Empire homeworlds have max happiness at game start
Bugs:
Fixed multiplayer lobby player list scroll position resetting when receiving updates from the server
Fixed rare bug where Floaters could spawn Forests in almost every system
Removed design deletion right-click popup for moderators to avoid crash
Fixed issue where setting the default save filename in a FileDlg would be overwritten when the working directory was set
Fixed checks of slot type when automatically adding parts to a design
Fixed in-progress building icon tooltips on sidepanel
Tweaks to child/parent windows to prevent possible memory leaks
Fixed potential hang when single player galaxy setup was cancelled
Fixed rendering issue with detection rangle circles on map
Fixed bug where a ship that is destroyed during a combat round when it it attacked multiple would be counted multiple times in the ships-destroyed statistic tracking
Excluded empty (destroyed) fleets from empire pedia listing of owned fleets
Fixed issue where after pasting text into an edit control, the cursor would always be at the end of the text
Prevented natives from spawning in player home systems
Fixed glitch with blockades
Made rounding precision "epsilon" value of production and research larger (0.01), so being a tiny fraction of a point away from complete is considered being complete
Fixed bug where a planet could have its combat round squandered due to having another planet selected as target (invalid)
Fixed a bug where a combat sitrep would not be sent to an empire whose outpost had been in combat, if the empire had no non-outpost combatants
Changed combat attacker order shuffle algorithm to standard Fisher–Yates shuffle to avoid a bias
Fixed issue where centred button text labels weren't repositioning properly when resizing
Fixed a bug where outposts could be prematurely excused from combat, allowing them to wrongly get shield regen the next turn
Fixed multicolored system names on the MapWnd for systems with more than one empire owning planets
Fixed names in multiplayer lobby, which were showing the local player's name for all players
Fixed combat 'reveal' of stealthed attackers to be after all the attacks of a given round have been completed
Fixed bug with fleet movement path deterimation, where it treated a fleet as refueling when in supply even if it did not stop at a system
Fixed MapWnd cycle to next/prev fleet so that it skips over destroyed fleets
Fixed Pedia Species Homeworlds bug that had caused entries with more than 5 occupied planets to be left out of the display
Fixed planet names on sidepanel losing formatting tags when the planet is renamed
Fixed multiline text display bug when rendering colored highlighted text
Fixed Exobots not having Bad Ground Troops as described
Removed the (useless and faulty) ability to drag sitrep entries
Fixed the multiplayer galaxy setup dropdowns having unneeded and blocking scrollbars
Only partially fixed: same seed and game settings do not reliably produce the same map independent of platform

New in FreeOrion 0.4.4 (Oct 18, 2014)

Key Changes:
Interface and turn processing time improvements
Extensive AI updates
Combat mechanics reworked
Balance changes including supply mechanics, damage control, ship hulls
New "core" slot type
Configurable Hotkeys
New save / load file dialog
Queued fleet move orders
Python scripted universe generation
Change Log:
New Features / Improvements:
Implemented Python scripted universe generation
Can be easily modified by editing script files
Accessible through "Irregular 2" galaxy shape in galaxy setup
New "core" ship design slot type, added to some hulls and required for some powerful ship parts
Made all empires' sitreps visible to moderators and observers
System and ship names moved into stringtable, so they can be translated with the rest of the in-game text
Added a bombardment mechanic, allowing ships to target and affect planets outside of battle
Added a UI for configurable hotkey command key bindings
Galaxy setup data is stored and can be accessed from the pedia during a game
Graphs display added that allows plotting game history of various statistics about empires
Made it possible to refresh the stringtable or change stringtables without restarting the program (although not all of the GUI will immediately refresh text when doing this)
Gifting mechanic allows giving ships to other empires with a presence in the same system
Improved support for FreeBSD
Modified system naming to group adjacent systems and give them similar names, distinguished by Greek suffixes, to prevent running out of system names in large galaxies
Reordered turn processing to improve consistency between server results and client-side estimates of effects processing
Added tracking and pedia display of various statistics about empires, such as numbers of things destroyed, lost, invaded...
Combat mechanics reworked:
3 rounds, during which objects all fire simultaneously at random targets
Initially undetected ships that fire become targetable on later combat rounds
Made low-aggression AIs even less dangerous to help new players
Added shift-right-clicking to queue fleet move orders
Set default multiplayer autosave option to true
Content:
Various tech tree adjustments, including removing prerequisite techs and merging of similar techs
Translation updates:
Added / updated / corrected descriptions of various parts, techs, hulls, buildings...
Added more star names and ship names, and gave unowned monsters names
Added sitreps for unlocking buildings, hulls, ship parts, monster growth,
Reformatted / standardized sitrep text, added information to sitreps
Replaced the "Weapons" species bonus with piloting skills, which modifies ship damage
Organic hulls "grow", increasing structure over time
Core slot type introduced, appearing on some hulls, and with some parts only mountable in core slots
Changed default galaxy options to 150 stars and 6 AIs
Added more predefined ship designs
Ancient Ruins special:
Modest decrease in spawn rate
Preventing them from doubling up in a system
Much rarer now if Monsters Frequency is set to "None" (in part due to lack of guard monsters in this case)
Explored Ancient Ruins are now marked as excavated
Made less sparse on Low Planet Density setting
Added preferred focus to species, to which new colonies will default
Made all (including non-monster) unowned ship hulls move around on their own
Head on a Spike specials track the locations of captured empire capitals
Natives sometimes given advanced tech bonuses, making them more dangerous to attack
Reworking the Experimentors
Starlanes removed at the beginning of the game will not be replaced until after turn 200
Sitreps announce monster release events
The stealth levels of Black Kraken and Bloated Juggernauts are reduced
A Victory Sitrep is generated if the Experimentor Outpost building is captured
Ensuring after capture / destruction, fleets are not trapped in a no-lane system
Removed some old and uninteresting specials and renamed some existing specials
Added Robotic Interface Shields, which get bonuses from being located near other ships with the same part
Added Krill Spawner part as a possible Ancient Ruin unlock
Added Ramscoop part
Added Transpatial Drive part
Removed Interstellar Lighthouse because it was incompatible with current visibility mechanics
Reworked Psychic Domination to require a focus setting to enable, and to require telepathic species
Added some restrictions to when buildings can be added to the production queue
Can't build a second palace
Prevent quirks where a second something could be added to the queue, but would then become unproducible due to there being too many of it enqueued
AIs announce their aggression at the start of a game
Graphics / GUI:
New and updated icons for various ship parts, buildings, techs
Added right-click popup on players list to look up empires
Fleet management improvements
New automatically created fleets are set to aggressive if they contain warships, or passive otherwise
The new fleet aggression toggle can be set to automatically decide aggression for new fleets, as above
Right-clicking fleets or ships gives management commands: merging, splitting, and splitting by design
Added changing expression planet happiness icon
Production queue made to highlight items in the currently selected system
Added production queue right-click menu commands
Improved rendering of visibility circles
Limited copy-cut-paste functionality in some GUI text controls
Indicated mountable slot types in part descriptions
Made some multiline text areas scroll multiple lines per single mousewheel tick
Fixed longstanding missing item drop sound issue on options screen
Made looking up techs, buildings, ship parts or hulls from the map screen just show the pedia entry, and not open the design, production, or tech screens
Increased thresholds for displaying wasted PP or RP notifications, to avoid them appearing due to rounding errors
Sorted system droplist by system name (except for Deep Space, which are scatted through the list)
Numerous pedia text and GUI control placement layout adjustments
Tweaked cloud spawning effects
Design screen disables the confirm button to prevent creating duplicate designs
Added tooltips for design confirm button to explain why it is sometimes disabled
Restored system name colouring by owners, including multiple colours when shared between empires
Added right-click command to rename ship designs
Fixed / implemented mouseover highlighting in popup menus
Made clicking on a non-command in a popup menu not cancel the popup
Fixed a few places where changing text or list contents would annoyingly reset list scroll positions
Hid fleet/ship names when panels are small to avoid overlapping with destination text
Added Linux install targets and icons
Added toggle buttons for info windows: graph, messages, empires
Modified rendering of GUI windows to show a pointed bottom-right corner when resizable, and a cut off corner when not
Added buttons to adjust objects list window visibility filters more quickly
Added tooltips to tech tree tech panels, production queue
Made production / research queue widths adjustable in options
Reworked fleet icons to be more complicated and informative
Added All / None sitrep filter toggles
Enabled sitrep filters for observers
Added turn auto-cycle button, which automatically ends turns for players (immediately) or moderators (when all players have finished their turn)
Made clicking empire PP and RP total indicators open the production or research screens
Improved disabling of order-giving GUI controls when a player's order giving is disabled between turns
Redesign of save/load file dialog, now showing information about each game, and sorting by file modification date
Added automatic generation of repeat keypresses while holding down a key
Rates and delays for keyboard and mouse repeat have options in the options screen
Made objects list columns configurable by right-click popup menu
Enabled (glitchy) sorting of objects by any column by left-clicking the column heading
Incomplete ship design name changes are now immediately reflected in the pedia description
Added Available, Unavailable, and Redundant parts filtering on the design screen
Added right-click popup to enqueue production items and techs on their respective screens
Hulls and designs can be dragged from the list to the main design panel to load them (and can also be double-clicked, as before)
Made clicking the design background image show the hull in the pedia instead of the incomplete design
Added toggle to pin GUI windows in place
Removed X from top-right of windows that can't be closed
Changed the default design screen layout
Balancing:
Extensive ship hull rebalancing
Made colonization require at least partial visibility of the target planet
Made stargate construction require at least 1 population, so the required focus can be set
Added penalties to planet resource meters when changing focus, to discourage doing so frequently
Tweaked various effects, to ensure intended-bonuses never actually amplify penalties, and penalties never actually give bonuses
Various supply mechanics changes
Made supply meter grow 1 per turn up to max supply
Changed Interstellar Logistics to give a fixed +3 to supply range
Planet size affects supply: smaller gives more supply than large
Space Elevator gives any planet equivalent supply to tiny planets
Species can have good or bad supply traits
Increased native planet troop levels, making invasions more costly
Adjusted universe generation special distributions
Made meters reset to 0 if a planet is conquered, and disabled meter growth on the turn after capture
Changed Ion Storms to give fixed 40 point penalty to stealth and vision
Made derelict specials stealthy (40 stealth)
Adjusted monster spawning rate dependence on galaxy setup setting
Damage control techs rebalanced
Made Concentration Camps require a population of 3 to be built
Bugs:
Fixed production costs at start of queue processing, so that processing the queue doesn't affect the costs of other queue items during the same turn.
Hopefully fixed issue causing dangling server processes from failed load game attempts, which would prevent starting a new game.
Fixed issue with having multiple different production block sizes on the queue leading to incorrect production costs
Fixed Collective Thought Network bonus range
Fixed bug causing display errors in the production queue, including "never" for items that should complete in one turn
Fixed xenophobic self script triggering from outposts with negative population, or from use of exobots
Fixed homeworld growth focus overriding homeworld bonus for the same species elsewhere if it has more than one homeworld
Fixed crash and memory leaks when filtering the objects list
Gaia special will no longer trigger for Exobots on an Adequate planet
Fixed issue on OSX where selecting observer or moderator mode in multiplayer lobby could cause a crash
Fixed memory leak in tech tree display code
Fixed memory leaks in AI ship design code
Removed rename command from other empires' fleets' popup menus
Fixed issue where failed colonization attempts could leave ships in an inconsistent state
Fixed issue where hotkeys would be enabled while entering text, preventing certain letters from being typed
Fixed issue where auto-exploring fleets wouldn't update the GUI to show that they had been told to stop exploring
Hopefully fixed issue where the system instead of bundled Python framework was being used on OSX
Fixed issue with a ship moving from a system with the derelict special to another system with the derelict special not receiving both bonuses
Fixed issue with scrapping multiple ships causing a crash
Disabled game saving in GUI when doing so could cause problems
Stopped Asteroid Snails from moving
Fixed (broken) use of galaxy setup seed in multiplayer games
Fixed crash with observers enabling multiplayer autosave
Fixed glitchy window dragging
Fixed random seeding functions to properly seed more random number generation
Fixed some crashes when a model dialog was open (such as a droplist) when turn updates arrived and caused a GUI refresh
Fixed Cosmic Dragon adding Nova Bomb Activator specials to any / all planets when it was not in a system
Attempted to fix some quirky GUI state issues when alt-tabbing or clicking in/out of the game window
Stopped setting of galaxy map pedia article when opening the research or production screens
Adjusted population reduction formula for the Concentration Camps and Evacuation buildings, to correct odd results when target population is substantially below current population
Adjusted colonization process so colonizing an outpost doesn't cancel scrap orders on buildings on the planet
Fixed issue with multiplayer chat history display
Fixed issue with ships with self-repairing hulls starting with 0 structure when produced
Fixed rare situation where if a floater is the only monster outside a system, it could spawn forests at almost every system
Removed design window options for moderators in multiplayer to prevent crashes

New in FreeOrion 0.4.3 (Aug 3, 2013)

New Features / Improvements:
Fundamental change to ship shield mechanics: ship shields reduce the amount of damage suffered from a hit by a fixed value (determined by the shield strength stat), instead of providing additional structure that regenerates between battles
Reworked supply block / fleet movement blockade mechanics
Supply blocks and fleet movement blockades have been harmonized to occur in the same situations
Non-stationary ships no longer create blockades / supply-blocks
Armed aggressive fleets arriving in a system and then remaining stationary will maintain any supply flow for their empire, and block it against enemies not already having armed aggressive fleets present.
If armed aggressive fleets for two enemy empires arrive at a system at the same time, supply maintenance takes precedence over supply blocks -- they will each maintain supply for for their empire, and not block supply for the other, for so long as both sides remain and survive.
An empire 'secures' use of a starlane as an exit from a system simply by having a fleet enter that system along that starlane. If no armed aggressive enemies were already present in the system, then passage through all exiting starlanes is secured for that empire so long as it maintains an armed aggressive fleet presence in that system.
Passage of an empire's fleets through 'unsecured' starlanes exiting a blockaded system is blocked until the blockade is completely broken, by defeating all armed aggressive enemy forces present (previously movement was only halted for one game turn); exit along a 'secured' starlane will be allowed after the fleet has halted for at least one turn in the system, even if the blockade is not broken.
Raised max number of systems to 5000 in GUI.
Note FreeOrion is balanced for and performs best with a galaxy in the low 100s of systems. Higher numbers make a game increasingly unbalanced and make rendering performance and turn processing times worse.
Many fixes and improvements to the AI
Added a configurable random seed value for galaxy generation
Made focus visible on detected planets a player doesn't control
Detailed combat log display
New Moderator player type in multiplayer mode
Sees the full universe like an observer.
Controls the length of turns.
Can create and destroy objects, add or remove starlanes, and set ownership of objects.
Can be used with no other human players and several AIs to have a more-controlled AI test arena than using observer mode.
Made fields visible if any part of them is within detection range, rather than their centre.
Content:
Major revision of shields/armor/weapons (due to the new shield mechanics)
Added new shield techs and parts
Added new armor techs and parts
Rearranged tech tree for armor and shield techs
Changed starting techs: instead of basic shields players now get basic armor at the start of the game
Completely reworked/rebalanced shield, armor and weapon parts stats, tech and build costs
Adjusted space monsters accordingly
Adjusted a few basic pre-made/starting ship designs, discarded the rest
Adjusted affected species picks accordingly
Reduced Acirema ship shield bonus to +1
Added molecular clouds that reduce ship shields, which spawn outside the galaxy and move in
Added nebulae that spawn on no-star systems.
Added more species write-ups
Added terraforming reversion building
Translation updates: Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian
Tweaks/refinements for Evacuation building
Concentration Camps now cause a lingering negative effect on population, of indefinite duration even if the camp is removed.
Fixed Solar Orbital Generator building description
Fixes to Psychogenic Domination and System Defense Mines techs
Corrected description of requirements for the Static Multicellular hull
Fixed Egassem species description
Tech tree reorganization and various adjustments to techs
To avoid confusion removed "can colonize" property from species that can't build ships
Fixed weapon species picks:
Grant not only a specific refinement level, but also all preceding techs at the start of the game
Lowered weapon tech for ultimate weapons from Laser 4 to Laser 3, adjusted premade ship design "Mark IV" accordingly
Graphics / GUI:
Replaced galaxy map toolbar button text with icons
Added detection range circles opacity control to galaxy map options
Added empire statistics to empires window
Sitrep window will not pop up if the design, research or production screens are open
Sitrep messages:
Added sitrep message when tame monsters mature
Added sitrep message upon total population loss from Concentration Camp
Added sitrep messages for mines
Added sitrep messages for Psychogenic Domination
Reordered sitrep order of presentation; is now customizable via content files
Augmented census popup with tag/characteristic info
Reorganization of species description text
Planet and field icons in objects list
On the ship design screen ship parts are now hidden for which improved/refined parts have become available that are superior in every aspect (so, Laser 2 hides Laser 1 etc.)
Added "X" close buttons to objects list and pedia windows
Added aggregate fleet stats icons at top of fleet window
Moved focus drop box to top level of planet panel, out of the resources subpanel
Overhauled research screen rendering
Rewrote rendering of tech panels.
Adding tooltips to tech panels with details that are now not shown on the panel itself.
Highlighted enqueued techs on tree.
Tech panel mouseover and selection indicators
Removed tech type buttons on tree filter
Added prerequisites and unlocked techs to tech descriptions in pedia
Removed tech navigator. Pedia entry for techs have equivalent links.
SHIFT + single click enqueues a tech
CTRL + double click enqueues a tech to top of queue
Ship stats of a ship design displayed on the ship design screen now take into account effects groups acting on a ship
Readjusted fleet window summary bar to show current stat rather than projected next turn values
Modified pedia panel "up" button behavior to always be enabled and to always go directly to the index, regardless of what page the view is currently on
Replaced pedia panel button text with arrow icons
Tweaked multiplayer default empire names, species and colors selection
Balancing:
Reduced required distance to moving ships for Collective Thought Network (from 500 to 200)
Species balancing:
Having xenophobic species in an empire causes disruption (in form of maluses) for the colonies of the xenophobic species as well as for other colonies near them
Xenophobic species get the Concentration Camp tech at the start of the game
Reduced Etty detection range malus (from 20 to 9)
Increased chance for no star systems
Made Gas Giant Generator and Interstellar Lighthouse building bonuses non-stacking
Bugs:
Fixed spawning of Acirema guard ships so as to not be triggered by (player owned) Acirema ships
Fixed several issues with one click colonize/outpost buttons
Fixed issue with empty fleets appearing in-game after their ships have been destroyed
Various fixes/adjustments to Concentration Camps
Fixed issue that sometimes stars were stacked on top of each other during galaxy generation
Fixes for various issues with loading/saving games
Restricted speed bonuses granted by Infrastructure Ecology tech and Interstellar Lighthouse building to ignore immobile ships
Fixed stealth reducing effect of Interstellar Lighthouse building
Fixed display of system name for systems that have no star but do have planets
Fixed map hotkey issues
Fixed issue that production progress stops for ships if their design is deleted
Fixed non-working "Cancel Scrapping Ships" order for fleets
Fixed issue where planets that lost population and converted to outposts retained their focus setting
Fixed some crashes in research screen / tech tree
Fixed detection range circle overlap artifacts at high detection ranges
Fixed issues with fleet stat calculations
Fixed sometimes inaccurate population projections on colonize button and planet suitability report
Numerous other bug fixes

New in FreeOrion 0.4.2 (Feb 23, 2013)

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.

New in FreeOrion 0.4 (Feb 8, 2012)

New Features / Improvements:
Further reduced turn processing times.
Added ship repair.
Split LifeFrequency galaxy setup setting into separate Monster and Native Frequencies.
Added lists of planets and fleets to Empire encyclopedia entries.
Disabled order issuing on various screens between turns, which should avoid potential crashes.
Balancing:
Simplified the tech tree.
Adjusted stealth and detection values for monsters and early ship hulls. This helps avoid sudden appearances of ships in player systems, battles, and resulting loss of ship messages without warning.
Imperial palace now adds +10 to the capital planet troop meter.
Switched research output to be population based.
Added ship shield regeneration when they have not recently fought in battles.
Content:
Added techs for increasing the size of troop garrisons.
Added new 'Planetary Defense' tech catagory
Combined some theory techs with their application to simplify the tech tree.
Made some techs, ship parts, ship hulls, and building types that had very large costs be officially not researchable or producible.
New Sitrep messages: when a planet is terraformed by the Terraforming building, and when a tame space monster is 'born'.
AI script updates
New default premade shipdesigns for empires.
Graphics:
Made companion stars always visibile in in sidepanel.
Added clearer fleet icons.
Made AI empires choose more distinctive colors.
Made structure meter icon distinct from health meter icon.
Added icons for some ship parts.
Added animated system selection indicators.
Replaced ground invasion overlay graphic.
GUI:
Sorted techs alphabetically in encyclopedia index.
Added a separate message for starting up AIs so any problems with that won't appear to happen during universe generation.
Hid unresearchable and unproducible items on the tech tree, production screen, and design screen.
Made map zoom with the slider smoother.
Removed separate fleet windows that opened when double-clicking a fleet in the main fleets window.
Limited messages window history to 100 lines.
Coloured fleet window icons with empires / monster colour.
Tweaked tech dependency arc positions.
Added tooltips to producible items in production screen list.
Added highlighting to show which producible items can be produced on the selected planet.
Made automatically adding parts to ship designs more flexible; parts will be moved around to accomodate the new one, if possible and necessary.
Improved in-game chat autocomplete.
Bugs:
Fixed problem with non-Latin font character rendering.
Fixed tamed monsters wandering off on their own initiative.
Fixed some crash bugs related to the Psychic Domination tech.
Fixed bug where the tech tree view reset every time a tech was added or removed from the queue.
Fixed / prevented crashes when font files are missing.
Fixed misplaced text on tech tree tech panels.
Fixed a crash occurring during tech tree layout.
Fixed centring on techs on tech tree.
Fixed issue that caused AIs to do nothing on OSX.
Fixed crash or graphical glitch ocurring when transferring all ships out of a moving fleet.

New in FreeOrion 0.3.17 Alpha (Sep 24, 2011)

New Features / Improvements:
Added space monsters
Added neutral natives on planets
Added frequecy of monsters and natives can be adjusted during galaxy setup.
Ground troop ship parts that allow a ship to invade neutral or enemy planets. Planets can be invaded only if their shield meters are zero. The original and new owners get sitreps after invasions succeed.
Very basic ground combat system for capturing planets - ship combat can no longer capture planets.
Reduced turn processing time, particularly for large galaxies.
New versions will ignore old config.xml files, preventing some crashes after updating.
Added more lists of content, and more details about content, in the encyclopedia.
Reduced file save size by using binary format (instead of semi-readable text).
Balancing:
Generally a lot of little tweaks to make the beginning of the game more playable.
Decreased cost of colony pods by 20%.
Unexplored systems block resource sharing between planets, preventing players from knowing about a hostile presense in a system before exploring it.
Ships no longer have functional detection when moving on starlanes. Ships must be in a system to detect objects.
Planets can be seen, although without details, by any object in their system, regardless of detection and stealth. Detection strength above planet stealth gives details about the planet.
Planets do not increase their shield, troops, or defense meters on a turn they are attacked.
Fleets must end a turn's movement if they arrive at a system that contains hostile fleets and no friendly fleets.
Increased base detection of all hulls to at least 5.
Colonies target construction is increased to 20 so once the meter fills, they create 1 jump supply lines.
Content:
Added a lot of minor "native" species, a few of which have extended descriptions.
Experimental addition of various space monsters
Added domesticateable space monster nests.
Added Small & Medium basic hulls (smaller and cheaper than standard)
Improved, usually cheaper, pre-made ship designs
Added Computronium Moon & Damaged Computronium Moon specials.
Added automatic terraforming to Gaian planets
Added guard ships sometimes to Gaian, Ancient Ruins, & Computronium specials.
Graphics:
Added binary star variant star graphics.
Added new building graphics.
GUI:
Systems with no stars but with populated planets now show their system name on the map.
Systems with only non-player populated planets have a lighter name on map than non-populated systems.
New sitrep messages
Slightly improved resolution settings apply button functionality on OSX
Made default sidepanel with slightly larger so that the 6th meter icon in planet panels will not be partly hidden.
Made default message window and players list wider and less tall.
Invade button on planet panels works similarly to the Colonize button; a troop ship must be selected in the same system.
Bugs:
Fixed issue where empty fleets would remain when moving ships around
Fixed crash when using conditions to check the distance between two systems
Made sidepanel disable focus droplists when the planet is not owned by the client's player
Modified the Imperial Palace to only work on planets owned by the empire that produced it, preventing captured palaces from moving a player's capital.
Fixed bug with detection system where ships in a system could detect arbitrarily stealthy objects in the same system regardless of their detection strength.
Fixed issue where planets would not feed themselves, even if they produced adequate food, while being blockaded.
Fixed issue where ordering a single ships to colonize multiple planets in the same system could leave nonfunctional cancel buttons on planet panels.
Fixed bug where actual system name was being shown instead of "Deep Space" in the FleetWnd.

New in FreeOrion 0.3.16 Alpha (Sep 22, 2011)

Replaced the fullscreen turn progress window that covered the map with progress indicator text in the message window. The map now stays visible between turns, but with order-issuing UI disabled until the next turn starts being playable.
Chat messages are now entered in the same message window with a more obvious interface for entering text and displaying old messages.
Added an empire / player list window above the chat / message window. When any empire or player is selected, chat messages are sent only to that player.
The server now sends updates several times between turns, including fleet movements before combats, and a full update (as before) at the start of the next turn.
Added an encyclopedia to the in-game interface, showing information about game content like ship parts, techs, species, etc.
Added the option to have observer players in multiplayer games. These players can see the whole universe, but don't have an empire to control and can't control when turns are ended.
Added the option to have AI players in multiplayer games.
With the observer option and AI players in the multiplayer lobby, it is now possible to create an AI-only game with only a human observer. This works like an AI test arena, with the AIs playing against eachother and no human player.
Added a "Drop" option in the multiplayer lobby, to allow removing human or AI players from games.
Added "Deep Space" to possible types of systems in universe. These systems have no star, but may still have a planet.
Made map screen zoom centre on the cursor instead of the centre of the screen.
Improved rendering support for graphics cards that don't support rendering buffers and shaders.
Made system sidepanel resizable and draggable.
Made the UI generally respond better to FreeOrion window resizing. The intro screen generally looks good, but production and research don't resize properly, yet.
Content updates, including new species.
Tweaked fleet window layout to remove the new fleet drop panel when the window is very small.
Added optional autogenerated effects descriptions to various tooltips and content descriptions. These must be enabled in the options to be seen, since many people complained that the autogenerated text was hard to read.
Translated stringtable updates.
Updated AI scripts.
Reworked autoresolved combat.
Added an "Apply" button on the resolution screen. This seems to work on Windows, but may not on other operating systems.
Changed the tech tree layout code to a custom implementation. There may be some quirks with this new system.
Tweaked layout and rendering of meter bars.
Fixed issues with food distribution to planets.
Made rollover link text colour modifiable in options.
Made SidePanel retain scroll position of planets list between opening and closing the panel or changing system, and when pressing the turn button.
Fixed issue with SidePanel where scrolling up planet panels would cause the system droplist and forward/backward buttons to become unusable.
Fixed sidepanel scrolling problem when expanding and collapsing planet panels.
Tweaked how colonization works, so that ships ordered to colonize, and their fleets, don't disappear until the turn is ended. Ships ordered to colonize are marked with an indicator. As well, colonization now can't occur if there are enemy armed ships in the same system.
Various bug fixes and new features within the game content and AI scripting systems.
Made the client respond more promptly to server disconnections, so that players don't attempt to finish their turn before being made aware of the disconnection.