Starpoint Gemini Warlords, a unique mechanic-blending 4X strategy, received a huge patch today on Steam. The title, and other games in the Starpoint Gemini franchise are on discount for a week to celebrate this major update, which brings a sweeping overhaul to the diplomacy systems of the game as well as under the hood changes to the game's engine.
The 2.0 patch is a significant turning point for Starpoint Gemini Warlords, bringing in a huge diplomacy rework that fans have been requesting for a long while now. The patch rebuilds the entire diplomacy system from the ground up, which project manager Nikola Jukic described as a lengthy and complex process. Some of the highlights of this overhaul include how AI factions respond to the players' scientific research and infrastructural development, AI factions will trigger scenarios on their own and sometimes request alliances.
"Diplomacy overhaul was a lengthy process. We had to break things apart, put a lot of updates and fixes in the middle, and put them back together to make everything work as intended." said project manager Nikola Jukic.
The engine tweaks bring a host of bugfixes, addressing GPU related crashes, memory leaks and modding issues. Certain AI tweaks not falling under the umbrella of the diplomacy overhaul have been implemented as well - specifically, AI factions will now automatically attack the player faction if war is declared, and they will also respond to Satellite hacking attempts.
The developers went into the 2.0 update with the idea to make the game more accessible to new players. Warlords isn't the simplest of games, and while long-time players will have learned the ropes by now, its high learning curve caused many newcomers to bounce off. With new tutorials and the reworked diplomacy system, Zeljko Kos of Little Green Men thinks the game will be easier to adopt, while staying true to itself and to the expectations of existing fans.
Starpoint Gemini Warlords 2.0 is out now, and the game is 66% off on Steam through the 29th of April
