01/06/25:
Greetings, conquerors! The AI that should have been in the initial launch is finally here, among with various little fixes here and there. 

What's changed: 
I began the whole AI overhaul after noticing that while AI tried to conquer planets, it was pretty much all it did. It didn't seem to develop it's planets even to build mines, so it's resources dried up fairly soon. Conquering galaxy with some 10-15 fighters with no replacements incoming isn't easy, so AI was childishly easy to defeat. 

AI now keeps developing it's planets.
It also concentrates it's planetary development to key planets, which are then fortified. AI also aims to upgrade key planets' infrastructure, as well as possible shipyards, but only after it's economy is stable. If there's not enough mines to benefit from the upgrades, it's kind of nonsensical to even begin upgrading for the more expensive stuff.

AI also now builds bigger ships.
When I began the overhaul, the concept of AI cruiser was somewhat mythical. Like unicorns, they just weren't to be seen anywhere even if they were possible in theory.  Now in the later stages of the game you can see fleets of fighters, destroyers and cruisers roaming the galaxy.  AI can now prioritize and save up for bigger ships in the same way it can save up for larger planetary upgrades. If you have strong Planetary Defenses or enough Destroyers, the AI will prioritize building Cruisers to wipe that grin off the player's face.   

I also adjusted the cost of infrastructure and shipyard upgrades. They're now considerably cheaper to upgrade. I also brought the cost of destroyers and cruisers down to make them more appealing for both the player and AI.  

Cruisers no longer fly sideways. 
Now they're huge and egg-shaped, and fly with the pointy end forward.  

Added a possibility to adjust game speed. 
This was mainly for debug purposes, but I left it in the game as .. well.. why not. If you now want to go fast, you can. Or if you want to pause the game and still interact with the map, you now can. 

Added particle explosions when a ship gets destroyed.
Just something to beautify the game a little. :) 

Added income / tick to resources-panel.
Now you can see with a glance how many credits and minerals you gain or lose per 10 second tick.

Adjusted the starting star counts in the Start Menu.
New minimum map size is 75 instead of 25
Default star amount is set to 150 instead of 100
Added an option for 500 stars - this one should be practically unwinnable due to the sheer scale involved. 

Adjusted the math for starlane generation.
Now even the largest maps have decent amount of starlane connections between the stars. 

ADDED UPKEEP COST TO PLANETARY UPGRADES AND SHIPS.
While at it, I added a set of upkeep costs to limit the credits piling up. You still gain +1 credit per a population, but now you use some of this wealth, too. Now you should not see tens of thousands of credits in your wallet at the endgame anymore. Maybe this encourages developing the planetary infrastructure as well.

UPKEEP COSTS:
Shipyard: 3 credits / level
Planetary Defense: 2 credits / level
Fighter: 1 credit / ship
Destroyer: 2 credits / ship
Cruiser: 3 credits / ship.

Note: You CAN go into negative balance, but you will not be able to build anything until you have the credits again to do so. 


//EDIT 03.06.25: 
ADDED A POSSIBILITY TO HAVE MULTIPLE AI OPPONENTS
You can now choose between 1 to 4 enemies in the start menu. You can also pick their colours (hint: while black AI color makes the map pretty eery quite soon, it's not recommended for general clarity ;D). The AIs will fight each other as well so it's all one big grand melee. This change was huge in terms of code (old mistakes without proper planning for future lead to a sweaty future), so there ought to be new bugs and weirdnesses around. I have to keep an close eye on their behaviour and some changes are most propably incoming in the future, but as I flagged this devblog post as a 'major update', I wanted to include this change in the patch as well.  

Edit: a bit later: 
As I thought, the multiple AI's broke some of the combat code. Planetary Defenses would not go off if only one faction was left on the planet, even if the faction was an enemy one. This would result in attacking faction capturing the (useless) planetary defenses along with the planet and other planetary upgrades. This should now be fixed: planetary defenses shoot until destroyed, after which combat moves on to melee and conquering phases. 

EDIT 06.06.2025:
Added various quality of life -improvements yesterday:
Targeting reticle around a selected planet to highlight the current selection.
Tooltip to explain why any planetary development or ship build buttons might be grayed out (ie. insufficient resources, maxed out building, already in queue)
Player colour change to a slightly lighter blue. It was too easy to miss a fighter orbiting around a planet because of the darker blue against dark background. First time players might have built a fleet and still miss the orbiting ships. It should be slightly better now. 
Group selection buttons to the bottom of the screen. Now if you make a group of ships (ctrl+[number 1-0]) you get group button on the bottom of the screen which tells you how many of each ship type you have in this group, as well as total ship amount. 
Center the camera on a group by clicking the buttons with a mouse. 
Center the camera on a group by double-tapping the group number on your keyboard.

EDIT 08.06.2025:
Fixed a bug that resulted in only 1 attacking ship to continue conquering, if the conquest got halted because a fight happened in the orbit. Other ships in the fleet remained in orbit, but not participating in the conquest -> resulting in very slow conquest after a fight in orbit. This is now fixed. All remaining ships in orbit now participate in the conquest after the melee is resolved. 

But this resulted in an unexpected problem. Above bug had protected the AI from player aggression early on. Player could build massive fighter fleet with starting resources and capture AI homeworld straight away. AI would build another one later, but it would already be seriously handicapped by this plunder. 

This new problem I solved by introducing two new mechanics. One is HUGE and the other is just to make sure such plunders would not happen. 

The HUGE update:
The AI will now actively defend its' planets. Not just its' homeworld, but all of them. This should result in overall more varied gameplay and hugely improved AI opponents.

Keep in mind that the AI doesn't gather ALL its ships to defend a planet, but just enough to repel the invasion, AND only from a certain radius around the planet in question. Hence the player should not be able to cheat AI by sending only one ship to conquer a planet in hopes of gathering its all fleets to a single planet. Nuh-uh. But it seems to work miracles in keeping the early player in check.

Especially with the second mechanics: 

Planets with shipyards take longer to conquer. Exactly 100 % longer per shipyard level. Additional benefit should be that this should also encourage players to build cruisers in the later game, when there are lots of lvl 3 shipyards in the galaxy. Cruisers are the conquerors.