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Soil is a space real time strategy game inspired by Homeworld and others. You have base, you mine asteroids, build ships and send them to their deaths. Ships are made of subsystems and hardpoints, destroying them removes functions of those subsystems and removes turrets. Debris from damaged or destroyed ships can be mined for more resources. Game features unfinished campaign and somewhat working multiplayer (there may be some desyncs, but if it doesn't happen too often games resyncs automatically) Game is primarily made for windows, but most likely runs on linux with WINE (at least it does on Ubuntu)

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This update introduces gas. This is another layer of "debris" that damaged/destroyed ships leave behind.
The initial motivation for adding this was to provide motivation for player to not harvest one group of asteroids only, and instead spread their harvesters to multiple locations, which would create motivation to fight in multiple locations. As such, the first effect of gas is that any resource asteroid inside a gas gets reduced mining rate. This will go up to 95%, but that only really happens if multiple resourcers mine the same asteroid. I've also changed harvester AI to spread out between nearby asteroids, so you don't have to micromanage them.

There are also other gas effects, such as slightly lowered armor efficiency, repair beam rate reduction, so ship getting pummeled cannot be kept alive by repair beams indefinitely. Ships inside gas also get reduced damage they take from using abilities, so you can use gas cloud to get more juice out of that reactor overload or weapon overcharge.

gas

Gas is created when some object takes damage, and then spread to nearby area, and eventually completely disappears (this can take several minutes). Damage to asteroids caused by mining creates more gas than by regular damage. Gas is additionally created whenever resources are "lost", such as when destroyed cargo hold is losing resources, ship is destroyed with not enough storage left in jettisoned containers, cargo transport (fighter type) is destroyed, or when resource asteroid is damaged and mineable resources are lowered.

gas2

The performance of rendering of gas is right now not very good. You might want to lower the details on it, and if you're using high resolution monitor, perhaps lowering gas resolution to quarter will still look acceptable.

This update also brings a slight visual improvement to UI. This includes changed UI textures and colors (still not final), basic animations, and UI sounds. There is still a problem that UI is updated in a thread that runs at 20 FPS, so animations won't look very smooth (this also makes their speed dependent on game speed, which is less than ideal). I'll hopefully fix this in next update.

Lastly, you can now financially support development of Soil on Ko-fi (https://ko-fi.com/soilrts) if you wish so, and have nothing better to waste your money on. You can of course still download and play the game for free, and you will get nothing in return for your money, except for a big thank you and a "supporter" role on discord if you wish so, which also won't give you any benefit. (you can probably guess I don't work in sales or marketing)

Soil - December 2023 update

Soil - December 2023 update

News

This update features new mission, replays, and new model and capabilities for Xanthous resourcer, mission briefings and more.

Soil - July 2023 update

Soil - July 2023 update

News

This update brings fixed multiplayer, automatic updater, mission briefings, and various other improvements and fixes.

Soil - March 2023 update

Soil - March 2023 update

News

This game update finally brings resizeable GUI, one new no-build campaign mission, and more research options for your campaign

Basic AI, updated tutorials, and more

Basic AI, updated tutorials, and more

News

New update of Soil features basic 1vs1 AI, improved tutorials and readability of mission objectives, added autosave and improvements to sensor view, as...

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Soil - April 2024

Soil - April 2024

Full Version

This update brings new "gas" mechanic. Gas is created when objects take damage, and objects inside gas clouds receive modifiers such as reduced mining...

Soil - December 2023

Soil - December 2023

Full Version

This update features new mission, replays, and new model and capabilities for Xanthous resourcer, mission briefings and more

Soil - July 2023

Soil - July 2023

Full Version 1 comment

This update brings fixed multiplayer, automatic updater, mission briefings, and various other improvements and fixes.

Soil - march 2023

Soil - march 2023

Full Version 1 comment

This update brings resizeable GUI, new no-build campaign mission, and more research options

soil - november 2022

soil - november 2022

Full Version

This update features basic player AI, improved tutorial, autosave and optimizations

soil - july 2022

soil - july 2022

Full Version

New mission, new ship models, updated UI and added achievements

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LunarShuriken
LunarShuriken - - 1,275 comments

Looks interesting...

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empirescurropt
empirescurropt - - 3 comments

enemy frigateS are very powerful the beams are seriously devastating comparing the damage I do to my enemy is double I know I need research points to access better armament but there is no way to have that extra research that is necessary to unlock the best armament mission 4 is impossible to reach the objectives since it doesn't have resources for mass ships since it takes 3 frigates of mine for 1 of my enemy! I think the research should be added in destroying the enemy's units 1 or 10 research points according to the enemy ship so it would be more reasonable since even destroying the warp beacon I didn't achieve any advantage I tried to do this mission many times but I can't do it I think that the enemy advantage is very big at armament balance level one , the normal frigate should have a reduced cost from 550 to 450 , scout frigate 650 to 600 is one of the best frigates for damage but even so I think maybe a hp buff could help against beams , assault frigate I don't see any advantage during the game since I think it needs more distance and better damage the advantage I have is only speed but nothing weapons miss the target many times and if the target is moving it fails it is very complicated ! I really like the game I wish you good luck and I hope to have more frequent news

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soil-rts Creator
soil-rts - - 4 comments

Thanks for the feedback! I plan on improving research a bit because now it is really not used that much.
In mission 4 (the one with warp beacon), you are not supposed to fight enemy head on, but make hit and run on transports, but that is failure on my side to communicate it properly (I've done improvements on this for next update). Destroying warp beacon is something I'll make more clear. You should only do that at the end, but objective is added too soon to do it, so that's bit confusing because dialog for that can be easily missed.
There sure is some work left on balancing. My intention was to have assault frigate deal more damage against armored, and the other one against less armored (transports, miners, etc.).

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cllmsteele
cllmsteele - - 1 comments

Hello I've unloaded the zip file and accessed the soil.exe but it just freezes im not sure what to do. ive loaded up the game but everything is comming up as error when the command bar is loaded im not sure what to do any chance to help?

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soil-rts Creator
soil-rts - - 4 comments

Hello, could you please send me the soil.log file that is generated when you launch the game? I cannot help you if I don't know what the actual errors are :)

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Guest
Guest - - 689,536 comments

Hello I've unloaded the zip file and accessed the soil.exe but it just freezes im not sure what to do.

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Guest
Guest - - 689,536 comments

so i already downloaded the file so how do i find the game?

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soil-rts Creator
soil-rts - - 4 comments

Hey, sorry for late reply, somehow I'm not receiving any notifications for these comments...
When you unzip the downloaded zip, there is "bin" folder which contains "soil.exe" if this is the question

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blackgobygames
blackgobygames - - 27 comments

Looks amazing, I'm looking forward to hearing more about this project!

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soil-rts Creator
soil-rts - - 4 comments

Hey, thank you! I hope to keep making new WIP versions at least twice a year

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