Hi everyone,

Good news… the next patch will be released early next week!

It’s been a long 6 weeks since we released a patch. But we hope when you see how much we’ve got done in that time you’ll agree it was time well spent.

As things stand, it’ll be out next Tuesday or Wednesday. We’ll let you know on the forum as soon as the time of the release has been finalized. The Skirmish galaxy will be closed at around the same time (we’ve left it running for a few days longer than originally announced to be able to close it at the same time as the patch).

Player profiles sneak peek

We know that many of you are patiently waiting for details on alliances – so we’re going to put a post together on that very soon.

In the meantime, what we do have ready to show you are the designs/plans for player profiles. Like alliances, work on player profiles began a while ago. But we haven’t been able to invest any serious time on either of them since, due to the usability crisis we’ve been working on resolving.

So, what do we have planned for player profiles?

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Hi everyone,

We’re still trying to get the next patch finished. Private messaging is working, it just needs a bit more polish before we can release it. And although one of our devs is tied up with private messaging, the other – yes, we’re still down to only 2 devs at the moment 🙁 – continues to squeeze in improvements until patch 0.938 is ready to drop!

Last week we brought up balancing assault troop carriers. Some exciting things came out of the discussion that followed which we’ll go over here for the benefit of those of you that may have missed them. Because some of these changes could be just around the next corner…

Proper troop mechanics

The troop mechanics currently in the game were introduced a long time ago and with little depth (defensive troops are tied to a planet/military base and assault troops are instantly created by transferring colonists on to assault troop carriers).

It’s an area of the game we’ve wanted to look at for a while, but due to other priorities haven’t been able to free up the time. But the topic came up again this week in the community, and after spending some time considering the suggestions, we don’t think we should put it off any longer!

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Hi everyone,

The Skirmish galaxy was won last week – congratulations again to Pepelekus – but we decided to keep that galaxy open until Monday June 3rd to let players carry on with their games there for a while longer.

This week the devs are working on the next patch – which is almost ready! Most of the changes won’t affect gameplay, but they will make the game easier to play and less frustrating.

For example, holding the spacebar will hide all labels (to avoid having to pan the camera when a fleet you want to select is obscured by a planet’s label), and the new fleet tooltip will make it easy to see fleet intel (and without the annoyance of having to first stop the fleet and zoom to fleet management). We’ll let you know when we have a definite date/time for this patch.

Private messaging is on the way

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Hi everyone,

Wow – three patches last week and a dev diary at the start of the week – what’s going on?

Last week’s patches saw many annoying bugs fixed, but there were also changes to gameplay and other additions e.g. the first round of planet management improvements and notifications are a lot less intrusive now. Check out the release notes for each of last week’s patches here: 0.935, 0.936 and 0.937.

There’s still a focus on improving usability and making the game easier to understand, but we’re also trying to address gameplay issues affecting players (thanks to all of you that posted your top 5 issues on the forum for us). Let’s look at one such issue now.

Conquered while you sleep

We’ve heard from players that moves to defend a planet can be too easily bypassed by an attacking player. Even building an orbit defense system or laying a minefield provides little defense. A planet could have:

• A large population/home guard
• Many defensive troops (through military bases)
• Orbit defense system installed
• A minefield encircling it

Yet still be captured in less than two hours? Why – and what can we do about it?

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Hi everyone,

Since the last dev diary post two big things happened:

1. The 0.92 patch was released and included: the nearby player colony scanner, new minor civilizations, a settings panel for auto colony development, fleet + planet transfer and bio-farms. If you didn’t catch that post you can find it here.
2. The Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy was launched.

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Hi everyone,

There’s a lot going on at the moment. In the week to come we’ll be releasing a new patch (hopefully Monday) and then on Thursday the experimental Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy will launch. Are you as excited as we are?

The new patch

The wait for a new patch has been much longer than usual (the scope of the new patch was ambitious and on top of that one of the devs was ill). But the wait is almost over. We’re expecting to release it on Monday and it’s going to be the busiest patch of Alpha 3 so far:

• Smart merging for fleet management
• Nearby player scanner
• Transferring fleets and planets to other players
• New bio-farms (increase the max population size a colony can support for all organic civs – both primary and secondary populations)
• The settings panel for automated colony development
• A fix for the ‘fleets getting stuck in a planet’ bug
• And more

You’ll be able to see full details of all new features and changes in the release notes we’ll post when the patch is released.

Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy

In case you missed Friday’s announcement – we’re launching an Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy on Thursday April 4th at 15:00 UTC (if there are any significant issues with the new patch we may have to push the start date back a bit).

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