New Pre-Beta Galaxy: Launches 11th August

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Hi everyone,

After a quiet month we’re back!

The team took it in turns to take some holiday time off over the last month to recharge – ready to press ahead with the rest of a very exciting year.

Starting with a new galaxy that’ll be the most fun and engaging yet…

New ‘Pre-Beta’ galaxy

We’re launching a new galaxy this Sunday August 11th at 18:00 UTC. We’ve named it the Pre-Beta Galaxy – instead of Alpha 4 – because:

  • The quality of the game feels much closer to Beta than Alpha (so we’ve been told) but the game isn’t feature complete yet to consider it Beta
  • ‘Alpha 4’ after ‘Alpha 3’ – starts to get confusing?
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Release: Alpha patch [v.0.955]

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Hi everyone,

The game servers have been offline since Monday afternoon, which is the longest downtime we’ve had for a running galaxy (and this one’s been running since the end of last year). But they’re back online again now – along with a new patch.

It’s a thin patch – since the last patch a lot of the dev’s time has been spent on the server environment. But it does contain one important fix though that corrects the issue with minesweepers sweeping 4 times faster than was intended!

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Release: Alpha patch [v.0.95]

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Hi everyone,

We’ve got another patch for you. Alpha patch 0.95 has just been released and although it’s been little over a week since the last patch, there are a couple of cool changes included.

Troops reworked

It was a bit odd how troops worked before. There were defensive troops that were intrinsically linked to military bases, and there were assault troops that were magicked into existence by transferring colonists onto assault troop carriers. It caused confusion among players and just didn’t make sense (it was a feature we half-implemented a long time ago that we hadn’t been able to get back to until now).

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Release: Alpha patch [v.0.94]

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Hi everyone,

We’re pleased to announce that Alpha patch 0.94 has finally been released! It’s been well over a month since the last patch went out so its arrival is well overdue. And it’s a big one. You can find the full list of changes at the end of this post.

Please note: the Skirmish galaxy was also closed with the release of this patch (we included a reminder this was happening a few days ago).

But without any further ado, let’s dive into some details…

Private messaging

A new private messaging tab has been added to the chat window
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Dev Diary #27 – Player profiles sneak peek

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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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Dev Diary #26 – Troops & Invasions

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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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Dev Diary #25 – Hi neighbor!

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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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Skirmish galaxy: we have a winner!

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Hi everyone,

Congratulations to Pepelekus on winning the Skirmish galaxy!

Pepelekus crossed the 100k points winning line on Wednesday morning – needing only a month to do it – and wasted no time in letting us all know 🙂

Not only did they win the main competition, but they also managed to top each of the other 5 leaderboards while doing so. Very impressive!

You can see the final leaderboard standings at the end of this post (the live leaderboards will continue to change while the game is still running – we didn’t pause them).

And a big thanks to all of you that took part in the Skirmish galaxy. Your participation and help with testing the game is vital and always much appreciated.

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Dev Diary #24 – Conquered while you sleep

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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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Release: Alpha patch [v.0.937]

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Hi everyone,

Alpha patch 0.937 has been released today via Steam to all Alpha players. Yes, the 3rd patch of the week! We needed to apply a hotfix to the servers related to this morning’s issues, but thought as we had a few other changes ready – why not push out another patch? There are a few changes and bug fixes – less notification spam should be nice 🙂 Check out the Full patch notes below for full details.

We’ll be back soon,

– The Outscape dev team

Discuss on forum
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