Hi everyone,

The new Skirmish 2 and Main 2 galaxies are now OPEN and ready for you to play!

Start playing today and enjoy building your empire in a massive persistent galaxy.

Better yet – why not invite your friends to play alongside you?

The start of a new galaxy is a very exciting time to join – for both new and experienced players.

Choose a different civilization, try a new strategy – what are you waiting for?

Starting a New Game

New players and existing players with a spare game slot can join a new galaxy from the game lobby immediately
Existing players already using both Skirmish and Main game slots will need to free one up before they can join another galaxy
You can use a spare slot to join either a new Skirmish or Main galaxy – we’ve made these slots cross-compatible for you so if you want to continue your Main 1 game but also start a new Main 2 game – you now can

Old Skirmish 1 and Main 1 Galaxies to Continue

The Skirmish 1 and Main 1 galaxies will run in parallel with the new Skirmish 2 and Main 2 galaxies (we’ll let you know well in advance if we plan to close them). But it will only be possible to start a new game in either Skirmish 2 or Main 2.

What’s New in the Game?

As well as the two new galaxies – we’ve also released a new patch to go with them.

The full patch notes can be found at the bottom of this post. But let’s take a quick look at a couple of the highlights.

New Government Building

New home planets start with a government building – upgrade yours early

Each home planet starts with a Government Building (Central AI Node for Syntis)
The government building boosts your colony’s credit income from tax
For organic civs it also increases corruption immunity, for Syntis the max colonies they can support (Syntis can also increase this with the technologies they already have – for Syntis it means they will be able to reach 48 colonies in total instead of 37)

The boost to income from the government building means that you will have much more credits early game. Government buildings can – and should – be upgraded very early in the game. Doing so will further boost your income and make your empire’s expansion smoother.

Wiki: Government Building

Improved Galaxy Overview

We’ve had a lot of requests from players to be able to manage their empires from the galaxy overview. To avoid having to visit each planet one by one to check on status or adjust taxes.

Well, now you can! There’s a new ‘My Empire’ tab that’s been added to galaxy overview.

We have a few more tweaks in mind to make galaxy overview more useful – but what do you think? Once you’ve had a chance to try the new tab out, let us know on the forum what changes you think we should make next to it.

Please note: apart from the changes to galaxy overview and minefields – the changes in this patch have only been applied to the new galaxies.

Thanks everyone, take care of yourselves and we’ll be back with more news soon.

– The Outscape dev team

Comment on the Forum

Outscape on Steam

Full patch notes

Features and changes

Two new galaxies launched: Skirmish 2 and Main 2. Skirmish 1 and Main 1 will also continue.
Relaxed the game type slot restrictions for Skirmish and Main: you can play in any two galaxies at the same time instead of the previous limit of one Skirmish and one Main galaxy. For example, if you are still active in Main 1, you can keep that game going and start a new game in Main 2, without having to first reset in Main 1.
Improvements to Galaxy Overview: more easily manage your colonies from a new ‘My Empire’ tab e.g. adjust the tax rate, view the construction queues
New Government Building: in each new game the home planet will start with one special new government building. See the wiki for full details.

The new government building strongly boosts early game income. But mid/late game players have too many credits. So income from other colonies has also been decreased by about 35%.
City center costs and performance have been increased and home planets no longer start with multiple T3 city centers. Beron, credits and personnel costs have doubled. But so have the percentage increase boosts they give to the economy and population growth. See the wiki for the new stats.
We will likely make further balancing changes that affect income as we collect data and feedback from the new galaxies.

Max Population Balancing: planets with a single civ population now get a x1.4 max population bonus to better balance the differences between single and dual population planets. For example, if a planet has space for 500k colonists, it can either support a single population of 700k (500k x 1.4) or a double population totalling 1m (500k x 2). Click here for more details.
New Syntis tech to increase the max number of fleets they can control from 72 to 92. This is to better balance the total number of fleets the Syntis can reach vs the total fleets organic civs can reach.
Minefield laying and sweeping costs increased: it costs 3 times as much limbalt to lay a minefield and 2 times as much olzine to activate a minesweeper.

How minefields deal damage has also been changed. We’ll post more details tomorrow to the forum.

Minimum starting distance between players in Main 2 increased from 19LY to 25LY. We’ve had requests to increase this even further, but the previous distances were based on prior player feedback, so we’re weary about increasing it much further in a single change.
Warp 9 (scout engines only) has increased from 16 LY to 22 LY/hr. We’ll post more details about this tomorrow to the forum along with more details on minefield changes.
Small research cost changes for some technologies related to defense and Syntis specific
Added 6 small general slots to Mankind Hermes hull to increase the total from 4 to 10
Apart from the changes to galaxy overview and minefields – the above changes will be applied to the new galaxies only

Bugs fixed

We’ve not been able to reproduce the exploration history bug in our test environment. But we did find and fix something that has likely been causing it. However, there is still the chance that there is more than one issue causing exploration history to reset, so please let us know if after updating to this patch it happens to you./li>

Updating the game client: the game should be automatically updated via Steam. Please check here if the download doesn’t automatically start when you launch Steam.