Greetings Explorers, Over the past six months Master of Orion has been in Early Access on Steam and it has been an incredibly valuable experience. In this crucial time we've received an unbelievable amount of feedback on the game. Player passion for Master of Orion is exactly why we incorporated the Early Access route into the development process. It's been a long road with challenges along the way, but our mission from the start was to include your voice in any decisions we made during this phase and you have helped shape this game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzQqXv-9kHo

Release Date

We are excited to announce that on August 25th, 2016 Master of Orion will be officially launched. At that time the Standard Edition will become available for purchase at $29.99 USD (regional pricing varies).

About the Standard Edition

The Master of Orion Standard Edition has all of the core gameplay experience, including:

• 10 races
• Custom races
• Tactical combat
• Ship design
• Espionage
• Multiplayer
• Diplomacy
• All victory conditions

The in-game content not available to players as part of the Standard Edition will be the Terran Khanate race and the Retro Fleets alternate ship models feature. However, if you enjoy the Standard Edition and would like to upgrade to the Collector's Edition later, we will be offering an upgrade option so there is no need to repurchase entire game.

Post-Release Development Plans

It is incredibly important for us to stress that Master of Orion leaving Early Access does not mean we will cease improving the game. There is still more work to be done, and we have a pretty large list of changes we're still planning to implement. We will release an update for August 25th with some of those changes, as well as balance adjustments and fixes for issues found in Early Access 6. Additionally, we have several post-release patches mapped out, which will be free updates to the game. The timelines on the release of each patch is still to be determined, but expect them very soon after August 25th. We'll have more details on the post-release patches as we get closer to release. But for now we want to be upfront with you about three of the bigger features included in post-release updates, just so we don’t leave you wondering about them.

Multiplayer Custom Races

This feature is currently in development and if not available by release, it will be part of a free update post-release. It’s just as big a priority to us as it is to you. Implementing this is not as simple as just enabling custom races for multiplayer; there are balance considerations in player-versus-player that you don't have to worry as much about in a single player experience.

Minor Civilizations

This feature is currently going through a redesign. The last thing we want to do is add a major feature into the game without proper testing. That’s sometimes okay for Early Access, but it’s not acceptable after.

Mod Support

Modding is more popular and prolific than ever, and the value it adds to 4X longevity cannot be overstated. It can take you from playing a game for 40 hours before moving on to playing for over 1,000 hours and never stopping. Supporting mods is, simply put, a no-brainer. In one of the first post-release patches we will enable modding support for YAML files. These are the files that include most of the gameplay data in Master of Orion. Some examples of things moddable will be:

• Races
• Ships / Units
• Planets
• Technologies
• Structures

In the future we plan to expand that in ways that allow you to create mods that add new features, or even alter existing features. We don’t want to get too detailed about it just yet, as we need to ensure the framework can support each potential type of mod, but you can expect more details on modding functionality when we’re closer to it being enabled. Those three features don’t even begin to scratch the surface of what we have planned for post-release patches. The backlog as it stands right now has at least 180 items that we plan to address and implement in updates, and more items are added constantly based on your feedback. Some are simple in nature--things like UI polish, minor tweaks to functionality, and new settings. Others are as extensive as a feature redesign, or adding brand new functionality to a feature that wasn’t planned before Early Access. Steam announcements have a limited character count, so we can’t get into heavy details on that list here, but as mentioned above you can expect more details on the initial post-release updates when we're closer to release. In closing, thank you for your support, honesty and passion during Early Access. You kept us honest and on track and we knew you were doing it because you care deeply about Master of Orion. Please keep sharing your feedback; the release might be approaching, but this journey is just getting started.