Release noteshere.

Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game.

If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused.

So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• This build is perhaps the biggest example of why we wanted all this testing feedback prior to going to 0.900. Just saying. The number of things that irritated people in prior 0.850-era builds that are now fixed is pretty enormous. Let's talk about those!
  
• Auto-assigned hotkeys for your fleets (in new savegames) are now more likely to be useful for you.
  
• Your command stations will now auto-rebuild themselves if you lose them but win the battle with battlestations or citadels in place. Yay lack of busywork!
  
• You can actually hack unexplored planets to explore them with nanites, properly! This is a pretty big deal, as it's the only means of manually scouting without incurring an AIP cost.
  
• Bunch of irritating bugs fixed, and the longwinded backstory has been condensed down to the important points.
  
• Tired of having all of your fleets have giant centerpieces in them? ME TOO! I, too, like lots of little strikecraft for most of my forces. Thus we now have Strike type fleets with just a transport at the center, and then "Officer" type fleets that are more like what you've been used to.
  
• Protip: take Strike fleets against ion cannons and mass drivers. Officer fleets are suicidal there.
  
• Note: we thought about making lobby options for giving you more or fewer Officer or Strike fleets relative to one another, but frankly it's more interesting if you make those choices in-game (in my opinion). If there absolutely aren't enough of one kind of fleet to find, then... we'll consider lobby options. But choices made through gameplay rather than the lobby are so much more satisfying...
  
• Most of the Officer-style centerpieces are a lot faster, so there's less waiting around for them. Even though they aren't QUITE so central as before.
  
• The AI's costs to purchase most things doubled, so you won't be getting wrecked with quite so large of enemy forces anymore.
  
• Your higher-mark ships no longer cost more metal than your lower-mark variants, so you can't accidentally hose youreconomy by upgrading a tech. Techs are 100% positive goodness now, no downsides (opportunity cost aside). Don't worry, you'll still need that metal for all the other fleets you're getting now.
  
• There's a whole bunch more cases where you get extra engineers, in new savegames only.
  
• There's a whole bunch more cases where you get extra decloaking ships, in new savegames only.
  
• Among those bugfixes, you can actually select between the different starting fleet types, now. Enjoy those parasites... ;)
  
• And the really huge one: there are no more mysterious AIP increase penalties for having too many fleets at one place. We'll deal with the exploits that you can potentially get up to later in terms of fleetballing too much, but the first solution we had was just plain irritating and not good. There is discussion about potential options here, if you want to get in on that.