We added tons of good stuff over the past seven days! We are also getting closer and closer to the private beta. The current plan is to have the beta out sometime during the week of November 26.

Gameplay

• The base attack multiplier is now different for every location. The higher the energy output of the star the lower the attack multiplier. This was done to balance out overpowered blue giants that generated too much energy and population, which resulted in their ability to execute swift crushing attacks that didn't seem fair. Before this change the only downside of blue giants was their shorter lifetime. Now, it feels a lot more balanced. The "scientific" justification behind this change is that stars with higher luminosity make it harder for civilizations to coordinate offensive and defensive operations in space. Since research stations are not stars and don't have regular star properties, we changed their base attack multipliers to be extra low.
• Research stations have limited population now. This change makes a lot of logical sense and also makes stations much easier to re-capture.
• Black holes and research stations don't have energy spheres anymore. We needed this change for logical and gameplay consistency, since neither of the two objects have any energy output capabilities.
• How do black holes and research generate energy now? We added a new structure called an *energy reactor*. It generates less energy than energy spheres but is cheaper and takes less time to build. You can also build it in any other location if you need a little bit of energy quickly.
• Research stations now have a research lab structure. It increases population and resource limits and the research rate.
• Research rate was changed to be dynamic based on the number of stations (5% per station) and research lab structure upgrades.

User Interface

• We added more properties to the location info panel that now includes the base attack multiplier and the building cost rate. We also added a popup message to research points that shows what the current rate of research is.
• We added a global (not location-specific) message that shows up at the top of the screen at the beginning of the turn. For now it only tells you when a research item is done. In the future, we'll add more items to it like when a player gets eliminated or some plot-specific event happens.
• We added icons for all location structures!

Next Week

• More playtesting and gameplay improvements.
• Finish technology research tree and do some initial work on trying to balance different research items.
• Graphics optimizations. Ideally, I want the game to run smoothly on systems with Intel HD Graphics. There're some low-hanging fruit fixes that I can quickly apply to get closer to this goal.
• Steam build upload shenanigans for the private beta.