Great news: we officially launched the private beta today! Last week was mostly filled with tons of testing, planning, and various uninspiring errands that had to be run prior to the launch. But its all done now and we can focus on building the game again. You can join the fun if you are interested in trying out early versions of the game and providing feedback! We still managed to squeeze in several important gameplay changes. The most significant one is the new type of location called asteroid field. Asteroid fields represent large asteroid deposits that contain significantly more resources than regular locations.
Asteroid fields dont generate any energy or population, so the only viable strategy for extracting resources from them is to build an energy reactor, an asteroid harvester, and a space fleet, so you can transport resources to neighboring locations. If you want to increase population in asteroid fields (say, for defence purposes), youll have to transport it from other locations. Another change has to do with asteroids contributing to locations total mass. As you extract resources around stars, the total mass of the star system goes down making it cheaper for other stars to attack or transport resources and population to it. We also modified the supernova logic. Now stars dont ever completely disappear but instead, depending on the type of star, either collapse into white dwarfs without the explosion or go supernova and collapse into black holes. Other minor improvements include:

• Global notifications when new research becomes available.
• The AI difficulty setting now maps to AIs attack modifier. Basically, the harder the AI setting the more painful attacks become.
• AI players dont cheat anymore by having the whole map visible to them. Now, they also have to deal with the fog of war and build space telescope to discover stars near them.

Next Week

• Working with the private beta community to figure out which core game mechanics work and which ones dont.
• Adding better tooltips that describe game mechanics.
• Working on the hotseat multiplayer mode.

Epic Turn-Based Star Battles

FEATURES

• Build your star empire: take control of an advanced civilization and build mega-structures like hyperspace tunnels, energy spheres, and ring worlds. Develop your economy by collecting star energy, mining asteroids, and growing your population.
  
• Experience the cycle of stellar evolution: new stars are born and ancient ones turn into black holes, white dwarves, or dust over tens of millions of years—all within a single battle!
  
• Explore star systems: create a system of hyperspace tunnels to nearby stars to conquer them.
  
• Research new technologies: capture mysterious space stations to make strategic decisions about your civilization's research.
  
• Unique stellar mechanics: learn how to thrive in an evolving battlefield with stars going supernova, asteroid fields depleting, and new hyperspace tunnels being built by you and your opponents. All stars are procedurally generated based on real physics. Luminosity, mass, and energy output change in accordance with star properties.
  
• Single-player campaign: follow a procedurally generated story of an advanced civilization spanning millions of years and dozens of stars.
  
• Hotseat multiplayer: play on the same computer with up to four friends.

• Processor: AMD Athlon II X4 640 @ 3.0 Ghz or Intel Core 2 Quad 9400 @ 2.66 GhzMemory: 1 GB RAM
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• Graphics: AMD HD 5770 or Nvidia GTX 460 with 1024MB VRAM
• Storage: 1 GB available space

• Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 850 @ 3.3 Ghz or Intel i3 2100 @ 3.1 Ghz
• Graphics: AMD HD 6850 or Nvidia GTX 560TI with 1024MB VRAM
• Storage: 1 GB available space