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.