Greetings captains!
It's high time to let you ladies and gentlemen know what to expect in the upcoming update. Apologies for the late delivery of it. We were simply swamped with work.
The update is slated for release on Monday, 20th March. We'll likely take most of the day to do final tests and polish and release the update in the afternoon (CET time).
Yeah yeah yeah... who cares... what's in it? you say? Well let's have a look at the most important bits:
Planetary assault
It's true! You can now assault and take over planets. 15 planets (not counting Phaeneros) are waiting for you to rule with an iron fist. And this is only the beginning, the base layer of sorts. More variety and improvements can be expected with the next update! Oh and you'll have to dish out the big guns... Release the Kr... erm... Proxima! Once you construct its shipyard, you'll unlock a whole new Tech group to research and develop.
Taking over stations
If you can conquer planets, why wouldn't you do the same with stations? Well, now you can! No more magically unconquerable territory in Gemini. It is all up for grabs! As with planets, this mechanic will be further improved with updates.
Boarding and capturing ships
Waaaaaaaaaagh! Time to pillage and capture your way to swashbuckling fortune. You can board and capture other ships to keep for yourself, sell off, scuttle for Materials, strip down and let your scientists reverse-engineer them or even pass the ship to your war fleets as a beneficent ruler does (or maleficent if the ship is a piece of c***). Along with this comes a number of related research techs and perks!
Unpaused context menu
You know that li'l bit that's been annoying some of you from the start? Exactly... that paused game while on context bit... It's gone! Poof! Like magic... As we usually do, and as was agreed with you fine ladies and gents, this feature is optional. The default state is unpaused, so if you want things to be as they were, just tick the checkbox in the options and you're good to go.
NOT EVERYTHING IS DANDY
So, not everything is dandy as the above title says. We're trying everything we realistically can to keep saves compatible across versions, but we're reaching a limit. The amount of changes already done in the game world and the game in general, and the amount of changes left to do is really straining the save-load segment. Primarily loading of course as we're noticing a bulging number of bugs, glitches and even critical errors when loading our own older save files. Basically we're spending a whole lot of time running after bugs that don't exist... time we would otherwise be using to implement features, polish or optimize performance.
We're going to have to wipe progress on the next update. We're sorry for this, but it is necessary. We're still going to try our best to implement some form of soft reset so you get to keep at least some portions of your overall progress, but we cannot guarantee it. PLEASE KEEP THIS IN MIND!