Hello everyone!

Today we have two announcements to make, and we’re also briefly going over what you can expect in the february update, codenamed Phoenium Update.

The first announcement is that starting from this update on we will start having a public testing branch before we release a new major update, and we’re going to open a new forum dedicated just for that. This ensures new major updates will be more stable and have less balancing issues.

This is very important for us because each new update introduces new content, major balancing changes and even new features, and these always carry a certain risk of breaking something, or certain changes not being well received by the community. In addition, this also means bug fixes can also be pushed out earlier and we don’t have to worry as much about testing these before issuing a new update, as well as making sure these bug fixes actually work in cases we can’t reproduce a certain issue.
Starting today, you can already preview the Phoenium update and test it out.

The second announcement is not exactly new for some people as we have mentioned this very briefly, but we are adding a new update to the roadmap and updating it as we’ve changed our priorities. The march update will be very similar to the original february update, minus story events and adding new victory conditions, however all the content, bug fixes and balancing changes we originally planned for february are still in, and more will be added in March.

Thanks to the awesome feedback we have received after the Titan Update, we decided to prioritize some other major changes that we originally intended to release later on. These include the addition of Mining ships and mining stations, some major AI balancing and improvements, black holes now working as portals to previously inaccessible systems, major changes when it comes to colonization and some major balancing done when it comes empire management, diplomacy and colony management.
We also made some major changes to the Titan ship class. Now they are now locked at startup and need to be researched, additionally they now have 1 extra weapon and defence slot, far more base HP and more max weight. While they are much more powerful now, they are also significantly more expensive, making them a luxury not every empire can afford.

Story events are a new addition as well. While more of these will be added in every new update, players can already have a glimpse of what they can expect. These work like quests, but are always related to the lore of each race and the universe and for those who would rather ignore them, they can be disabled.

That’s all for today, we can’t wait to hear what you have to say about the new update and don’t forget you can already play the latest development build and see what we mentioned above for yourself. Visit the Steam forums to know how you can access it if you don’t know how Steam branches work and as always your feedback is greatly appreciated.

See you around!