We have now reached Beta, and we wanted to thank you all for your help, feedback, and activity around the game so far.
Games2gether has been a tremendous success; since the Alpha, 18,000 new members joined have us to reach a community size of 20.000. We had to upgrade our server 3 times to support all that unexpected growth!
I hope you enjoyed the 3 latest factions we added: The Amoeba, our wise and friendly civilization; the Sowers, set to terraform the universe for their long gone masters; and the Pilgrims, our nomad faction obsessed by the secrets of the Endless.
The Multiplayer should be a lot more stable now, and please be nice to me if you see me jump in your game
And if you really don’t want to see me come in, private games should be working with the next patch.
With your 50,000 posts in just over a month, I think we have a list of improvements and addition that will keep us busy for a while.
It definitely helped us improving, tuning and tweaking every aspect of the game whenever we could, like the new construction queuing system, better identification of the technology types, and the renaming of ships and systems. You can see the whole list of changes here: http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?446-Release-Notes
Together, we have also selected background story of our pirates, which in turn determined their visuals. To be honest this was my least favorite background story, and even though I tried discreetly to influence your votes, you guys won
I will not go over all the heroes, ships, and logos you guys voted for as these were much less traumatizing for me, I more or less voted for the same ones as you
We also asked you a few times what you would want to see first, and we’ll do it again. Obviously we have our priorities, but we want to make sure we take your priorities into account also.
So I wanted also to thank you for choosing the Free Camera view in combat and the Combat Retreat as your main priorities among the choices given. You can’t imagine the impact it has on the team, when everyone is swamped with tasks to finish the game, to know that one of them was chosen and promised to the community. That really gives us that extra energy to do it, and do it well!
If all goes well you should see the retreat very soon as we are testing it right now.
What else are we working on?
Optimizations, network, custom factions, AI, game tuning and balance.
This is more or less what we will be working on until the Gold Master.
If you are afraid that one of your wishes is not addressed, we’ll update the community request list this week to tell you more specifically what to expect. But again--the Gold Master will be just one step in the life of Endless Space, with a team entirely dedicated to the game, Games2Gether with your support could take that game very very far!
Thank you all!
SpaceTroll
PS: VOTE IMPERATOR SKIN!