This update for March brings good news! I now consider the game to be core-feature complete for an alpha phase. However, there were some reason major changes that need testing, and stability is not guaranteed, but there is now a test war up and running which will run through Thursday April 12th. This places it at just under 3 weeks, and is running at 400x speed (as opposed to 200x of a regular 4 week war). It is designated as a Test galaxy, so players are given free resources by using the FRE command, which works exactly the same as DRY, except you can use it anywhere.
I am not currently marketing this at all, it is really only targeted at former SE players, and is certainly still considered to be unstable.
Some notes about the current state:
- Planet burning isn't really fully implemented, if you pm too tight, it could crash and burn really fast.
- Combat values are complete guesses at this point. They feel pretty decent, but feedback is welcome.
- Troop strafing is more direct that it was in SE, meaning the troops you kill will mostly be proportionate to the number of figs you are attacking with. There is still some randomness to it, but it is not quite like SE was, but there is little else I could do with the data available to me.
- Sounds are very cheesy, just placeholders where something was critical
- Most ships are currently just colored triangles, graphics improvements will come later.
To start flying you can download the latest alpha client at http://www.stellaremperor.com/alpha/Ste ... _0.6.0.zip , unzip it, and launch the executable. Also feel free to inform any alumni!
If testing goes will, I will likely start regular (stable-ish) wars in mid-late April.
Enjoy, and I hope to see you in space!
--Willis AKA Caleb
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