BETA 1 IS ALMOST HERE!

Greetings!



I can't even begin to express how excited we are to finally be able to go into beta with this game.



We've been working on this game for going on 3 years so being able to share the full game (minus Ascendancy Wars, it's coming along well) is something we've been looking forward to.



We'll have a more detailed "What's New" next week but I wanted to give you a bit of a preview of what to expect.



#1 The Substrate are in. I'll be talking more about these guys. There are two things to understand about them. First, they have no armor. They use shields instead which regenerate. Second, their weapons tend to require energy which means to get the most out of them you will want to build a unit called a Capacitor which can recharge the energy on nearby units.



#2 Capital ships (Dreadnoughts) now have special abilities as they level up ala Sins of a Solar Empire. So as they gain experience they get a lot tougher.



#3 Ranked games are in. The ranking system works somewhat like Hearthstone in that if you win, you move up, if you lose you go down until you cross into Legendary ranks.



#4 Performance is much much MUCH better than 0.71. Both in terms of hardware requirements and in terms of MP performance.



#5 The graphics are much better. They're not release level yet but they're substantially better than 0.71.



#6 All of the Orbitals are in which means lots of cool global abilities.



#7 The third-tier economy is now in. For instance, you can now further boost power generators to get more from a given region. As a result, you can build up your economy almost infinitely given sufficient time.



#8 The Orbital Nullifier is now in so you can prevent your enemies from doing bad things with orbitals to you in a given area (ala they can't nuke your base if you have a nullifier near it).



#9 Units have been updated to be more obviously distinctive both cosmetically and in how they work. A Brute and a Archer play very differently for instance.



#10 There's been some significant (but not nearly enough yet) improvement to the UI. There's a + button next to logistics when you start to run out and the area blinks. The music changes if someone is getting close to reaching critical mass. The combined stats of a Meta unit are now displayed if you select an army. The empire tree is hidden until you create control groups and the less used elements of it are now gone.



All in all, it definitely feels like a beta rather than 0.71 which was still an alpha.



It should arrive in your hands in about a week (week from Thursday).



