It’s been a while since we last updated this blog. Both Ju and I have been busy with other endeavours (work-related stuff, mostly) so we haven’t been able to work on Legacy Worlds as much as we’d have wanted to. Add this to the fact that the latest additions to the development wiki are mostly formulas, which are not something we’d want to publish.

But here we are. In the coming weeks, we are going to publish a few posts about the geography of the Beta 6 universe – mostly about the organisation of systems – and I will try to continue on the “Writing formulas” series. Speaking of that, my current “todo list” contains, well, mostly formulas that need to be written – distance computations (which is very boring, but almost finished), trading system, mining, corruption, influence and propaganda, happiness, population growth and migration… I am not looking forward to working on most of it, to be honest… but it has to be done.

Last but not least, I have kept on improving the planet pictures for Beta 6; at this stage, it looks like the ones I had uploaded to the current website for you to vote on are completely outdated. Since the new generator almost always manages to generate decent pictures, we might actually skip the voting part. Here are examples of the latest versions…

How, you say?…

The first thing is to make the new version about choices. Beta 5 was quite limited on this point – sure, you could choose to enact a law, or not, and you could decide to follow one strategy or another, that is either “fact-whoring” or “pop-whoring”. But that is far from enough.

One thing you should know about Beta 6 is that the amount of planets you’ll be controlling will be massive when compared to Beta 5 – probably up to a hundred, if not more, planets. You’ll also get to control star systems, not just because they contain planets, but as separate entities. There is already quite a variety of buildings, space stations and starbases available, and we are still in the process of adding more.

Technologies will change quite a bit as well. At the moment, a rough estimate would be around 600 or 700 technologies – we tried to write a list of technology categories, but stopped at 40 because we didn’t have all the elements. Some of these categories were quite generic, for example “Weapons” which we know will include at least 36 technologies.

Laws will work in a completely different way. In general, you’ll get to choose laws on a per-planet basis, and will have the choice between different options in different “classes” of regulations. The set of laws you enact will affect the direction your empire follows as a whole – which brings us to alignment.

Alignment describes the way your empire behaves in different domains, for example its attitude towards the different species that inhabit the planets it manages, or its attitude towards ecology … While this may seem trivial, being in an alignment or another will give you the ability to access completely separate branches of the tech graph, and more importantly, will allow you to reach an “achievement” in one of these alignments.

One of the problems we had with Beta 5 was the fact that money tended to accumulate, and “big” players would no longer find a way to use it. Well, Beta 6 will provide plenty of remedies to this. Many of the actions you’ll be able to perform will cost quite a bit of money; in addition, the fact that there are now 3 categories of weapons, which can only be blocked by a specific type of defense, will require you to adapt constantly to your enemy’s strategy when fighting a war … But then he might adapt to it … And you’ll need to adapt again … And so on.

Well, that’s all for now. Don’t expect us to post too often in here, but it will definitely happen on a regular basis.

Cheers,

TSeeker

The “New and Improved Features” forum has been an endless source of suggestions for future releases.

As those of you who go on irc.legacyworlds.com on a regular basis already know, we have started working on Beta 6 in a more organised way about two months ago. For now we are in a design stage (which should still last for quite some time).

What is somewhat frustrating for us is keeping everything that we plan for ourselves. Once again, the IRC regular visitors may have heard some words on the design plans and may have had some spoilers.

TSeeker and I both think the sharing of what we do has always been our first interest and is in my opinion the strength of the LegacyWorlds community. Sharing development progress shouldn’t be limited to IRC.

As a consequence, we chose to create this blog dedicated to Beta 6 progress updates. The only persons entitled to create topics there will be persons involved in the development of Beta 6. However, comments (answers) will be open to everyone.

As for the form of the progress updates, well: quotes from the development wiki, thoughts, perhaps single concepts for your imagination and curiosity to explore…

Hoping you’ll enjoy that.

Ju