The shape of things to come
One thing that has become clear recently is that Beta 6 will not be the same game at all; while Beta 5 was already very far from Beta 4, it still amounted to the same principles: build factories, research technologies, build more ships than your neighbour and then bomb him back to the stone age. Which is basically one big pissing contest. We are going to try and avoid that.
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.