The most important thing to know is that actions have no immediate consequences. Instead, everything updates once per minute. The game time, present on all pages, corresponds to the number of updates since the game was started, one “hour” of game time being in fact one update. By default, all durations are expressed using game time, although that can be modified through the preferences.

Empire overview and research

The first page a players sees once he logs on to the game is the empire page, which is split into two pages – an overview of the empire’s current situation, and the research status and management page.

The overview gives, as usual, some statistics about the state of an empire – its planets and fleets as well as its economic situation. The empire’s economic situation consists in three somewhat unrelated part: the empire’s cash reserves, cash flow (income from planets, upkeep from both planets and fleets, over a 24h interval) and current investments (how much money is being poured into constructing new buildings or ships). In addition, information regarding new messages and ongoing battles is available, linking to the appropriate pages.

The empire's overview page

Research in Milestone 1 is extremely simple, re-using the same principles as Beta 4 and earlier versions. There are two “lines” of research – civilian and military. Each line contains three technologies. As time passes, the empire’s planets contribute to research depending on their population, until a technology is discovered. At this point, the technology must be implemented in order to gain access to the new ships or buildings. Technologies do not provide automatic, empire-wide effects – buildings must be constructed.

Research view and management

Planet management

An empire’s planets can be managed using two pages – the empire’s planet list, and the individual page for each planet.

The planet list displays information about all planets in an empire. Since there is a lot of information to display, and because the user interface is not really roomy, tabs allow different types of information to be displayed:

• the “General” tab lists coordinates and population information (population size, happiness level);
• the “Economy” tab lists income, upkeep and profit (or loss);
• the “Production” tab corresponds to the activity of buildings on the planet: military production, which allows ships to be constructed, industrial production, which increases income, and growth increase, which augments the population’s growth rate;
• the “Construction” and “Shipyards” tabs indicate what is being built on the planet, in terms of buildings and ships, respectively;

Shipyards information from the planet list.

• finally, the “Military” tab displays the military situation on all planets.

The planet list's military situation view, including a planet under attack.

The various tabs in the planet list all link to the relevant part of the individual planet management page, with the exception of the military tab (which leads to the battle view if there is an ongoing battle).

The individual planet page consists in three tabs:

• the “General” tab lists various statistics about the planet such as happiness (which changes over time – an indication of the current change is displayed if appropriate), and allows general commands such as renaming or abandoning the planet;

A planet's general information tab, showing statistics, controls, and military situation.

• the “Buildings” tab lists the buildings present on the planet, including details such as the amount of jobs provided and the type of production, and allows the construction or destruction of buildings (which takes time and therefore uses a queue);

A planet's buildings and construction queue.

• the “Shipyards” tab controls the production of ships.

The planet page's shipyards tab controls the production of ships.

Fleets and battles

Once ships are produced by a planet, they enter an initial deployment phase during which they are unavailable. When this deployment finishes, the ship or ships automatically join the biggest fleet present in orbit. As usual, fleets can be moved around, set to attack other planets, merged, split or disbanded. All ships are capable of interstellar travel – there is no Hyperspace in this version. A fleet can be clicked to obtain more details on its current location, status and composition. In the case of moving fleets, a little more information is provided.

The fleets page, showing details about a moving fleet.

A fleet’s speed is determined by its “Orbit-to-Orbit Flight Time” (OOFT), which determines how much time it takes for the fleet to move from one planet to the next. It also determines the speed of interstellar travel.

When attacking fleets are present at a location, a battle begins. Because of the minute-by-minute nature of B6M1, there are no actual battle reports; instead, a battle viewer listing the battle’s current status and all events that affected the battle is provided. The history of past battles remains available at all time.

The battle viewer includes all battle-related information: fleet powers, ships and events.

The rest of the universe – friends and enemies

A very simple alliance system is provided. It works much like Beta 4′s alliances worked – they are basically a set of players, managed by a single leader. All members can see the list of members and planets. In addition, the leader can disband the alliance, kick members, accept or reject pending requests, and transfer leadership to another member. If the current leader leaves the alliance for one reason or another, the alliance is automatically disbanded.

The alliance page, showing the planet list with a planet under attack

The usual enemy list is also included, with the possibility to add either players or whole alliances.

The universe in B6M1 is pretty simple; the rectangular map only contains systems, which all contains 5 planets. The map is basically a grid, on which an empire’s own planets are displayed in green, allied planets in blue, planets belonging to enemy alliances in red, and planets belonging to other alliances in yellow. It can be displayed either in 3×3 mode, which provides a clear view of a small chunk of the universe, or in 5×5 mode, or in 7×7 mode (at which point names become unreadable, but colour-coded information becomes more useful).

Map in 5x5 mode, including all available colour codes.

The map viewer’s defaults may be altered from the account preferences.

Communications

A simple messaging system has been included. Folders are gone, so are internal transmissions. There are only two lists of messages – received and sent. Messages are colour-coded: grey for messages between empires, blue for alliance messages and red for messages to or from administrators. Because there are no rankings, it is possible to list all empires, alliances and administrators when composing a message. Because it was quite easy to do, direct IRC access is provided, using PJIRC (Java is therefore required to use this page).

A list of received messages (no alliance messages there, unfortunately).

This is a new release, a completely new code base, and it will contain bugs. There is no avoiding that. Because there are no forums at this point, and because forums are not the best tool for that anyway, a bug tracker has been included into the game’s interface.

Next time, on the B6 blog…

A post about the administration interface will be published on July, the 9th.