An empire is identified through its empire name. There may only be one empire using a name from a single account at any given time. An empire possesses various quantities of different resource types. These quantities are always greater than or equal to 0, as debts are handled by damaging fleets and buildings.

Research

An empire may have implemented a set of technologies, and it may also be researching technologies. For each technology being researched, it is necessary to know the amount of accumulated research points. A priority (low, normal or high) may be assigned to a technology being researched.

Empire-controlled planets

An empire may own planets. Each owned planet may be in the process of being abandoned, which implies knowing the amount of game updates left before actual abandon.

All planets currently or formerly owned by an empire still include the empire’s configuration of the planet. This “configuration” includes:

• the extraction priority for each type of resource,
• the default name, tactics (target selection criterion and target selection mode), attack strategy and defence strategy of fleets produced by the planet,
• the planet’s battle tactics (target selection criterion and target selection mode),
• the building priority for both the civilian and the military build queues.

Visited / known planets

The last known status of any planet visited or formerly owned by an empire is stored. In addition to the game update identifier at which the information was last obtained, this includes information about the planet’s population, buildings on the surface and, if the planet had been scanned for resources, the amount and type of detected resources. Fleet information is also included: for each empire possessing fleets at the planet, the amount of ships and current mode are retained.

Empire-level diplomacy

An empire may define two types of enemy lists: enemy empires and enemy alliances.

An empire may define up to 5 ordered trusted allies, which are other empires to which an empire grants the privilege to move its fleets. A trusted ally entry is either pending or validated. Each empire may also define a T.A. blacklist, the list of all empires which are not allowed to give an empire trusted ally status.

Alliances

An alliance is identified by an alliance name. It must have at least one member empire, and one of the member empires must be the alliance’s leader. In addition, an empire that is not a member of an alliance may be requesting to join one alliance. An empire may only belong to or be requesting to join one alliance at any given time.

Milestone 1 is definitely not a good game, in that there are no incentives for anyone to actually fight (which was also true of Beta 5, with the exception of corruption which never really worked as anticipated). If the next step had been planet management, as was initially announced, it would have made it even worse, as the relatively heavy Beta 6 rules on this point would have added complexity, but no incentive, and no reason to spend money on anything other than just “breeding planets”.

Milestone 2, reloaded

The (new) second milestone must therefore concentrate on bringing these two elements to the game.

First of all, the new ship design and fleet management system will be added. Ships will be capable of carrying three different types of weaponry (beam weapons, mass drivers and missiles), as well as their countermeasures (shields, armours and point defences, respectively). But since a weapon in space isn’t really much of a viable ship, other parts will be provided – hulls of various sizes and engines. Finally, a “special module”, the drop pod, will allow ground troops to be deployed. A few default designs will be provided, but you will have the option to customise the designs or to create new ones.

Why is this important? Because, by changing the fleet’s configurations, you might gain an advantage on your enemy. For example, if you are at war with someone who uses mass drivers and shields, you might want to construct or refit ships to use heavy armour and missiles. This constant need to adapt will cost money, which should take care of one of the problems mentioned above.

The second problem remains, however. Why would you go fight your neighbour if there is no actual reason to do so? The solution is relatively easy to find. Why are there wars, in the real world? The major reason for that is resources. As a consequence, the resource system which was planned for Milestone 4 will be added in the next release. However, to keep things simple for now, resources will only be found on planets (which will remain the only available map objects for the time being), and won’t come in too many varieties. Most advanced technologies will require resources to be used.

While what we just discussed hopefully took care of both major problems, they introduced new ones.

A consequence of the new fleet system is that the hastily designed, totally unbalanced battle system from Milestone 1 has to go. This is not a bad thing, it’s just worth mentioning.

Many ship parts, many new types of turrets (as they would have to follow the same pattern as ship weapons), mining facilities to extract resources… The line-based research system of Milestone 1 will not be sufficient to handle this. A graph-based research system, similar in structure to Beta 5′s, will be implemented. It will not feature any optional technologies at this point, as this would require some form of technology exchange. In addition, the “research budget” system used in Beta 5 will be replaced with a much simpler system allowing per-technology control.

In addition to the above features, which should introduce major changes to the gameplay, a few minor elements might be added, depending on how much time I have: a new user interface as well as replacements for both internal messages and the “normal” messaging system. The French translation may or may not be included.

Because of my relatively heavy schedule, Milestone 2 will be released sometime between April and June of 2011.

So, what about Milestone 3?

Milestone 3 has become more distant. It will definitely feature the new planet management system (from M2 in the initial post), the new economy and in-system objects (M4). It will also include forums, although its alliance management will remain simplistic – this will allow Beta 5 to finally rest in peace. It might also include the new universe structure, but that is a big “maybe”. A few alien races might be present as well.