First of all, we'd like to announce that the next testing session with take place from April 26 to 28th. BEWARE! April 26th is a SATURDAY, unlike previous sessions! (see the start time in all timezones)

And if you haven't done it yet, we'd be eager to hear your comments about last session in the forum. (let's make the English section more alive!)

No introduction would be complete without giving all our thanks to all participants of this Session #10. Thank you everyone, you rock!

And now, the report!

On the technical side

The servers held quite good for our first 48h extended session. We had a few problems with some conquest maps (especially Octet systems...) but altogether, it has been a pretty decent session as far as bugs are concerned.

About the new features

The big new feature was the Deployable Gates system. After a few issues fixed by Erhune (and a few other minor things like the opening delay not being respected), the Gangs were able to deploy new gates correctly. And you seemed to like it, considering the number of newly conquered systems! We're pretty happy of the result, but of course this is only the first step and this feature will need more tuning in the future (for example maybe add indicators on the minimap for gate placement points?).

As for the new stats and speed settings for all ships, we didn't hear much about it. This is not very surprising to us because these are very subtle things, but they are necessary to reach a polished-enough play experience. We are waiting to see if the number of complains of new players about how the game "feel slow" will decline...

The new mini-tutorial did gather a few positive remarks, and no negative ones. Of course we don;t think it will be enough to teach the basics of the game, but this seemed to be a good first step.

One surprise on our side is that no Gang used the new command to rename systems they govern. That's probably because we didn't announced it loud and clear, and not that many of you read the changelog (poor Erhune, who spends so much time writing & translating them!). Now that this had been mentioned here, we'll see if this will change in the next session!

A Game of Gangs

Being able to deploy Gates means being able to extend your territory in unlimited quantities. And that, Clementine Space Industries realized it, because they ravaged the conquest rankings! Jumping from 2,000 u² to more than 5,500 u², the CSI dominated this session and got a wide lead on everyone else. Congratulations to them! As a reward to their vailliant efforts, we have decided to hand them the title of Administrators of Quadrant Alpha for the time being. This is only a cosmetic reard for now, since the Administrator right have not been implemented yet, but we want to see if this will be enough motivation for other Gangs to try to catch up to them!

The previous champions, Supremacy Inc, kept their second position and extend a bit their own territory. They were quite unlucky to bet it all on the conquest of Octet systems, which proved impossible due to a bug in enemy spawns. We apologize to them for that, with the hope that they will take their revenge during next session!

Even though old Gangs are still present in the ranking, this session saw the rise of many young Gangs that want their share of the Universe.

• 7 - Ascendance
• 8 - Les Gentlemen
• 9 - Lazuli

We have no doubt that all these Gangs will give all they have in the competition!

An interesting entry is the new Gang Ascendance which is our first Gang aiming toward the trading of territory, as their explained in their introductory post in the forum. We hope that they will form a strong basis of the Galactic Trading that will take more and more importance as the game servers get open more and more often.

A small postmortem for v0.16

Not good

• Conquest bugs (especially in Octet systems)
• Putting the local chat channel as the default channel, instead of the /alpha one.
• Not enough exposure on some new features

Good

• Conquest, power struggle, and dominating the Universe!!!
• New ship settings
• Repartition of players in the Universe

Some stats!

The Harvest

30,314 Medals (strong increase!), as follows:

• 17,453 for contracts (++)
• 7,216 for pacification (+)
• 5,645 for killboards (+)

Losses

• 187 ships lost forever (strong decrease)
• 3,975 items destroyed on board (increase)

Conquest of the Universe

• 197 sectors conquered by the players, 20 by the enemy forces
• 545 sectors "pacified"
• 4 sectors sold

And

• 192,548 Pirnats atomized (strong increase)
• 54,966 Asteroids destroyed (strong increase)
• 17,315 Vermillons liquidated (strong increase)

Global killboard

• 52,839 Asteroid S0
• 48,463 Pirnat Scout
• 37,394 Pirnat Wasp
• 24,681 Pirnat Spike
• 23,209 Pirnat Miner
• 22,713 Pirnat Scout MKII
• 10,394 Pirnat Hunter
• 8,075 Vermillon Hermios
• 6,642 Pirnat Pickelhaube
• 6,421 Pirnat Drake
• 6,048 Pirnat Miner MKII
• 4,490 Pirnat Hunter MKII
• 3,378 Vermillon Melenos
• 2,651 Vermillon Berthos
• 1,918 Vermillon Berthos Evo
• 1,595 Asteroid S1
• 1,097 Pirnat Lobstor
• 976 Pirnat Hunter X2
• 974 Vermillon Melenos Evo
• 397 Asteroid S2
• 319 Vermillon Merros
• 103 Asteroid S3
• 32 Asteroid S4
• 13 Pirnat Mega Blade
• 7 Pirnat Giga Blade

Which makes...

• 1,291 enemies per player

And at least, the top 10 medal reward for our valiant fighters lost in combat:

• 615 yfuu
• 592 arsdant
• 366 RodZilla
• 318 Grouroux (oh, the shame...)
• 292 JiuZhongBaXian
• 283 JiuZhongBaXian
• 245 Eniotan
• 241 Melitas
• 202 Ethinn
• 180 Palgork

Incoming features

This is something we've been mentioning for a long time, but at least! behold! the enemy forces will stike back in conquered systems, every few hours or days... You will need organization skills to keep then at bay!

At this occasion, we will activate automated e-mail alerts when your systems are under attack. This system will evolve in a full-fledged notification system accessible via the Gangs of Space API in the future.

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