The first BETA for the fun game was in several ways successful. It managed to point out many critical areas of the game that require modification, it pointed out many bugs that required fixing (and were for the most part). It also tested my severs capability to host this game, which it has for the most part - though a larger downtime than I had hoped for and some of my auto mapping features were consuming more bandwidth than I had expected.

Thanks very much to the BETA testers that really stuck with it until the end, I realise it was pretty well screwed from day 2 or 3 in terms of balance and I appreciate the testing of the later game rather than just giving up!

Things to do for the next version, and problems cropping up in this version.

    Basic Game Mechanics
  • Remove the exponential population growth mechanic as it didn't prove to make for very good gameplay. Instead have population growth cap itself at the quantity of housing you have.
    • Construction and Balance
  • Create an algorithm that creates a good spread of construction times from a small time for a low ranked building, to a large time for a highly ranked building.
  • Update the database with balanced values of rock cost for buildings, whereby the amount your settlement can grow is dependant entirely on how much rock you can pull out of the ground (or buy!).
  • Special buildings such as airports can increase trade and tourism, also special building for specialties.
    • Twinning
  • Twinning needs to be more useful and exciting, maybe add some sort of tourism bonus cash moneys for empires that are twinned.
    • Market, Trading and Resources
  • Gems... hmmm.
    • Research
  • Universitys are pre-existant in your empire to give you a bit more to do at the start (even though you cant spend much!).
  • Research does not tally up to a million anymore, that mechanic was boring. Instead your research gets you settlement points which can be used to specialise your settlements. Each settlement will have the option to become a certain type of town, for example you might have a town specialised in mining so all the mines on that settlement get bonuses to the output. The other current specialisations are Defensive specialty and Offensive (Military) Specialty. Only a set amount of points may be spent on each settlement, where your capital city has more than this (so it isnt forced to build defensively).
  • Each branch of research will also carry with it tokens that can be spent on extra items - for example you could plough 3 informatics tokens into a spying agency to provide extra intelligence to your forces, or 5 agriculture tokens into Genetic Engineering for extra crop yields.
    • Empires and Settlements
  • Settlements will from now on have specialties (see research). Therefore design of your empire will be just as cruical to success than a mighty empire. For example defensive settlements around the edge, and your capital at the center.
  • Picking new settlements can be done at a much earlier stage of the game, costs alot less money and can only be placed on one of the predetermined spaces (that you see on the start map).
    • User Interface
  • Messages window needs CONSIDERABLE work, with the ability to send to multiple players.
  • The building planners needs to be a bit less clumbsy and more user [noob] friendly.
  • There are areas of the site (such as attacks) whose design it not of the same style as the rest of the site, ti lacks consistency. This all needs to be put into one style to make the game more consistent.
  • Settlement ID in the menu links will allow the player to use multiple tabs for multiple settlements
  • The empires page needs to list all the attacks on all the settlements in the empire.
    • Combat
  • The option to withdraw an attack is needed.
  • Twins should be able to help with impending attacks.
  • Combat needs extensive balancing.
  • Defeating a settlement allows its capture or its destruction, but losing an offensive attack should reap some loss bar the military losses. No more surrendering for our men and women, not even Jayne!
    • Money
  • Tax stuck into one bracket.
  • Extra money gained through tourism.

Bugs that still require fixing

  • Doesn't work with IE8... I hate you Microsoft. AJAX stuff needs to be fixed by me, CSS functionality and Rendering issues need to be fixed by Microsoft.