[h2]It's been a while, but we are still working on this. 1.2.0 is delayed, until mid-November.[/h2] A lot has happened actually. Firstly, to apologize for the lack of communication recently. We have had a lot occur on the past month. Firstly, a ton has been going on in the background. Most of us are working on another project which we are getting started on and a third project exists in my head, with possibly two other projects being discussed at our studio. Universal Conquest is something which is still being worked on actively, but as I'm the main developer and I've ended up getting stupid busy over the past month or so, since the last update I've had a lot less time to work on it. We also hired 7-8 voice actors to replace the AI TTS in the game, so that's probably going away except as a backup. So, their voiceovers will be in this project shortly (after one of our Audio Engineers is done processing the audio) and we're going to have to update the credits substantially. We are also changing the name of the studio. We've lost a few people who contributed early on - our web guy for example from Darkweb Studios, ended up having many personal real-life events, was hosting the website. So, he could not stay on the project, we're having to migrate the website and are in the process of doing this and setting up new infastructure to eventually have multiplayer and a better setup enviornment He has my condolences, the game is dedicated in part to his mother, who I knew very well for a long time. RIP. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44247064/75195e9a0a855d117c4e9575e0c792e48c0c9901.png[/img] [i]A look at some of the new stuff we're working on, including the new Main Menu (WIP)[/i] Quite frankly, I've become been extremely busy - almost too busy to work on this. Over the summer when this was released, I ended up picking up a job at the local university, as when I had been let go from my last job was right before when this game came out. Since then, I'm back working full time at another software company for my day job. This is again, a hobby to work on - and because most of my time has been occupied with that and the one family member experiencing Stage 4 cancer or other family with other issues and I'm helping taking care of them, I spent all summer physically moving stuff and cleaning floors, etc. (UBI only exists on other planets, apparently.) There are other things I'm working on - for example I volunteer my time and money to help people out that I know, such as helping a number of people I know get through drug rehab or legal issues in my spare time. To the point that at some point in the future, to draw attention to the somewhere between 1,000,000 and 200,000 estimated people who died and have died of drug overdoses in the United States, we are going to add a feature called a "Drug Epidemic" that occurs when crime gets too high in a settlement, and will last longer than a regular pandemic, but have less casualties, for example. I have personally been affected by the one going on in the United States substantially, knowing a number of friends who have died in the Opiate Epidemic and if I can draw attention to it in this manner, I will absolutely do so. That being said, for future reference - if your controversy in this game is over things like "wokeness" or not being "PC" enough, I simply don't care. I've seen far worse than your favorite video game character being gender-flipped in real life. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44247064/c688374e81a93389e79c8758a71b3c26f1cc7ef0.png[/img] [i]We now have keybindings. (also WIP)[/i] Secondly, a bit of note. We often receive criticism on the UI. One of the reasons we designed the UI the way we did is... well at one point, I was a massive fan of a franchise about commanding and conquering various armies across the world, that's now somewhat dead. There's a part in one of the aforementioned games in that series where one of the factions you control an alien race, and in part - I based the UI on that. The problem is when I was thinking about this, I didn't realize that the UI itself in that game... wasn't designed for humans. To be fair, one of the more fascinating things I read during the research for the game was that strategy games are apparently popular among aliens (I'm looking at you Chris Metzen) - so who knows, maybe some of them are fans and have played it. Such that apparently the "Royal Game of Ur" is supposedly a game from the people (humans from another planet - moon specifically) known as "Anunnaki" that visited Earth a long time ago. Apparently Grey aliens play chess also. Some of it is already done, like a redone main menu, redone construction view, new humanoid portraits based on that information... we're going to redo the options menu, and if we get time - the generation menu. Perhaps aliens can handle the UI, being advanced often genetically engineered beings that travel the universe. But in reality, most of our fanbase and our customers are human - even if they aren't from Earth... so we have to change the UI so that it is playable for them. To the point that we've hired people on to help us do this specifically. So as part of a progress report, we're actively designing and implementing changes in the UI, to the point that there's going to be a lot already in the 1.2.0 release where the UI is going to look substantially different in some areas. Some of it is already done, but there's still a lot to do. We're leaving that for 1.3.0 release - and yes, we are behind on 1.2.0 for the reasons I already mentioned. But 1.2.0 is going to be a major, major update. Among some of the things we have implemented already in that update include terraforming - where you will generate a unit like a construction crew that will be able to modify the terrain of any world to suit your fancy, and have the terrain potentially spread across the planet... or change the atmosphere of a planet by constructing a very expensive settlement called an "Atmospheric Terraformer". We also added a bunch of things that are almost working, such as "Waypoints" and "Attack Ground" and things like pre-battle positing prior to a combat map like another famous strategy game series. Another thing we want to add is formations such as X, "Wall" and echelon formations if we get time (we might because I thought that was a damned good idea.) We're also redoing widescreen support because using the sales of the game I finally bought a widescreen, 4K monitor and I found that the game is... unplayable in 4K to the point that we're going to have to redo that. I was that broke all summer, seriously. So no, sadly - we're going to try to fix as much as possible, and then start letting people know it exists beyond a Steam search. We did end up implementing keybindings per request, and if we get time, we may even implement localization. We did have to cut some stuff because of time constraints. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44247064/da8afb80ec078ed04b3a52e545b310c4d29774c6.png[/img] [i] Some other UI has changed as well. (Again... WIP)[/i] Additionally, we have some other stuff planned and (and implemented). For example, we are adding in a new series of portraits, adding in an Earth start (with historical scenarios as an option in 2224 AD and 50,000 AD no less - complete with real world nations such as Kazakhstan that you can play as and a means of selecting them), the ability to carve up territory on the Earth start that will work like... say you put in "Assyria" or "United States" or "Russia" in the generation empire name and it will generate a civ with the same territories as those historical or real nations at the starting date, 60 something new planet starts to allow you to choose more specifically what kind of planet you start in (Such as "Island Planets"), a ton of new units that we're still working on, new settlements like Hospitals and Universities that are still halfway done, some changes such as increasing the materials gain and cap on planets per request, and a huge number of other bugfixes that we're slowly but surely working on. Once the new project is up and running, we should have this out sooner rather than later. One of the other things I'd like to mention - I want this to be clear, this game is a slight "milsim" in that the UFO research I did was to build a game that would semi-accurately portray how wars are fought according to UFO lore. It takes place in a fictional setting, and we are adding lore for it - the far future... but the principles are the same. There are no cheat codes in the universe we live in, unfortunately. For example, most civilizations end up having populations similar to the ones we depict, to things I've read like "Technology only advances to a certain point after industrial societies start for about 300 years or so". According to a bunch of UFO websites, infantry is a constant across the universe, wars are fought similar to human wars like we have them depicted, your standard issue weapon for aliens is something like a "microwave laser" that "phases" things and heats them up through dielectric heating like a microwave, most of the physics is the same, there are nuclear weapons and other superweapons used exactly the way we depict them, and so forth. As for drones, drones are actually relatively rare in interstellar warfare because they are expensive and aren't as effective as you might think. But yes, we tried to make this as accurate as possible. If it actually is, who knows. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44247064/9cffba7310449913d23d8b7d457d17279e846739.png[/img] [i]From what we understand from our research, how we have wars depicted is fairly accurate.[/i] For the record, I'm not a Scientologist, Raelian, or some sort of Heaven's Gate fan or something. At best, I'm just a guy who works for the government on occasion (and mostly private industry) who's been involved in some crazy stuff, who now tries to keep a somewhat low profile to avoid trouble - and beyond that I won't say more. I already get enough flak for that, trust me - you have no idea. I do have 5000 hours in Arma 3, so there's that (I enjoy milsims). There's a number of games that inspired this game, and if you've ever played any of them, you might know which ones I've played previously that didn't scratch that itch like the one I'm working on does - to me anyway. Quite frankly, I have to hold a double opinion on this, because quite frankly despite all the news media literally outright telling you that there's aliens and this isn't a joke, you're still going to get people who think it's bull - which frankly I don't care, this game isn't for you in that case. Neither is this game made for people who "I want X feature like in Y game" - there's a number of games that I've played that inspired me to make this one, and legally... I can't say which ones. Obviously if someone asks for a feature from a certain game, and it's a good idea - I'm going to try to implement it. So, you're welcome. But I'm not actually seeking fame or fortune for making it, I simply made the game I've always wanted to play, and I'm sharing it. It's that simple. There's nothing more to it. Take it or leave it. Yes, we are implementing as many features as possible that people suggest or fixing issues people have with the game... because I do want to make it playable for humans, not just aliens. We are recieving a lot of feedback, and we're going to fix all that going forward... but I want to wait until after the elections also to ensure we'll still be able to work on this. We regard the current build as "Stable" despite any issues. We're still working on the next update. We've had to delay it because of RL things and other projects. We would have burnt out had we kept going the way we were going. Hold onto your butts. Thanks, The Developer and Staff