Planets Con Overview - State of the Nuniverse

Over the past weekend Planets Con 2018 saw a gathering of Planets players from around the world. The Planets Nu team took the opportunity to release some new features during our annual State of the Nuniverse presentation. 

This post highlights some of the key elements which were presented. 

New Campaign Features:

Feds - Advanced Recycle

Rebels - Hide! Mission

Crystals - Minefields Save Fuel

Privateers - Hide! Mission, Rob Fighters, Pleasure Planets

Robots - Hardened Mines, Dense Minefields, Minefields Save Fuel, Build Robots, Internal Temp Regulation

Empire - Galactic Power

- You can see the details of all of these exciting new campaign features on the Races page under each race. 

More Mobile Support

Fun Fact: Within the past 2-3 years average mobile screen resolution has grown to be similar in size to the desktop computers when WinPlan first came out - 640x480 which is called "VGA".  

One area of development we are focusing on is improving support for mobile. With phones getting bigger it is becoming more and more possible to play turns on your phone. A new browser based mobile version is now available at http://mobile.planets.nu - this version is still in development, but since it is already far superior to hitting the legacy planets.nu interface from your phone you will be automatically directed there if you are on a mobile device.  

Our goal on mobile is to make you want to play your turns on your phone, to leave your laptop behind when you are on vacation and to have fun opening your game from anywhere you happen to be. 

Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced Rulesets

The second big area of development is reducing complexity of the game for beginners while maintaining the feeling of the game. To enable this, new settings are being developed to turn off various features of the game. We envision a new beginner ruleset which will exclude some features of the full game. For example

Beginner: No Fuel, No Supplies, No Ammo, No Minefields, No Warp Wells, combat complexity (left/right) and other FC features removed and Individual Ship Limits (PLS).  

Intermediate: No Fuel, Individual Ship Limits. 

Advanced: Full featured rule set.  

We will experiment with the different rulesets over the coming months to see what works best to help people learn and like the game without the full complexity.  These new rule sets should replace the Academy format.  

Smarter Assistant

The assistant is also getting a big upgrade and a voice! Our goal with your little bottom right assistant is to make him so smart it feels like you've got a real person looking over your shoulder giving you tips and helping you learn to play. He's becoming more aware of the current context of a given situation and now that text-to-voice technology has advanced tremendously over the past few years he'll be able to talk to you about your turns.  

More Options for New Players

We also intend to have more startup options for new players. There is clearly no "one size fits all" signup option. We intend to make it easier for new players to decide the best path for them when signing up. 

Possible options will include:

• Join an MvM game.
• Start a private game for friends
• Single player vs computer
• Blitz
• Join a public game. 

Many of the above changes are already well under way and there are some fantastic discussions taking place on the feed. We love the feedback and are following those discussions closely!