VGA Planets Nu Blog

ChallengeSpaceYard has begun the hosting of a new blitz tournament. The last tournament was held in 0008 and was a big success culminating in an incredible 60+ turn finale between Admiral_Thrain and Joshua. Now is your chance to prove your blitz skills. The winner of this tournament will receive one free month of Premium membership!

There has been a significant amount of interest in being able to build additional tools and utilities for working with planets data and even some thoughts about building completely new clients for other platforms. To help empower our very creative community we have created a new application programming interface (API).

Since it is the holiday season, our gift to you is a whole set of new features, just the ones you've been asking for on your list. We have also made one change to the default config and have now made "beginner" games available.

The best commanders in the Echo cluster are showing their prowess early on. Despite the early collapse of the Cyborg homeworld the ship limit of 500 has been reached in just 25 turns! As was loudly stated in by Thin Lizzy... we now enter the mid game. Commanders will have to make do with what they have and now carefully manage their current fleets as they engage in combat to earn priority points to get critical build rights.

Recently a number of very long running games have come to a close. It seems appropriate to highlight our current longest running game Beta 3. Beta 3 was the 7th full running game to launch here at Nu. It began in the Nu Year -0002 which is November 2010 Earth time and so it has been running now for more than a year and has seen 162 turns.

In the Nu Year 2011, during a rare moment of diplomatic unity, the 11 races came to a new strategic information sharing agreement. The new agreement states that any race which has gained information through an alliance or strategic intelligence agreement will not share that information with other allies. A new Holiday Mode has also been created for Premium Members.

News bulletin from The Scorpius War, battle for our future Emperor. Nearly 1 full Nu Year has passed since the war began and as expected the Race Champions are off to an incredible and adventurous start. The most notable news coming out are the reports of the destruction of the Cyborg homeworld!

We have implemented a new public user feedback system for tracking your suggestions and bug reports. The new system is powered by UserVoice which allows each participant to vote up the ideas or issues they think are most important. This will allow you, our fantastic community, to help with prioritizing and tracking our work.

A terrible war for complete control has broken out in the Echo Cluster. The 11 races, locked in an intense battle for dominance, have each named an elite military commander to lead their forces to win total control and power on behalf of their race and individually to rise to the ultimate seat of power and ascend to the throne as the Almighty Commander of the 11 races, his Excellency, The Emperor of the Echo Cluster. So begins, the Scorpius War.

After much discussion (particularly about the cloak failure rate) we have decided to modify the default config to correct 3 of the 4 differences from the original default configuration. This will affect new games created after today.

The early-bird special offer of 3 months of free premium membership when you purchase a 3 month, 1 year or 2 year subscription ends on September 1st. Sign up this week to take advantage of this offer.

Planets Nu is proud to present - Stellar Cartography, an all new add-on to VGA Planets unlike any add-on which has been seen before. Stellar Cartography is a deeply integrated add-on which brings greater depth to the star map in Planets by adding Star Clusters, Nebulas, Cloudy Ion Storms and Debris Disks (Interstellar asteroid fields) to the map.

We'd like to send out a big thank you to Matthias Kuehl (aka Madinson) who has created an another set of 100 planet images to complement the 100 he's already made.

The long awaited first Championship Match will begin on October 1st, 2011. This is the battle to be crowned Emperor of the Echo Cluster. The top...

Several major enhancements have just been released to everyone after a week of testing by the test group. New features include zooming up to 4000% with a special warp-well view, touch screen support for iPad and iPhone (Android still to come) and now accurate minefield previews even when laying mines inside of existing minefields.

Eraulli is hosting a blitz tournement and is looking for 16 players to sign up, discussions are still ongoing for the format. If you are interested...

We are looking for about 10 - 20 active players who visit the site regularly and are comfortable with experiencing the odd problem.

We have just released a new version which has some slightly updated graphics for minefields and ionstorms. This is part of a larger series of changes...

There will be a 6 hour host time delay for games hosting today due to the downtime experienced over the past few hours on the website. We are...

A change has been made to the policy when joining "Officers Games". Previously you had to have the required game rank in the race you were choosing. Now with the new policy you may join any race in the game as long as you have the required rank in any race.

The explore map addon is here. Explore map is one of the traditional add-ons to VGA Planets. In an explore map game the map of the planets is not visible until you start exploring the map with your ships which makes the game more challenging.

Development began on VGA Planets Nu over 1 year ago and we've come a long way since that time. The first training games were being tested in September, October of 2010 and the very first standard game, Rebirth 1, began on November 3rd, 2010 and just ended a little over a week ago after 8 grueling months of conflict.

The "Diplomatic Planets" win condition has been running for the past couple of months and the first couple of games have come to a conclusion. Overall, the feedback has been good and this has been a very good step to creating a clear cut win condition which is achievable.

We'd like to send out a big thank you to Matthias Kuehl (aka Madinson) who has created an entire new collection of 100 planet images. Matthias has been a long time supporter of VGA Planets with his hosting site vgaplanets.de.

The diplomacy options have been upgraded and alliances now come in two new levels instead of just one. Share Intel and Full Alliance. The new alliance settings allow you to share a lot more information about your empire and your scanned enemies with your alliance partners.

A new Replacements wanted screen has been created to highlight open players in key positions. This is an automated screen which displays open positions where the race is currently in 1st, 2nd or 3rd or games which have just started and have open positions. There are currently two games with first place positions open, one for the Lizards and one for the Robots.

Rbos has created a new WIKI page for VGA Planets to allow everyone to contribute documentation, guides and strategies for VGA Planets. The new WIKI is available at http://vgaplanets.org. He has invited everyone to head on over there and contribute.

It has come to our attention that the amount of fuel burned while cloaking has been calculated incorrectly for cloaking ships weight > 100kt. These ships should burn their Floor((hull mass / 100) * 5) fuel per turn. Due to a small miscalculation all ships have been burning 5 fuel per turn regardless of their mass.

Due to the large amount of system resources running host takes and the number of players who sign in to make last minute turn changes we have...

Everyone has been waiting for this for a long time. You can now search for ships and planets using the Search (s) map tool. Hotkey is "s". Just type...

The colors we use to display the map are now editable.

We have just completed a tune-up and cleaning on the leaderboard. There were a number of small bugs which were causing some leaderboard scores to be misreported and we felt after 3 months that there were a few changes needed to make it easier to understand and aim for. A couple of the changes are significant.

When you open your turns today you will find that you have two new elements in your user interface. A small checkbox next to the X on each of your planet, ship and starbase screens and also a button in the navigation which toggles between "all" and "idle". This is the new Mark Ready functionality.

Congratulations to Figak (The Cyborg) and Kedalion (The Crystalline) who formed an alliance to win the first complete game at Planets Nu in 81 turns. It was a powerful victory leaving 5 empires annihilated.

A new checkbox has been added to the planetary tax screen entitled "Auto adjust taxes to maintain happiness levels". This checkbox's purpose is to adjust tax rates up or down (usually down) to keep happiness at the level that you have specified with your tax rate.

After many requests to setup private games we've decided to make it possible for any of you to create your own game for you and your friends.

We are happy to announce that VGA Planets is now a Facebook app. So you can conquer the Echo Cluster while you chat with your friends. Our main goal for porting to Facebook is to make the game easy to find and join for new players. Many people love playing games on Facebook and the turn-based style of play is very popular there.

This bug is going to affect everyone so we need to announce it here. It turns out we have not been calculating the military score correctly. Thanks to Admiral Thrain and ChallengeSpaceyard for discovering this.

After a lot of thinking and a long discussion amongst the players we have decided to change the default win conditions so that the focus is on capturing planets to achieve victory. This change will only affect new games going forward.

We have just released an update which includes a new "Warp Chunnel" button on Firecloud's which will help you to initiate a warp chunnel. Even more importantly if you do setup a correct warp chunnel it will be displayed as a dashed blue line on your starmap.

I would like to say a very big thank you to Jonathan Sue (aka JonnyDoH) a very talented graphic artist who volunteered his time to create a new Icon...

The VGA Planets Nu team is proud to introduce an entirely new hosting concept - Blitz Games. Blitz games are 1 on 1 games where two players try to defeat each other on a small map. This game format is designed to be completed in a few hours or a few days depending on the designated settings.

A small, but important to know, update has just been released. Your movement fuel calculations now include mass adjustments that occur when your ship is performing an alchemy mission (Neutronic Refinery and Merlin) or when your ship is building fighters or torpedos

A new feature has been released today which lets you "go back in time" to look at your previous turns. You can use this by clicking on the Time Machine link on your main dashboard.

We have frequently published that the default configuration on Nu is the original default configuration. Several players have pointed out that this...

A new scenario has also been released called "Basic Training" and the default configuration for new games starting has now been modified to include custom maps.

A new and improved Starmap has been released. It looks pretty much the same as the current Starmap, however, it can zoom up to 200%.

Special thanks to Lasse Karhu who composed the music which is used in the new homepage video. The track is entitled "Welcome to The Echo Cluster". Lasse is part of a two man team with John Chernoff who have been producing original scores for VGA Planets.

The Nu leader board has arrived. The leader board is the player ranking system here at VGA Planets Nu. At the heart of the new ranking system is the quest to become the Reigning Emperor of the Echo cluster.

Today we are introducing a new concept to the "Nu" community. It is the first step in a series of new functionality that will be released in the coming weeks to better define the war for the Echo Cluster.

A new map tool has been added which allows you to plot the minerals on planets in your empire.

Starting up all these new games has lead to a deluge of feature suggestions. We're going to keep packing them all in to the new game. In the long run we hope to have everything you can think of and a few more than that, for now expect to see a few new "play enhancing" features added each week.

Matthias Kuehl (Madinson) has begun contributing some artwork. You can see his first piece as your new dashboard background.

We are happy to announce that all functionality for VGA Planets Nu has now been added and the game is ready to be played by all. We are hereby upgrading the status of the project from Alpha to Beta and you are invited to come join in the new Beta games.

A fourth Alpha test game has been opened for joining.  If you are interested in participating in one of the first live multi-player games here on Nu you may join Rebirth 4.

The last three remaining functions have been added to the game as well as a button to transfer from Starbases to Ships. I'd like to talk for a moment about some implementation decisions we made when building the diplomacy and message system as well as jettison and ship to enemy ship cargo transfer.

A third Alpha test game has been opened for joining. Please keep in mind that the game is still in a very alpha stage, but very playable.

We are happy to say we have now posted the first full multi-player games here on Nu. As most of you know, the game is still in a very Alpha stage and we will almost certainly encounter a few bugs on the way. So the intention of these first games are to have a lot of fun, find the bugs and make history by being the first players to play here at Nu.

Long awaited Alpha Release 4 is here and it is a complete game. We're calling this release "Let Slip the Dogs of War", because that is exactly what we will be doing. The first full multi-player Alpha games will be played on this release.

A new scenario has been released called "Strike Early". This is a bit tougher scenario where you need to build an early army as soon as possible.

Announcing the first "playable" version of VGA Planets Nu: Alpha Release 3 entitled "An Empire is Born".

We've been working hard on Alpha Release 3, which is going to be a huge step up in functionality over AR2.  In the process we are moving to what will...

Here we are 8 days after Alpha Release 1 happily announcing Alpha Release 2 titled, "Build Your First Starbase". This release is a huge step up from the first release and starts to breath life into your home world.

We are very proud to announce the deployment of alpha release 1 (AR1). This release is the first major step toward the new version of VGA Planets. Our goals for this release were the development of the overall user interface framework as well as the hosting framework and data extraction from the original source data files to a more modern database format and we have achieved these goals.

The team has begun extracting data from the original file formats and publishing it here on the website.  The data is being moved to a database where...

We have decided to proceed with the project and are now opening the site up for Early Registration. With early registration you can sign up to reserve your game name and begin discussing the new version in the Forums.

The first screen design concept has been created. The intention of this concept is to give everyone a first look at the the idea behind VGA Planets "Nu" and how it may appear in the final version.

We achieved our first milestone today and are one step closer to a new VGA Planets version. The project has just reached 10% funding only 4 days after starting the fundraiser.

There have been a lot of questions from the community over the past few days. I wrote some long responses in the forum at RCWorld and am reposting them here so that everyone can see them.

No official VGA Planets project could start without the first step taken by its inventor, and the hero of the community, Tim Wisseman. So, when we here at Geographical Media decided we would like to create a new web based remake of Planets v3 we knew that before even considering the project we would need to contact Tim.