VGA Planets Nu Blog

We have released a new API which allows the complete data set of any finished game to be downloaded. This includes every turn for every player. This should help for any replay functionality you may want to create instead of having to call load turn hundreds of times.

We are proud to introduce new Mentors and Midshipmen games. Where experienced players play with new recruits to help them learn the game.

The first installment of the new Single Player game has been released. This installment includes 10 levels geared toward introducing new players to the game. All levels come with some tutorials which will help new players learn how to play.

Emperor Mentar has designed and released a new ship and dedicated it's design to his consort Lina. The new ship is called the Tantrum Liner.

For the past several months the Planets Nu team has been working toward the goal of making it easier for new players to learn and enjoy the game. We are happy to say that we have completed our first big step toward that goal. We have created a new and powerful computer player for Planets. We have nicknamed our new artificial intelligence "Hiatus".

The fifth Championship match has begun. The 11 races have once again named an elite military commander to lead their forces to win total control and power on behalf of their race and individually to claim 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. Please welcome the proud commanders participating in The Capricorn War!

After 158 turns the Sagittarius War Championship Match has ended. After an incredible diplomatic performance Mentar of the Missing Colonies of Man has won!

After considerable time spent in development and manufacturing our very own community member Thin Lizzy has created a Planets themed card game called Planets Super Trump! It went through a thorough round of testing by a recent gathering of some of the best Planets players in the Nuniverse in Munich this past weekend.

The latest significant round of changes to the Planets Nu system has been released. As always, we've been listening to your feedback and working hard to make Planets Nu a better and stronger community. This release features changes to the leaderboard, new campaign modifications and some changes to the Tenacity system along with numerous bug fixes and technical improvements.

A number of new enhancements have been made including integration with Facebook and new Forum categories and search.

Most people will tell you that tenacity is a great quality to have, especially if you're trying something challenging that takes a while to complete. - Introducing the new Tenacity Rating

YEAR 0029 - Breaking News! A massive intergalactic disturbance of unknown origins has ripped through the Echo Cluster causing subspace communication errors preventing many Commanders from communicating with their ship captains and colony governors.

There has been a lot of discussion on the new activity threads about the new version. Much of it very positive and some of it critical. I'd like to talk a little about the direction of Planets Nu and why we've made some of the recent changes. Particularly the new Activity Feeds.

Blitz Tournament 0029 is here! Hosted by ChallengeSpaceYard it is entitled "Breakthru the 4th dimension" and will feature 32 players.

Can't get enough planets? Some of the top commanders at Planets Nu, including Emperor Spacesquad, Thin Lizzy and EchoClusterVeteran have decided to branch out and create their own Planets Blog with detailed strategies, incredible video tutorials and plenty of fun commentary on the Echo Cluster.

Attention everyone who isn't already playing at http://play.planets.nu. The new website design at http://play.planets.nu will become the main website later this week. In its first stage the home page of http://planets.nu will redirect to play.planets.nu. The old version will continue to be available at http://planets.nu/home. There is a link to the page n the upper left corner of the new design.

It is with great pride that the Galactic Senate would like to unveil the new ship design of Emperor SpaceSquad. His Excellency has put much thought, deliberation and effort into his first act as Emperor, including designing from scratch the appearance of this beautiful ship. Working closely with his Crystalline designers he was able to craft a masterpiece worthy of his name.

The Planets Nu team has been busy working away on a new release of the website. We've taken the lessons learned from releasing play.planets.nu and the things that work from both sites and integrated them into a new platform we believe the community will love and which will help new players learn and enjoy the game as well.

The fourth Championship match has begun. The 11 races, have once again named an elite military commander to lead their forces to win total control and power on behalf of their race and individually to claim 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. Please welcome the proud commanders participating in The Aries War!

The results are in for the two voted prizes on the Scorpius War.

The Sagittarius War has produced a marvelous opening salvo of 60 turns entertaining all watchers with drama, intrigue, betrayal and sex appeal. These incredible commanders hit the Ship Limit in just 24 turns (a Nu record).

The 155 turn Scorpius War, a battle for complete control of the Echo Cluster which began in Year 0010 has finally ended. Spacesquad of the Crystal Confederation has strangled his opponents.

His Excellency, Emperor DungeonMaster has directed the resources of the Cyborg collective into the creation of a new Ship which will now become available to all Cyborg commanders who research and activate its plans in campaign sectors.

The results are in for the two voted prizes on the Taurus War.

First off I just want to thank all of you who have been developing user scripts for Planets Nu over the past couple of years. You've been doing some amazing work which has really helped to fill in the gaps of client functionality we have not had time to get to.. or didn't even know we needed.

On this day, on the 24th year of the Nu calendar, the imperial senate of the Echo Cluster recognizes DungeonMaster of the Cyborg as the Almighty Commander of the 11 races, hereafter known as the Emperor of the Echo Cluster!

EchoClusterVeteran made an excellent post requesting more details about the Campaign abilities. The questions and answers are listed in this post. If you have more questions to add to this list post them in the comments and we'll answer them here.

The third Championship match has begun. The 11 races, have once again named an elite military commander to lead their forces to win total control and power on behalf of their race and individually to claim 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. Please welcome the proud commanders participating in The Sagittarius War!

We are proud to announce the beta release of a new version of the Planets Nu in game interface as well as an all new web application to host it. We are calling this release Planets Nu Version 3. This release is a big upgrade from the current version and features a powerful (and fast) new map engine, new build ship screen and touch screen enhancements throughout.

All games have been migrated to the new database. Host is running and everything should be back to normal. Important Notes: 1) If you can press play...

The Planets Nu team is happy to announce the arrival of Planets Nu - Campaign Mode games. Resources gained from all of your standard games have been accumulating on your Officer home-worlds. These resources can now be used to research special new technologies and ship hull designs which may be used in Campaign games.

Destruction comes in many forms in the Echo Cluster and the Taurus War Championship match is no exception as the top commanders battle viciously through tactics, diplomacy and propaganda to achieve victory and become the Emperor of the Echo Cluster! For some... the pressure of command, or the realization of defeat can become too great. This turn saw a huge shift in the War as 2 races admitted defeat at the hands of their enemies and sacrificed their ships without warning!

After six grueling months of battling, along with a great deal of bug squashing, the tournament has finally been concluded. The ultimate champion of this tournament is none other than JKovalainen, the Taurus War commander of the Birdmen!

The Scorpius War is now 75 turns in and the war has gone into the trenches, a battle of minefields, more minefields and web minefields. It is an all out economic war.

We have released our first round of updates to the new system to http://play.planets.nu. Included in this is a new tutorial "assistant" who will walk...

The original planets.nu homepage has been restored. This week has certainly been one of the tougher weeks in the history of Planets Nu. It is clear from your response that the new version of the software we have presented to you this week is not ready for production, and not universally desired.

Wow! What a lot of energetic and passionate response we've had to our newest code release. In this post we are going to address issues regarding the new website, but not the new gameplay. There are many questions about the new site design and more importantly, a lot of confusion.

Over the past few months the development team has been working hard on designing and developing the future website and game design for Planets Nu. We are happy to announce that the new version has arrived.

The Scorpius War has been ravaging on for over 7 Nu Years, and after 62 turns of the sector 3 races have been annihilated and a few races have moved...

The Planets Nu player community has a significant number of software developers. A few of those players have been hard at work making additions and improvements to the Planets Nu user interface. These improvements can be optionally installed by you to improve your game playing experience.

We are proud to announce the beta release of an incredible new game format called the "Giant Melee" along with a host of other new features, fixes and improvements. We'd also like to welcome a new developer to our team: Zelrik.

If you've got your speakers on when you open your turns this week you'll be greeted by a sudden rush of sound and music. Definitely not what you are used to from your normally near silent Planets playing experience. We have added sound effects and music to the game and want to shout out a big thank you to two main contributors. John Chernoff a player who has composed individual theme songs for every race and Cory Troxtell of Dependency Injection who generously contributed his album Scifiology to serve as th

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 0011, 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.