We've been hard at work on a new game - Pirates of the Polygon Sea. You can learn more about it at www.praxiaentertainment.com and follow us for updates.

This new game will carry forward many of the core gameplay elements that made Beyond Sol great such as: city building, diplomacy, action-based combat, multiplayer, etc...

But it will also be a new and distinct game in that we are not only going with a fantastical pirate-esk theme but we'll be making many of the alterations you've been requesting from us here. Your feedback on Beyond Sol has been invaluable to us and we hope that you'll join us on the next great development adventure.

If you have any questions or feedback for us feel free to tweet or facebook our official Praxia channels.

Cheers,

For the holidays we are releasing an exciting new late-game event: Pirate Dreadnaughts! Is your fleet powerful enough to destroy these dreaded behemoths? The rewards are massive, but can you risk your entire fleet?

We only have a couple quality-of-life changes this week, but we are really enjoying watching people on the new map sizes and AI difficulty settings. We would love to hear more about your attempts at winning on the Impossible setting!

• Your camera zoom setting is now saved so you don’t have to zoom out every time you start the game anymore.
• The repair cost for dying has been capped at 100,000 credits no matter how advanced your ship is (it won’t reach millions of credits anymore).

This week we are pleased to release new map sizes so you can choose how big you want your solar system to be. We’ve increased the maximum number of AI players to 32 to take advantage of all of this extra space since the largest map size (Huge) has 3 times the number of hexes. In addition, we have added an AI difficulty slider when generating a new solar system so you can fine-tune how challenging you want your opponents to be.

• New map sizes: small, medium (original size), large, and huge.
• Increased maximum number of AI players from 16 to 32, but you may need to play on the larger map sizes or reduce AI starting size to reach some of the higher values.
• New AI difficulty slider to control challenge level of AI cities.

This week we decided to bump up the rewards for mining asteroid clusters a little bit since that activity wasn’t really competing well with missions or trading. This should give you an additional source of resources if you find that you are running low on missions or can’t find a good trade route. We’ve also got a few more bug fixes to the AI city building behavior.

• Spawn rate of rich asteroids in asteroid clusters increased by 15%.
• Average number of resources found in rich asteroids increased by 15%.
• Increased the amount you can zoom out the camera by 15%.
• Fixed a bug that caused AI cities to rebuild their Control Center in the wrong spot (not at the center of the city) if it was destroyed.
• Fixed a bug that caused AI cities to sometimes not build new hangars after some of their hangars were destroyed.

This week we have an exciting new feature to unveil. You can now enable your Military Stations to use their fleets offensively in a war. These fleets will attack any enemy outposts in their range, but won’t attack cities directly. With careful strategic planning, you can use this to decimate your opponents more quickly, but make sure you don’t let the AI cities do this to you…

• New option in the Fleet Management tab on the map screen when you select your Military Stations that will enable fleets to attack nearby enemy outposts during a war.
• Hovering over cities or Military Stations on the map now shows an indicator (in red) for sectors in influence range but owned by another faction. This also shows which sectors your Military Station fleets will attack during a war.
• Added a UI screen when hovering over the unlock player ship button to show you stats and price of unlock.
• Fixed a bug where you un-docked from your city when you upgraded your Control Center.
• Fixed a bug where you were teleported to your city if you landed at a Military Station while upgrading it.
• Fixed a couple broken hyperlinks in the main menu.

This week we made a bunch of balance changes and bug fixes to smooth out some of the frustrating areas of combat and AI. Defense fleets should perform a lot better now, and the AI will be a lot smarter about which targets to attack in a war. We would love to hear your feedback on these changes, so please visit our discussion boards!

• Increased Military Station max fleet garrison size from 16/20/24 to 24/30/36.
• AI cities are now more careful about attacking Military Stations and cities when they don’t have a strong enough fleet.
• Reduced hull strength of Radar and Mining stations by about 33% to make them easier to destroy.
• Fast travel no longer drains shields, so your shields behave normally when charging up and travelling in fast travel mode. Although this made escaping a battle an interesting tactical choice, it caused too many balance problems with AI fleets, so we decided to remove it.
• Lots of bug fixes to battle simulations, which should improve the performance of your military station defense fleets.

Thanks for all the great feedback this week! We are hard at work making balance changes and bug fixes to improve the gameplay experience. Below are the patch notes for this week’s update.

• Pirate bounties now get harder as the game progresses, but the rewards also increase.
• Debris fields now give more resources as the game progresses.
• Reduced volume on fast travel sound effects.
• Added a notification when trying to purchase resources and your inventory is full.
• Added an indicator when your city inventory is full and you can’t harvest any more resources.
• AI cities will purchase Dreadnoughts sooner.
• Some bug fixes for battle simulations (battles that take place when the player isn’t in range) to make results more consistent with real battles.
• Fixed a bug that caused the random event generator to sometimes generate the same event over and over again.

Beyond Sol is officially released! To celebrate version 1.0 we’ve added a number of fixes, balance changes and Dreadnoughts – harbingers of doom.

Read the full notes on our official forums[venturebeyondsol.activeboard.com]