Lords of the Black Sun
Lords of the Black Sun is now Beta !
We are very pleased to announce that Lords of the Black Sun (previously known as Star Lords) has now entered BETA stage !
What this means for you as a player, is that development of the game has now reached a more advanced, (almost) feature complete, more polished stage. Over the past months we have worked hard to improve what the community felt was lacking when we first entered in Early Access ‘Alpha’ state back in December 2013, although never straying too far from the direction we set out on.
We worked very hard since the start of this project and for that we are proud, as well as very grateful to the community for the fantastic feedback we got. However there is still some way to go, and we hope to continue enjoying your support and patience, so that we can make certain that Lords of the Black Sun becomes the great space strategy game everyone wants it to be !
Here's a changelog of what you can expect from this new build:
- Improved AI: Now the AI fully uses the ship design component and its latest additions, designing more powerful ships and better managing its military forces making it a significantly tougher opponent.
- Major bug fixes and fixed some crashes and stability issues. Bug and crash fixes include the corrupted save files bug and the Trade Routes menu crash.
- Multiplayer is now being tested internally. While it's not available in this first beta release, it will be included as soon as we are confident enough with what we have, namely in the coming builds.
- Added revamped Light and Medium Draakian ships models
Cheers and hope everyone enjoys this new update !
PS: We are raising the price now that we have reached Beta version, but it is still cheaper than the final launch price will be, so don’t wait too long !
Star Lords name Change !
In order to avoid any possible confusion in the market, we have opted to change Star Lords’ name to LORDS OF THE BLACK SUN.
This name change, effectuated today, coincides with the game entering Beta-stage on Steam’s Early Access program today as well. More on that later !
Alpha 19.0 is live !
Here's a brand new build that introduces one major concept but mostly fixes several major bugs, and hopes to improve overall stability.
Here's the changelog:
-New immigration concept: Citizens from other empires can now migrate to your colonies and vice
versa, depending on several factors such as the living conditions, taxes and overall happiness of both your colonies and their native empire.
Immigration plays an important role on diplomacy and espionage and foreign grants for specific planets can be negotiated with other empires to ensure faster population growth.
- Major optimization in several areas of the game, major bug fixes and a tentative fix for the stability issues reported by several players. Some of the bug fixes include monthly payments, and missing generals in the Generals menu.
- Did some balancing on a few areas. For example, units can travel farther each turn and embassy and trade consulates won't have such a big impact on relations as they previously had, making it too easy to get another player to like you and arrange good deals.
- Updated galaxy view icons and symbol graphics for every race in the game.
As always, your feedback is very important for us so if you were one of those affected by these issues please let us know if this build fixed or at least improved the problem for you and if you noticed the framerate improvements.
Thanks !
Alpha 18.0 is live !
We are back with a major new build: Alpha 18 ! This new build should kill off those dreaded stability issues introduced back in Alpha 17, and also adds a bunch of improvements and major new features.
Here's what you can expect:
- A budget adjustment screen is now available. You can now adjust the budget for crime, health and propaganda (if you have the respective domestic policy enabled), as well as research and social welfare. All this makes your economy more easily manageable and adds some more depth when it comes to empire managment.
- Added Social Welfare concept: The larger your population, the more expensive social welfare becomes. This helps balance mass colonization and can also be used as a means to fight poverty, strikes and rebel attacks for instance.
- Fixed stability issues. Due to people having so many different PC configurations we still need to check if everyone is able to play the game normally, so as always your feedback is very important for us.
- Renewed ship design component: We added a lot more depth to the ship design component and greatly improved the UI, with the possibility for instance to add more than one weapon in one ship. This isn't final and there are some placeholder graphics but all this will be addressed in the coming builds.
- We got rid of the double clicking to go the galaxy view, and got rid of the previous zoom limit, making it possible to play the game however you want.
- Balancing: ships move faster and can move further each turn than in the last builds, and taxing is more profitable than ever.
- Added several new random events.
- A new batch of bug fixes.
As always, we are looking forward to your feedback and thanks a lot for all the feedback we got so far. :)
Cheers !
Alpha 17.0 is now live !
We're back with a new Alpha build, introducing some major new features, improvements and important changes and bug fixes.
Here's a list of what you can expect from Alpha 17.0:
- Added Embassy and Trade Consulate concepts in diplomacy: An Embassy and a Trade Consulate is needed in a planet belonging to one of the parties to unlock certain deals such as an Alliance or a Free Trade agreement.
- Added Threats in Diplomatic Negotiations: Your Reputation plays an important on whether or not your threats will be taken seriously and can be used to get otherwise hardly accessible deals.
- Added Monitoring Diplomatic Activity intel mission: Your spies can now track when the target empire signs certain deals or when they propose to impose an embargo or declare war on another empire for instance.
- Added Trade Routes menu: This menu gives an overview of all the current trade routes you have with other empires.
- Improved the AI's handling of diplomacy and economy.
- Added a '?' icon next to the space debris, to make them more noticeable
.
- Added Shortcuts for camera control (Hold TAB to rotate the camera, Page Up and '+' keys to zoom in, Page Down and '-' keys to zoom out)
- Added 'Total War' game option: All the players start at war with each other.
- Bug fixing: Fixed several minor and major bugs, including a couple of crashes (including the invasion crash), and the game stuck on AI turn bug.
- Balancing: Ships have 20% more movepoints so they can move farther in less turns, and research is 20% faster. Greater accuracy in combat: Missing constantly isn't fun and could end up being frustrating so we tweaked the hit chances.
Have fun !
Alpha 16.0 is live
We have just released Alpha 16.0, here's what you can expect from the new build:
- A new game creation screen: You now have a single menu with three tabs: Race Selection, Galaxy Settings and Game Settings. Each of these tabs has been greatly improved from the previous menus, with less cluttered and better organized information.
- Stability improvement: We implemented a series of experimental fixes that should fix most (if not all) stability issues. Regretfully, of these experimental fixes involved temporarily removing the weapon and armor ship parts from the game. These will be reinstated in a later build. It's very important for us to know if these fixes are working in a variety of PC configurations, so any feedback on whether or not the game still crashes for you is very important for us.
- The domestic policies mechanic has been fleshed out and further balanced, with various random events having an impact on the population's approval of certain policies. Now, an event message box will pop up when the majority of the population disagrees with one of your policies.
- A new batch of bug fixes: among them, most (if not all) of the full-screen issues (such as the screen only displaying a part of the UI for example) should be fixed, the tutorial text is no longer out of bounds and the crashes on loading a game should be gone once and for all.
- Some general balancing has been done, most importantly, every player now starts with 5000 BC, to make the early game more challenging, and exploration more rewarding, with valuable space debris having a bigger impact than before.
- Graphical Update: Improved backgrounds and updated the ship models for the Krifith Empire. More improvements in this aspect will be introduced incrementally.
We hope you like this new update, and have fun !
Alpha 15.0 is up
This update took a bit longer than the last one but hopefully it will be worth the wait.
Here's what you can expect from the new build:
- Revamped UI visually. In addition to the visual changes, some menus have been improved such as the Colony Management menu. There's still some work left to do in this regard but we're looking forward to hear what you think so far.
-The Domestic Policies component has been finished and enabled. Other than having a impact on certain aspects of your empire and government form, some domestic policies can trigger certain events, while certain events can cause your population to approve or disapprove certain policies.
The respective tutorial will be available in the next build.
-This build feature some important bug and crash fixes such as the AI not building fighters (bug introduced in the last build), some buttons such as the save and load buttons not working correctly, and the race portraits not being rendered correctly.
-For people with issues with changing resolutions we have included a StarLords( WIndowed) executable in the Star Lords folder (Steam/steamapps/common folder). As the name implies this executable will always start in windowed mode.
In the next build you can expect some new features, further UI and stability improvements. In the meantime and as always we're looking forward to hear what you think :)
Cheers !
Update: 14/2/2014
15.1 version released
This minor update fixes the tooltips in the colony menu; adds a warning when you try to build something without having the required funds; adds mouse wheel scrolling in the Build Queue and Building and Units list and fixes the double click to build/delete from queue bug.
Alpha 14.1 is live !
Alpha 14.1 is now live on Steam.
Here's what you can expect from this new build:
-Major optimizations, the game should now run much faster and smoothly. In one of our tests, a low end PC (roughly the minimum specs) that struggled at ~ 20 FPS in a small galaxy could now play a game in a big galaxy at steady 40 FPS. We still need to make sure these optimizations work well in every system configuration so your feedback on this is greatly appreciated.
-Mouse and keyboard input is now frame rate independent. What this means is that the mouse will no longer lag and keyboard input will be detected regardless of how slow or fast the game is running. Again, some big changes underneath were made to make this possible, so if any issues arise please let us know.
-The Huge galaxy setting has been unlocked. Thanks to the important optimization we made, we are confident that most people should be able to play in a huge galaxy without having too much of a framerate hit.
-Added new graphical effects such as shadows on the planet rings and a fog effect and readjusted the image colors and backgrounds.
That's all for this week. We are aware that some people are experiencing frequent crashes, which will be the main focus of our next update, along with the addition of new features and content.
Have fun everyone :)
Alpha 14 is live !
The brand new Alpha 14 is live !
Here's some of the biggest additions to this build:
-Reworked the brightness, contrast and lighting in the game, background generation and how planets look. We also tweaked the bump and specular maps of most of the ship models in the game.
-Reworked some menus, such as the Research menu and the Empire menu and brightened them up signficantly.
Don't worry though, we are far from done with the improvements in this area and you'll see more changes in the coming builds.
-We have several tentative fixes for the crashes some people have been encountering. We also disabled Steam Achievements for this build as one of the possible causes for the crashes is the Steam API. They will be reactivated as soon as we find out if they are causing stability issues or not.
-The keyboard input and click lag issues should be fixed.
-Did some major optimization in several areas, the game should now run significantly faster.
-You'll notice there's two new buttons in the Empire Management menu, namely "Budget Adjustment" and "Trade Routes". These are some of the new features we'll be introducing in the upcoming builds.
-Other than that there's some bug fixes and changes under the hood to pave the way for what's coming.
Like I said in the previous announcement, we're going to start to release more incremental and frequent updates. We expect to release Alpha 15 next week.
As always, your feedback is very important for us, if you encounter any new issues in this new build please let us know.
It's specially important for us to know if the crashes fixes and optimizations worked for you.
Well that's all from me, hope you enjoy this new build :)
Thanks !
Update: There were two game breaking bugs introduced in this build, we've since updated the build with the fixes to these issues. If you are still running into issues, let us know.
New build coming
First off, we hope 2014 will be a great year for everyone! Best wishes from the whole Arkavi team.
For the ones who are wondering what we have been doing. We are going to release a new Star Lords build this Friday/early next week with some important UI changes and visual improvements as well as a good amount of bug fixes!
From now on you can expect more regular patch updates. Initially we planned on only releasing big updates but we have decided to release updates more frequent. This way we can test out features and perform bug fixes faster while you get to play the latest version of the game faster.
I also want to thank you in the name of the whole Arkavi team for the huge storm of suggestions, bug reports and feedback you sent our way since Star Lords was released on Early Access. Sometimes it's tough for us to reply to each and every one but we read every post and write down all the suggestions we can find.
Again, thank you :)