As I mentioned back in April, the Alpha backend, which ran on App Engine, was costing me too much to run and would eventually need to be shut down. Since that announcement, and the opening of the Beta realm, usage of the Alpha realm has dropped quite drastically (yay!):

Well, now the time has come to make it official: effective June 30th, the Alpha server will be shut off.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to migrate the alpha data to the new infrastructure, so you will need to start afresh on the Beta.

Blitz

It's not all bad news, though. I've decided to experiment with a new style of realm, which I'm calling "Blitz". When the Alpha realm shuts down, a new realm, known as "Blitz" will start up.

The idea of Blitz is that it's functionally the same as Beta, with one very important difference: the universe is reset at the end of every month. Your goal, then, is to expand as far and as quickly as possible within that month. The leaderboard in Blitz will therefore be slightly different to the one in Beta, in that it will still show you your current rank as in Beta, but it will also show you your rank for the last three months as well. So you will be able to compare your relative performance each month.

There will (likely, it's not 100% confirmed yet) be a website where you can see your past and current rank in Blitz and I will also provide a simple API so you can integrate the data with other websites as you like.

Other things

The amount of work I need to do to get Blitz up and running is actually fairly small, so obviously that's not the only thing I'll be doing this month. The main thing I'm planning this month (apart from bug fixes, of course) is updates to the colonization and taking over of planets. Currently, your only option is to destroy and re-colonize from scratch. But a number of people have requested (and I agree) that the ability to integrate enemy colonies into your own empire is also important.

Integrating colonies will be a matter of employing propeganda to convince the population to join your empire. Native colonies will be fairly easy to convince, but enemy colonies will be much trickier (not least of which because the enemy can deploy propeganda of their own to counter yours).

More details of how these two things will work will be forthcoming soon, but leave your ideas in the comments below, or in the Google+ community!