A new version of the game has just been posted to the Play Store. This version has all the usual bug fixes (a big one is it should fix most of the cases where you come into the game and the screen is just blank) but also included in this version is a change to the way population grows.

Or, more accurately, it's a change to the way the population drops. To show you what I mean, here's a colony where we've run out of food. Once you run out of food, you population starts dropping. Previously, due to a quirk of the algorithm, having a low population focus meant the population dropped slower than having a higher population focus. But that doesn't really make sense, so now it's reversed: if you don't have enough food to sustain your population, your population drops faster with a low population focus than with a high one, as you can see below:

The screenshot on the left you can see I have a low population focus and it's dropping the population by about 10 per hour. The one of the right has a higher population focus, so it drops more slowly.

Another change is that your population will drop more slowly in general now, similar to the way population increases more slowly the closer you get to your population limit, now the population will drop more slowly the closer you get to zero.

Population "Cooldown"

Another important change is that when you populate a new colony, it enters a "cooldown" phase where the population will not drop below 100, for the first eight hours. You can assume the people who got off the colony ship still have access to whatever resources were in there to sustain themselves for a little while...

This is an important change, because it now makes colonizing asteroids more feasible. You can colonise an asteroid, safe in the knowledge that you're not going to kill off the population before you get a chance to build a Biosphere. You can see when you're in "cooldown" mode when the population delta is in yellow - it's telling you how fast your population would drop if you weren't in the cooldown period.

One of the common feature requests I've had for War Worlds is tha ability to "zoom out". I think it's a good idea, to help you plan your empire's expansion and also to help you find where your opponents stars are more easily.

But I think just a simple "zoom" function, which would just render the current view, but smaller, is not that useful. You want something that presents the extra information that you can get from a wider view in a new and useful way.

So to that end, I've been playing around with the idea of a "tactical" map. The idea of the tactical map is that instead of rendering the starfield as it appears in the regular starfield view, you get a view which removes a lot of the visual clutter and just presents the interesting information. In particular, the main point of the tactical map is not so much the individual stars as extent of your (and your enemy's) empire. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's a quick example of what I'm thinking of:

What you see here is just a test app I made to see what it looks like, but basically the red dots would represent stars and the green shaded areas represent area of influence. Basically, each of the stars inside a green shaded area is colonized by an empire.

So what this means is, if you were the guy on the left in the image below, you'd see quite clearly that the guy on the right is up to something...

This is just a quick test app I threw together to see how it looks, but I think this could be useful. Obviously the shading is not that great (it'd be nicer if the edges were smooth, say) but it's not bad for a first pass, I reckon.

You could tap on the individual stars (points) to see a little bit of an overview of what's going on at that star, and the ability to zoom into the full starfield view and then back to the tactical map would be have to be pretty seemless as well.

Of course, it'll take a little while for this to be integrated into the game, and I'm definitely interested in hearing anybody thoughts on this before I take it much further. Reach out in the comments below (on our Google+ community) with your thoughts!

Up until now, the only source of income for me from War Worlds has been the ads that show on the starfield and solar system view. But my costs have not been zero, and so far hosting is costing me about 10 times as much as I'm getting back from the ads (mind you, we're talking around $2 per day for hosting and 20c per day in income from the ads, so it's not exactly breaking the bank yet...)

However, I've never wanted to do in-app purchases that basically result in pay-to-win, where you get some sort of in-game advantages for paying money, and that's definitely not going to change.

Renaming Stars

So to help me out a little, in the latest update you can now rename stars which you control, for a one-time fee of US $0.99 (or whatever local equivalent). So if you want to rename 5 stars, it's 5 x $0.99 = $4.95. You can rename stars as often as you like, though it's $0.99 each time. You can only rename stars which you have a controlling number of colonies on (so if you share the star with another empire - natives don't count - then you can rename it only if you have more colonies than the other empire).

I'll have some screenshots of the flow once the update has made it through the Play Store (I can't do "real" purchases on my device until it's in the Play Store).

Tactical Map

Also in this update is the initial version of the tactical map. The performance is pretty attrocious at the moment, and it's missing a lot of features (for example, the stars are just represented as red dots, whereas I'd like to see them coloured to indicate what kind of star they are). Here's a quick screenshot showing what it looks like right now:

As you can see, it's definitely quite basic. But you can see there's some empires butting up against each other here, it's getting exciting!

Using the tactical map is quite simple, you just click the "Tactical" button from the starfield view, and it'll zoom out to the tactical view, centred on the same view you had in the starfield view.

Double-tap on a star in the tactical view and you'll zoom in to that star in the starfield view. I've found this is a great way to quickly zoom around the map and see exactly what's going on.

Of course, there are plenty of features that can be added to the tactical map, for example it just colours the areas based on which empire owns the stars. It could also put the name of the empire there. And as I said above, I'd rather like to see the stars coloured such that you can tell if it's yellow, red, blue, black hole etc. That should help you keep your bearing a little better. Finally, perhaps some kind of info panel could pop up when you tap a star.

Bug Fixes

And of course, there are numerous bug fixes and crashes fixed in the latest update. New features like the above always introduce the possibility for new bugs as well, though, so please keep reporting them!

Well, it's been a long one-and-a-half years, but War Worlds is finally ready for "release". You can now download War Worlds on the Google Play store:

Now, there's still features to be implemented, and probably bugs, too. There's only so much testing one guy with a limited set of devices can do after all. So please understand if you do download the game to be a little bit patient and absolutely contact me with any bug reports or feature requests!

I've written a fairly comprehensive Getting Started guide, which I highly recommend you take a look through before firing up the game for the first time (or read and play along is probably a better idea). The Getting Started guide only covers the first few stars you'll colonize and doesn't cover what happens when you encounter another human player in the game: that's up to you to decide!

I would also encourage anybody getting started with the game at this early stage to get involved in the mailing list. I will be setting up forums here for general discussion in the future, but for now definitely sign up for the war-worlds-testers@googlegroups.com mailing list to get involved!

I'm really happy with the progress of War Worlds so far. People seem to be enjoying themselves, which gives me a fantastic feeling! Thanks everyone for the support so far!

So today, I thought I'd just take a few minutes to talk about some of the short- and medium- term plans for the game so far. I don't want to have too much set "in stone" because I want to see how people are playing the game and the sorts of strategies that emerge as we progress. But I do have some plans for features and functionality at least to keep me busy for the next few months.

Short-term

Some of things I'm planning for the short-term (other than the obvious bug fixes and whatnot) are:

Upgradable Buildings

This has been a pretty common request so far, and it's definitely the next thing I'll be working on. Particularly when you look at some of the more exotic planet types (radiated, asteroids, etc) they'll typically have quite high mining scores, but low population scores. So that means you'll want to have a fully-upgraded biosphere on there to take full advantage of the mining.

Beacon

This was suggested in the Google+ community, and I really like it. Basically, you can build one of these and on the starfield view there'll be a constant pointer pointing back to your beacon, so as you scroll around you'll never get lost. Perhaps even a quick-tap to get back to your homeworld.

This would probably also require the ability to destroy, or "sell" buildings, so that you can build the beacon on another star as you expand.

Transport Ships

This was another suggestion from the Google+ community. These would allow you to transport goods (food and minerals) between stars. This way, if you're building something that requires a lot of minerals you can enlist the help of other stars.

Research Labs that do something

I put the "research lab" in the game not long before I initially released it, and they don't actually do anything currently. I'm thinking a research lab could be used to unlock higher levels of biosphere, higher levels of ships and so on.

Medium-term

And in the more medium term (so within the next couple of months), I'm hoping to do some or all of the following:

Alliances and Factions

The ability to form an alliance with other players. I was thinking of two kinds of alliances, first would be just simple one-on-one alliances between your neighbours where you agree not to attack each other for whatever reason. There could be additional benefits from forming alliances like this, such as the ability to see each other's scout reports and a private chat channel as well.

The other would be the ability to form factions which consit of many players. You'd be able to belong to whatever alliances you'd like (between factions or within factions or whatever you like) but you'd only be able to belong to a single faction. We could then have a global ranking of factions (and players) based on things like total cash, total number of ships, number of stars/planets colonized and so on.

Marketplace

Somewhere where you can trade ships and equipment. This could be a good way to get some quick cash before launching a big assault, or perhaps as a way to calling in backup in case you're attacked. The mechanics haven't been worked out, exactly, but I'm open to ideas!

And then?

I don't want to try and think too far into the future here. I want to make sure the game is evolving based on how people are actually playing it and so I like to keep my options.

At some point, I will want to start advertising the game more widely. I'm totally stoked by the reception it's had so far, but the only place I've mentioned the game is on Reddit's r/indiegaming, so there's plenty of scope for more there.