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After this morning's testing, there are a few more "known issues" in today's beta than I would like, but we are going ahead with it as we need to get more feedback on the economic balance before making this official later this week. Expect it to show up in the Members Club sometime this afternoon. I will make a post here once it's ready.

I'm looking forward to it! I hope you will continue to update the game until you need more money. Then... make an addon [:D].

ORIGINAL: OberonDark
I'm actually going on a school trip and will have no time to play any games. We're going to Epcott, Universal, and competing in Disney World on Friday (I play Trombone).

Good luck [:)] let us know how it goes

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

After this morning's testing, there are a few more "known issues" in today's beta than I would like, but we are going ahead with it as we need to get more feedback on the economic balance before making this official later this week. Expect it to show up in the Members Club sometime this afternoon. I will make a post here once it's ready.

Erik, you probably would do this anyway, but you would save yourself some grief if your post announcing the 1.04 beta listed those "known issues" that you refer to.
For my part, I am really looking forward to seeing what you guys have done with the economy!

I'm still not clear on whether this works with existing saves.

It does, but you really need to start a new game to have the full effect of the rebalancing and the new features. Old saves will open, but will not be an accurate gauge of the new balance.

Here's what's coming later today:

v1.0.4 Beta – April 20, 2010

Public Beta Update
Please Note – This update does create a new save folder, although it will work with previous saves. You need to navigate to the previous version save folder to open your older saves. We recommend starting a new game in order to get the full effect of the changes and improvements, as some will not apply to older save files.
Also, this update may reset the automation settings in your Options and adds new ship filtering options for the top zoom level in your Advanced Settings on the Options screen. Please open the Options screen again to adjust them to your preference. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Known Issues and Testing Requests:
The economic balance needs some additional tweaking and there may be one bug remaining in the new code that sets money/cash flow to a non-numerical value. Because of the degree of rebalancing required after the earlier economic fixes, we need more feedback here with different race and empire types and galaxy sizes to make sure things are looking better than in previous versions.
We are also very interested in getting more feedback on the new auto-engage and auto-refuel code for manual control ships and how it performs at various game speeds. There may be some minor issues remaining here which we will aim to fix before the official release of 1.0.4.

Bug Fixes:

1. Races with special tech now have requisite resources at startup to build ships using the special tech
2. Medical and Recreation center components now work at bases other than space ports
3. Fixed crash with defeated 'ghost' empires reappearing and 'ghost' ships visible in the mini-map
4. Fixed crash that sometimes occurred when viewing a Construction yard list sorted by some columns
5. Fixed various other minor crashes
6. Designs for Resupply ships, Colony ships and Construction ships now have size limits, even though built at colony. Size limit is current maximum base construction size. These civilian ship designs also have some minimum requirements for the number of certain component types that must be present.
7. Fixed issues with super-luxury resource distribution in small galaxies
8. Can no longer retrofit to designs that are bigger than your current construction tech allows
9. Fixed bug where freighters sometime stack up waiting to dock at a space port


Game Balance Changes

1. Racial bonuses apply in more gradual manner for multi-racial empires - will only get full bonuses if a race comprises at least half your empire's population
2. Balanced economy with tax resistance and corruption so that income does not vary wildly between large empires and small empires - as your empire grows, increased tax resistance and corruption consumes a lot of revenue, meaning that large empires should no longer have excessive income.
3. Rebalanced trade offers so that valuations for tech, bases and colonies much higher. Valuations now also scale quite dramatically based on how much the other empire likes or dislikes you
4. Research speed has been halved
5. Empires now much less likely to colonize in another empire's system
6. Your empire's reputation now has less impact on your colonies if the population at the colony is aggressive and unfriendly. In other words, citizens of war-like races aren't so concerned about you having a poor reputation.
7. Positive reputation impact from destroying pirate ships has been lowered, but positive reputation impact from destroying pirate bases has been increased.
8. Ending a war no longer completely resets attitudes, there may be some lingering animosity
9. Other empires much less likely to accept unfavourable trade offers
10. Private ships can now only be armed with a single weapon - this armament will not cause any offense when they enter other empire's systems

Fleet and Ship Management Improvements

1. Holding down the Ctrl key while right-clicking to assign a mission now overrides the default mission for the selected ship. This allows you to override the default right-click behaviour and gain access to a comprehensive pop-up menu to select the mission you want, e.g. military ships can refuel at a space port instead of patrolling it, troop transports can refuel at a colony instead of loading troops at it
2. Added filtering for ship and base icons at galaxy zoom level - can selectively enable/disable ship types displayed at galaxy level. By default civilian ships are turned off at Galaxy zoom level. Please see the Options screen, Advanced Display Options to change this to suit your exact preferences.
3. Manually controlled ships will now automatically refuel when low on fuel, and then return to their previous mission
4. Manually controlled ships will now automatically engage enemy targets without needing to be manually directed to each target. They will then return to their previous mission, e.g. patrol, escort, etc
5. Patrol missions now automatically reset, i.e. a manually-controlled ship will stay at a patrol target until you tell it to stop
6. Fleets should stay together better than previously
7. Fleets should not cancel their missions when advisors suggest other uses for them

Ship Design and Retrofitting Improvements

1. Added mass retrofit option in Ships and Bases screen. Multi-select ships from the list and click the retrofit button to select the design to retrofit to.
2. Added new design subroles: energy research station, weapons research station, industrial research station, high-tech research station, monitoring station, defensive base. These types of bases are no longer AI-designed if you turn off automation for ship design
3. Design screen now shows all latest designs (when Show Latest Designs selected), regardless of whether you can build them or not.
4. Added maximum weapons energy use to Design screen (top of Weapons panel) so that you can compare reactor power output to optimize military designs
5. Added energy collector to default military ship designs

Other Improvements:

1. Expansion Planner now always shows colonization and mining targets, even when they are considered unimportant
2. Slightly fewer surprise attack suggestions from advisors
3. Message added in research progress bar to indicate when you have completed all research in an area

manual fleets auto refuel! yeh.. now if we can just figure out a simple way to deal a death blow to pirate rebul scum! lol

oh nice! eagerly awaiting the new patch and when its out, time to update my compilation

Wow

What a list!!!

Thank you

3. Manually controlled ships will now automatically refuel when low on fuel, and then return to their previous mission
4. Manually controlled ships will now automatically engage enemy targets without needing to be manually directed to each target. They will then return to their previous mission, e.g. patrol, escort, etc

These changes are nice.  Keep up the good work.  Please append system and planet name to random moon name.

Excellent.......Matrix just keeps reinforcing why I only buy Matrix games now a days. You rock Erik.

great update!

any eta on getting the AI to adapt to other empires that are attacking it? im finding that the AI doesnt adapt to me crash researching bigger ship sizes, and i wipe them out easily.

for example, it could make faster ships with torps etc, or ones with more shields, or crash research ship sizes itself

wouldn't it be great if the balance change stuff, all those ai variables etc, where in a file we could tweak as we wanted? it would get to squashing the bugs faster and let the community take care of where they want to balance their game

3. Manually controlled ships will now automatically refuel when low on fuel, and then return to their previous mission
4. Manually controlled ships will now automatically engage enemy targets without needing to be manually directed to each target. They will then return to their previous mission, e.g. patrol, escort, etc

i hope this doesnt cause AI splitting up my manually controlled fleets to chase off running gnats or getting refueled


nice list, looking forward to playing 1.04!

Done!

Also you said the next update would be this afternoon. Which afternoon? what time difference?

I just want to emphasize this part...

Known Issues and Testing Requests:
The economic balance needs some additional tweaking and there may be one bug remaining in the new code that sets money/cash flow to a non-numerical value. Because of the degree of rebalancing required after the earlier economic fixes, we need more feedback here with different race and empire types and galaxy sizes to make sure things are looking better than in previous versions.
We are also very interested in getting more feedback on the new auto-engage and auto-refuel code for manual control ships and how it performs at various game speeds. There may be some minor issues remaining here which we will aim to fix before the official release of 1.0.4.

This is a bit more of a "beta" than 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 were, as those were really focused on fixes. We will be looking for as much feedback as possible after the public beta is available, including save files, to show us how the new balance is working out. We are only looking at balance for games started with 1.0.4 as not all the balance changes will apply to older save files, though you will be able to load and play.

could everyone leave Erik alone.

I want my patch! and its nearly 21:00 here...

afternoon my ass. grumble. waiting to conquer galaxy. grumble.

Nice.
Keep doing good work.

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
10. Private ships can now only be armed with a single weapon - this armament will not cause any offense when they enter other empire's systems

Death Rays ready for civilian distribution

[:D] good idea.