Good morning, conquerors! A new week and a new devblog. 

After last week's huge improvements to the AI and overall quality-of-life fixes, it's time to add some more content to the later stages of the game. I’ll again update this post after each patch during the week to highlight the notable changes.

But what’s on the roadmap for this week?

New planetary improvements and new ships!

After thorough playtests, I’ve come to the conclusion that the end game could use some extra depth and options. At the time of writing this post, planetary infrastructure can be upgraded to level 5 (or 6 — I honestly can’t remember xD), but the maximum shipyard level is still 3.

This setup generally works fine for a rock-paper-scissors–type of game — if it weren’t for one particularly blatant problem: I really don’t want to build cruisers. They’re slow to produce, and sooo very slow at gliding through the void.

I think I solved half of that problem yesterday, by increasing the time it takes to conquer a planet with a shipyard by +100% per shipyard level. Cruisers are now pretty much mandatory in the later stages of the game to capture those juicy level 3 shipyard-planets from the AI.

But that alone doesn’t solve the real issue:
I still don’t want to build cruisers. Or, to be more precise — I still actively avoid them and prefer to use faster-to-build and generally just faster fighters. Masses of them. 

But players should be excited about unlocking bigger ships. Right now, that’s not the case — so that needs to change.

The main problem is void-travel. It’s just... so darn slow.
Sure, I could add more starlanes, but the map gets cluttered way too easily at the expense of clarity. So I don’t want to.

What I want, instead, is to make cruisers something you want to build. That’d be cool.

One planned improvement is a new planetary upgrade: Stargate. It should be very expensive, so I’ve planned it as a level 5 planetary upgrade.

“But wait a second,” you think, “how does that help me want to build cruisers, if I still need to send them through the void to an enemy planet — where I can’t build planetary upgrades?”

Well... yeah, it doesn’t. But it would still be cool, right?

But planetary upgrade level 4 — the Factory — just might help!
If we make bigger ships faster to produce, building them might not feel as repulsive as it does now. That would address not just the construction time of larger ships, but also the awkward issue of unused planetary expansion slots at infrastructure level 4.

But to be honest, what would really make Cruisers and Destroyers feel desirable is if they were actually faster in the void. But just increasing their base speed would undercut the Fighters’ role as fast interceptors — which I don’t want.

And I do want more ship types in the game — just not at the expense of the core rock-paper-scissors mechanics.

A conundrum indeed.

So here’s a possible solution: what if there was a support ship that speeds up all ships around it in the void?

Right now:

• Fighters fly at 12 units/sec

• Cruisers and Destroyers fly at 6 units/sec

• Starlanes provide 60 units/sec base speed

Enter the new support ship: the Slipstream Frigate.
It would create a “slipstream bubble” that accelerates nearby ships to 20 or 30 units/sec. The actual increase remains to be seen in playtesting. 

It wouldn't make starlanes obsolete — those are still way faster — but it would ease the pain of slow travel without breaking strategic starlane placement. You might still want to build your own starlanes through planetary upgrades, but the slipstream frigate gives your fleets some mid-game flexibility.

Plus, it just makes sense narratively. The slipstream frigate feels like a natural step between sluggish void-sailing and fully deploying your own warp highways across the galaxy. And adding a storyline on the game is also on the planning board, so it's all slowly coming together. :)

Other minor updates I hope to add in near future: 
Waypoints. I want to add a system to give waypoints for your fleets: "go to this planet and from there head here, and then there." 
I kind of also want to change the "fighters" to be "frigates". I think frigates would be thematically more proper term and "fighters" would be something that a carrier could maybe build. Carriers could require lvl 5 or lvl 6 shipyard to build, but this is something that I'm only considering about. Unlike the defenseless slipstream frigate, there's a risk that carriers would break the rock-paper-scissors -mechanics of the game, and so I'm a bit hesitant about them. Especially when considering that if you're going to have carriers, you should also have battleships in the game. So it doubles the risk of core mechanics breaking down. What do you think?  


EDIT 09/06/2025 (later in the day):
Slipstream Frigate added. This needs some polishing still, but the ship is now in the game and for now it makes ships around it fly at 20 units / second in the void. This also makes it easier to coordinate different types of ships to assault enemy planets. Without Slipstream Frigate your fighters will propably be the first to hit enemy planets, and as Planetary Defenses devour fighters, you're bound to lose big chunk of your fleet. Hint: If you don't have a Slipstream Frigate in the group, send the cruisers out first to take out the enemy PD. 

Slipstream Frigate looks like elongated fighter, and it has a transparent bubble around it. This bubble is the area where the speed bonus is applied. It should cover all the ships orbiting a planet so no one is left behind if you so wish.

Slipstream Frigate will be available only to the player. I considered adding it for the AI as well, but at this time I don't really see the point. The AI doesn't mind if the cruisers fly a bit slower. I think. I hope.