Dev Blog #019 August 13, 2024

Hi all, I hope everyone is well and enjoying the beta so far.

Senate

The Senate is a great way to make your corporation stand out as one of the most powerful in the Aquila system. The Senate is made up of all corporations that control at least 1 sector. Each region has its own member list made of all the corporations in that region.
The future features of the senate will include voting on system wide policies that will have positive and negative impacts on things like trade, security, and resource availability.

Market Rates

Dynamic market pricing has been added and is now enabled, you will see prices rise and fall based on real player trades. Sectors that have an increased supply of resources will see their prices drop, while sectors that have a lower supply will increase their prices.
Prices are updated every few minutes, any time a price is updated while you're viewing the market, there will be a notification.
This new system means that delivering ore or other resources to less supplied sectors will increase your trade profits.

Lockboxes

Combat is currently the only way to find research fragments and improve your tech, which doesn't work so well for traders and miners, so I've added new Lockboxes to the game; these spawn around space and contain tech, ore, and sometimes equipment that can be looted.
Lockboxes spawn all over the Aquila system, mostly hidden inside asteroid fields, although you can find them in other areas of space.

Beta stage change

Up until now I've tried to focus the beta on certain parts of the game so I can focus on bugs and improvements in a single area, this hasn't been working very well, and feedback has been coming in from all parts of the game. So I'm just going to scrap this way of doing it and just work through every bug report and feature feedback/request as they come in.
With the beta structure change, I'm going to do more frequent, smaller updates as soon as bugs are fixed or features are ready to turn on.