Due to several complaints we changed the costs of extra vacations. According to our stats this feature isn’t used very much, but there are players that use them a lot for holding of battles. So we wanted a system to help the player that needs to buy an extra day occasionally, and that would prevent rich players to buy lots of days.

The cost of the extra vacation day is now 25 * 2^NumberOfTimesYouBoughtVacationsLast30Days. So, the price is heavily influenced by the number of times you bought vacations on the last 30 days. This change is now online an subject to some tweaks if necessary.

We’ve put online a new implementation for the vacations engine. Vacations has been our biggest problem so far, with players loosing battles while they were still on vacations. Now we implemented a double check and the game won’t timeout if you’re on vacations. There may be some bugs here and there but now at least you won’t be harmed by these bugs.

If you spot anything funny please let us know.

We’ll have our on stand and we’ll be present at the XL LAN Party this weekend in Pombal. If you’re going to attend do visit us and you may get some goodies. We’ll post some photos on the next week.

After intense debate on the gazette about the Levyr handicap, we decided for now to change the prices of some Levyr units. To be known:

• The Seeker is now 5 times more cheaper
• The Destroyer now has lower rare prices
• The Heavy Seeker doesn’t cost rare resources
• The Hive King only has Prismal has a rare resource

We’ll test these settings and see how things progress. There are also other changes on the table, that we’ll discuss on the future.

Who said this universe was overtaken and the war was over?

We’re very sorry for the down time of Orion’s Belt since yesterday! Something blew up at the data center and we’ve had our hand tied. We did manage to stop the tick from processing this morning, and we’ll start it again in a couple of moments.

As we expected, a lot of voices would dislike the universe reset idea, and all the others would welcome it. That’s why we won’t reset anything, and we’ll deploy the OB 2.1 on a new server, leaving s1 as it is.

The other day we (the team) were talking about the problems of this server and how to solve them. And we came to realize that although all the problems, this S1 was phenomenal. We, and I hope the majority of players, had a blast playing it. There were lots of events, lots of alliances leading, the universe were far from dull.

What a great journey we had up until now. Let’s hope to make the game even better, and larger!

Yes. According to our conception of winning, Death Squadron managed to conquer all the relics and thus end the relic wars. Independently of those that think that they used some less legal tactics, the truth is: they were the most organized, the took full advantage of the games rules, and they manage to face all opponents with success. So it’s fair to say that today they are the winners.

The thing is… we never thought that an alliance could achieve this. The relics should work like a leader board. You climb your way to the top and then you try to stay there as long as you can. I don’t believe that any other force on the universe can overcome DS as they are now, not on the next couple of months.

So this brings us to a dilemma: what should we do? We have several ideas to make Orion’s Belt more interesting, for example:

• Increase the number of levels of facilities and the construction speed (for example, 500 levels). The idea is to have player climbing a level every week.
• Make the private zone faster to move and with bot challenges, for new players to start from the beginning to interact with the battles
• Make alliances with a cap  limits: starting at 5 members, admirals would have to pay to buy more members support, up to 20
• Make more quests
• Put mobs on the universe
• Create even more alliance challenges, besides the relics: the idea is to make an alliance focus on some challenge. We could have the relics challenge, merchant alliance challenges, etc

We have come up with most of these ideas for quite a while. The problem with this is that most of the ideas would require a reset on the game. And there are those that would not like that. Even if we keep your orions, elo ranking, services, etc, there are players that don’t want to start over, because they spent to much time and resources already.

An alternative is to leave s1 like for as long as it has active players, and start a new game on s2 with the new rules.

We are thinking on several options to make Orion’s Belt better, and now is your time to say your thoughts.

The first public version of the game was launched on the 14th of January, 2009. And we totally missed it! Given that our Christmas promotion was so well taken by the players, we decided to launch an Aniversary special at the shop. You can go there now to see what we prepared for you.

The offer will be available till the end of January.

We changed they way that random fleets are generated. These fleets are most used on tournaments, ladder and arenas, it’s basically when the game provides a fleet for you to play. The first thin changed was changing the Samurai quantity to an amount that won’t be able to destroy the Flag on Regicide matches. This way we won’t have more victories just because the adversary didn’t notice those samurai (yes, it happened to me, yet again, just the other day:)).

The other change is something that a player asked, and I thought it was a good idea. Instead of having only generic fleets, also put race specific fleets. So, we will try the following: the chosen random fleet may be one of:

• The ones we have now, random fleet with random units from all the races
• Utopians only fleet
• Renegades only fleet
• Levyr only fleet
• Mobs only fleet (yes, with the bosses)

I think this will provide different kind of tournaments with these race specific fleets.