Recently we updated the universe map with a new cool functionality: the zoom.

Now you can see the universe in 4 different levels:

• Zoom level 0 – The biggest zoom. Here you can see all the markets, arenas and wormholes you’ve discovered has well has the systems where you have fleets and planets (this feature is still under development).
• Zoom level 1 – In this view you can see a part of the universe in detail. This view has about 60 sectors wide, for 36 high.
• Zoom level 2 – This a closer look into the universe. In this view you can see about 6 Systems (3 of them not completely)
• Zoom level 3 – This is the zoom that you were used to. The typical 15 sectors wide for 9 sector high.

To switch between levels, when you are seeing the hot zone map, simply click in the +/- links near the arrows.

Here is a image that compares all the levels of zoom:

What do you think we can to improve even more the universe map? Share your ideas with us.

We made some changes to the game:

• Now the Extractor building will only give one random rare resource per odd level
• We added some quests for the dark humans
• We updated several costs: facilities, units, etc are now more expensive

You can check the new resources and quests on the manual.

Today we deployed several new features:

• Now you have Dark Humans available. To use them, go to Account (top menu) , then Manage Players, then Add New Player. You’ll also be able to switch between players
• Universe zoom: you can see it on the Universe section, we have a zoom control that enables you to zoom in and out
• We can now embed battles anywhere (example)

In the current tournament of Total Annihalation I did one of the coolest battle I ever play. My oponent were Nuno that played very well as always (I shouldn’t said this…).

And here’s the battle:

We’re preparing the Dark Humans race for prime time, you may have already noticed on the top menu that you have an Account option, where there’s a Manage Players option. On that page you’ll be able to create an additional player or set your active player. We’ll leave it without restrictions for testing for a while.

Meanwhile, we’re configuration facilities and units, costs, etc. The units dependencies are a bit troublesome, because the dark units are all heavy power, so it’s hard to choose witch ones to release at lower levels. Here’s what we have came up by now:

1. Dark Rain
2. Toxic
3. Anubis and Driller
4. Scarab
5. Kamikaze
6. Vector
7. DarkCrusader
8. doomer
9. Bozer
10. Dark Taurus

What do you think?

As you already know (and if you don’t you will know it now) we will add two more races to the new version of Orion’s belt.

One is a race of dark humans and the other a race of bugs. In the current alpha, only the humans are available. Not because we didn’t have the support for the other two races, but because we don’t have the graphics ready.

Marco, the Artist of Vortix Game Studios, is the one that is doing all the art work that you see in the alpha. Although we are a little bit behind schedule, things are appearing with great quality.

Today we will reveal the concept art of the buildings of the race of dark humans. The layout vision will be different from the view that you seen in the humans (there won’t be any waterfall or constructions in a cliff). The dark human buildings will be constructed in the ground like you see in the most common RTS games (or in some massive multiplayer online games browser based).

Hope you like the concept like we did. I think all the buildings are pretty good

I’m tired to call the races by their code names (humans, dark humans and bugs). We really must find some good names for them.

I’ve been checking out the fleets on the game and I came to the conclusion that everyone is upgrading their planets and their resource income, but few are actually building on the military part. Almost all fleets have only one Rain, and very few have Krills. This is because there’s no need to build an arsenal at this moment, there’s no war, there’re planets for everyone, and all the players are in a peaceful state.

We have to change that…

I’ve just updated the game with the quests functionality. At this moment we only have a few of them, and probably you’ll be able to complete them all in one go. There are three types of quests that we have planned so far:

• Objective quests – you gain something by achieving some checkpoint; we’ll use this quests to guide the player trough the game, like a tutorial
• Progressive quests – these quests you’ll have to accept and you’ll have a deadline to achieve some objective, like transport something, attack someone, etc
• User generated quests – these ones will be harder to implement, but the game will benefit extremely with them. On top of the common fixed quests paths, we want the players to create quests, and that will make the game much more dynamic

The only available quests by now are the simple objective quests, that’ll work like a tutorial. For each quest you may gain some orions or even some resources.

Some day I’ll be able to enter the game, go to Quests -> Create Quest, and add a bounty for Shadow Knight, saying that for each player to wins him a battle, I’ll pay 500 orions, to a maximum of five battles.

I don’t know if the current players are fighting a lot or not, because there are only 25 beta testers, and there’s planets for everyone, there’s no need to fight. But we’ll see that changing when we start launching quests like: “Defeat five fleets” or “Attack 3 planets”.

As you can see for the next image the first tournament in Orion’s Belt 2.0 is already started.

All this layout is to change but for now we just want to show usefull information. You can see the fleet that is in the tournament, the links to the tournament stages and the groups or eliminatory games.

The rules are simple and identical to Orion’s Belt 1.0, the 3 first players in each group pass to the next stage, if the next stage is the playoff than in addiction to the first 3 players of each group will pass so many players to have a sufficient number of players that is a power of 2 (Ex: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32). In the particular case of this tournament will pass 3 players in each group and the next 2 players with more points, so we will have a playoff with 8 players.

The Orions are the game coin and with them players can progress much more quickly. The next image can be view in the left upper corner of the game and represents the amount of Orions.

Now you can earn orions by doing 3 things:

• Selling resources in the Auction House;
• Win Arena battles;
• Win tournaments (each tournament will have a different prize).

In the future there will be 2 more ways at least:

• By doing a payment with money that will be converted in Orions;
• By doing some quests.

So spend them wisely, and try to earn the maximum you can.