The Predestination Early Access alpha has been released on Steam for about a week now, and we’ve finally caught up with all the requests for keys and fixed a lot of high-incidence bugs. There was a small problem with the key request form during a period of heavy load, so some of you who requested a key may have been missed.

If this has happened to you, I sincerely apologise for the inconvenience. Anyone who pre-ordered the game or pledged on Kickstarter and wants a steam key should email earlyaccessrequest@brainandnerd.com with the email address you used on Kickstarter or Paypal and we’ll aim to send you a key within 24 hours.

Dev Tracker Thread:

Now that things have died down a little, we’ll be starting our Early Access marketing and getting into a regular development cycle. As promised, we’ve launched a development tracker thread on Steam to keep track of upcoming features, explain what we’re currently working on for the next version, and provide patch notes for each update. We’ll also continue doing blog posts and kickstarter updates on major releases as we work hard to add features and squash bugs. Below is an exerpt from that thread covering all the features we’re currently working on for the next major release:

Adjustable Tax: Right now, all planets use a base tax rate of 3BC per 1000 population. We’re now adding a Tax UI that’s opened by hitting the Treasury button and lets you set your own tax rate. Increasing the tax rate will reduce morale on all planets, which will reduce metal production. This lets you essentially trade off metal production for money production during the game, similar to how MOO2 worked. Low or high morale in Predestination will also tie into the spying system, ground combat, and will spark random events.

Freighters: Build Metal, Food and Energy freighters in your shipyards. These can load resources at one planet and unload them on another, for those who like to micromanage resources. You might find it helpful to send a full metal freighter along with your colony ships to kick-start your new planet, or shuttle energy to a planet for terraforming. You can also use freighters as extra off-planet storage for resources. This is not the same as recurring trade routes, which will be added separately.

Empire Age Option: Right now you always start a new game in the pre-warp stage with a single planet. We’re currently adding the option to skip straight to the Space Exploration or First Contact tech eras. The game will put an AI in control of your empire and fast-forward through the turns until you get to the appropriate game stage. Your empire will be self-sustainable and on par with the other AI, but you can of course go in and edit them, change blueprints, and run them the way you want.

Cheers,

— Brendan, Lead Developer