You can find galaxy-specific updates here.
Now, let’s dive into the bigger picture!
Interface and Performance
Interface and Performance
As mentioned in the Feedback Summary and Roadmap, the focus right now is upgrading Imperial Conflict’s interface and performance. This is something that will benefit all players regardless of galaxy, play style, or experience.
I’m extremely happy to report that progress has been fantastic. The new interface is based off of a control panel template named AdminLTE, and is looking great.
Here are some teasers. Note that these designs are still in progress and may change before they are released:
Interface Preview Examples
Council Infrastructure Graph
This will help you understand at a glance how balanced your infra is, and will help you assess needs for future builds.
In-Game Messages
These have been redesigned to flow more like modern messaging applications that you are likely familiar with.
Family News Timeline
A new news timeline view will more clearly indicate family activity and updates, and also allow actions to be taken from the news page directly.
For example, you will be able to send a retake fleet by clicking on a defense report, or send an aid package to a family member who failed an attack, all without having to leave the news page.
Not all pages will see dramatic updates, but the goal is definitely to improve not only the design of individual pages, but also the experience of taking action in general. The guiding question here is:
How can a player do what they want to do, with as little effort as possible, and as fast as possible?
On that note, we also now have support for Vue.js, a modern Javascript framework that will bring amongst other things, “reactivity”, which means that data on a given page will instantly update itself in accordance to user interactions and without a page reload.
We already do this in some places, but the new interface will support this as the baseline, and with less error-prone code to make it happen.
This will not only make the game’s interface feel snappier, but it will also reduce the stress on the server overall as actions will be processed as smaller components. This will result in fewer and smaller requests to the database, which further improves performance.
As for timing, I originally wanted to have a live preview ready by this update, but I’m now aiming for the 2020.2 update planned for March.
Game Changes
Game Changes
Of course, the game itself is just as important as the website. The following features and settings have been added.
- New Galaxy Setting: Expansion
- New Galaxy Setting: Disable Exploration Ship Limit
- New Galaxy Setting: Race Whitelist
- New Galactic Event: Cataclysm
- Population Income Increase
- Population Growth Rate Increase
Further details can be found in the Milky Way 74 and Infinitum updates.
Different Galaxies
Different Galaxies
A couple of threads have come up recently regarding different galaxies:
The interest is clearly there for another galaxy to open. However, we need more players overall before we can support this without diluting competition in current galaxies and/or burning out our current players. This is the same reason for recently Suspending Custom Galaxies.
Let’s aim for a collective goal and incentive: as soon as we end a MW round with at least 100 players, we will open another galaxy.
Don’t wait for somebody else to help grow the game: it’s within your power to bring in new (and returning) blood! Contact your old IC buds, and/or bring in new peeps and help get em through virgo and into MW mid-round.
If we all give it some word-of-mouth hustle we’ll get there before we know it! A fresh galaxy is waiting. 
That wraps it up for this update. Questions and comments welcome, otherwise I’ll see you on the next one!