You can find Milky Way-specific updates here:
Incoming wall o’ updates!
New Staff Structure
New Staff Structure
We’ve got a team again!
@warken will be joining us as our first new staff member. He will be here to, amongst other things:
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Help organize newbie material, including improving the Virgo experience.
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Help with managing forums and chat.
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Help managing in-game issues.
Our new staff will be continually evaluated between release cycles as well. That means that every 6 weeks, our current team will adjust based on their activity. This will help us keep the staff fresh by adjusting if members need a break, go inactive, or otherwise need to step away from the role.
This also means that we’re continually looking for new staff members. We’re still (re)defining the roles and responsibilities, but if you’re interested in helping in a more official capacity, feel free to let us know here.
The Dev Server
The Dev Server
The dev server has returned!
https://dev.imperialconflict.com/
It runs 1-minute ticks and is available to our Patreon subscribers. $1 is all it takes. 
We’re going to be using the dev server to run more comprehensive tests for new features and changes for upcoming rounds, and also to help evaluate and improve existing core features and functionality.
New Player Improvements
New Player Improvements
Objectives
Virgo has an additional section on the guide page:
This is a first iteration, and will be improved upon to include additional objectives. We’re also going to explore objectives as a game-wide feature that players (especially Leaders and Vice Leaders) can create and customize for themselves and their family members.
Virgo Auto-join
After registration, new players now bypass the gate page, galaxy join, and race selection and are automatically placed in Virgo with a default race. They land directly on their guide/objectives page.
New players can still adjust their empire settings within their first 2 days, like new empires in regular galaxies.
Virgo-Specific Navigation Menu
Virgo has its own navigation menu with a more prominent link to the interactive tutorial.
We will explore this concept further to allow for navigation to be further tailored to different player types.
Other Changes
Other Changes
Planetary Recovery
- A new feature, called “Planet Recovery”, requires freshly conquered planets to have a 1-tick cooldown before building new infra. This is a galaxy setting, and was discussed here.
Misc adjustments
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Planets page
- Individual planet build links are now buttons
- Mass-build links are disabled until at least 2 planets are selected
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The home page and registration page have been cleaned up and optimized
Questions and comments are welcome here or in #support:questions and #support:feedback. As always, bug reports can be posted in #support:bugs and #roadmap:brainstorming is open if you have suggestions.
Thanks for reading!