Newbie

Great question. Welcome to the forum and thanks for being a long time fan. I'm glad our articles were able to draw you back into 4x games. My own journey back to 4x games also landed me on SpaceSector as a reader first and then a contributor. Adam did a great job rekindling the fire in many of us for the genre!

Yes, I'm confident that new releases with release notes will be announced on the forums at the very least and may also be announced via social media and other channels. We should have something in place very soon to accommodate these announcements.

For now I can tell you that at this point there has been one hotfix release since the pre-orders started to resolve a crash that could occur during combat.

 

Thanks for pre-ordering the game, and welcome to the forums!

As @aReclusiveMind as said, new releases with release notes will be announced on the forums, in the Releases section. In fact, I have just made a post there informing that the Pre-Alpha 7a hotfix has been released. Instructions on how to update to the new build are provided there.

 

Try allocating more production towards construction projects by adjusting the triangle towards the orange crane icon (or just click on that icon), to speed up ship construction, if that's what you wish. If you're using the sliders view instead of the triangle increase the orange slider, or set it to full.

At full production (with a 0% tax rate), a survey ship takes around 40 turns to complete at the beginning (a bit more if you're the Draguul because of the morale penalty). If you think that's too much you could try to develop your infrastructure further first, or pick the Overmining space culture perk (in a few turns you should have the first culture level up available) to boost colony production. Other ways to boost production is to hire a colony leader with a good labor skill, or to build a Robotic Factory, or a Deep Core Mine.

 

I did a pretty thorough analysis of production for the VIPs right before this release and can offer a few additional tips. Some of them only apply later in the game though so I'll offer what I think is useful advice for early on.

Morale is currently a very powerful modifier to your production output. A leader with the Empathic trait or the Spiritual Leader secondary skill offers a very large boost to morale and thus a very large boost to production. If you find one, definitely spend the money to hire them.

Morale can also be increased by increasing the eco of your planet. There are a few techs available to increase your planets from Eco 0 to 1 and from 1 to 2. Each one improves morale and thus production output. Once researched you need to set your planetary engineering from habitat control to the new ecology ability and allocate some output towards it (left side of the triangle)

Infrastructure (on the triangle, this is towards the top) is a multiplier for all production output. Increasing infrastructure also gives you an option to get additional boosts to production. For instance, in Aerospace Engineering, the Starship Engineers options increase ship building production by 25%, 50%, and then 100% which doubles your output towards buildings things like Outpost ships. Early on, stick a point in this if you want to build ships faster.

The leader labor skill can help if you have a very large planet since its increase is dependent on the number of population. I do feel it is a little weak per point invested right now though.

There are quite a few ways to get production right now, but some of them are more useful later on. I think mastering the Production Allocation triangle would be a good first step. Keep in mind also that any taxing you are doing, in the very top left of the screen under your BC treasury total, reduces production output. If you aren't at 0%, you are losing some production to taxes. In fact, the impact can be pretty severe. 10% tax is a 10% reduction in production after all.