Good evening ladies & gentlemen, I hope you have all had a very nice Christmas and that you are looking forward to having a fun filled new year! I'm just going to bring you some of our latest news about the continuing speedgame and a few more details about round 20.

The speedgame will be reset tomorrow at 3pm (GMT). We hope to have the speedgame running with regular (soft) resets until the signups for round 20 start. If you want your say about resets, havoc and the like please visit #speedgame on irc.netgamers.org.

Additional to the previous round 20 announcement we will be implementing the following changes with regards to the alliance limits and alliance rankings.
- Alliances have a maximum of 60 members up to tick 168 (1 week into the game). After this, once the limit of 60 members has been reached, an additional 10 members can be accepted below the average planet score of the top 10 alliances.
- Alliance rankings will be structured as in Round 19.
- Alliance merging can only happen between two alliances who, in total, will be below 40 members. It can only happen in the first 4 weeks of the round.

And also the following changes with regards to galaxy setup and exile costs.
- Exile is going to be more expensive.
- The score of a Galaxy will be worked out in the same way as the alliance score from round 19.

These changes finalise the basic alliance, galaxy and cluster structure for round 20. Additional to this only minor changes regarding the exile formula will be released.