Firstly, thanks to all those that joined our Creators Hour.

A log of what was said can be found here.

Much of the start of the session involved changes and updates to those items mentioned in our previous announcement.

Chief among those was the setup for the next week or two with respect to Round 21, the Round 21 beta and this weekend's "CTF" speedgame.

Firstly, please vote for the Round 21 name before signups open! Choose your favourite name from the list on our forum thread.

Signups for Round 21 open on Wednesday 28th March at 20:00 GMT at http://game.planetarion.com/signup.pl, with ticks starting on Friday, 13th April at 20:00 GMT. Round 21 continues for 7 weeks, stopping on 1st June at 20:00 GMT.

Also tomorrow, beta testing opens on the beta server. Signups open at 12:00 GMT - sign up at http://beta.planetarion.com/signup.pl. The first beta testing session will commence at approximately 17-18:00 GMT. Ship statistics are located via this link but are likely to change in the weeks before the ticks start.

We're also having a "Capture the Flag" Speedgame with 1 minute ticks this weekend. Signups will open on Friday at 12:00 GMT, and the speedgame will run from Saturday 12:00 GMT until Sunday 12:00 GMT. The idea of the game is that each galaxy has a "flag" asteroid, clearly marked on the galaxy pages. The idea is to capture this asteroid from them. The asteroids are randomly allocated at tick 72, and to stop the flag holder going inactive, all flag holders will be able to be attacked by other planets. The stats for this will be announced by Friday.

Both the speedgame and the beta are free for everyone. Round 21; however, is a fully paid round.

As mentioned in the Creators Hour session, Population and Government are new features, with Population replacing the old "Engineering" option, giving you the option of concentrating your population in several different areas of your planet, and Government being a one off choice that gives you certain bonuses in some areas of your planet in exchange for (roughly equal) costs in other areas.

Finally, a few changes that we forgot to announce in the Creators Hour discussion:

- Asteroids now only cost 150 of that resource to initiate, instead of 250

- Home fleets no longer get XP for defence, and incoming defence fleets still get XP for defence based on the TOTAL (including home fleet)% defence sent

- XP for defence has increased. It's now 15 XP / Tick in the galaxy and 10XP/ Tick out of the galaxy when sending a fleet to defend someone who has incoming that tick. It's also (up to) 300 XP divided amongst all non-home fleet defenders.

Edit:
Slightly major feature we somehow neglected to announce, we now have "random events", which cause minor good / bad things to happen to your planet. More information on this will shortly be contained in the manual.