Round 22: Shards of Infinity has just opened its signups. This round is a FREE round. Ticks will start on Friday, 22nd June at 20:00 GMT, and finish on Friday, August 10th at 20:00 GMT. The ticks (turns) will be 1 hour in duration.

A list of the major changes can be found here (some of which were mentioned on this portal article):

-Research, Construction and Production have been recoded. They use "units", and they act in "real time", so the time it takes to research / construct / produce changes depending on population settings and so on.
-Alliance scanners can scan (up to) a whole galaxy at once
-Layout/skin changes
-Galaxy banner not stretched
-Notes on "scan" and "news" tags added
-Galaxy fund log now includes selfexile 'donations'
-Overview race key fixed (only shows up when you have ships not yours, and then it only shows the colours of the races you have stolen).
-Character counter added to mails
-Smilies have been updated
-Multiple mails can be deleted at once on the mail page
-Able to toggle galaxy mates scanning through your distorters
-Option to send a "welcome message" to new galaxy members when they join the galaxy
-When sending a mail to all alliance members, it only saves one copy of the mail.
-25,000,000 resources in any 200 tick period is the maximum donation limit to a planet in galaxy
-Donations in galaxy are done via score not value
-Covert ops are improved in terms of damage.
-Covert ops page modified slightly too to display more information.
-Government bonuses have been completely altered to make them more balanced.
-Auto exile to Cluster 200 of all planets that are set as "unwanted" by the galaxy ministers will be after 144 ticks (this drops to 72 ticks when the planet has less than 40 roids).
-The shuffler will remove all planets more than 24 hours old that have not got at least 30 asteroids into Cluster 200. This happens at tick 36, as always.

Ship stats are not final, but undergoing final tweaks such as EMP resistance changes.

The speedgame is still being run at http://speedgame.planetarion.com. It will continue running until almost tick start.

We will also be opening a public preview of Round 22 within the next 48 hours.