published on July 20, 2026 in devlog
In this week's devlog Michi talks about a real-life team meeting and new rules regarding company liquidations.
Michi (molp)
This week Martin, Fabian and I met in person in the simulogics HQ. It has been a while since we last did that, so naturally there was a lot to talk about. Right now I don't want to go into the details, but I can say that we reprioritized the upcoming features a bit. While we still think that the faction influence feature would be a great addition to the game, we reduced its priority to look into a few other things before that. Fabian will now start working on a design document for a feature that will redefine the very start of a company. We are thinking about letting all new players start in a specific location (this might be the remaining generation ships) and only once they've gotten to know APEX's interface, have to make a decision where to build their first base. This actually helps with two issues we face: The learning curve is a bit more gentle and the whole plot situation is defused as well. This is now in the idea stage and I am eager to see what Fabian comes up with.
Talking about plots. Given my limited time this week, I decided to work on the automatic company liquidation. Usually, depending on the license status, we allow a certain amount of inactivity before we announce and execute the company liquidation. The announcement happens in the form of an email, as this is the only way to reach the players. With players coming from Steam this doesn't work in many cases: Steam doesn't provide an email address for the players and if they don't deliberately choose to complete their simulogics account, we have no means of contacting these players and telling them about the upcoming liquidation. Hence, we decided that we'll allow 200 days of inactivity and a 30-day deadline for these players before actually liquidating their inactive companies. This is obviously a very long time. There are many players who just start the game and notice that it is not for them. In the worst case they might block a planetary plot for more than 200 days.
To combat that, I implemented a new retention factor that is based on actual activity. For example, if a player's last activity is on the day they joined, the 200-day retention is cut in half. If they never built a base or started a flight: cut in half again. That way I hope to vastly speed up the liquidation of actual inactive companies. The change is already live in production, and we should see first results in about a week.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!