Endless Space gets its 4th add on, and its FREE!

by: Andrew - posted: 3/13/2013 12:19:00 PM

With the sale of 300,000 units sold Amplitude Studios has announced a 4th add on of their turn based strategy game, Endless Space.  Entitled Endless Space: Virtual Awakening, this add on comes complete with new community driven content like Heroes, gameplay elements and escalating random events.  They have also bumped up the AI to make this add on even more challenging.  For a full list of features & Improvements, read the full press release!

Amplitude Studios celebrates 300,000 Endless Space units sold with the release of the 4th free add-on!
Haarlem, The Netherlands – 11 March 2013- Video games developer Amplitude Studios celebrates 300,000 units sold by releasing another free add-on for their 4X turn-based strategy game, Endless Space. This 4th add-on, titled ‘Virtual Awakening’, will be made available through Steam later today. The new add-on will bring new content designed or voted by the community such as mysterious heroes, gameplay elements gravitating around asteroids and gas giants, new escalating random events, AI improvements, and several other additions.
To make the release of ‘Virtual Awakening’ an event, the original Endless Space game will have a -50% week long promotion on Steam which will end Monday, 18th of March.
A new batch of screenshots and artwork accompany this press release; the full pack can be downloaded here.
Background story for the ‘Virtual Awakening’ add-on:
“Driven by their need to terraform and cultivate, it was only a matter of time before the Automatons turned their eyes to the least hospitable planets: Gas giants. A probe ship departed for an uncolonized system, hoping to test technology that could transform these jovian worlds into something livable.
 
It was a nice plan, but luck and reality had other ideas. The gas giant had a derelict platform orbiting it that had been of the Virtual Endless war effort -- and the Virtuals had left a guard behind. Worse yet, the system was rich in minerals from its asteroid belts, so a small but well-equipped group of Pirates was also keeping an eye on it.
Automaton, Endless, and Pirate -- an interesting enough mix. But there was a fourth unknown actor, watching from the “surface” of the gas giant. Deep in the viscous atmosphere, where the boundaries between gas and liquid and solid are vague and changeable, an intelligent life form tracked the signals from the platform and wondered what was going on.
 
Up above an uneasy truce was reached: Automatons experimented while the Pirates kept an eye out for profits. The project went smoothly until one of the Automatons, who had shown unusually clever behavior since landing on the Endless platform, noted that the radiation seeping from the planet might be transmissions from a sentient race…
 
Finish the testing at the risk of genocide? Try again elsewhere, regardless of the costs? Steal the technology and see what you can get for it? There are many questions, not the least of which is: What exactly is going on with that unusually clever Automaton?
The galaxy is about to get even stranger.”
Features of the ‘Virtual Awakening’ add-on:
Free Weekend Rewards
•    4 unique Heroes including a powerful Virtual Endless
•    Extra Technologies and Buildings focusing on asteroids and gas giants
•    Global Interactive Events (including an event designed by Codename_Veers)
•    New Escalating Random Events (2 of them designed by KingJohnVI)
•    Additional Exploration Rewards and Planet Anomalies
AI Improvements
•    Ability to scrap buildings
•    Enhanced hero management
•    Better affinity and faction trait management
Other additions and improvements
•    Victory Warning alert messages
•    Improved blockade effects: now activated on Guard and Invasion only
•    New Auto Scrap button for unnecessary improvements in the Empire view
•    Redesigned game speed effects
•    Tax Rate tooltip in the Empire view