Up until now, the only source of income for me from War Worlds has been the ads that show on the starfield and solar system view. But my costs have not been zero, and so far hosting is costing me about 10 times as much as I'm getting back from the ads (mind you, we're talking around $2 per day for hosting and 20c per day in income from the ads, so it's not exactly breaking the bank yet...)

However, I've never wanted to do in-app purchases that basically result in pay-to-win, where you get some sort of in-game advantages for paying money, and that's definitely not going to change.

Renaming Stars

So to help me out a little, in the latest update you can now rename stars which you control, for a one-time fee of US $0.99 (or whatever local equivalent). So if you want to rename 5 stars, it's 5 x $0.99 = $4.95. You can rename stars as often as you like, though it's $0.99 each time. You can only rename stars which you have a controlling number of colonies on (so if you share the star with another empire - natives don't count - then you can rename it only if you have more colonies than the other empire).

I'll have some screenshots of the flow once the update has made it through the Play Store (I can't do "real" purchases on my device until it's in the Play Store).

Tactical Map

Also in this update is the initial version of the tactical map. The performance is pretty attrocious at the moment, and it's missing a lot of features (for example, the stars are just represented as red dots, whereas I'd like to see them coloured to indicate what kind of star they are). Here's a quick screenshot showing what it looks like right now:

As you can see, it's definitely quite basic. But you can see there's some empires butting up against each other here, it's getting exciting!

Using the tactical map is quite simple, you just click the "Tactical" button from the starfield view, and it'll zoom out to the tactical view, centred on the same view you had in the starfield view.

Double-tap on a star in the tactical view and you'll zoom in to that star in the starfield view. I've found this is a great way to quickly zoom around the map and see exactly what's going on.

Of course, there are plenty of features that can be added to the tactical map, for example it just colours the areas based on which empire owns the stars. It could also put the name of the empire there. And as I said above, I'd rather like to see the stars coloured such that you can tell if it's yellow, red, blue, black hole etc. That should help you keep your bearing a little better. Finally, perhaps some kind of info panel could pop up when you tap a star.

Bug Fixes

And of course, there are numerous bug fixes and crashes fixed in the latest update. New features like the above always introduce the possibility for new bugs as well, though, so please keep reporting them!