Last night we updated to beta 4A.

Here's what's new:

1) Added some new music -- different races start with their own sound track.

2) Initial race theme music lasts first year, then changes to a broader sound track.

3) Clicking on an uncolonized planet to look at the planet closer won't crash anymore.

4) The technology rate slider at the start of the game has been hooked up, balanced and tested. At "Very fast" techs are a little more than half as much as normal.  At very  long they are over twice as long to get.

5) Fixed a low level math function that a lot of things counted on that will likely cause things to work more like they were designed.

6) Tweaked the habitable planet slider.  Too many good planets in all settings before, now more varied.  No more class 1, 2, 3, 4 planets (they're just useless other than as outposts and that's what starbases are for -- the micro management involved in dealing with them wasn't worth their value as outposts.  Class 1 planets may return later.).

On the Stardock Central front:

Installation is still a pain.  SDC is a great technology for delivering final product.s But it is less well suited to very large things that are being updated regularly.  Last night we switched it to sending the finals individulaly rather than sending single large compressed SDC files.  The old SDC client is a bit slow downloading the individual files, the new client that we hope to release next week is much MUCH faster.  But this way, downloading should become a lot more reliable and doing updates a lot less painful.