Phase 2: The "New Code" - Rounds Saturn 4-8 + Mars Rounds 1-4

After the first 3 rounds the developers chose to revamp the UI of the game along with the code behind it.

A number of issues had been noted which were addressed due to abuse factors. Out went solely 3 planet systems, out went trade posts due to their misuse and out went mass alliances.

In their place home planets were moved out of the range of other players so even if you lost all your planets you could still try and continue back from your home planet. 

Alliance member limits were capped at 100 players and while this could be worked around to some extent by making secondary alliances they would still be able to kill each other if a mistake was made. 

Sectors were split into systems including a mix of 1 planet to 5 planet systems. The less planets in the system the better the planets were for abundances and space. This change also increased the number of planets available in a sector and so with the introduction of planet limits the better players would no longer take all planets in a sector, leaving space for new/smaller players to build up.

By this time some of the older alliances had broken up and new ones began to emerge. For the active organised alliances they no longer needed huge amounts of members to do well and so a organised alliances of 30-50 members became more frequent.

Due to the change in travel, in part to protect new starters who signed up late there was only linear travel between galaxies. Only once 1 galaxy was full would the next open, this lead to strategic alliance decisions to avoid/work with other specific alliances without the potential threat of being jumped on from another galaxy due to the travel times. It was quite possible to sign up later but away from the majority of active alliances and so farm your own galaxy without much fighting.

At this time a second server was introduced to allow for increased player numbers and for somewhere to restart if you lost everything in the Saturn server. For this reason the Mars server was generally considered the lesser server and no truly good alliance would play there without being mocked for hiding from the real fights.

Issues in this phase included the fact that fleet scan would show all ships in a galaxy not just the fleet you wanted to scan making it useless and meaning often it was a case of attempting to work out an enemy fleet composition based on radar score or just sending all you had to try and win the fight. 

People were also able to block enemy planets by using "the fighter bug", sending 1 fighter each turn so any combat stopped loading/unloading at the planet.

In the end a bug allowing people to abuse the building of destroyers to massively increase their score. This ultimately ended up in the game being stopped for redevelopment.