The site says that purchase is not available until August 21st

Q: Is this like empire total war? zoom for battles while campaign map stops?

Nope.  The whole game takes place in a singular space.  You can certainly zoom in on battles and so forth but the gameplay isn't divided into sections; it's whole-cloth.

Q:what I am not seeing in the screenshots is a sense of depth perception. I am seeing the stars at the rear through the objects at the front.

That is a recognized problem: we'll be trying our best to resolve that and have a few ideas how we might do that but it's likely that those solutions will either have to be put in a day-0 patch or later on due to time constraints with the rest of the interface, multiplayer functionality, and so forth on the line.

Q:This game is out in August right?

August 21st, yes.

Q:Any chance of this coming to Impulse or Steam?

Steam has still yet to reply to our e-mail and so we are likely to stop pursuing a release with Steam until post-release.

As for Impulse, I cannot say.  We would love to be on Impulse.

Q:I hope the ship desgin can also be very simple or automated, because I don't really like micromanaging that aspect of the game.

Modifying existing ship designs is fairly fast and designs will update automatically with your technological research but ships are not automatically designed a la Distant Worlds.  Though the AI can see all the subsystems in the game we have been unable to teach it how to genetically build ships from those parts yet.  That is likely to be pursued in later patches for the game as well as a rapid ship design constructor.

Q:Thanks for working on this project and I'm also very eager to support it. More video's would be welcome to see how the game looks like. THis also worked very well with Distant Worlds.

Thanks!  I'd like to make some videos for you guys but I'm not the best at producing videos so they'll probably be a little cheesy/indie if I just one-off them from gameplay with commentary.  I'm not quite sure how much time I have left to work on video content for the game but I'm trying to fight through all the interface design to get to it.  With luck, I'll have some more video footage of the game for you guys soon.

Q:Back in April didn't he say "sometime in June/July?"

Yes, but we deemed that the game was far too unfinished for the game to launch back then so we moved the release date to August 21st, which is as far back as we could possibly push release without running completely out of funds and having to stop working on the game.

Q:When is the demo coming out?

We're not sure.  With all of the above in mind, we're trying to find the time to do one but it may be as late as post-launch before we can actually produce a demo of the game.  Hopefully we'll get to it before then, if not: sorry.

I'm afraid that's confidential at this time and I can't directly answer.

Also: Not a problem, I enjoy answering all your questions.

Thanks Firgof! I think I'll pick it up if you guys get it on impulse (or steam). Here's to hoping you're already working something out with Stardock since you can't answer

You can pause any time you wish and can issue whatever orders you'd like and et cetera while the game is paused.

Only the server can pause the game or change the timescale in multiplayer.  It's currently unstable to change the time-rate in multiplayer as it impacts the number of packets that are sent per second but we might be able to make it stable enough in the future that the server op can change the time whenever they feel like.

Sync will probably be better in that sort of situation for LAN games.  I'd imagine you'd encounter less problems with things like numbers of units on the server and what timerate the game is going at as the packets can transfer down to the connected clients at such relatively low latency.  That's only a guess however; we haven't tested the game in LAN for a little while so I have yet to prove or disprove that.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Much appreciated! I believe that the some gameplay video's (even if they are somewhat indie/cheesy, which was also the case with DW) could temporarily give an idea to interested gamers what the game looks like, before the demo is eventually released. Good luck with the last ends.

I really appreciate the time you spend here answering questions firgof and i may very well give your game a go. There are just two things that bother me : the video of your gameplay is just terrible, the screenshots on you site don't give any piece of intel about the way it actually plays.

In fact, the whole gameplay thing actually looks like a mess. Which is strange because i went to your forum and the comments of the dev team are those of people who know the 4X space game type.The features looks good, it is the presentation of the game that don't make me at ease (i mean, guys talented enough to make a video game can surely make some scrrenshots that would at least give a hint about the way it is played)

The second thing is scale. I played sword of the stars with 200 stars and 8 opponents. the end game was terrible as i had to manage my 50+ stars empire. And you are saying that i will have to manage galaxies ! In the end game, it will be more "Star bureaucracy" than "Star ruler" i am affraid !

That was an interesting interview. I'm looking forward to this game.

Just found out about this today from Penny Arcade. I made a thread over on Gamefaqs, but here's some posts from Firgof from PA in case this news isn't too old for everyone around here:

Introduction and technology discussion

What can be created

Game Length

Research

This is sounding great and I can't wait to be able to see all of this in action. Between DQ9, Starcraft 2, Elemental, and now this, I'm going to be set for quite a while.

I strongly agree.  Brad, go for it!  This would really suit Impulse, and it would be a fantastic goodwill gesture to get them a good deal and on board (especially since Steam has seemed to give the cold shoulder).

I say, Go for it!

Best regards,
Steven. 

Thanks, Jalicos.  Check your PMs; Artem wanted to say thanks.

Heh I read the thread at penny arcade and I will be picking up my jaw now.

Looks interesting, but I have a few questions

1) is it possible to have multiple civilizations occupying the same planet

2) if not, would it be possible to mod that functionality in?