In Alpha 7 we plan to have a start menu that counts for a start menu
, and also an introduction to in-game options and short tutorials on gameplay since a newbie, even if he knows botf quite well, can miss crucial options and features of the game, like for example saving
and of course the use of cursors in build menu to quickly switch between your colonies. Also it'll then be explained (by popups I think) how changes of options take into effect and when, since it's not clear right at the moment if changed preferences in-game (not before game, they always count for all games started afterwards of course) have an immediate effect and how this all affects other games (multiplayer for example that you run parallel to a single-player game, but with other options/difficulty levels and victory conditions for example).
Another quite interesting feature is the possibility of doing a hot-seat match simply by running multiple instances of bote.exe from the same directory. You then have to connect to your local IP address (I believe even the 127.0.0.1 loopback, but I have to test it again myself honestly
) and use alt-tab each time a player finishes its turn and the next one has his turn.