German publisher Kalypso Media, publisher of Sins of a Solar Empires and Tropico 3 and 4, is publishing a new game about space faring civilizations.  This new game will be a blend of turn based and real time strategy labeled as a 4X strategy game.  The grand map will be turn-based and the battles will be real time.  Planets will not always be friendly to your species, so many will need to be terraformed.  After colonizing a planet, you will build buildings on the planet and specialize it to your strategic interests.

One of the most interesting parts of the game is the extremely customizable ships.  You will choose a chassis and then custom fit your ships with a considerably large amount of modules for specialization.  The video below shows a few seconds of what this is like.  The game reminds me a bit of Sword of the Stars, but Kalypso has a better reputation for releasing more polished games than Paradox.

The game will support multiplayer of up to 8 players and 40 hours of single player campaign mode.  Of course there will be a sandbox.  The game will include 3 races and numerous "guilds" which will be minor factions or corporations.  These guilds may have planets that are colonized and aligned with them. 

Novacore Studios which is developing the game is a new German developer.  Legends of Pegasus will be it's first game to be published.  The graphics which I don't generally put much emphasis on are just too beautiful to ignore.

Video

Races

Guilds

The game is available for pre-order on Steam for $33.99 at a discount from $39.99.  The game will be released on August 10th and the pre-order price will no longer be available.