Were these models included? I think it would make the game much cooler.
Sadly, I'm not sure whether that will pan out or not. We are sorely lacking productivity on the models front (slightly shored up thanks to our hero, ere4s3r and the volunteer work we've been able to ask for from my friends in the SpaceBuild Enhancement Project) and many modelers have come and gone over our development cycle, often necessitating a 'reboot' when they left. We are looking to barely make two ship-sets with differentiation of scale between them at our current rate. I'll be taking as much of our pre-order money as I can and dumping it into getting us another 3d Artist so that may still make it in but don't cross your fingers; there's a lot of headway there that's yet to have been made up.
I will say that, post-release, we will be putting in a lot of features that we know we won't have time to implement before Day-0, and that is one of the items on my 'short list' of things to do should that feature not make 1.0.
Will there be a demo?
We would love to do one, yes, but we're not sure if we'll have the time to do so. We will have something (I think) but I'm not sure what it will be. It may only be a tech. demo-ish sort of deal or it may be a full-fledged demo. It all comes down to how long it takes us to get what's left on our list of features into the game.
So is Beta Testing still going on for this at all? If it plays as good as it looks, I'm more than willing to continue my trend of supporting indie game devs and get this for some quality 4X-RTS.
We're not sure how many more beta testing waves there will be but yes, beta testing is still ongoing. We're going to be implementing features and so forth into the game as we continue to sprint toward the release date. It's looking like the next wave will open up when we get the UI upgrades and Multiplayer 2.0 into the game.
It sounds like the vessels in SR will have far more depth to them!
They're very deep and fluid; it's been a challenge to both keep everything balanced as we work due to how modular ships and ship construction is in Star Ruler and to make sure we provide more than decent controls to the whole process to limit micromanagement as much as possible (it is totally in real-time after all and we have to assume that the player can't always pause the game).