Version 1.027 is out, and has some very nice goodies!

The biggest thing here is the increased power of a number of the dispatches – not just those related to the RCI at planets, but several of the others, as well. There are also 4 new dispatches, which allow you to affect RCI negatively at planets, rather than just positively.

But doesn't this destroy balance? I was just talking about this in the forum threads for the prior version, after all. Well, the thing that occurred to me is that it's only unbalanced if there is no counter-cost. Before, the counter-cost was solar map time, which was frustrating to players and made them feel powerless in a bad way. Instead, the solar map time costs for those sorts of dispatches has been removed, but in place of that there are now substantial credit costs (whereas previously there were actually credit gains, of all things).

This really changes the dynamic with a lot of those dispatches, and also really changes the nature of your credit needs late in the game. It should be very interesting to see how this plays out with more players getting time on that.

What's Was With The Shift In Schedule Lately?

I actually wrote about that last week on our recently-moved blog.

Ongoing Updates

The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been 10 weeks, and it's clear we definitely have a winner here. As of a couple of days ago we have now broken even on the game, meaning that we actually are making money over and above what we spent creating the game. We're continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.

It won't always be on a consistent schedule, but if you're familiar with our post-release support for AI War: Fleet Command over the past 5 years, that's basically the arc that we are currently expecting here unless something unexpectedly changes.

At present we are also working on expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site in early July, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in August at this point, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

The official forum post discussing this release: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15940.0.html