Exit From Early Access, Onward to Full Release

Well, I guess it is officially a game. Build 14 marks version P 5.0.14 where the P stands for “Production”. Just what does this mean?

It means my belief is the game has reach a high level of stability/quality, which was the primary goal of Early Access. That does not mean it is perfect, but you should be able to play many hours bug free I hope. (If you do find an issue, as always let me know). The map/scenario uploading is in place, and I do have people looking over and using the open source AI code. So I know it will never be perfect, but as of now the game is considered in “Full Release”.

Version P 5.0.14 (still known as build 14 to all of you 'insiders'), has not made a ton of changes, but there were a couple of notable additions:

Waypoints – Map labels now hove the ability to contain one of eight key-bindable waypoints. When you set the key for a waypoint in your keybinds, and then in game assign a map label to a location, and assign that waypoint to that label, pressing the key will center the map to that location (regardless of whether or not the label is displayed). So you have up to potentially 8 hot key locations to zoom to.

Map Editor Copy And Paste – this is pretty rudimentary, but you can now define a rectangular region and copy the objects in that region (terrain, cities, units), and them paste them elsewhere on the map. You can also rotate this rectangle when pasting. What fun!

The remaining fixes and changes were pretty minor, though there was a network marshaling error, which now advances our network protocol value to “2”. There were also some issues with group orders in network play that needed to be cleaned out.

The full patch notes list is posted here: http://killerbeesoftware.com/edce/dev/

There were some fixes to the AI players, so there will also be an update to the AI source code later on June 1st.

I will of course continue to work on fixes an some changes, and it is possible other things will get added. In other work I am currently working on a prototype for The Perfect General, and I will pass information along about that if it seems to be taking shape. Also, now that I am out of EA, I plan on exploring Android/iOS possibilities. Earlier this year I did build an apk, (Android), but decided to wait for this Full Release before pursuing it further.

So I am quite pleased with the game. It is quite a lot of fun, as it has been for a long time. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

--Mark