I've been told to ask

Won't be the first time.

Other than Galatic war what are the main things missing? Please dont say better graphics or balance.

For me its just transports really, both orbital and on planet. What other units were people expecting?

There was talk of around 100 units planned, I think the current crop is what, 40? So there's a lot in the pipe yet to get released.


I'm betting on a likely 'release' closer to maybe Feb-March, especially if they want to honor all their kickstarter goals in the release.

Moving this thread to the backers forum. Please maintain the "What's said in backers forum, stays in backers forum" honor code here.

And "Software development experience says so".. All I can say is.. you don't know our team very well. Not saying we'll absolutely hit everything we want by mid December, but to quickly go through your bullet points.

1. And what makes you think it's not already well under way?
2. Half? How'd you get that number? We have the units we knew we needed for alpha, we have a few we've added as we moved through alpha and beta, and we'll add more as we identify the missing spots. It takes me or a designer a few hours to "build" a unit, and then an artist usually a day at most to build out the art, and another day or so to animate. Don't make up imaginary metrics like half, but.. We make units as we identify a solid need, usually tied to overall unit features we want to get in to the game.
3. This is mostly FX and unit work. Not a whole lot of code work needed here.
4. That's a pretty subjective statement. We want to do a lot more with it, but there's also a lot of the underpinnings already there.
5. How so? This is the style we've always promised. Not sure what you're expecting.
6. No question on this one. We have been intentionally staying away from doing major passes on balance or updating unit behaviors until we finish a number of ongoing development efforts.
7. How so? It's not 100% yet, but mostly just in the fact that some art isn't done yet, and some constraints need to be built into the system. Probably the most broken component is the "randomly generated" systems, but that actually is mostly fixed by getting our constraints in place for what each biome's limits should be.
8. Play the AI over the next few builds and tell me how early stage it is. That's not to say there's not plenty of work to do in the future, but if the AI can't beat most average to good players by the end of this month, I'll be utterly shocked.

Our own internal TODO list is a heck of a lot longer than this 8 point list. Some things have to get done by launch, some can slip past. We have a pretty good grasp on what needs to get done, and as Neutrino has said, the game is done when it's done.

Some weeks it seems like we move slowly on patches. Some weeks we move fast, but our team does an amazing amount of work, and often, that work has zero obvious and immediate client side impact. It doesn't mean it's not incredibly important and necessary. Some stuff is obvious. Much of it is not. If you look at the build notes for the latest patch it's 10 or so bullet points. The build, however, is actually a few hundred check-ins. For instance, I didn't call out the fact that the entire server architecture, and much of the client, was rebuilt over the last month and this is the first build to use that new code. It was literally 5 to 6 weeks of time from one person, and a few additional weeks worth of effort from other people if you combined all the effort. But from the user perspective? There's almost no difference. But that work will enable us to build out a very robust server side modding capability for the engine. Just as a for instance.

Garat I'd just like to take this opportunity to say thanks for all the hard work from you and the team I'm really enjoying being part of the Beta. Sure, some stuff isn't as feature complete as it can be, and sometimes features are just frustrating in their lack of implementation (that dude who evac's his commander to the other planet at the last minute) - but the game is entirely playable as is, and I'm doing all I can to recommend it to friends and so on.

Edit: Oh wow. I didn't realise there was a new build. Double my sentiment.