The game is in good progress. It is currently beta tested and scheduled for its announced release date. The reason you might feel there is little new info is because it's mid summer in Europe and our hard-working lead developers deserve some vacation too. Rest assured they are returning for the final QA sprint and we will all have a greatly polished title. In my humble opinion, this is probably the best AGEOD title up until now.
(excluding PON which I am virtually married to...
)
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Regarding the anticipation, I can only provide a certain hint:
read about what went wrong in the opening moves of the conflict. These details shall be thoroughly abstracted in the game. As a player you need to make sure you don't make the same historical mistakes.