Thanks forthe kind words, all! Updates to ai war are never a chore for us, but in some cases (like now) where we're trying to balance them with another title that is getting rapidly updated, it can be a challenge. Thanks for your patience, and glad the new stuff is a hit!
In terms of the upgrade from unity 3.1 to 3.3, see those embedded links in the op for their full release notes. In general, keeping current wight the game engine is important to us, as that's the only way we get all the bugfixes and such. Compatibility with WINE isn't something we really factor at all in our decision making, unfortunately, as we can't control it and we can't stop getting engine updates even if it did temporarily break the WINE compatibility. My hope is still that a native Linux version of the engine will come out at some point, but we'll see. In the meantime, the sort of updates they tend to do seems highly unlikely to break WINE compatibility in the first place. The upgrade of fmod would be probably the only real risk in that department.
In terms of the other things that were NOT improved by unity, it seems apparent that we're the only game that has run even remotely close to that. It's funny, because AVWW is just as large a game (if not larger) as ai war, but it currently uses about 17mb of heap as a baseline, going up to 30mb at absolute most, rather than usig about 250mb as a baseline, and going up to 800mb and thus dying in some cases. And avww is way more visually complex and dense than ai war, with tons more graphic assets per screen, so that's doubly funny. The difference is in the simulation, because avww keeps so much stuff just cooling on the disk, whereas ai war must have it all in memory at all times. I think some of the display text also has an impact here, though. Anyway, that's a memory-reduction possibility for ai war that I plan to investigate at some point, but a lot of it might come to nothing, anyway. As you say, the best solution is for unity to have a better gc.
