Yep, I think that this might be our single largest in-cycle patch delay, including Valley 1. Although with AI War 4.0 we did have a month-long one while we switched engine from our old custom one to our new custom one running on top of Unity 3D (ported from Tidalis).
Right now, the ball is pretty much in Keith's court as far as an ETA on the next patch, as he's got the design notes for the current internal batch of work, and the implementation on that is the main holdup at the moment.
That said, I'm still working on other things that are related but not must-haves, and actually there are some things relating to the flagship abilities that are must-haves but that may not take too much time after his current batch of stuff (I'm handling some of the abilities directly, and then others would be in a smaller implementation phase for him after this). Then there's the various bugs and so forth that I'm finding, some of which I'm logging internally and some of which I'm fixing, as I go through the current stuff.
So it's kind of a "late-Tuesday at the earliest" thing, I'd guess. There's just more stuff going on with this patch under the hood than I had really anticipated in terms of how much we'd have to redo and expand in the combat arena. It hits literally every combat-related hostile and friendly action (contract, though we don't ever use that word in the game, actually), adds several new ones, and rewires balance, flow, the interface and a number of other things. As well as adding I think 5ish defensive goodies, 13ish civilian ones, and a variety of other stuff.
And that's really just the mainline new features -- there are a ton of other things that aren't related to the mainline feature set that I and others have been working on while Keith is up to his elbows in those central guts. So it's a really big thing, no two ways about it.
