Greetings!

Fall is here in the northern hemisphere. Time to migrate to Australia!

Here's what's new…

## Version 1.5 ##

I am hoping that version 1.5 will arrive before Halloween. It's going to be tight. Lots of work going on. I'll outline below some of the focus.

## UI ##

According to the Steam data, 28% of our players are playing at below 1920x1080 and the text and such looks awful. Unreadable imo. We are updating how the the game is displayed which should, we hope, result in a dramatic improvement to how the text, UI and really the game itself looks.

## Balance update ##

The Substrate are going to get a bit more love on the building destruction side. The PHC is going to get a bit of a nerf. We are also looking at porting back some of the work we've done in Escalation for the Substrate economy which should make them a bit different.

## Performance ##

Hopefully some of you noticed the significant performance boost in the September update. We are continuing down that path with version 1.5.

## Keyboard ##

High on our list is getting WASD keyboard support options in. I don't know if they'll make it into 1.5 or not. But it is coming.

## Vulkan ##

This is now working in our internal builds! This might show up in 1.5. AMD is providing a lot of assistance to us in getting Vulkan support so please be sure to give some kudos and credit to AMD for Vulkan in PC gaming. It'll run great on any GPU that supports Vulkan.

## Replays ##

This won't happen until after the Escalation expansion. We wanted to get this into 1.5 but it's a pretty big job. But it is coming.

## Scenario Creator & Steam Workhop ##

While probably not for 1.5, we are putting the final touches on a GUI Scenario editor. Lucky you guys. I had to make scenarios in a text editor. This will be in a free update that will include Steam Workshop support.

## Names Names Names ##

The mobile orbital nullifiers for PHC and Substrate need names. Put your suggestions in the comments.

## Reviews ##

We really could use your help on the reviews. We took a pretty big hit when people started down voting Ashes because they thought Escalation was a replacement to Ashes (it's not).

We are talking to Valve as to whether it'll be possible to turn Escalation into DLC so that it eliminates any confusion and we develop a game launcher that lets you pick the base game or Escalation. We prefer being able to use the Steam client as the launcher but given the backlast against expandalones, we're willing to spend the time and budget on writing our own launcher if that makes people happy.

Anyway, if you haven't reviewed the game on Steam, your review will absolutely make a difference.

That's all for now!

-brad