Hello! We've been hard at work since early October with a large number of Updates:

For new units, most notably we've added a large number of Cataphract visuals and variations, including Parthian, Anatolian, Sassanid, Kushan, Early Roman, Hellenic and Early Hellenic Cataphracts, and some visually related Late Companions, Persian Guard Lancers, Kappadokian Cavalry, and Hippeis armored Greek cavalry from the Hellenic era. For the Apulian region Italians we've added Daunian Warriors and Iapygian Warriors. The Galatians now have their own Galatian Armored Cavalry, and there are a few variations of eastern spearmen in the game now, including Sassanid defensive spearmen with their characteristic large shields. Tarantine mercenary cavalry are now a distinct unit and visual from native Tarantine Cavalry, and the Romans now have dedicated Equites Sagittarii in the late period. The Ligurians have their own veteran warriors, and ancient Lydia was added with Lydian irregulars, Lydian Armored Hoplites, and Lydian Lancers, and so was Lycia/Caria with Lycian Warriors, and Armored Veteran Hoplite visuals were added to some of the older Greek lists. With new assets, we also updated many existing units with new helmets and weapons like Italian Cavalry, Steppe Lancers, Agema Cavalry, Auxiliary Infantry, Celtiberian Infantry, and more.

For new factions, the game now features Atropatene (early/late), Georgian, Caucasian, Indo-Skythian, Indo-Parthian, Arab City, Dacian, Germanic Foot/Horse tribes, and a few other choice additions to fill out the Near Eastern areas especially with more lists.

The AI has undergone various improvements to behavior and deployment. They are able to pick auto drop flanks better, move and maintain their line better, deploy and use horse archer armies more intelligently, and I've added more and better bespoke AI for Lancer lines, overwhelmingly light foot armies, medium foot armies, and bowmen deployments (including some bespoke deployments for bowmen armies that mix staggered lines of bowmen and infantry to protect their shooters, and for certain medium foot armies that will post up in terrain and draw you in with light troops/shooters). There are fixes to pursuit to charge, pursuing and evading with intervening routed units, moving and attacking coherently in formation, using more reserves, having multiple units coordinate against single targets, more intelligent evades based on matchup, pursuers pursuing other pursuers, and fixes to pathing around combats.

We have a few new Desert style maps now, and are in the progress of integrating various Gaia terrain plugin features like GTS, which we're using for terrains and foliage etc...I've also updated the Unity version, and significantly updated the plugin versions for GPU instancing and Pathfinding/Navigation, so those features are more advanced and performant now. I've also greatly expanded the tutorial and added a second tutorial for advanced concepts.

Couriers are now all cavalry in a light cavalry style appropriate to a faction, rather than just being drawn from soldiers in the General's unit, which is more appropriate and visually consistent, and generally looks better. For settings, FPS caps, VSync, many keybinds and other options have been added, and more and better UI support for different resolutions are now in. There have been many tooltip updates as well, including on hovering terrain, showing unit portraits and descriptions on unit selection, displaying allies and era information in the in-game menu, and many more small things. There are also many more allied faction selections and optional randomization of allies with randomization of factions.

Localization has made much progress with localized unit names and descriptions, faction names and descriptions, menu items, and tooltips, and new font atlases for Cyrillic (right now we are localizing into Spanish, French, German, and Russian).

Thanks for reading, and we'll keep you updated with the latest as we make more progress!