Had a quick play of their demo last night. Camera control, and as a result unit control, feel quite clumsy. There was a lack of keyboard shortcuts, or at least of ability to discover shortcuts through the UI, which was frustrating for someone who almost never clicks a button in the Age games, and frequently avoids even clicking on buildings.

But its basic mechanical flow felt smooth and competent. It's not quite my type of RTS, but I'd definitely recommend at least checking it out if you do enjoy the sort of eco-light area defence games.

• Buildings are more resistant to hack damage with higher increases for some defensive buildings, such as Towers and Fortresses.

• Towers and Fortresses now deal significantly more damage to help players defend their bases.

Niiiiice. This is sorely needed!

Fixed cases where units could be produced from some angles on production buildings and end up stuck inside pockets in the treeline.

That's really interesting. How effective will it be, in practice? I wonder if a fix like this might also be made to aoe2?

Sentry Tower: adjusted as follows

• • Damage increased from 5 → 8 pierce.

This, plus the fortress-type building 50% damage boost, seem interesting. I'm sceptical that it's going to be enough of a damage boost to overcome the problem Magic noted in this video, but it's a start. Fighting under a fortress with equal total resources should be a fairly overwhelming victory, IMO; maybe equivalent to if you had, like, 25%–33% more resources in a units-only fight.

Halo of the sun (Helios): adjusted as follows

• No longer affects Fire Ship range and damage.
• Now also increases Arcus range by +1.

I would love to see a dev note explaining this one. I think I like the change, I just want to know why.

I agree a lot with the commenter early on in Beasty's chat who said it looks like Battle for Middle Earth. And that feeling only increased as I kept watching.

The dragon reminded me a whole lot of the Nazgul in that game. The map view seems to resemble the War of the Ring mode, and it seems like economy is based on map control in a more direct way than the worker-based economies of games like Age of Empires. Plus the most obvious bit: the squad-based militaries with unique heroes.