It’s been a week since we released The Second World War and began the Early Access pre-release phase. Overall, the launch went very well. Some players did experience a memory crash but this issue can be addressed through game settings. We’ve changed some of the default settings to minimize future problems. Along with the remaining feature work we will also be doing optimization and performance improvements wherever we can. This week we spent a lot of effort on improving the way the AI manages the production of factory outputs like Steel and Rail Capacity. We’re trying to get them to produce more and trade more. It may take a few rounds to get the balance right. Please let us know if you think the AI is doing a better job with this. We continue to make adjustments to the Annex logic so nations will liberate their friends and replace the governments of their enemies. The AI is directed to establish governance based on a character property we call International Policy. There are 4 settings: Imperialist, Expansionist, Ideologue and Neutral. The decisions are also influenced by technology dominance and governing ideology. We want the AI to form coherent states based on the mindset of nations during this era. A few oddball cases will still exist and sometimes that makes for good gameplay. As with most systems in Early Access, we will not declare it done until we release. The Workshop will be officially turned on with this release. Many of our users like to create mods and we want to support their efforts. The Editor is being kept up to date as new features are added to the game. This might cause mods to incompatible so beware. You may want to wait before investing a lot of time into a large scale project. We decided not to expose the Event editing section since these are still being changed and new Triggers will be added in the next couple of weeks. It will be including at some point in the next few weeks. And finally, I’ve received a few comments about the choice of music in the game. I understand the Spaghetti Western style is not accurate to the period. But there’s something about those old Sergio Leone movies that I aesthetically associate with WW2. Maybe it’s because the majority of movies I've watched about the war were made back in the 60's. Since this is Early Access I figured I could try something a bit different. And I do intend to add in some moody ambient tracks to soften things up. If it’s super annoying to most people, I'll swap them out when we release. Until the, every gun makes its own tune. Next week we have a stack of things to work on, we are hoping our main focus will shift away from the Economy and on to the Military AI. I’ll be on the forums answering questions and making comments when I feel I can be useful.

Notes for Early Access Update #1:

- Added +/- indicators to top bar supplies. - Lowered points required for most research projects (To Speed up). - Increased Ethiopian Starting Units. - Re-added Atheism as Soviet Religion. - Relocated Wurttemberg Airbase. - Fixed Music reference errors that kept a few songs from playing. - Some trigger typos fixed (Thanks to our community spelling skills). - Added missing unit icons for Colier, Troopship and Oiler. - Changed Compressed Terrain option to default to On. - Changed registry location for game settings to Making History SWW (was sharing flags with TGW). - Updated World Demand values for capacities. - AI now considers all resource demands for 2nd and 3rd order production. - Balanced Resource Costs and Output/Turn Factors. - Balanced Higher level Transportation Infrastructure properties. - Starting gold for new subordinates is now deducted from the Master's treasury. - Annex Puppet now transfers resources and units to Master Nation. - Updated Status Quo Peace deal annex logic. - The AI Pre War region list is now based on owned regions. - Added turn length option to Military Access Event Triggers to keep the AI from ending the treaty. - Implemented forced Military Access treaties to Soviet Baltic triggers. - Added fallback unit position index for air patrol units if they don't have a valid one. - Disallow splitting air groups that are based off of carriers. - Fixed pixel noise around main menu Buttons. - Added some New Notification images. - New Triggers Started: Lend Lease, Bulgaria, Chain Home. - Added more silent Non-Aggression pacts at start. - Fixed bugs and made improvements to many triggers. - Removed Expansionist Policy from all starting nations, added triggers to turn these on. - Changed Commonwealth nations from Imperialist to Ideologue - except UK.