Hey everyone!

We wanted to share what we've been working on in an update that will be coming later tomorrow.

First, thank you so much for your support and constructive feedback. We know this game can't be all things to all people, but we think we're steering it in a positive direction and we hope you like the changes that are coming.

We've been working with a few players still experiencing connectivity issues with debug builds of the game to help isolate where the issues are occurring. We're ruled out a lot and it's clear that in many of these cases, when the connection fails, it fails after joining the Steam lobby. We are investigating whether there is something going on in our code that affects the connection in a minority of networks, or if there exists a bug in the game's engine that again only affects certain networks. In many cases, however, resolutions could be found on the network side. We will continue to do all we can.

Mechanically, we are changing things so that escalating a situation past a given threshold will have a guaranteed cost in country loyalty. While these costs are always lesser than the cost of backing down from an escalation, we hope this will give players pause as to whether an issue that is caught is truly important enough to dig one's heels in on. This will likely change player strategies significantly.

Also, we agree it's kind of weird to face a 6-army resistance in Greenland. In the new update, the randomness of local army strengths has been softened significantly. Local army strengths will be calculated as a range between two reasonable figures based on historical data.

And most importantly, the AI is getting a major behavioral update that is going to push us into the weekend. We've heard a lot of your feedback about the AI, and we'll be ensuring that the cost of escalating a challenge is also built into the new AI decision-matrix.

There will also be many bugfixes and quality of life improvements coming tomorrow.

Again, thank you for your patience and for being a supportive fanbase.