Copied this from the Com. They have started a thread telling us what they are doing.

April 8th:


Just thought I would make a post about where things are, where things are going and what we plan on doing.
First off, we are going to support Empire for a long time. The first game play patch with both a lot of fixes and balancing/economic changes as well as more is in testing, and then the cycle of hot fixes then game play patches will begin again. At the moment every programmer is focused on fixing bugs.

What balance/economic/other changes will be in the first game play patch?
Quite a lot really. Unit balancing has seem some general tweaks across the board to improve it. Unit costs have changed for both multiplayer and single player.
For multiplayer there are now separate costs for early and late era so that units better reflect the techs available, and units such as mortars and rocket ships have had big cost increases and light infantry have had their cost increased a bit as well.
For single player, unit costs have increased on normal, even more on hard and even more on very hard so that on very hard units cost 4x their upkeep cost. Bigger ships have had their cost increased and all ships upkeep costs have increased.
There have also been general economic tweaks to prevent the huge sums of money that were possible in the late game, and so to increase the challenge of the game.
As for the other changes, we've added in a delete save game button, a button to allow you to view battle replays from the single player Play Battle menu, improved ship grouping UI and other things.
There are also of course AI improvements and yes naval invasions though they may be rare for now.

What you going to do after that?
Well we are going to carry on fixing and improving the game. The AI (both battle and campaign) will see continuous improvements, multiplayer will see improvements, there will be more balancing improvements, and some nice free stuff you'll be hearing about in due time.
From a personal perspective as someone working on unit balancing, the next game play patch after this one will see some big improvements in terms of diversification of different unit and artillery types. The game play patch after that one will see improvements to naval battle balancing.

So what are you getting at?
We are going to carry on supporting Empire for a long time. We are going to carry on improving Empire. You'll see more as things get done.



Jack.
http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/topic/53425