Just wanted to give you guys a heads-up. The EB Team (with the assistance of our dedicated group of playtesters) has surmounted the final obstacles, and the path forward to v.81 is clear. The last tweaks, edits, and improvements are being assembled into the Update 7 Build, which will be tested internally for a few days. We expect to see no problems, just improvements, and once that's confirmed we'll begin to assemble the v.81 Release. We make no promises as to the release date, but it should be soon.

This patch contains literally hundreds of improvements, from major to barely perceptible, but a few of the most important are these:

1) Every CTD that's even remotely repeatable has been eliminated. There are still a few extremely rare reports of the Reinforcement CTD, but most of our playtesters have never seen it even once. This means that - by far - EB v.81 is the most stable build we have EVER released.

2) Elimination of Peasant Cards. Out of some 350 units, there's only about 7 cards still not finished. To put that in perspective, 18 of 20 factions will never see a Peasant Card again!

3) Playability. Every faction is playable now. They still have varying degrees of completeness, and several will test your skills to the limit, but there are no broken factions.

What v.81 is NOT, is "perfect". There will be typos and bad grammar and (far fewer) missing descriptions and several other tiny annoyances. And those are things we'll continue to work on. But you will find EB to be more immersive than ever, and now the only thing stopping your campaigns (other than trying to play it on a computer with marginal specs) will be your personal decision to stop. So if the only time you ever went to bed was after a CTD, God help you now!