Parts 1 and 2 layed out how we got here and why we decided to make a huge change to AirMech. This post will talk more about the current split plan which feels good to us but is subject to change based on what happens when the game(s) are released.

Over the years we have swung between wondering if we can figure out how to make F2P work, or if we should do something drastic like un-F2P the game. That second option felt like a death sentance for the game, as it is much more a F2P game than anything else at this point. So we continued on, trying to find a F2P angle that could work, always not quite hitting that sweet spot.

Then it occured to us--why not do both? As AirMech evolved, it continued to pull in two different directions. One was from the PvP crowd, the other from PvE and coop lovers. "More balance" called one side, and "more power" called the other. "Pay to win trash" called the one side "please let us pay for power" called the other. The only solution is to split the game.

Which means literally two games on Steam. Not one game, and DLC under it. Two completely seperate games on Steam, at least from the Steam side of it. Underneath, they share an engine (our own custom engine) and a backend, so you still have just one AirMech account with Carbon and lots of cool benefits due to that.

So follow our train of thought--if we have two games, are they both new? Keep the old classic AirMech around? No, "current" AirMech is a mess, it deserves to become AirMech 2.0, which we call AirMech Strike. Someone who has been away for 3 years, or 3 months, they come back and they are playing the latest and greatest version of the game. So AirMech F2P remains F2P, is renamed AirMech Strike, and launches out of Early Access.

The other game, AirMech Wastelands, takes what was hinted at with the campaign and warzone content, looks at it from the perspective of a paid game, and rebuilds it from top to bottom--and expands it. Parts are to AirMech what swords and armor are to Diablo--you can get them as drops, buy them in shops, or even craft them in some cases. They scale to become incredibly powerful, and you'll need that power. Later game content is overwhelmingly powerful if you aren't fully geared out. These are missions of war, not battling an AI playing by the same rules as you.

Wastelands features a 3D overworld map where you can see the areas yet to explore. You can see your friends and other players moving around the overworld. Special missions appear and can even move around. It is a framework that allows us to easily add more missions and content.

There is a lot to talk about in Wastelands and the rabbit hole went down in rethinking the game. However the core fun is still there--your mech, your units, the tactics of moving things around to getting your hands dirty, it's all there. It's exploded in terms of how much stuff there is in the game and it's only the start.

So if there's so much stuff in Wastelands, what is in Strike? When you launch the game you are in a 3D lobby, your mech in front of you all ready to go. Queue for matchmaking, Browse for a custom game, or create a custom game. Or do practice mode--all 12 original pilots are there with new custom AI behaviors to ramp up their difficulty with each one you defeat. Battle them on any map you want, against any pilot you have already defeated.

There's a brand new queue system. Previously, for PvP it would need to fill the entire game, both sides before you saw anyone. This was bad, as it often gave the impression no one was in queue. Now, it will match your team before it finds opponents. Other players appear beside you, and you can see their mech/skin as they pick it.

What we removed (or moved to Wastelands): pilots, parts, items no longer apply to PvP games. These things all still exist on your account, but they are not useable for PvP balance reasons. They are all becoming more powerful in Wastelands.

Unit picking now has a huge change--you can swap out units ingame for a small time penalty. And instead of picking units in the lobby, you pick them pregame, which has a very positive effect on the game. Now players can focus on just their AirMech choice, not their units and their teammate's units.

Benefits go beyond that: because maps are randomly chosen for matchmaking games, you might not have the right units previously. Now you can choose units after knowing the map. It also encourages more creative unit picks, intead of always having to go with a safe loadout. No longer do you have to feel helpless by having the wrong loadout to deal with an opponent. You also don't have to reserve precious slots for late-game units--just swap them out at that time.

Orders have been given a large rework. "Follow me" is now a core order that can be used from the air or ground and is a huge change strategically. Unit AI has been improved, much thanks to the VR version of the game.

I'll dedicate an update to just Strike soon and talk more about the gameplay nuts and bolts. There's a ton of exciting changes that are a mix between going back to the original PvP focused game's roots and new features to keep gameplay fast paced and allow a wide range of play styles.

AirMech Strike is currently available on the "beta" channel of AirMech for anyone who can't wait. We hope to do some larger scale testing in the coming week. As soon as we feel the beta version of Strike is better than the current live version we will switch it over and let the fun/chaos begin...

For those who have played Strike, is it better than the current live version? Why or why not?

Parts 1 and 2 layed out how we got here and why we decided to make a huge change to AirMech. This post will talk more about the current split plan which feels good to us but is subject to change based on what happens when the game(s) are released.

Over the years we have swung between wondering if we can figure out how to make F2P work, or if we should do something drastic like un-F2P the game. That second option felt like a death sentance for the game, as it is much more a F2P game than anything else at this point. So we continued on, trying to find a F2P angle that could work, always not quite hitting that sweet spot.

Then it occured to us--why not do both? As AirMech evolved, it continued to pull in two different directions. One was from the PvP crowd, the other from PvE and coop lovers. "More balance" called one side, and "more power" called the other. "Pay to win trash" called the one side "please let us pay for power" called the other. The only solution is to split the game.

Which means literally two games on Steam. Not one game, and DLC under it. Two completely seperate games on Steam, at least from the Steam side of it. Underneath, they share an engine (our own custom engine) and a backend, so you still have just one AirMech account with Carbon and lots of cool benefits due to that.

So follow our train of thought--if we have two games, are they both new? Keep the old classic AirMech around? No, "current" AirMech is a mess, it deserves to become AirMech 2.0, which we call AirMech Strike. Someone who has been away for 3 years, or 3 months, they come back and they are playing the latest and greatest version of the game. So AirMech F2P remains F2P, is renamed AirMech Strike, and launches out of Early Access.

The other game, AirMech Wastelands, takes what was hinted at with the campaign and warzone content, looks at it from the perspective of a paid game, and rebuilds it from top to bottom--and expands it. Parts are to AirMech what swords and armor are to Diablo--you can get them as drops, buy them in shops, or even craft them in some cases. They scale to become incredibly powerful, and you'll need that power. Later game content is overwhelmingly powerful if you aren't fully geared out. These are missions of war, not battling an AI playing by the same rules as you.

Wastelands features a 3D overworld map where you can see the areas yet to explore. You can see your friends and other players moving around the overworld. Special missions appear and can even move around. It is a framework that allows us to easily add more missions and content.

There is a lot to talk about in Wastelands and the rabbit hole went down in rethinking the game. However the core fun is still there--your mech, your units, the tactics of moving things around to getting your hands dirty, it's all there. It's exploded in terms of how much stuff there is in the game and it's only the start.

So if there's so much stuff in Wastelands, what is in Strike? When you launch the game you are in a 3D lobby, your mech in front of you all ready to go. Queue for matchmaking, Browse for a custom game, or create a custom game. Or do practice mode--all 12 original pilots are there with new custom AI behaviors to ramp up their difficulty with each one you defeat. Battle them on any map you want, against any pilot you have already defeated.

There's a brand new queue system. Previously, for PvP it would need to fill the entire game, both sides before you saw anyone. This was bad, as it often gave the impression no one was in queue. Now, it will match your team before it finds opponents. Other players appear beside you, and you can see their mech/skin as they pick it.

What we removed (or moved to Wastelands): pilots, parts, items no longer apply to PvP games. These things all still exist on your account, but they are not useable for PvP balance reasons. They are all becoming more powerful in Wastelands.

Unit picking now has a huge change--you can swap out units ingame for a small time penalty. And instead of picking units in the lobby, you pick them pregame, which has a very positive effect on the game. Now players can focus on just their AirMech choice, not their units and their teammate's units.

Benefits go beyond that: because maps are randomly chosen for matchmaking games, you might not have the right units previously. Now you can choose units after knowing the map. It also encourages more creative unit picks, intead of always having to go with a safe loadout. No longer do you have to feel helpless by having the wrong loadout to deal with an opponent. You also don't have to reserve precious slots for late-game units--just swap them out at that time.

Orders have been given a large rework. "Follow me" is now a core order that can be used from the air or ground and is a huge change strategically. Unit AI has been improved, much thanks to the VR version of the game.

I'll dedicate an update to just Strike soon and talk more about the gameplay nuts and bolts. There's a ton of exciting changes that are a mix between going back to the original PvP focused game's roots and new features to keep gameplay fast paced and allow a wide range of play styles.

AirMech Strike is currently available on the "beta" channel of AirMech for anyone who can't wait. We hope to do some larger scale testing in the coming week. As soon as we feel the beta version of Strike is better than the current live version we will switch it over and let the fun/chaos begin...

For those who have played Strike, is it better than the current live version? Why or why not?

This post will talk about the game avalable for the 9 months prior to the split. If the game you are playing is AirMech Strike, then this references an old version.

I had never imagined AirMech as a F2P game way back when it was just an idea and we hadn't started creating it. Take one part Herzog Zwei, add 20 years of game mechanics evolution, toss in a bit of C&C Red Alert and Advance Wars, and a big dose of WH40K miniatures aesthetic and we're done--right?

As I touched on in Part 1, F2P didn't really exist on PC back when we started. I hated F2P on mobile, and felt that there was probably some formula we could tap into that would work well for an indie dev of our size. After all, we knew we could make a game, so even Kickstarter seemed like a strange approch--why not just put the game in player's hands and let them support us if they like what they see?

While we knew nothing about F2P when we started, we quickly learned. Having 5% of your players pay something was normal it turns out--and even part of the "game" can be not paying. This doesn't mean the players are being unsupportive or anything, but it's a tricky chicken and egg thing.

We struggled for years trying to balance the line between rewarding the paying players with lots of excellent bonuses and keeping the game fair for free players. It was a problem I didn't expect--we wanted all players who gave even a small amount to be rewarded handsomely, so we started the VIP system. Make a purchase, become Silver VIP for life, simple. XP, currency bonuses, exclusive cosmetics, we experimented with lots of things but the better we made VIP (even if it was cheap) the more we got called "pay to win". This was very frustrating to say the least.

It seemed no matter what changes we made, or how many features we added to the game, revenue seemed incredibly consistent. Retention was never great, but steady. The playerbase wouldn't grow much--or shrink. It was strange. We always thought "this is the feature players have been asking for, this will make the game take off". But it might be we were building the game for the already dedicated players, which did make the game better, but did nothing to bring in new players or help them early on. And again, most of these features benefited the paying users, furthering the divide.

Around 2 years ago, we were experimenting in VR. This got us a lot of attention, and Oculus in particular was very interested in us doing a full game in the AirMech universe for them. We were very interested in VR, but saw designing the game for motion controllers to be too much at the time. With Rift launching with a gamepad it was perfect--we knew we could add motion controller support later on.

We focused the core team on AirMech Command (the VR version) but also wanted to improve F2P AirMech. So we brought in some outside help from someone who worked in F2P games. He had some quite different ideas on what types of content to give players for what to play (Warzone, Tutorial Campaign) and a plan for how to make it. It was hard for me to give up creative control of AirMech as it was my baby, but for financial and business reasons I felt it was the right decision. After all, after many attempts I was never able to launch AirMech into a huge success, so letting someone new take a shot seemed sensible.

I take full responsibility for what AirMech would become. While it was not my plan, I did approve of it, because it was at least something "different". I don't think the result is a game that I would play, but Carbon was in the position where we were very focused on VR and not able to spend time to "fix" the game. VR, even with its tiny userbase, was already generating more revenue than the F2P game, so we relucantly had to keep almost all of the team focused on our VR project(s).

With the release of AirMech Command on Steam this spring, it freed up the team to come back to AirMech properly. I am again leading development, and having come back from a long break I can see a giant amount of "stuff" we have in this game--but it's spread all over into a mess.

At the root is a conflict between PvP and PvE style play. One wants to be fair and competitive, the other wants progression and a variety of challenges. We have always had battles between the two groups of players over this, resulting in neither group being satisfied. I remind myself that even Blizzard gave up on PvP for Diablo 3 probably due to this very reason.

The solution is that AirMech should really be two games: a PvP focused one, and an RPG/PvE focused one. Instead of two new games however, the current version of AirMech will be relaunched as AirMech Strike--think of it as AirMech 2.0. It will remain F2P, and be entirely PvP focused. You'll still be able to do coop practice against AI and custom games, but all the campaign and coop special missions are being moved too...

A brand new AirMech game: AirMech Wastelands. I'll need a whole post to go into detail about that because there are many radical changes from rebooting AirMech into a semi-open world game with RPG-style power and progression curves.

It's important to note that any player who is Silver VIP before the split will be gifted AirMech Wastelands on Steam. Originally it was meant for just owners of Prime to get the story/campaign, but we want to bring over anyone who has supported us financially on any level in the past. There will be benefits over and above for Prime owners, don't worry.

Once again, I apologize for the current state of the game. It pains me to see it this way, and you can see for yourself on the recent Steam reviews that the players feel the same way. I am very excited to be close to releasing Strike, and shortly after that we will leave Early Access. Wastelands is coming soon after as a new Steam game, not as AirMech Strike DLC.

Worth noting is that the accounts for Strike and Wastelands will be linked. There will be some content only available in one game or the other, in some really interesting ways. Longtime players will find themselves quite happy with the benefits of what they have collected ahead of this split.

Keep an eye out for the next update where I detail out what will be in Strike and what will be in Wastelands.

This post will talk about the game avalable for the 9 months prior to the split. If the game you are playing is AirMech Strike, then this references an old version.

I had never imagined AirMech as a F2P game way back when it was just an idea and we hadn't started creating it. Take one part Herzog Zwei, add 20 years of game mechanics evolution, toss in a bit of C&C Red Alert and Advance Wars, and a big dose of WH40K miniatures aesthetic and we're done--right?

As I touched on in Part 1, F2P didn't really exist on PC back when we started. I hated F2P on mobile, and felt that there was probably some formula we could tap into that would work well for an indie dev of our size. After all, we knew we could make a game, so even Kickstarter seemed like a strange approch--why not just put the game in player's hands and let them support us if they like what they see?

While we knew nothing about F2P when we started, we quickly learned. Having 5% of your players pay something was normal it turns out--and even part of the "game" can be not paying. This doesn't mean the players are being unsupportive or anything, but it's a tricky chicken and egg thing.

We struggled for years trying to balance the line between rewarding the paying players with lots of excellent bonuses and keeping the game fair for free players. It was a problem I didn't expect--we wanted all players who gave even a small amount to be rewarded handsomely, so we started the VIP system. Make a purchase, become Silver VIP for life, simple. XP, currency bonuses, exclusive cosmetics, we experimented with lots of things but the better we made VIP (even if it was cheap) the more we got called "pay to win". This was very frustrating to say the least.

It seemed no matter what changes we made, or how many features we added to the game, revenue seemed incredibly consistent. Retention was never great, but steady. The playerbase wouldn't grow much--or shrink. It was strange. We always thought "this is the feature players have been asking for, this will make the game take off". But it might be we were building the game for the already dedicated players, which did make the game better, but did nothing to bring in new players or help them early on. And again, most of these features benefited the paying users, furthering the divide.

Around 2 years ago, we were experimenting in VR. This got us a lot of attention, and Oculus in particular was very interested in us doing a full game in the AirMech universe for them. We were very interested in VR, but saw designing the game for motion controllers to be too much at the time. With Rift launching with a gamepad it was perfect--we knew we could add motion controller support later on.

We focused the core team on AirMech Command (the VR version) but also wanted to improve F2P AirMech. So we brought in some outside help from someone who worked in F2P games. He had some quite different ideas on what types of content to give players for what to play (Warzone, Tutorial Campaign) and a plan for how to make it. It was hard for me to give up creative control of AirMech as it was my baby, but for financial and business reasons I felt it was the right decision. After all, after many attempts I was never able to launch AirMech into a huge success, so letting someone new take a shot seemed sensible.

I take full responsibility for what AirMech would become. While it was not my plan, I did approve of it, because it was at least something "different". I don't think the result is a game that I would play, but Carbon was in the position where we were very focused on VR and not able to spend time to "fix" the game. VR, even with its tiny userbase, was already generating more revenue than the F2P game, so we relucantly had to keep almost all of the team focused on our VR project(s).

With the release of AirMech Command on Steam this spring, it freed up the team to come back to AirMech properly. I am again leading development, and having come back from a long break I can see a giant amount of "stuff" we have in this game--but it's spread all over into a mess.

At the root is a conflict between PvP and PvE style play. One wants to be fair and competitive, the other wants progression and a variety of challenges. We have always had battles between the two groups of players over this, resulting in neither group being satisfied. I remind myself that even Blizzard gave up on PvP for Diablo 3 probably due to this very reason.

The solution is that AirMech should really be two games: a PvP focused one, and an RPG/PvE focused one. Instead of two new games however, the current version of AirMech will be relaunched as AirMech Strike--think of it as AirMech 2.0. It will remain F2P, and be entirely PvP focused. You'll still be able to do coop practice against AI and custom games, but all the campaign and coop special missions are being moved too...

A brand new AirMech game: AirMech Wastelands. I'll need a whole post to go into detail about that because there are many radical changes from rebooting AirMech into a semi-open world game with RPG-style power and progression curves.

It's important to note that any player who is Silver VIP before the split will be gifted AirMech Wastelands on Steam. Originally it was meant for just owners of Prime to get the story/campaign, but we want to bring over anyone who has supported us financially on any level in the past. There will be benefits over and above for Prime owners, don't worry.

Once again, I apologize for the current state of the game. It pains me to see it this way, and you can see for yourself on the recent Steam reviews that the players feel the same way. I am very excited to be close to releasing Strike, and shortly after that we will leave Early Access. Wastelands is coming soon after as a new Steam game, not as AirMech Strike DLC.

Worth noting is that the accounts for Strike and Wastelands will be linked. There will be some content only available in one game or the other, in some really interesting ways. Longtime players will find themselves quite happy with the benefits of what they have collected ahead of this split.

Keep an eye out for the next update where I detail out what will be in Strike and what will be in Wastelands.

Where to begin? This has been a long time coming indeed. As one of the very first Early Access titles, AirMech probably holds some records on Steam for that. This series of posts is about much more than exiting Early Access however. I wanted to lay everything out for the players to understand the road we took to get here, what we have been working on the past half year, and where we are going next. I plan to make a few posts here to cover the different areas since there is a lot to talk about. It will probably go like this:

Part 1: Backstory - general history of AirMech and Carbon
Part 2: The Split - overview of how AirMech is expanding on Steam
Part 3: AirMech Strike - more detail on the PvP focused AirMech
Part 4: AirMech Wastelands - more detail on the RPG/PvE AirMech

Carbon Games is almost 6 years old now. We started the company with the goal to create AirMech, a spiritual successor of sorts to a game I loved in my youth, Herzog Zwei. There was some magic to that game that I wanted to bring to a larger number of gamers who probably never even knew about it.

Looking back now, I can't believe we started our own company--I'm not sure I would do it again! We survived through a combination of luck and skill, probably more luck than anything. And by luck I mean spotting smart opportunities to let us continue to move AirMech forward while keeping control of the core game.

We started AirMech when F2P was in its infancy. To me, it wasn't actually F2P at the time, it was built around Microsoft's Xbox Live original model where all games were required to have demos, and at the end of the demo you had the option to buy the game and keep your progress.

We also wanted to make the game free while we were in beta, as that's what I always thought a beta was--you're asking players to test your game, so charging them to play it before release seemed crazy to me. Steam didn't have a way to do this however--but Early Access appeared just as we wanted to release our first test versions, so it seemed like a perfect fit.

Fast forward to now, and both Free to Play and Early Access have become something different than what we believed in. Since we are F2P, we don't require payment to try the game out, and I really like being able to offer that. It means that someone who paid probably has a lot of hours invested and is very likely to be a satisfied customer--more than an average EA game I hope.

The Elephant in the Room: why no updates to AirMech since last September? After more than 200 updates to AirMech (sometimes multiple times a week) we stopped. We didn't want to, but we had some other things taking our attention: the VR version of AirMech, named AirMech Command. Released both on SteamVR and Oculus, this was a huge technical and design challenge that we enjoyed very much. It took all of our time to focus on it.

We were surprised by two things: one was how small the VR market is, the other was that the VR games generated more revenue than the F2P AirMech. We again wondered if we were handicapping AirMech by labeling it as F2P, since we are not a typical F2P game. So the idea we have been bouncing around internally for a long time came up again:

AirMech can become two games, one F2P, and one paid.

We have been talking about this with our most devoted fans for over 6 months now, running through what would happen, questions, answers, and together we came up with a great plan where everyone sounds happy. In Part 2, I'll talk more about what the split means, how we'll look after all of the existing players, and all the new things that are coming to AirMech as a result. If you have questions about the split, please hold off until Part 2 is posted and read that first.

Questions about the history of AirMech and Carbon? I skipped over things like AirMech on Chrome, AirMech Arena on console, and what it was like being on the frontline of VR using a custom engine instead of Untiy/Unreal. I'll answer any questions I can below.

Where to begin? This has been a long time coming indeed. As one of the very first Early Access titles, AirMech probably holds some records on Steam for that. This series of posts is about much more than exiting Early Access however. I wanted to lay everything out for the players to understand the road we took to get here, what we have been working on the past half year, and where we are going next. I plan to make a few posts here to cover the different areas since there is a lot to talk about. It will probably go like this:

Part 1: Backstory - general history of AirMech and Carbon
Part 2: The Split - overview of how AirMech is expanding on Steam
Part 3: AirMech Strike - more detail on the PvP focused AirMech
Part 4: AirMech Wastelands - more detail on the RPG/PvE AirMech

Carbon Games is almost 6 years old now. We started the company with the goal to create AirMech, a spiritual successor of sorts to a game I loved in my youth, Herzog Zwei. There was some magic to that game that I wanted to bring to a larger number of gamers who probably never even knew about it.

Looking back now, I can't believe we started our own company--I'm not sure I would do it again! We survived through a combination of luck and skill, probably more luck than anything. And by luck I mean spotting smart opportunities to let us continue to move AirMech forward while keeping control of the core game.

We started AirMech when F2P was in its infancy. To me, it wasn't actually F2P at the time, it was built around Microsoft's Xbox Live original model where all games were required to have demos, and at the end of the demo you had the option to buy the game and keep your progress.

We also wanted to make the game free while we were in beta, as that's what I always thought a beta was--you're asking players to test your game, so charging them to play it before release seemed crazy to me. Steam didn't have a way to do this however--but Early Access appeared just as we wanted to release our first test versions, so it seemed like a perfect fit.

Fast forward to now, and both Free to Play and Early Access have become something different than what we believed in. Since we are F2P, we don't require payment to try the game out, and I really like being able to offer that. It means that someone who paid probably has a lot of hours invested and is very likely to be a satisfied customer--more than an average EA game I hope.

The Elephant in the Room: why no updates to AirMech since last September? After more than 200 updates to AirMech (sometimes multiple times a week) we stopped. We didn't want to, but we had some other things taking our attention: the VR version of AirMech, named AirMech Command. Released both on SteamVR and Oculus, this was a huge technical and design challenge that we enjoyed very much. It took all of our time to focus on it.

We were surprised by two things: one was how small the VR market is, the other was that the VR games generated more revenue than the F2P AirMech. We again wondered if we were handicapping AirMech by labeling it as F2P, since we are not a typical F2P game. So the idea we have been bouncing around internally for a long time came up again:

AirMech can become two games, one F2P, and one paid.

We have been talking about this with our most devoted fans for over 6 months now, running through what would happen, questions, answers, and together we came up with a great plan where everyone sounds happy. In Part 2, I'll talk more about what the split means, how we'll look after all of the existing players, and all the new things that are coming to AirMech as a result. If you have questions about the split, please hold off until Part 2 is posted and read that first.

Questions about the history of AirMech and Carbon? I skipped over things like AirMech on Chrome, AirMech Arena on console, and what it was like being on the frontline of VR using a custom engine instead of Untiy/Unreal. I'll answer any questions I can below.

Looking to level up your Warthog and equip that Advanced Minigun upgrade? Need a couple more levels to finally hit the next name color? Just a few more stats to max out on your pilot? :airmech:

We've got you covered all weekend with Double XP from all matches! :mechy:

Looking to level up your Warthog and equip that Advanced Minigun upgrade? Need a couple more levels to finally hit the next name color? Just a few more stats to max out on your pilot? ːairmechː

We've got you covered all weekend with Double XP from all matches! ːmechyː

Greetings, pilots! WarZone 1.1 is here, and deadlier than ever! We've rounded off a few corners a sharpened a few others to bring you the best weekly war in the wasteland.

-New 5 Star Map completion and Universal Difficulty: Keep a sharp eye on your current difficulty, or step it up a notch with these new features. Select difficulty right in your WarZone tac display, see it during matches, and now map completion stars correspond to the 5 difficulty levels you know so well!
-Difficulty Amnesty for all: No matter your level, select ANY difficulty in any map! Yep, no more leveling your smurf to get creamed on Highway to Hell!
-Ruthless is no longer Toothless: You asked for a challenge, well here it is. Insane damage and HP scalers for THE IRON HAND at maximum difficulty, and a huge score multiplier to make it worth the pain.
-IRON 1 is in the fight: Play against the notorious IRON 1 in the toughest AI Versus battles!
-Login screen field repair: Our killer new Login screen is streamlined and GTG, so no more cooking hot pockets during login!
-IRON HAND and SATCOMM chat badges! Win any WarZone map for a slim chance at a cool new chat badge to show your allegiance in the rising tide of war. Will you side with the tyrannical hordes, or stand firm for Earth unified in peace?
-Map Tweaks: The Great Wall now has a split Goliath wave, so no more ez mode turtling! The Keep is now AirMech sudden death, so stop dying and get a healer! Also, Highway to Hell has an improved unit spacer to make the infamous 5th wave a little more reasonable, no no easier! Get to it!

General Updates:

• added Iron 1 to Ruthless AI
  
• added Patchnotes and other Field Guide menus to the patching screen
  
• some changes to various Warzone maps
  
• new SATCOMM and IRON HAND badges
  
• added difficulty selection to the Warzone menu
  
• tweaked enemy unit stats and rewards for Warzone per difficulty
  
• removed Automatic difficulty selection
  
• tweaks for scoring in Warzone

Bug Fixes:

• fixed issues with low framerate on login menu
  
• fixed map publishing for AirMech Prime Booster owners and added additional error messages for any future issues
  
• fixed exiting to lobby after spectating, map editing, or playing a tutorial map
  
• fix for exiting a lobby via the gear icon
  
• fix for infantry falling through the terrain when entering the Southern outpost on The Keep
  
• fixed some transforming issues on Dogs of War
  
• fixed some floating assets on some Warzone maps
  
• fix for names being cut off on Leaderboards
  
• fix for Rocketeer animation when occupying an outpost
  
• fixed Fourth of July set not being searchable

Balance Changes:

• Void units are much stronger!

Greetings, pilots! WarZone 1.1 is here, and deadlier than ever! We've rounded off a few corners a sharpened a few others to bring you the best weekly war in the wasteland.

-New 5 Star Map completion and Universal Difficulty: Keep a sharp eye on your current difficulty, or step it up a notch with these new features. Select difficulty right in your WarZone tac display, see it during matches, and now map completion stars correspond to the 5 difficulty levels you know so well!
-Difficulty Amnesty for all: No matter your level, select ANY difficulty in any map! Yep, no more leveling your smurf to get creamed on Highway to Hell!
-Ruthless is no longer Toothless: You asked for a challenge, well here it is. Insane damage and HP scalers for THE IRON HAND at maximum difficulty, and a huge score multiplier to make it worth the pain.
-IRON 1 is in the fight: Play against the notorious IRON 1 in the toughest AI Versus battles!
-Login screen field repair: Our killer new Login screen is streamlined and GTG, so no more cooking hot pockets during login!
-IRON HAND and SATCOMM chat badges! Win any WarZone map for a slim chance at a cool new chat badge to show your allegiance in the rising tide of war. Will you side with the tyrannical hordes, or stand firm for Earth unified in peace?
-Map Tweaks: The Great Wall now has a split Goliath wave, so no more ez mode turtling! The Keep is now AirMech sudden death, so stop dying and get a healer! Also, Highway to Hell has an improved unit spacer to make the infamous 5th wave a little more reasonable, no no easier! Get to it!

General Updates:

• added Iron 1 to Ruthless AI
  
• added Patchnotes and other Field Guide menus to the patching screen
  
• some changes to various Warzone maps
  
• new SATCOMM and IRON HAND badges
  
• added difficulty selection to the Warzone menu
  
• tweaked enemy unit stats and rewards for Warzone per difficulty
  
• removed Automatic difficulty selection
  
• tweaks for scoring in Warzone

Bug Fixes:

• fixed issues with low framerate on login menu
  
• fixed map publishing for AirMech Prime Booster owners and added additional error messages for any future issues
  
• fixed exiting to lobby after spectating, map editing, or playing a tutorial map
  
• fix for exiting a lobby via the gear icon
  
• fix for infantry falling through the terrain when entering the Southern outpost on The Keep
  
• fixed some transforming issues on Dogs of War
  
• fixed some floating assets on some Warzone maps
  
• fix for names being cut off on Leaderboards
  
• fix for Rocketeer animation when occupying an outpost
  
• fixed Fourth of July set not being searchable

Balance Changes:

• Void units are much stronger!