The demo opens on 12 August

This is the build it ships from. Most of the work since the last update went into two things: making the game behave on hardware it had never been properly tested on, and correcting parts of the simulation that were quietly wrong.

Controller and Steam Input support

You can play the whole game on a pad. Steam Input actions drive the same navigation the keyboard uses, and touching the keyboard or mouse suspends pad focus so the two stop fighting over where you are.

A misbehaving controller no longer runs away with the cursor. The device that caused it is quarantined, recovers on its own, and tells you it happened instead of leaving you to wrestle the menu. Settings has a Controller Diagnostics dialog showing exactly what the game reads from each pad.

Also in this build

• Rival firms handle money better. They used to size research, marketing and training budgets from the same pile of cash, committing it three times over. They now spend from one running balance, count overtime in their fixed costs, and check they can pay for a design revision before starting one.
• A tutorial that waits for you. Steps hold until the thing they describe is actually possible, name the button that is on screen, and stand aside when a turn interrupt takes over. Skip skips the step you are on, not the rest of the chapter.
• Production lines in one place. A detail sheet gives output and upkeep per line, with Change and Demolish where you are already looking rather than back in Administration.
• Saves that admit failure. A failed save used to be silent, so you found out by losing progress. It now raises a message that keeps coming back until the write succeeds.
• Desktop keyboard and screen work. Fullscreen is a real rebindable key, F11 by default. The dashboard economy tile reads as a peer of the tiles beside it, and the research comparison stopped listing the same technology twice.

Fixes from playtesting

A long tail of smaller corrections. Money committed to a purchase that outran your cash is carried as a deferred charge and named in the turn summary, instead of quietly disappearing. A queued credit draw no longer counts as spendable in the turn you draw it. The government fleet contract now does what its description says.