I worked on this game when I was in High School and at the time we were just entering the first alpha release (amazing to see it grace HN!). Most of the team then and still today is comprised of part-time volunteers, students - people who are simply passionate about game development, art, history or some combination thereof. Many of the contributors actually were sourced from Age of Empires/Age of Mythology fans that wanted to build something that paid proper homage to the things they liked and overcame the things they didn't. Though my contributions are quite distant at this point, I can say that as this is our collective passion project they likely never intend to "release" the game because they're simply having too much fun making it. That would imply a finality that we can instead avoid by passing the project to the next generation of ambitious developers and artists as I once did to my successors. The game is actually quite stable now, supported on all three major OS's, and has a small but devoted modding community. Even though it's free, I've felt that the limited budget (exclusively donations) has always made marketing the game its biggest challenge to finding a broader audience. Hopefully landing at the top of HN will help! We just want people to enjoy the game - if you're an RTS fan, give it a shot!

Big shout out to any of the current or past contributors reading this post - you all deserve immense credit for your work over the decades: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/dat...