Arcen Games, one of the leading developers of, well, innovative indie games has an announcement for you. Their most successful and best supported game, AI War, will be getting a huge update on August 18, 2014, alongside the release of the sixth expansion pack, Destroyer of Worlds.

Labelled v8.0, the update is supposed to introduce a whole bunch of new stuff and some polishing to the gameplay. Some of the most notable changes are:

Linux support comes to AI War!
Hacking is now a primary resource, seen up on the top bar. There are also new forms of hacking.
Crystal, on the other hand, has been removed from the game. All metal now, baby. (There were many detailed discussions about the need for this with fans).
Tons of refinement has been made to how the AI manages its resources and how it reacts to various things that you do.
An entirely new way of playing with Champions has been added -- a free new feature for a previous expansion!
Spirecraft, Golems, and Warheads have all been rebalanced.
AI Carriers now work entirely differently; they pass damage to the ships within themselves, among other changes.
Turret caps have been revised heavily, so that their main lines are now per-planet caps rather than global, which allows you to better defend on multiple fronts.

This sure looks promising, especially the Linux part. AI: War is bound to appeal to IT-related gamers, who oftentimes use Linux. And as we all well know, Linux gamebase includes mainly Battle for Wesnoth, Europa Universalis and potato. Now we get to play some AI:War while the latter loads, how cool is that!

Seriously though, we are in for a lot of smashing, exploding and conquering. Those of you who already own the game should get the most recent update, 7.055, as it includes most of the new features, save some of the polishments. And for those REALLY desperate to know more, here is the whole changelog of updates between v7 and v8 of the game. It is 29k words long. Yeah, you should probably see someone if you are THAT desperate.