Dragon Commander - What's Going On?

Larian's Swen Vincke has posted a new blog entry titled What's Going On With Dragon Commander? The post covers a lot of territory from recent hires (congratulations to Raze from their forums who has been hired as a community manager), to their current focus, to engine changes. Lar also announces they will have their own booth at E3 (not under the umbrella of a publisher) and will reveal Project E:

As a quick recap, Dragon Commander is a game that is played in several turns. Each turn, you make decisions in a RPG fashion that affect the flow of the game. You research and invest in magic & tech, upgrade your dragon & fleet, and decide how to run your growing empire and what territories you want to attack. Then, you engage in combat, using your dragon & fleet side by side to defeat your enemy.
At this point, we’re pretty much done with how the RPG part will work, are in the middle of dealing with the strategy part & have changed the combat gameplay drastically so that it has much more depth.
The big problem we had with the combat was how to ensure that controlling both your dragon and your fleet at the same time was fun. It took a lot of iterations and try outs to get that balance right, but I think we finally cracked it.

Thanks, Alrik!
More information.

Sounds great! I like that engine update. Regarding combat gameplay, I hope they have a reasonably large pool of testers they can cycle through: I know from own experience that developing a software that seems intuitive and fun to use to yourself is not at all the same as developing a software that is intuitive and fun to use for someone who did not spend months with it already and does not know its inner workings by heart. Though obvious, not all developers seem to take this into account while iterating through possible designs.

Anyway, I have high hopes for Dragon Commander!

I'm not sure if Raze is on rpgwatch; but congrats! He has been super supporter on their forums.

Funky concept that's hard to sell: better have a demo.