We congratulate you for seven years of trustworthy and steady delivery of Half-Life, Steam and mod news to German fans and players. You have reported about Empires and its releases for our complete history of (nearly) 6 years now. Without you we might not have such a strong presence in Germany and Europe, as we do now. Without you I myself might have never found nor played Empires. I hope both our histories are going to keep running parallel and steady for a long time to come.

To summarize: Wir danken euch und wünschen alles gute zum Geburtstag!

So, we're on steam. Steam patch 1 can be expected any time now, with a number of important crash fixes, optimisation improvements, and now we are proud to announce things that will come with the second patch:

Some more  integration into steam itself, in the form of both Achievements, and some brand new features which Valve have personally helped us to implement.
So, for you, our dedicated, unrelenting community, We present you:

Hats!

Empires will, in the next version, receive a variety of hat unlocks, that will enable you to fit out your classes with their own unique touch. To complement this, we will be adding new player models for each class, which our modellers (Smithy and Mayama) have been hard at work on for several months. A minority of hats will be unlockable via achievements, however most of them will be purchasable from our very own Hat store. We have chosen not to include hat drops, crafting or trading, as we feel this may promote idling.

But we're not there yet. As it stands, we have just a small selection of hats. However, based off the huge support and contributions we've had to the voting for achievements (many of which we've used), we have decided to let you, the community, submit your hat ideas, for our modellers to create. You can find the submission page at: http://brutos.org/hats.php (Please keep images at 64x64).

And, as if this wasn't already fantastic news, Valve have agreed to put our venerable Brenodi Engineer hat, into TF2, unlockable by receiving a yet to be revealed achievement, in Empires. Here's a sneak preview from our Steamworks test account:

So, here's to more development. Thanks go to the dedicated guys behind the scenes, helping make this happen, as well as our dedicated community. If all goes well here, we may even expand into new items such as new weapons! And remember to submit your own hat ideas to get them in!

Fun Fact: We have received over 6000 votes on the achievements until today. 

Empires has been reviewed on modinformer.org:
http://www.modinformer.org/?p=847

Hotfix released, see download page

http://www.empiresmod.com/drupal/node/13

Changelog:

Empires v2.31
February 22, 2011

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Empires 2.31 Changes

Added:

• Basic stats sender on server.
• "Missing armor/engine" message in vehicle customization.
• Rank points for kill assists.
• Class loadouts are now saved for the duration of the game.

Removed:

• Support for DirectX levels lower than 90.

Modified:

• Revive icon now hovers above ragdoll instead of spot where player died.
• Vehicles can now have limited or unlimited ammo to experiment with higher-level weaponry having limited ammo and low-level weaponry having unlimited ammo.
• Walls, turrets and cameras are always recycleable.
• New dam area on emp_mvalley.
• New versions of Brenodi missile turrets level 1 and 2.

Fixed:

• Unstuck not detecting collisions with the world.
• Spawn points blocked by teammates.
• Second seat view getting stuck.
• emp_cyclopean.
• emp_crossroads.