Are they ever going to announce a ship date?

In a word, yes. But don’t go scanning to the bottom of this log, because it’s not in here.

As we’ve noted a few times on the forums, we’ve been working on the schedule to release. Usually on a game this is a tough period, in that you have to make some painful cuts to get ready for release. In our case, it’s been exhilarating. We’ve cut some things here and there, true, but most of them are behind-the-scenes things you’d never see, or things we still intend to do after we launch (such as my supercool Officers system – sob!!). What’s exhilarating is that we have a specific date that we’re confident in. To give you an idea of where this confidence comes from, half of every milestone is reserved for bug fixing and general polish, so we’re not exactly cramming in features to the last second. Also, we’ve had very good feedback from beta, and while we’ve got a lot of improvements planned, we know we’re on a good course.