Um, wasn't the harrier used as an A2A plane? I thought that was part of the challenge for the Royal Navy pilots, was they were shoe-horned into a role their plane wasn't built for.

And I doubt we'll see a total release by sept. If we're lucky, there will be only one more push back of the initial release. Chances are that the release will highlight a number of bugs across various system configurations, and the dev team will probably spend a quarter to a half year patching the game up to spec. After that, development will resume work on the expansions. My guess is that by this time next year, we'll be about half way to the final release of this product.

The publishers might very well know/expect this to be the timeline, but if they told everyone the real deal, people would mentally "check out" of interest in the game until it hits shelves(this is my personal attitude toward storm of war, I've grown a little weary of week after week of nothing but tease). The alternative is they are foolishly optimistic, which is a bad way to run a business...

None of these are complaints by the way, just my own managed expectations.