As the question of whether or not the Fleet Operations Team will branch away from Armada II and create their own game engine seems to be asked and answered so many times in general, it is probably important to have this topic addressed definitively. The truth is that the Developer Team has never written an engine from scratch and doesn't plan to because it is an unbelievable amount of work, even with a team of people. A new engine would not just be about the graphics engine of course, but also the AI, network, weapon and damage logic, a modding interface and so on. It is work that you easily can invest years into. You also have to carefully plan how you code, as it will be really hard to integrate a working multiplayer for instance if you don't plan your code to later integrate one--syncing a strategy game over multiplayer can be a real pain in the ass. You need a lot of experience if you really want to program a game from scratch, which none of the team has. Obviously given this situation it is best to stick with the current Armada engine which can be quite easily modified. Even though the source code is not available, it is not that bad in reality. Most importantly, the Developer Team likes working with it.