First update of the year! I will try to keep a weekly update cycle, as I think that is the best cadence, but I hope you will forgive if it slips now and then. I'll count this one as a success, even if I didn't get as many things into this update as I would have liked. There are a few bugs still left open and I didn't manage to get any new Editor functionality in. The Allied Race bug turned out to be pretty severe, so I had to rip out most of the old code and write a new version. I'm pretty happy with the new one, though, as it has much more flexibility and potential. But it ate a significant amount of time. Still, I am happy with this first update of the year (and the 1.0.3 version). Next week, I should be able to find some time for a recap of 2021. But as always bugs take priority.
Thank you to the many players who contribute feedback, ideas, bug reports, create mods and offer words of encouragement. I very much appreciate it, and I will do my best to put into these updates, as much as possible from that treasure trove of ideas and suggestions.
Features:
Hostile Armies now block Resource Site production
Sovereign Warlord: Now gains +1 Pop on City Settlement. This Pop will have the faction primary culture. The other Pop will have culture based on the existing rules (ie overseer, worker and province culture).
Sovereign Warlord: Sorting changed Culture selection list. It is now alphabetical 'core' cultures followed by alphabetical exotic cultures.
Nomad Raiders: Will now pillage resource sites directly on the route towards a raid target
Nomad Raiders: Will now sometimes only sack a resource site and not raze it
Economy Window: Added a Buy All button. It buys the maximum amount available or the maxium amount the faction can afford. The tool tip for the button gives information on which of these is relevant and the total cost.
Faction Window - Deities Page: Double-click to navigate to details
Faction Window - Deities Page: Extended details including info otherwise only shown in Encyclopedia
Grid Battles: Attack cooldown fractions carried over (e.g. .5 turn cooldown results in a turn of cooldown every other turn).
Grid Battles: Characters no longer have unlimited range with ranged/magic attacks. This makes range-modifying traits useful during battles.
Light Crossbow: Reload Delay 2 -> 1
Crossbow: Damage 4 -> 6, slight cost reduction
Heavy Crossbow: Damage 7 -> 8
Arbalest: Reload Delay 3 -> 2
World Generator: More cultures can now have allied races and a greater variety of these are possible. Some are monsters, some are from other cultures, some are from minority races of the same culture.
World Generator: Slightly increased the number of traits that randomly generated (template-based or not) cultures have
World Generator: Added some culture traits to the non-template culture generator which it could previously never roll (they were template only)
World Generator: Cultures of Centauroid races have a very high chance for allied units to be cavalry units (so they can keep up)
World Generator: Added a template-based version of the Stonemen culture generator
World Generator: Subterranean cultures now have a greater chance for Cavalry unit types - and will usually have at least one (before it was very common for them to have none). They do actively wage war on the surface, and it makes the trait less terrible.
Items: Can now have a 'singular' trait which means a character can have only one of these items (for example, no stacking Cornucopia trinkets for silly food bonuses from a single character).
Wizard AI: Slightly improved ability to determine viability of a battle.
Wizard AI: Improved logic to evaluate need/benefit of relieving a siege.
Wizard AI: Will now be less likely to send only a single weak army to handle priority threats. If no sufficiently powerful army is available, it will try to send multiple armies to handle the threat.
Fire-Infused Weapon: Can now affect any melee weapon. Previously only slashing weapons were valid.
City Growth: Pops will now have alignment based on a random other pop in the city (of the same culture). This also prevents fully converted cities from gaining default alignment pops on growth.
Gargantuan Apes: New powerful unit type, specializing in melee.
Trolls and Vampire Trolls: +2 HP
Random Races: Added more feature variety to completely randomly generated races.
Bugfixes:
World Generator: Culture generation which is 'forced' from traits and settings will now properly respect the 'no-templating' setting.
Hire Follower: Fixed missing culture-specific character dominating the hire pool (for factions with a main culture). Added a small chance for 'special' characters to appear (e.g. faeries, demons, celestials) for compatible factions.
Encyclopedia: Fixed terrain-specific special abilities missing from unit tool tips
Faction Window - Deities Page: Fixed a bug where the text would become blank and the navigation state corrupted
Faction Window - Deities Page: Fixed a scroll focus bug (for the grid)
Military Window: Equipment which were cultural variants were not displayed when inspecting a unit type.
Pillage: Will now exhaust the army when initiated
Character Traits: Demonic Corruption, Celestial Blessings, and similar 'cosmic alignment' traits were incorrectly blocked for almost all characters
Several text errors fixed (spelling, formatting, etc.)
Grid-Battles: Fixed a number of bugs related to Ranged weapon range calculations. An incorrect (and almost unlimited range) was sometimes used in various calculations.
Grid-Battles: Fixed the Advance to Missile Range order not working as expected
Grid-Battles: Fixed Attack cooldowns not working as intended. Such attacks either had no cooldown or could not be used at all.
Equipment: Weapons with Reload Delay had a off-by-one error when determining the resulting attack cooldown
Worker Training UI: Training time bonus "mentor" shown as "alignment clash"
Recruitment pool: The Refugee event granting a city no longer breaks an existing specialized recruitment pool for that culture.
Recruitment pool: Temporary recruits are now always added to a special pool if one exists. This also means that 'gather recruits' and diplomacy will add to this pool if you've used conversion actions to create it.
Divine Offering: Fixed missing UI update after assignment
Organize Worship: Fixed missing UI update after assignment
Recruitment Cost / Upkeep Cost: Fixed several units that did not have a non-magical version of these, resulting in the magical version applying to Factions without Mana.
Fire Elementals: Fixed the non-functional cooldown on Fiery Globs
Patch 1.0.3.3
New update to celebrate a new year - happy new year everyone! And thank you so much for a great year. The support and positivity from the player community has been truly amazing. You have provided me with ideas, beta branch testing, bug reports, words of encouragement, constructive criticism and more - I am grateful and I hope that the game will provide you with entertainment and enjoyment for years to come.
It's been a little bit more than a year since version 1.0.0.1, and a lot has happened since then. I will try to get a post up with a summary of the changes and improvements made, highlighting the major milestones. I will also share my plans and ambitions for the coming months. I look forward to another year of work on this game and I'm excited to see how the game will grow and improve during this time, and interacting with the community, trying to get as many of those awesome ideas and suggestion into the game as possible.
New Warlord Type: Sovereign
Can choose from any culture template, start as a random culture template or select from a list of cultures generated for the world
Has the same mechanics as AI Rival Warlords, which is unlike Tribal and more similar to Wizard (without magic).
Start with a full province usually containing a city, a village and a fortress - although this can vary considerably based on what the world generator produces (and the setting chosen).
Sometimes has one or more garrisons of higher tier units present at game start. These have free upkeep for 20 turns, but the Units are also locked to those garrisons for the same duration.
Terrain-specific ability logic has been added. This allows units to have stat modifiers and/or movement modifiers applied only in certain terrain (or when not in certain terrain).
The following Unit Types have terrain-specific modifiers: Yetis, Medusae, Jotnar, Rime Trolls, Grendelkin, Giants, Frost Giants. More will be added in future patches.
Modding support has been extended to cover these ability types.
Elephants and Mammoths cannot be Chariot mounts for most races
Additional mount variance chance (based on size)
Chariot-specific mount variance chances
Beast Tamer culture trait: reduce cavalry/chariot mount attack modifier from -2 to -1
Massively reduced the chance that Cultures are generated with no traits
Greatly reduced the chance that Cultures are generated with only one trait
If a unit cannot benefit from the Garrison upkeep reduction due to recent movement the upkeep tooltip will now state this
Fortress Window: Summary of characters present now includes the Garrison
Independent Realms no longer build mines in hexes without resource specials
Encyclopedia: World entry now includes any seed used to generate it
Prospectors: Geomancy, Subterranean, Wanderlust now increase chance for a culture to generate a character of this class.
Independent Realms now have show info on hostile actions in the diplomacy relation log
Roads can now be built with a destination which is controlled by allied and vassal factions. One end of the road (ie the origin) still has to be controlled.
City: +5% Divine Offering value per level of Spiritual.
Bugbear units now have +1 HP
Adjusted the animation speed when resolving ranged attacks during grid battles. It will now adapt to the number of units, speeding up when there are many units/attacks.
The numerical keys (1, 2, 3, etc) are now keyboard shortcuts for the corresponding top bar button. They can be used to quickly open the main windows: Magic, Military, Economy, Faction, etc.
City Window: Added 'Show Unavailable' toggle. This also adds Requirements text to all relevant buildings.
Added Monster Slayer character type
Gunpowder weapons now do additional damage at short range (25%-)
Many gunpowder weapons are less effective considerable at long range (50%+)
Attack, Site and Unit Conditions can now utilize base Condition logic (and / or / not)
Army Window: Units with (temporary) free Upkeep now have a tooltip showing what the cost would've been without the effect.
AI Rivals will now use the same 'Easy' Scouting game setting as the player, with the exception of Very Easy (does not gain if player has) and Hard/Very Hard (gains even if player has not)
Spell: Training Day now has a 4-turn Cooldown
Many (mundane) unit types now have shorter training time. This mostly affects races which had very long training times.
The list of constructed city buildings is now sorted alphabetically.
Followers Window: Location is now specified.
Followers Window: An Icon now shows when the Follower counts as 'At The Tower'.
When giving items to Followers, and they do not gain Loyalty due to having > 5 items already, "(No Loyalty Gained)" will now be shown in the character history log to help make it apparent this is not a bug.
Fixed a bug causing the majority of Bow units to have Poisoned attacks.
Fixed a bug where diplomatic relations towards an independent realm could get stuck at the current level
Fixed a bug where cultures where are an area of the map which was supposed to have a realm seeded was instead empty, and the culture not added to the world.
Fixed a number of bugs/issues which could cause an AI Rival to become mostly passive
Fixed bugs relating to Rename dialogs
Fixed equipment stats not being applied when for encyclopedia tool tips
Fixed being able to open the editor while having the new/load game window open
Fixed administration center not giving +1 Influence
Fixed unit battle leader stat bug. Retroactively fixes save games.
Fixed outpost worker add bug (skill req)
Fixed bug where effects checking if a unit was airborne instead evaluated if the unit was engaged in melee (even disregarding whether it can fly at all)
Fixed a bug when assigning an item after completing the enchant item project. The item was either removed for the vault if a duplicate existed there or not given at all, depending on circumstances.
Fixed incorrect requirements for Prison and Mercenary Sprawl buildings
Fixed a bug causing lairs to block outpost construction for Warlords
Fixed bug where unit type descriptions did not include stat modifiers from equipment in some cases (display bug only)
Fixed some spelling errors and missing spaces/commas
Fixed Warrior Monk characters almost never being generated
Fixed unit type export omitting attack modifier target conditions
Fixed city walls not being available after palisades
Fixed inverted modifier to recruit follower success from not sharing a class type with the target
Fixed a bug where city buildings could be constructed multiple times.
Fixed a crash bug related to followers with province-scope location.
Patch 1.0.2.68
Units now have an experience level icon displayed if they are level 1+. The tool tip for this icon will show what benefits the unit has gained from those experience levels.
Unit experience level display also comes with modding support. See the Modding Guide for instructions on how to change the display with custom images and frames.
Improved the unit strength display in most windows to be more readable, with larger and clearer font.
Unit strength display now has a tooltip showing the max strength of the unit - and the default strength of the unit type, if a unit is understrength.
Tribal Population Growth: Migration now provides a greater benefit to Population Growth.
Tribal Camp: An action has been added which allows allocating Food from faction stores to a particular Camp. This will boost Population Growth and provide a buffer against starvation (through a local Food store increase), based on the amount of Food provided.
Shrine Dedication: Religion-class followers now contribute to the pool of available dedications. The religion still has to be compatible with the faction, but in most cases this will be so.
Influential: New character trait which acts as 'counts-as-class' for Civic.
Divine Favor: Most temporary boons now last 60% longer.
Dungeon Expeditions: Increased the experience benefit from having a Mentor in the party. However, Mentors can now longer give other Mentors bonus experience.
Character Experience: Overseeing construction of a site or the upgrade of an outpost (to city/fortress) will now yield Experience for the assigned character.
Save games are now listed in chronological order - even for autosave files. Many players have expressed that always having autosave at the top does not add value, and increases the risk of accidentally loading the wrong game file.
Workers Window: Settle City now includes in the query dialog whether a City has the blocking effect from recent settlement (including duration) and such options are now unselectable by default. Previously you would not be notified until you made a selection, and would have to reopen the window to select a new city.
Transfer Units / Split Army: Double-clicking a unit is now a shortcut for to the 'create new army' button. This allows quickly creating a new army with a specific initial unit.
"Give/Swap/Revoke Item" actions have been added to the Character Context Menu for Followers (when relevant).
Made some visual improvements to the Battle Report window in how units are shown.
Added notifications for the completion of City Settlement and Outpost Fortification projects.
Fixed an army state corruption bug related to saving/loading games during migrations.
Fixed a missing UI update trigger in the Dungeon Window.
Fixed Follower text overflow in the Trainer part of the Military Window.
Fixed Follower text overflow in the General/Officer panels of the Army Window.
Fixed a number of crash bugs in the Transfer Units window.
Patch 1.0.2.65
Road Construction can now terminate at Resource Sites (farms, mines, etc). For example: You can now build from a City to a Mine. You still cannot build from a Mine to a Farm (but you can link them with an Outpost as road nexus).
Balance tweaks to Death Knights, Lesser Celestial Phoenixes, Maladonisai.
Grid-based battles now have better logic for determining when a unit counts as charging. It requires the unit to have moved during the turn, and to have moved from a non-engaged position to the final position. This sounds more complicated than it is - if a unit moved into combat from non-combat (including combat -> non-combat -> combat) it counts, but 'sliding' along an already engaged battle line does not count.
Set Defense now gives a Fend bonus against units which charge it. (de facto reduces to-hit).
Set Defense now requires immobility to be active during melee resolution.
Lances are now "Charge Only", but do much more damage.
Workers will now be unassigned from a newly constructed site if they are no longer valid for assignment (requirements for assignment to construction and 'active' site work can differ).
Added two new game settings for Recruitment Pools: Relaxed and Harsh. Relaxed will count the number of units for each culture/pool as two less for all purposes. Non-Harsh now has the upkeep penalty capped at +25%.
Added a 'Summary' button to the Battle Report window. It allows you to see the final outcome of the battle without having to progress through every single round, or stopping when you've seen enough. You can shift-click it to close the window at the same time (tooltip also specifies this shortcut).
Enrage Wildlife now has a 2-turn cooldown and a slightly higher mana cost. It also applies a province-wide effect for 8 turns. During this period re-casts may fail fully or partially (creating an understrength unit). A success will extend the duration, a partial success will extend it partially.
New Spell: Greater Enrage Wildlife (Beasts 5). Summons a larger army and has a lower risk of failure when re-cast with a lingering effect than the basic version.
New Spell: Survival of The Fittest (Beasts 3). Summons a small army of beasts to fight one of your own armies, which will gain additional experience from the battle.
New Unit Type: Catoblepas. Poison-breathing and dark-gazing boar-bull monsters. Unlocked at Darkness Mastery 5 and can spawn in some unaligned armies.
Fixed the missing spell descriptions in the multi-cast 'select spell' dialog.
Fixed a bug where some battles did not register their location correctly and did not get the intended battle name.
Fixed a bug where "Nearby Culture Override" was not saved/loaded as part of game setting presets.
Fixed a bug where the message prompts in the military window did not close via the X button.
Fixed a bug causing tooltips in spell result prompts to not work correctly.
Fixed a bug where conversion-based recruitment pools did not interact correctly with the recruitment window - showing incorrect pool usage and not always giving the correct selection of available units.
Fixed a bug causing character items with a battle effect not working as intended during grid-based battles.
Fixed armor not importing/exporting as part of unit type mods.
Fixed a bug where the context panel showed an incorrect selection.
Fixed a text bug with the 'Compose Epic' event.
Fixed a bug allowing some city stats being able to go negative against the intent (had very strange effects on some mechanics).
Fixed characters not being unassigned from Army tasks if part of a garrison which becomes empty (and non-inspectable).
Fixed "Charge Only" attacks being usable in every round - charge or not.
Fixed "Set Defense" from weapons not always giving the unit this ability during battles.
Fixed Units gaining special abilities from Experience - which they already have from their equipment. This will no longer happen.
Fixed a bug where charges/ammunition for ranged attacks was being depleted much too quickly during battles.
Fixed a bug where some tooltip links did not work as intended.
Fixed a memory leak when loading/starting new games during an existing game session.
Patch 1.0.2.60
Changed the scaling of Marauder/Undead/Monster Armies. In addition to the chosen game setting for the power level of these, there is now a time-based scaling applied during the early game to mid game - depending on game settings. This will remove the risk of unreasonably powerful event armies spawning near a player in the early game - especially when playing with default settings.
After resolving a Battle the result dialog now has a button which opens the Battle Report. Previously you had to close the dialog and open the notification icon to see this report.
Fortresses can now be upgraded to the next tier. This can only be done if there is no upgrade construction in progress and no hostile armies in the hex. The cost and time scales with the level of the fortress. If hostile armies enter the hex, the upgrade will halt temporarily.
Fortresses can now be razed by their owner. The time taken scales with the level of the fortress. If hostile armies enter the hex, the razing will halt temporarily.
Dismissed and deserting workers now enter the hire pool in most cases.
You can now recycle the pool of recruitable characters. Free once per 10 turns, otherwise has a cost. The cost is a fixed amount of Gold and Influence in addition to 50% of total Influence. Cost and cooldown can be modded via mechanics modding using the following keys: CharacterHireRecycleCooldown, CharacterHireRecycleGoldCost, CharacterHireRecycleInfluenceCost, CharacterHireRecycleInfluenceCostFraction.
In-window dialogs for the wizard and tribal recruitment windows, replacing the pop-up dialog. You can close these with escape, clicking on the unit list, or through the X icon.
Spellfire Phoenixes got a small balance pass. Lesser ones nerfed (but lower upkeep), buffed movement for the regular and greater.
Fixed a crash related to the character generator
Fixed a crash related to the Battle Gate spell.
Fixed some road-related rules keys not being loaded correctly for mods
Patch 1.0.2.57
The Escape key can now be used to close additional windows, specificially most of the 'OK' info-style message windows. There are a few exceptions, one of which is the 'Missing Mods' info window on loading a game. (These will be given Escape shortcuts in a coming patch).
Battle Window (Grid+Classic): The list of spells in the 'More Spells' dialog is now sorted alphabetically
Battle Window (Grid): New Playback Speed option, 'Instant'. This skips all the attack pop-ups during the turn and plays the movement at maximum speed. Attacks are still shown in the log and you can still hover over units between turns to show attacks taken/dealt during the previous turn.
Battle Window (Grid): 'Fast' is now the default Playback Speed.
Units with bombs now have a +1 Siege Progress modifier. As before only the unit with the highest modifier in an army will contribute with bonus progress. Overview of possible bonuses: Sappers with bombs +4, sappers +3, burrowers with bombs +3, burrowers +2, other with bombs +1.
Fixed a crash caused by the Mass Resurrection spell
Fixed a bug causing irrelevant pre-battle dialogs being shown when choosing to auto-resolve battle
Fixed a bug where the cursor would change to an X permanently when casting spells via 'More Spells...' during battles
Patch 1.0.2.56
Bombs can now be generated as armament for units if the Gunpowder module is enabled. This is a possibility for cultures that have knowledge of Gunpowder or alchemy - and for special miner and sapper unit types. Note that Gunpowder is currently not a full Culture trait, so you'll only see it by inspecting unit types in the Encyclopedia. It will become a full Culture trait in a future update.
Added four Bomb weapons with different stats: Crude Bombs, Bombs, Shrapnel Bombs and Fire Bombs.
Unit weapons can now have non-Physical base damage. The first example of this is the Fire Bomb weapon.
Increased the chance of Gunpowder weapons being enabled for a culture, when that module is enabled. The chance is still based on technological progress and cultural traits, but more factors are considered and the base chance is slightly higher. I'll continue tweaking carefully if necessary to avoid overshooting.
Fixed a number of bugs relating to the Army Transfer/Split functionality and UI.
Fixed some Fortress Upgrades not showing full details on requirements when unavailable.
Patch 1.0.2.55
Just a small bugfix patch. The regular update patch is expected to be ready within the next couple of days.
Fixed a number of crashes related to battle magic.
Fixed a crash when inspecting Dungeon Expedition history.
Patch 1.0.2.53
Gunpowder units can now be generated for cultures (chance based on their traits). This is not enabled by default, but can be done so by via a new Module, Gunpowder: Basic. It can thus not be applied retroactively to existing games. A new trait has been added to identify such units for the purpose of modding, and the guide updated accordingly.
Dragon Summoning. A new Spellcraft has been added, with a progression of research projects to unlock summoning of Dragon units of increasing power.
Hero for Hire tooltip now includes details on the Hero, so that the player can make an informed choice on whether to hire or not.
Restarting the Tutorial is now possible via a button in the Settings window. This can be used if the tutorial was closed by accident, or if the player wants to show the tutorial and still wants to keep the tutorial disabled by default.
Unit Battle Experience: +1 XP for units led by Character. +1 additional XP if Character has the Mentor trait. +25% to total XP gain if the Character is higher or equal level cunit.
Wizard Tower: Each level upgrade now gives +50 Influence cap.
Several City buildings now increase resource caps for Food and Influence.
Thieves Guild changed: No longer reduces Unrest by 10, but increases by 10. Instead Influence gain doubled from 1 to 2. It now also increases the Faction Influence cap by 25.
New Building: Prison (Harsh). Reduces Unrest and boosts Industry. Requires Evil, Autocracy, Lawful, and/or Slavery. Not available to Good and/or Chaotic cultures.
New Building: Festival Grounds. Reduces Unrest, Industry and boosts Prosperity, Decadence. Requires Semi-Cultured, Culture or Highly Cultured.
New Building: Sacred Grove. Reduces Unrest and boosts Spiritual. Cultures with at least one of Primitive, Savage, Barbarian, Druidic, Pact with Nature.
New Building: Mercenary Sprawl. Unlocks Elite Units. Requires City Pop 10+. Cultural requirement: Chaotic and at least one of: Martial Honor, Philosophy: Conquest, Philosophy: War, Philosophy: Survival. Not available to Primitive or Savage cultures.
Patch 1.0.2.51
Unit Transfer Window: You can now create new armies directly from this window.
Unit Transfer Window: You can now rename armies from this window.
The 'Split Army' and 'Transfer Units' actions have been merged into a single action. The new functionality in the Unit Transfer Window makes the dedicated split action redundant.
Mana Nodes now have a different visual appearance on the map when drained. They will be dimmed and have a red border.
Mana Node tool tip now includes the number of turns remaining as part of the 'Drained' status text. (So you don't have to select it and manually inspect the effect duration in the context panel).
Expanded the dynamic unit type name generator with more culture/race-specific possibilities and templates.
Vineyards now increase the Food cap when upgraded, like the other similar resource sites.
