Skyward Collapse:Pre-Beta Release Notes

Skyward Collapse Alpha/Beta Period Round Up

The Beta Period for Skyward Collapse spanned from May 3rd through May 23 rd. 620 distinct changes were made as part of 34 different releases over the course of 20 days.

28 Players are thanked in this series. Some of the most common names this time around are:

• Cinth 64
• zharmad 56
• Misery 46
• Mick 45
• Winge 44
• orzelek 29
• Pepisolo 16
• nas1m 14
• SRombauts 13
• chemical_art 9
• windgen 9
• Aquohn 8
• madcow 8
• GigaClon 8
• greywolf22 7
• Admiral 4
• mrhanman 4
• YoukaiCountry 4
• Aklyon 3
• Cyprene 3
• JAlfredGoodwin 3
• Shumbok 3

Official 1.001

(Released May 23rd, 2013)

• Added a new "horse meat" finished good that is produced by the butcher for 0.5 horses. The units that eat horses now use this instead of horses directly. This way it is consistent with all the other foods.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

• Changed the resource cost of the Marauder back to what they were pre-1.0 so that the tutorial doesn't get iffy.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Changed the steel requirement of Huscarls to be horse meat instead.

Official 1.000

(Released May 23rd, 2013)

• Added the following line to the "Survive Until Turn 6" part of the tutorial"
  • Awesome tip: Hold down the shift key while placing tiles or tokens to keep placing more of them! Right-click to clear your current placement mode.
  • Thanks to Cinth, nas1m, Pepisolo, and Misery for suggesting.

• None of the mythological creatures or tokens on the sidebar require must-be-unlocked goods anymore:
  • Minotaurs no longer require ale.
  • Centaurs no longer require water flasks.
  • Valkyries no longer require venison.
  • Trolls no longer require ale.
  • Thanks to chemical_art and Mick for suggesting.

• Added a cheat code for unlocking the maximum profile level (for those who are impatient):
  • Just enter this into the chat box: "cmd:i_am_the_mighty_one" minus the quotes.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for suggesting.

• Added the following to the "You cannot smite this tile because it would cut at least one town center off from its fellows." message:
  • If this seems inaccurate, it's probably because a Woe or other ability has already cut off a town center from the rest of the continent. You'll need to fix that before you can do any more smiting!
  • Thanks to Cinth and Winge for suggesting.

• The "Atlas Shrugs" woe is now only allowed to strike in the age of monsters and up.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

• When gods are added to the game board, the playback now focuses on them just as happens with military units spawning from buildings.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo and chemical_art for suggesting.

• Horses were completely pointless for the Norse before, and are now brought into relevancy:
  • Norse Frost giants now need horses instead of bread (yum!)
  • Norse Trolls now need horses (again yum!).
  • Greek Centaurs now need horses (hey, they partly ARE horses).
  • Norse Catapults now require 1/5th as much lumber, but also now require horses. We'll leave it to you to decide if those are for eating or for pulling.
  • Norse Marauders now require 1/4th as much bacon, but also now require horses. Definitely a "yum" factor here.
  • Thanks to Mick for reporting.

• The ranch and horse resource descriptions have both been updated to note that sometimes horses are used for eating.

• When units spawn from inhabited forests or dead forests, the camera now focuses on them and shows them appear during playback as with any other unit that spawns.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• When mythological creatures are extinct, bandits can now still use them.

• During the age of gods, bandit keeps will now only spawn mythological creatures and siege units. This... hurts.
  • Thanks to Mick and chemical_art for suggesting.

• Fixed an outdated reference to god ranges in Ullr's text.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• Hera's diadem no longer grants you points for "killing" the enemy god, and no longer logs the enemy god as being killed in general.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• Athena's olive branch now gives massive negative points and has a huge cooldown.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• Greatly increased the cooldown time on Heimdall's Horn.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• Having a score of less than 0 no longer causes you to instantly lose the game.
  • This prevents insta-lose situations in the first round for novice players.

• Fixed a couple of issues with the new Undo feature:
  • Resource costs were not being properly refunded if the token that was placed did not have a faction flag. Same with the cooldowns on these sort of tokens. (Costs and cooldowns were working fine for units and tokens with faction flags).
  • Points for placing tokens or units were not being reverted.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• A trial mode version of the game has been created, with the following restrictions in it:
  • You cannot play beyond the age of man except in the tutorial, and sandbox mode and multiplayer are disabled.

• Nick Trujillo's comic about the game is now integrated into the game, and can be viewed at any time from the settings menu.
  • Also, the first time (and only the first time) you click "Start New Game," the comic is shown.
    • This provides a pretty great introduction to many aspects of the game even before the tutorial proper. And it's just plain entertaining.

• Fixed an unsightly issue with the credits sometimes scrolling behind the main menu buttons depending on your screen resolution.
  • Thanks to GigaClon and windgen for reporting.

• "Medium" general difficulty is now called "Normal" to be consistent with the others.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

Updated A Number Of Mythological Tokens

• Labyrinth has been updated to no longer spawn bandit minotaurs, but instead to spawn both one red and one blue minotaur at random places on the map.
  • The cooldown on this token has also been greatly increased.
  • Thanks to Winge and zharmad for inspiring this change.

• The function of Nemean Lion has been greatly changed to make it more interesting:
  • Grants the first five non-bandit humans to claim it a 3x attack bonus as well as full immunity attacks from bandits.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring this change.

• The function of Hebe has been completely redone.
  • All current and incoming woes are cancelled during the time she is active, and no new woes can arrive until she leaves. Does not work against Catastrophic woes.
  • She also now requires sunstone to be used, and has a super long cooldown. Use her with care!
  • Thanks to Mick and zharmad for suggesting.

• Cornucopia now works on both factions, instead of just the faction that initiated it.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring.

• Pandora's Box has been updated:
  • Rather than spawning bandits each turn, it now causes the next woe countdown to happen thrice as fast each turn while it is active.

• Fixed a bug where Palladium was mistakenly making buildings of ALL sides invincible, rather than just the faction it belonged to.

• Completely changed how Fenrir works, since he was way too underwhelmingly situational. The new function:
  • All military units from both factions temporarily get a 30x attack bonus against bandit units and bandit structures.
  • The cooldown for him has been greatly increased, and he also now costs negative points.
  • Related, the Skadi's Wolf token has had its cooldown increased as well.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring.

• Yggdrasil has been updated to be more powerful later in the game:
  • The level of the doppelgangers are now higher in later ages.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• Eldhrimnir has been updated to be more powerful later in the game:
  • The level of the newly-alive unit increases as the ages go up.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• Singasteinn has been updated to be a bit more powerful.
  • It also now grants immunity from ranged attacks.
  • It's cooldown time has been correspondingly increased a bit.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

Alpha 0.990

(Released May 22nd, 2013)

• Frost Giants now cost 3x as much incense as before, as well as having a new requirement where they need bread.
  • Their health has been increased by more than 3x, however, making them by far the sturdiest mythological creature out there.
  • Their attack power has not gone up, however their AP cost for attacks has been reduced from 3 to 1. This means that once they get in close, they do a lot of damage fast the next turn.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting a buff to the giants.

• The default turns per round is now 30 instead of 40.
  • Thanks to SRombauts for suggesting.

• When logged into Steam, the achievements window now has a link to the (not yet public) leaderboard for the game at: http://steamcommunity.com/stats/SkywardCollapse/leaderboards/165040/

• There is now a much more pronounced border around textboxes, because they were almost invisible on low-contrast screens (such as most laptop screens) before).

• Bandit mythological creatures have always been able to be upgraded to level 4, but those controlled by blue and red were locked into level 1 prior to now. This made them increasingly impotent as the game went on in terms of your ability to plop down a minotaur and alter the course of a battle.
  • Now mythological creatures can be upgraded like human units can be.
  • Additionally, for no extra cost, in the age of monsters mythological creatures start at level 2, and in the age of gods they start at level 3.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Flood and upheaval have both been updated so that if there are fewer than 10 lakes or mountains (respectively) on the map, they change some random lands into lakes or mountains. Thus these are actually woes of use regardless of what map type you are playing on.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the "waiting for other players" message was popping up in the lower left after you lost the game.

• Drug lord has been renamed to "Cult of Dionysus."
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

Undo Button For Tile And Unit Placement

• There is now an undo button on the left sidebar, which lets you undo accidental tile placement or entity placement mistakes during a turn. It only goes back as far as the turn you are currently in, and as far back as you were only taking those actions. If you smite a tile or upgrade a unit, for instance, that clears the undo history (and those actions cannot be undone in general).
  • Thanks to Aquohn, greywolf22, Shumbok, Misery, and Admiral for suggesting.

New Catastrophic Woes

• Black Death, The Edge of Civilization, Mass Extinction, and Ultima all now only appear on Hard general difficulty and up.
  • These are really quite devastating woes, and likely to throw inexperienced players for a loop. These are quite interesting, but only for a more advanced level of play.
  • This actually makes ALL of the original catastrophic woes only Hard and up, aside from Drug lord which is Expert-only.

• New catastrophic woe: Monster Pandemonium
  • Monsters are on the move! But these are no ordinary bandits; rogue creatures from all mythologies have decided to join forces with both to the red and blue faction, leading to a crazy fight with all sorts of creatures that normally couldn't be controlled by their respective factions.
  • Only available up through Hard difficulty.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for inspiring.

• New catastrophic woe: Elven War
  • The dark elves and the light elves are at it again! The dark elves have decided to join the blue faction, while the light elves have risen to defend the red faction as best they can.
  • Only available up through Hard difficulty.

• New catastrophic woe: Escaped Giants
  • Several extremely powerful (level 4) frost giants are about to break out of captivity and are... perturbed. Be on guard!
  • Only available up through Hard difficulty.

• New catastrophic woe: Horsepocalypse
  • The sounds of sawing and hammering echo through the woods. Bandits are busily constructing the ultimate siege weaponse en masse: trojan horses. And lots of them.
  • Only available up through Hard difficulty, and only after easy difficulty.

New General Woes

• Siegfried Is Hired
  • The legendary swordsman doesn't care whose side he is on, so long as the pay is right. He has been hired to strike against the afflicted faction. He lays into foes with many rapid strikes, causing mayhem everywhere he moves.
  • Thanks to madcow for suggesting.

• Atlas Shrugs
  • The world is jostled, and all of the land that is just outside of the radius of each town collapses into empty space.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for suggesting.

• Tartarus Rising
  • The underworld is spitting lost souls back out. Every time a unit dies, they are respawned somewhere at random under the control of the opposite faction -- at level 4. When bandits die, they go to a random faction.
  • Thanks to madcow for suggesting.

• Persephone's Bounty
  • It is a time of plenty! The production of all raw resources is doubled for the affected faction. Woe to the opposing faction who has to face this newfound might...
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• Midgard's Convulsion
  • The world itself spasms. Every land tile switches to another random land tile type.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• Magni's Focus
  • Thor's son Magni lends his great strength to all on the battlefield. While his attention is focused on Luminith, all military units deal 99,999 damage with every hit.

• Divine Summons
  • The Master has special need of fodder for... something else you're not privy to. All bandit keeps are immediately smited, and their occupants as well as all other bandits on the continent are called away to serve some new duty. This would seem a boon... except there's nothing worse than two large armies with suddenly nothing to do.
  • Thanks to Winge for suggesting.

• Condemnation
  • The Master steps in once again -- he is for some reason displeased with the amount of high magic being that you -- The Creator -- are tossing around. For a certain length of time, he sets a complete embargo on your placement of new god tokens, mythological tokens, and mythological creatures.
  • Thanks to Winge for suggesting.

• Crumble
  • The continent temporarily ceases growing each turn, and instead bits and pieces of it crumble away. The effect gets stronger in later ages.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

• Accelerated Growth
  • The continent grows at an alarming rate. The effect gets stronger in later ages.

• Drought
  • All lakes, marshes, wheat farms, pig farms, and sheep farms suffer extreme dry conditions and turn to dead forests.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

• Thanatos' Gathering
  • Thanatos decides to make his presence known. Every red and blue faction military-producing without a unit standing on it receives a Cerberus to guard it... and block it from further production.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• Logi's Wildfire
  • All forests of all sorts, plus all carpenters and woodcutters, burn to the ground. All that remains afterward is un-smiteable obsidian.

• Frailty
  • A terrible weakness sweeps across the land. Every turn, all non-god units have their health reduced to 1.

• Lockdown
  • All buildings are shut up tight, and can take no damage -- for both factions and the bandit keeps. However, in doing this the red and blue factions lose their ability to produce human military units during this time... while the bandits do not.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

Alpha 0.954

(Released May 22nd, 2013)

• The Golden Fleece now only grants 20 enlightenment to every town, not 50 like it was before.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

• Fixed several remaining references to movement points.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Some changes to ruins:
  • Only town centers, barracks, archery ranges, and siege workshops leave building ruins that have any bonuses in them. All other building types leave no bonuses now.
  • Grassy ruins now only have bonuses for two units, rather than five. This cuts down on the number of units with bonuses, helping to make them actually more unbalancing (in a good way).
  • Thanks to Misery and zharmad for suggesting.

• A couple of Greek mythological balance changes:
  • The attack AP for chimera changed 3 -> 5.
  • The attack AP for centaur changed 3 -> 4.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• Pan's Harpe and Ullr's Rune Stone now costs -1800 points.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• Tokens with negative point values now actually show that and work properly.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Bandit keeps should no longer spawn inside the boundaries of towns.
  • Thanks to SRombauts and zharmad for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where enlightened town buildings were still vulnerable to trojan horses.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

Easing The Tutorial Difficulty

• The score requirements are no longer shown in the instructions toolbar during round 1 of the tutorial.

• There is a new "survive until turn 4" inserted between "survive turn 1" and "survive until turn 6."
  • This new one talks a bit more about combat and how that plays out, and also reassures you that if you haven't dealt with the creature menace by turn 4, then the creatures will be removed for you so that you can move on.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for suggesting.

• During the "survive the first turn" message, it talks about building up barracks on both sides, rather than just one.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for suggesting.

• Score gating is no longer mentioned during the age of man in the tutorial, since it's not relevant yet.
  • Instead this is now mentioned at the start of the age of monsters, when it becomes relevant.

Alpha 0.953

(Released May 21st, 2013)

• Some rebalance to archery range units:
  • Toxotes: AP attack cost 3 -> 5
  • Akontistai: AP attack cost 3 -> 7
  • Lithovoloi: AP attack cost 3 -> 7
  • Norse Archer: AP attack power down (but still same AP attack cost)
  • Axe Thrower: AP attack cost 3 -> 4
  • Longbowman: AP attack cost 3 -> 2
  • Hippo Toxotes: AP attack cost 3 -> 7
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Some rebalance to barracks units:
  • Peltast bacon cost increased 30%.
  • Prodromos: AP attack cost 3 -> 5
  • Huscarl: AP attack cost 3 -> 6
  • Marauder: AP attack cost 3 -> 5

• A bunch of references to "movement speed" and "movement rate" have been changed to "action points" instead. This is referring to things like ruins bonuses, god passives, and otherwise.
  • Incidentally, some of these abilities, like the Ares passive, are WAY more powerful since the switch to AP.
  • Note also that when referring to civilians (aka Diplomats), movement speed/rate is still used as terminology instead of AP.

• The text of the passive ability of Zeus was way off when viewed on other entities, and is now fixed. The spirit of the text was right, but the format was all wrong.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

Score Multipliers After Game Victory

• All three of the difficulty types now have a "Score Multiplier After Game Victory" attached to themselves.
  • These multipliers don't kick in until you actually win, so they don't help you with score gating or anything like that. Once the game is won, you can see your final multiplied score as part of the victory text, and that's also what goes on the top score on your profile, etc.
  • One point of clarification: these multipliers are additive with one another, not multiplicative. So if you have three multipliers of 10, that will be a multiplier of 30, not 300.

Alpha 0.952

(Released May 21st, 2013)

• There is now a Load Game option directly in the in-game escape menu, to make for quicker saving and reloading of games if you want to try something and then go back and try something else.

• Fixed a bug where only one music track was ever playing during gameplay! Yikes!
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• A few resource balance changes:
  • The amount of wheat produced per turn on each wheat farm has been dropped from 12 to 9.
  • The amount of diamonds needed for jewelry has been dropped from 5 to 3.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• The jewelry costs for diplomats have been dropped to 1/3 their prior value.
  • Thanks to Winge for suggesting.

• Fixed a typo in the Inside Job woe.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

Alpha 0.951

(Released May 21st, 2013)

• Improved the visuals of the city border ring for when you're placing buildings.

• All units that can attack multiple targets are now able to attack the same target multiple times per turn rather than having to switch targets with every attack. This makes them a lot more powerful, and seem a lot more sane.
  • Thanks to orzelek and Winge for inspiring this change.

• Ranged units of any kind are no longer allowed to just stand on a military production building that they are on, blocking further unit production while they fire off volleys.
  • Instead they will move until they are no longer on such a tile, and then fire from where they wind up.
  • If it's not possible for them to move without needing to attack somebody, THEN they will stay where they are and fire at the target, but those are the only circumstances.
  • Thanks to Mick and Cinth for suggesting.

• Dark elves and hippo-toxotes now have proper upgrade resource costs, rather than being free to upgrade.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a minor issue in the sidebar where "Nemean Lion" and "Adamantine" would overlap their text slightly.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed the grammar in the description of the longbowmen.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• You can no longer place the same kind of tile on top of itself, as that was something that could accidentally waste action points for you.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• Fixed the visuals of a number of siege weapons that had their faction flags floating way too high, and their health bars also floating confusingly high.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting.

Score Balance

• Score rebalance:
  • The points granted from a unit kill have increased from 5 to 15.
  • The points granted from a building kill have increased from 100 to 150.
  • The points granted from token uses previously varied by your general difficulty, which didn't make a lot of sense and made people have wildly different experiences score-wise.
    • For the most part, these are now the values that they were on Hard general difficulty before.
    • However, in some cases like Tyr's sword or Cornucopia or palladium, the points are actually now negative!
  • The requirements for score during the age of man have been drastically reduced, while those for the later two ages have not been changed.
    • This allows you to get settled on your feet before you're having to deal with too much carnage, and it also makes it so that as more things open up to you (more resources available, new gods and their tokens, etc) the score requirements are increased then, rather than earlier.
  • Thanks to Misery, Mick, and Cinth for suggesting.

Siege Balance

• Updated the tooltips on all the siege weapons to make it clear that they cannot directly attack units, but will damage any who happen to be standing on buildings they attack.

• Norse arsonists require water flasks, while norse catapults no longer do.
  • This makes the arsonists unlockable, and the catapults not.
  • Thanks to Mick for inspiring this change.

• Greek siege towers now require ale, whereas the trojan horses do not.
  • This makes the siege towers unlockable, and the trojan horses not.

• Greek Siege towers can now attack multiple targets per turn, and their attack power has been only lowered by around half. This makes them... deadly.

• Norse arsonists have had their level 1 attack power tripled, and the upper range of their attack powers goes up less now.
  • Thanks to Mick for inspiring this change.

• Bandits no longer will use arsonists, siege towers, or mortars.

Attacks By Action Points On Each Turn

• Changed up how attacks from units work a fair bit. Previously, most units would end their turn after a single attack, unless they had the "attacks multiple times per turn" ability. Now:
  • Units move and attack using "action points." Each movement usually takes one AP unless they are crossing rough terrain. Each attack generally takes multiple AP, but it depends on the unit. The AP are the same as what movement points used to be.
  • Units can over-spend their AP. If a unit is down to 1 AP but is within attack range, they can still launch an attack that costs 3 AP. They'll start their next turn with full AP, no problem. Units only have to stop acting when their AP is reduced to zero or below.
    • This applies to movement and attacks, so that actually is a change from the movement side of things, too -- making slow units less bogged down in marshes, for instance.
  • This both makes the "how many attacks can I make per turn" more clear, but it also makes it so that more combat happens per turn between when players can take actions (something advanced players were commenting is a good thing, and we agreed).
  • Thanks to Mick for inspiring this.

• The camera no longer follows the projectiles of shots from enemies, since there are so many now and that gets very jarring. The zoom option makes it easy to see them if you're having trouble, and the battle sites are just as good as anything on that, too.

Tutorial-Related Improvements

• Added a new tutorial step called "survive the first turn" that explains combat a bit more, before launching into the "survive the first 5 turns" step.

• Updated the tooltips on most of the resources in order to make them more clear in terms of what their ultimate purpose is for.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for suggesting.

• Updated the "Spend All 9 Of The Blue Faction's Action Points" tutorial step to make it more clear that red and blue are more diverse in terms of their resource requirements than was previously hinted.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for suggesting.

• Updated the "Spend All 9 Of The Blue Faction's Action Points" tutorial step to have a tip that says:
  • Now might be a good time to save your game if you want to try out different setups and then see how the first combat rounds play out.
  • Also, the "survive the first 5 turns" message now has a similar tip.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for suggesting.

Alpha 0.950

(Released May 20th, 2013)

• Fixed a missing localization error for TutorialStepType_After_RedBuildARockQuarry.
  • This affected absolutely nothing at all, except showing a message when you launch the game.

• Since land can now be built over in one click (ruins aside), non-ruins types of land that spawn into your continent can now spawn within the radius of your towns (whereas before they were not allowed to).
  • This prevents various sorts of exploits (that were already pretty hard to do), and in general makes the shape of the continents more interesting when outlying towns are considered.

• Fixed an obscure bug where there was a very small chance that the "two new random lands that pop in each turn" could actually spawn right on top of one another!

• Military commandments can now only be placed on enemy gods, rather than enemy towns and enemy gods.
  • Thanks to Misery and Mick for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue where bandit keeps could prevent you from placing town centers like other town centers would.

• Lowered the number of turns the various "x type of producer revolt" stuff lasts.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• The points per mythological token use have been reduced to 10% of their former values.
  • Killing gods has also been reduced from 15000 to 5000.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting the mythological token part.

• Fixed a bug with fade-ins not working completely correctly for entities.

• Fixed an errant reference to social decay that was still in the tutorial.
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the removed rice resource still being referenced in the cornucopia description.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Fixed a last reference to rice and fish that was in the tutorial.
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for reporting.

• Ballista range has been toned down from 12 to 7.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Fixed several text overflow issues and spacing issues in the tooltips for unit production.
  • Thanks to nas1m, Pepisolo, and windgen for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in Skadi's Ski's tooltip.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting.

• Fixed several more tooltip typos.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting.

• When there are resource producer revolts that freeze your ability to use certain resources, it no longer makes those resources look as if they have been wiped out, as that was confusing.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

Interface Polish

• Added a new "Extras" tab to the settings window, and pushed a bunch of those sort of personalize-for-your-taste settings into there. Makes the game tab less overwhelming (and actually kind of bare, but okay).

• When you are placing a town center, the other town centers no longer show their placement radii, as that makes no sense.

• When you are placing a town center, its placement radius is still shown, but turns red when you can't place the town center in the current location (making it more visually obvious when you can and can't place a town center.

• Added a new "Allow Really Far Zoom" option in the settings menu, which defaults to on.
  • This lets you zoom waaay out, where the text of each city is much more apparent since everything else is so small.
  • In a lot of respects this serves as the minimap that people have been looking for, as well as a way to take a screenshot of most of (if not all) of your floating world.
  • Thanks to orzelek, Mick, zharmad, and Shumbok for inspiring this addition.

• Added a new "Show Resource Popups" option in the settings menu, which defaults to off.
  • This suppresses all those popups from resource producers, which really seem rather pointless and cluttering these days. But hey, if you really like them you can turn them back on with this.

• On the right sidebar, the tooltips now make it clear which are raw resources and which are key finished goods.

• For the raw resources only, the right sidebar's tooltips now shows the gained, spent, and net amounts for each resource for the prior turn.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• When you are in town center placement mode, all of the existing land tiles now turn red if you cannot place the town center there because of locational restrictions related to how far away or close town centers must be to/from one another.
  • It's surprising what placement locations this actually makes clear that you can do.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

• The explanation of why a town center cannot go somewhere is now a lot more concise in terms of not repeating the same information over and over if several requirements are not met.

• When you are in town center placement mode, the game now calculates which tiles out to two spaces can actually take a town center, letting you plan your town center expansions waaaay better than before. It also looks pretty darn cool.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

• The interface for placing building tiles and showing where that is allowed has been completely revamped.
  • A light-colored box shows above all the tiles, denoting the range you can place things in.
  • The land tiles within that range that you can replace are now highlighted in green.
  • The empty tiles within that range show up green in a manner consistent with what now happens when you place the town centers.
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for suggesting.

• Changed the chat hotkey from being T to being Enter.

• Auto-heal popups are no longer shown at all, as there seems to be no point to them. If somebody wants them, we can add a settings menu option for them.

• The popups talking about how much damage was dealt and received on units in combat are now an option in the settings menu, and are off by default. It was too much craziness to read most of the time anyhow, and they faded way too fast.

• There are new "battle site" icons that drop on any tile that sees combat during playback. These can be hovered over, and show the precise damage that was dealt on that tile, to who and by whom, all in the proper order. These get cleared when you start the next playback round, but otherwise hang around until that point for your perusal during or after playback.
  • In short these are suuuuuper helpful for after-the-fact analysis of what just happened in a battle, to a degree nothing else prior to this with combat logging had been.

• Buildings that are damaged now show a big health bar, and units that are damaged now show a little health bar.
  • This actually adds a surprising amount to the game, because now the damage that units take can be represented this way rather than those stupid popup messages all over the place (although you can toggle them back on if you really like them).
  • This also makes it much easier to tell which buildings to repair, etc.
  • Thanks to madcow, Pepisolo, SRombauts, Aquohn, and windgen for suggesting.

• The last turn button on the sidebar has been shrunk down (it's more attractive this way anyway) and a second button has been placed next to it: Filter Mode.

• There are now the following filter modes:
  • All
    • Shows everything like normal, with no filtering.
  • Battle Sites
    • Dims all the tiles that do not have a battle site on them from the last turn.
  • Blue Faction
    • Dims everything except tiles that belong to the blue faction, and blue units or tokens themselves.
  • Red Faction
    • Dims everything except tiles that belong to the red faction, and red units or tokens themselves.
  • Yellow Bandits
    • Dims everything except tiles that belong to the yellow bandits, and yellow units or tokens themselves.
  • Units And Tokens
    • Dims everything except units and tokens.
  • Gods
    • Dims everything except god units.
  • Mythological Creatures
    • Dims everything except mythological creatures.
  • Humans
    • Dims everything except human units.

Multiplayer Polish

• Added a new window for multiplayer games where it shows when you are waiting for other players to finish their turns or finish watching playback before you can continue. Otherwise the game just looks like it is stalled out until the other player finishes.

• Redid the way the internal multiplayer heartbeats work, so that they are a bit more robust and shouldn't get interrupted by menus or other factors.

• Fixed an issue where multiplayer savegames were not automatically remembering that they were multiplayer when you next loaded them.

• Fixed a multiplayer bug where saving your game on the server would cause the clients to all become disconnected.

Alpha 0.907

(Released May 20th, 2013)

• Fixed a rather large oversight in the prior version where you could spend more action points or resources when placing land tiles than you actually had available, allowing you to go into debt.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

Resource Adjustments

• The pottery costs for seers have been reduced from 25 to 10.
  • Thanks to Mick for inspiring this change.

• The amount of incense produced per turn from seers has been increased from .75 to 2.
  • Thanks to Mick for inspiring this change.

• Rice and fish are gone from the game:
  • The fishery and the rice field have been removed from being able to be placed from the sidebar.
  • The top row of the resources section has been combined down into the row below: so that's wood and rock down in the rest of the raw resources line now.
  • The diplomats now cost bread where previously they cost rice or fish.
  • The rice and fish costs for the mythological creatures have been completely removed.
  • Rice and fish no longer show up in the resource sidebar or in the tooltip on town centers.
  • Thanks to Mick for inspiring this change.

• Adjusted the tutorial to have players build a rock quarry instead of a fishery; which makes more sense anyhow, as that's more core to the early game.

• The sunstone costs of Tyr's Sword have been tripled, and the cooldowns (and points bonus) from using this has also been increased quite a bit.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

Alpha 0.906

(Released May 19th, 2013)

• Bandit keeps, which are the main source of bandits most of the time, are no longer allowed to spawn mythological creatures on themselves.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Mythological creatures that spawn as bandits through other means beyond the bandit keeps will spawn at one less upgrade level than their human peers do.
  • These creatures are tough enough as it is even without the extra upgrade level on them, and this makes the balance fluctuate less by chance.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Since light elves were so underwhelming, they now have a long-ranged attack instead of being melee-based.

• Fixed an exception that was thrown in the prior version of the game when you clicked into your profile.
  • Thanks to Mick and Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where blue building kills were not counting properly into your total score, thus making your score look artificially low.
  • Thanks to Mick for reporting.

• Improved the tooltip for "you can't place this tile here" to show you ALL the reasons you can't place that tile there, rather than just the "most important" one. That way you can tell when you can place a town center if you just build out a bit more land, for instance.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• Put in some code to make sure that the deaths of tiles or units could not be logged more than once, as it seemed like that might have been happening in some cases.
  • Thanks to Mick for the suspicious savegame.

Difficulties Split Out; New Score Requirements Option

• Complete revamp of the difficulty system. The single difficulty level has been split into three:
  • General difficulty: This works like the old one did, minus the distinctions between Easy 1, Easy 2, etc. It's just "Easy" in the new system.
  • Woe frequency: This is a smaller list and basically accomplishes the same thing that the sub-distinctions in the old system did. Just in a much less overwhelming way. With this you're just choosing the frequency of your woes from a predetermined list with clarifying names that specify the expected difficulty of each range.
  • Score Requirement: This is new. It's also optional, as the easiest option is Off. When this is on, however, there's now a new win condition for the game -- you must get a minimum number of points by the end of the age of man, the age of monsters, and the age of gods. If you don't, you lose.
    • On the really high score requirement skill levels, the only way to hit those targets is to be really aggressive with god powers and mythological tokens.
    • These may need some adjusting in general, though, as scores are only now really getting cleared up and so the upper score requirement ranges may be vastly too high. We'll see. The lower ones should be plenty fine based on what we've seen thus far, though.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting that we split all this out into three options, and make the score requirements an optional thing (since some people really wanted them, and other really didn't, this is a good compromise).

• Updated the tutorial a bit to reflect the new score stuff.

Alpha 0.905

(Released May 19th, 2013)

• Fixed an issue where if you put tokens or military commandments on certain buildings, entities could not spawn out of them. Most notably, bandit keeps.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The range that the game will search for the nearest TC now is further than it was before, to prevent it from not knowing how far away it was. Also, it now says "???" when it can't find any TC in range, rather than 999.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed an issue in the last few versions where clicking end playback or clicking next playback would have a delay on it same as when you are normally switching between entities in the playback.

• The amount of wheat produced per wheat farm per turn has been tripled.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where empty ruins sites could be smited.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• When targeting "the nearest enemy town center," red and blue units will prefer to target bandit keeps above towns of the opposing faction.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where, oddly, woes could sometimes strike the yellow faction when it was supposed to strike everyone. This is now fixed and will self-correct in existing savegames.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• The tutorial has been updated to no longer reference social decay, but to instead talk about the new mechanics of building perma-death and building repairs.

• Fixed a loophole where you could place tiles on top of units or tokens and erase them in the prior version.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the presence of a nearby Bandit Keep could prevent you from being able to place buildings in some parts of your town.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Black Death had become impossibly hard with recent changes. It now only kills 5% of your buildings, not 100%. But still all your units.
  • Thanks to Cinth and orzelek for reporting.

• Put in code to fix a very strange issue where apparently in some rare cases there could be two tiles on the same location. The game now checks for this and removes the older of the two tiles.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Some more visual variants of the ruins, making those more visually interesting when you have a landscape of them, heh.

Siege Weapon Balance

• The siege weapons have gotten a rebalance across the board, making them both a bit more unique compared to one another, and also removing all their building-specific bonuses (since they only can attack buildings anyhow), and in general nerfing their damage considerably as their upgrade level goes up in particular.
  • The baseline strength of these things was not too bad, but once they were a level or two upgraded, it was was straight to ludicrious speed. We're talking going all the way to plaid.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Units now give waaaay more priority to targeting enemy siege units.
  • Thanks to Winge for suggesting.

Mythological and God Token Updates

• Updated the Brokkr and Cornucopia descriptions to no longer state that they let you use locked units temporarily. Those units now have unlock levels on themselves directly, so that was no longer true for a while now.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• Pan's Pipes now also reduce attack range to 1, which is really what it was thematically supposed to do before anyhow, since units can't shoot farther than they can see. Because before they WERE shooting further than they could see.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Complete Midgard Serpent rebalance:
  • The Midgard Serpent normally holds the world together, but starts having a bit of trouble here. At the end of each turn, two random land tiles and one random building ruin are smited PER RED OR BLUE TOWN. So if there are six towns between red and blue, then 12 random land tiles and six building ruins (distributed randomly throughout the map) are destroyed.
  • The Midgard Serpent is no longer allowed to smite the tile that it is standing on, as that rather blunts it.
  • Now that this is super useful, its cooldown times have been increased accordingly. Also its costs have been completely redone.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring this change.

• Ullr's Rune Stone completely revamped:
  • The turn after Ullr reaches his rune stone, all Bandit Keeps are struck down.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an error in Poseidon's Chariot and Hermes' Talaria stating that their ranged dropped rather than increased.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Heimdall's Hofund now also strikes Bandit Keeps, which are new and thus had been missed by his power.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Pan's Harpe has been completely redone:
  • The turn after Pan reaches this sickle-sword, he immediately destroys all bandit keeps on the map.
  • This also now costs 4 sunstone rather than 2.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring this change.

• The cooldown turns for Palladium have gone through the roof now, since it's so powerful.
  • Thanks to Cinth and Misery for suggesting.

More Score Additions

• The total yellow kills and yellow building kills is now shown in the score tooltip even though it does not affect the score directly (but these numbers are still interesting to see).

• The number of god deaths are now tracked on the score tooltip, and you get a whopping 15,000 points per each god killed.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring this change.

• Mythological token points from their usage also now shows in the score window and is part of the score calculation.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• All of the god and mythological tokens now have high point-values assigned to them, which vary with the chosen difficulty level (so you can get much higher scores with them on higher difficulties).

• Your top score for any game you have won is now shown on your player profile right in the main menu.

A New Form Of Building Repair

• Added a new Direct Action that allows you to repair any allied building to full health -- but at a steep cost of 3 action points.
  • This doesn't work on buildings that have already been destroyed, naturally.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

Alpha 0.904

(Released May 19th, 2013)

• Fixed a bug where games saved in .903 could not be loaded.
  • Note that these saves are not corrupt, the loading of them was just not working properly.
  • Thanks to SRombauts and Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed an oversight in the prior version where tiles could be placed on top of grassy ruins.

• Town Centers now only have to be within 16 tiles of an enemy town center to be placed, rather than 8. This allows for much more varied game boards.
  • Thanks to SRombauts for suggesting.

• Added a second visual variant of the grassy ruins, although it's still not enough variance now that they are being used so frequently. We'll try to add some more of those shortly.

Scorched Earth To Prevent Cheesy Blockages

• When trojan horses explode, it now says "Sneak Attack!" and the tile becomes a grassy ruin instead of a marsh.

• When something would smite a tile a god is standing on, that tile now turns to a grassy ruin instead of a marsh.

• Buildings that are destroyed, including bandit keeps, are now knocked into ruins.

• There is now a special kind of ruin for just non-bandit-keep buildings that are knocked down.
  • These now show up as darkened like white-flag buildings used to, so that it's still obvious where your towns are taking damage and/or used to stand.
  • These also only have one unit bonus in them, rather than 5 (which was excessive in the case of these).
  • These also show a white flag until the unit bonus is claimed, again to help make it more noticeable where stuff has been destroyed.

The Victorious Return Of Score

• Score has returned, although in a bit of a different form. You can now see it again at the top of the screen, and hovering over it shows you the breakdown of where the score is coming from:
  • Red and Blue kills are shown (in terms of number of kills, and how much they contribute to the score -- 5 points each).
  • Red and Blue building kills are shown (again in terms of number done, and how much they add to score -- 100 points each).
  • Red and Blue points from god power uses are shown, which is kind of an abstract thing because it depends on the god power use and how effective it was.
    • All of this works now except for the god power use scores, which have yet to be assigned. But we didn't want to hold up this release for that, so that will come next release.
  • Thanks to orzelek for ultimately inspiring this.

• Showing your top scores and all that jazz will be coming, as will achievements based on score. But again we didn't want to hold up this release for that.

Alpha 0.903

(Released May 19th, 2013)

• The bandit keep graphics are now finalized (and look really cool).

Farewell Social Decay, Hello Town Center Requirements

• Social Decay has been removed, as it definitely was not fun. There was a big outpouring of negativity from the alpha players about it, and honestly I admit I had my worries about it from brief testing myself. I should have listened to those a bit more, ah well.
  • The revised mechanics that many proposed for social decay really just don't work, though; most involved using a random chance of something bad happening as social decay comes up.
    • The thing about random chance is that it's really random: you could have a game where a 10% social decay leads every city into banditry, and a 90% chance never does. The other thing about random chance is that when you roll it more times than once, your odds of the bad thing happening go up and up. In other words, a 10% chance over 10 turns is much more likely to give you a flip to the bandit side then a 10% chance on one turn is. And so on. Sine this game is talking about stuff "over time," random chances like that really don't work.
    • Hence always the "binary" nature of the systems I've come up with for crime and social decay. Though those have problems of their own, as we've seen.
  • But the primary problem with social decay was just that it was plain not fun -- AND, as Keith and a few others noted, something you could still cheese. So it wasn't even effective at its core job, while it was effective at suddenly sucking all the fun out of the game. But it was more challenging! ;)

• I did have a bit of a flash of insight when thinking about the core goals of social decay, though: and that's really that towns just don't want to be way off on their own. Well... there's a simpler way to solve that! Don't let towns be off on their own! If the guys refuse to live somewhere off away from the front lines in general, then that solves that problem right from the start and makes it a lot more interesting. Therefore, the game will now inform you that town centers you place must be:

Town centers must be:

• • At least 5 tiles apart from all other town centers (lower than before).
  • At least 8 tiles apart from all allied town centers (same as before).
  • No more than 8 tiles away from any enemy town center (new requirement).

• It is now possible to directly replace existing tiles by placing another tile over top of it.
  • This saves you the step of smiting something and then recreating it, but more importantly prevents some deadlock states where catastrophic woes could just make the game unplayable any further.
  • Placement has the following restrictions:
  • No land tiles on buildings.
  • No land tiles on obsidian.
  • No buildings on buildings.
  • No non-town-center buildings on obsidian.

Alpha 0.902

(Released May 18th, 2013)

• The bandit spawn rate has increased 1.5x over its prior values in Hard difficulties, and 2x over its prior values in Expert difficulties.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• During multiplayer, the rate of bandit spawns is multiplied by the number of players.

• Fixed a bug where the achievements for winning one difficulty would grant you the achievements for winning all of them. Haven't tested this, but it should be correct now.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a couple of issues with the veteran system and the centaur bonuses where too many upgrade levels would be granted, and at the wrong times, such that playback of the actions could become nonsensical (a unit didn't die during the initial prediction, but then did die on the actual playback).
  • Thanks to Mick for a report that led to this discovery.

• Lightened the lines in obsidian a bit, so that they can be seen on monitors with lower contrast.
  • Thanks to Winge for suggesting.

• Fixed an AI bug that was having allied military units prioritizing tiles with allied units on it as greater than zero. This could lead to them standing around uselessly when enemy buildings or grassy ruins were nearby.

• Gods are no longer allowed to stand or walk on buildings, as of several releases ago. However, this had the unintended side effect of making the gods confusingly not be able to get to their tokens sometimes, and so just stand there. Actually we knew that would happen and even noted that in the release notes, but we didn't plan on how confusing that would be.
  • Now if a god is unable to path to their token because of whatever stuff that's in the way (probably just buildings, unless it's somehow a gap in the land), they will simply jump straight to the token rather than standing around idly. They are gods, and they can fly, after all.
  • Thanks to Shumbok for reporting.

• When town centers get obliterated (obsidian, etc), the tiles now lose the name that they would otherwise display.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• Fixed an issue in the tooltips where Heimdall's bonus on other gods and mythological creatures was just showing his name and not what his bonus was.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Smelter was accidentally (and confusingly) in the second line of the resource producers, making it look like a raw resource producer when it was really a finished goods producer.
  • Thanks to Kjara for reporting.

• All of the sections in the sidebar now have labels above the lines that explain what each line has in it -- finished goods, raw resources, whatever.

Siege Unit Wrecking Balls

• Vastly increased the multipliers against buildings that units of those sorts have. On the order of 3x increases, most of the time. Now even towers fall in just a few hits from a higher-level siege weapon.
  • Thanks to Mick for ultimately inspiring these changes.

• The health of the raw resource producers has been reduced by about half, and the health of the finished goods producers has been reduced by about 30%.
  • Thanks to Mick for ultimately inspiring these changes.

Bandits That Mean Business

• Bandits no longer spawn in on tiles at random when those tiles get created.
  • Instead, when that would have happened before, a new Bandit Keep tile will appear somewhere at random on the map.
  • The bandit keep is particularly tricky, because it spawns units every turn when there is not a unit on it. It also has the same high health as a defensive tower.
  • Ergo, this is a much bigger threat from bandits, and it's also something that you need siege weapons already ready for in order to take it out. And since this means you need siege weapons to fight off the bandits, this means you need to have siege weapons out and fighting all the time, which puts your main towns more at risk, too. Especially when paired with social decay, below. And the siege unit / building health changes above.
  • Bandit keeps have names just like the other towns do.
  • The graphic for this tile is still inwork, but is partially complete.
  • Thanks to Mick for ultimately inspiring these changes.

Social Decay

• A new "Social Decay" mechanic has been added, which aims to bring back the balance that crime and score were once trying for. A detailed (way too detailed) post on the thinking is here.
  • Here's how the mechanic actually works:
    • Every turn, if there is not an opposing faction unit (bandits don't count) within 3 tiles of a town center, then Social Decay increases on that town by a certain amount.
      • The lowest amount (on Easy 1) is 5, whereas the highest amount (on Expert 4) is 26.
  • When there IS an opposing faction unit within the range specified, the Social Decay goes down by the same amount rather than up. It doesn't matter how many units are in range, it's always the same amount.
  • As long as the social decay percentage doesn't reach 100, nothing happens. But if it reaches 100%, then the town immediately defects to the yellow faction. Yikes!
  • Thematically, when there are no enemies around, these dudes just don't feel the need for protection from belonging to the faction they were a part of, so they declare independence (anarchistic independence?).
  • From a gameplay perspective, this means that you can't sequester towns and keep them completely away from the fighting. Even on Easy 1, a sequestered town will only last for 20 turns before it collapses into social decay. On the other end of the spectrum on Expert 4 it only would last 4 turns before collapsing.
    • On expert 4, this actually sounds super difficult, right? I mean, often units get stuck in battlefields in the middle of the map. The idea here is that you want to pair up your towns so that you're constantly having not such a long distance for enemies to cross. Also, expert 4 is supposed to be freaking insane anyhow. Expert 1 only has an increase of 14 per turn, so that's 8 turns that you last before a collapse; that's way more time, all within the expert difficulty range.
  • Thanks to Mick for ultimately inspiring these changes.

Updated Tutorial For New Mechanics

• Since bandits now spawn as keeps rather than as individuals, the tutorial has been updated to only spawn them every 10 turns, rather than every 5.

• When loading old savegames that were in tutorial mode but which were past the round 0 part of the tutorial, it now skips past those steps rather than making you try to play them. This is useful for a lot of other saves.

• The tutorial has been updated to have some new instructions for the first 5 turns, and then revised instructions after that for the rest of the Age of Man.
  • These cover such topics as the need for siege weapons, bandit keeps, and social decay.

Alpha 0.901

(Released May 17th, 2013)

• Fixed an issue with the tooltips being wonky during playback mode in the last release (this was due to some changes in the underlying structure of playback mode).
  • Thanks to Mick for reporting.

• Halved the wait time before the tooltips show up when you're hovering over existing land tiles or units.
  • Thanks to Mick for inspiring this change.

• Possibly fixed the bloodlust missing from bandits in hard and expert modes, although it's not yet been tested.
  • Thanks to Mick for the most recent report.

Alpha 0.900

(Released May 17th, 2013)

• The total games won, lost, and played are no longer including tutorial or sandbox games. This also means you don't level up from repeatedly playing the tutorial.

• A bunch of new building-related stats have been added the profile statistics windows for each of the factions.

• Fixed some issues with the last turn report mixing units that were killed/created from two turns back with the resources created the last turn.

• All of the stats on the last turn report are now fully logged!

• When the turn changes, it now jumps to the oldest enemy town.
  • Thanks to greywolf22, GigaClon, Aquohn, SRombauts, Mick, Pepisolo, and windgen for suggesting.

• All 84 achievements are now fully in place for the game!

• The game now keeps track of how long you have been playing in a given savegame, and that now shows in the "Current Game Status" display on the escape window's screen.
  • This also updates in your profile stats for across multiple games.
  • This marks the last of the central profile stats that were not being updated, so all the stats are now in place!

• The words Greek and Norse are now capitalized consistently through out the game.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting this.

• Hovering over the population counts at the top of the screen now shows you a rollup of how many barracks, archery, siege, creature, and god units you have, as well as a count of every kind of named building you control. It also shows you the total count of your units and buildings.

• The game now pauses when the "Age of Man" tutorial pop up is showing.
  • Thanks to windgen for reporting this.

• When you are exiting the game or back to the main menu, it now prompts if you wish to save your game, since that's not automatic.
  • Thanks to Aquohn and SRombauts for suggesting.

• When you try to overwrite a savegame that already exists, it now prompts you to make sure you want to do this.
  • Thanks to greywolf22 for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug that was leading the stated resource amounts of all multi-raw-resource-cost finished goods to be reported incorrectly. This was not a new bug, it's been around since the start of alpha; but since most finished goods only take a single raw resource, it was not very noticeable in many cases.
  • That said, it was CHARGING you for the real amount, but letting you put yourself in debt that way.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a rather humorous bug where entities that affect the cost of goods could cause the costs of placing themselves to be reduced. This was most notable with Brokkr, who would cause himself to be placed for free based on his own ability.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where hippo-toxotes and dark elves would never attack or move of their own accord, because their entity class (bandit-only units, which is unique to them) wasn't properly wired to have any AI!
  • Thanks to Cyprene and Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where trojan horses were not properly evaluating buildings as military targets all the time, and thus were sometimes just loitering around. The situation had to be kind of specific, though.
  • Thanks to zharmad and Winge for reporting.

• Made it so that as units are produced from your barracks and so forth, it now cycles you through those so that you can tell what is happening. Otherwise it's definitely pretty disconcerting without there being a way to tell that those are being created at all.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where at the end of your playback cycle it would jump away from the last action much too quickly.

• When Spies or Inside Job causes enemy units to get dropped on buildings, it now centers on the new units as they come in to show what is happening.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

• The Revolution and Traitors woes have been made more dangerous, as now either barracks or archery units now spawn on the converted town when it flips. More spawn on higher difficulties.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• Human Vanity now no longer is available to befall you at difficulties higher than Medium, as it makes certain aspects of the game a lot easier in many cases.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring this change.

• The number of turns a guild strike can last has been reduced from 6-12 to 3-5.
  • Also, rather than being a Hard+ woe, it is now a Medium-to-Hard woe.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring this change.

• Collapse has been updated. In addition to what it did before, it now also:
  • Has a 30% chance of marshes getting smited into nothing, or in the case of Midoro Marsh map type turning to obsidian.
  • Has a 10% chance of turning fields into marshes.
  • Has a 30% chance of turning hills into fields.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• Drug Lord now strikes both factions instead of just one, so that its effects are not so unbalancing. It's still really harsh, but not quite so unbalancing between the sides.
  • Drug Lord has also been turned into a Catastrophic woe, rather than a regular one. So you only have a chance of getting struck by it once per game, and still only on Expert difficulty.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring this change.

Alpha 0.818

(Released May 17th, 2013)

• Multiplayer server hosting now defaults to off, and has a toggle.
  • The flexibility for any game to turn into a multiplayer game at any time is great -- just like in AI War. But having the internet connection suddenly cut on whenever you start a game or load a game was a bit freaky here since it was less obvious why that was happening.

• Serial killer now kills more units per turn on higher difficulties. Not noticing it before? Now you will...

• Fixed a bug where serial killer was actually not working after all, as several people reported!
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Gods can no longer be attacked from a distance (where they are unable to counterattack). Units must now approach them directly.
  • Thanks to zharmand for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where counterattacks were disabled for normal units, and... enabled for units that are immune to counterattack. Facepalm.
  • Thanks to Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the sandbox mode window (on the L key) was not coming up for non-developer copies of the game.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a logical oversight where we were intentionally increasing the length of the current woe to last all the way to the next woe (in the case of persistent woes, like Fey Mooon).
  • The problem with that logic was that it actually made the easier difficulties harder. Rather than having gaps between woes, you'd have the hard woes stretch on forever and ever.
  • On harder difficulties this wasn't really a factor, because the time between woes is shorter and thus this didn't really come into play much anyhow. At most it generally meant a handful of turns, not like 20 turns.

• The default color of the buttons throughout the game is now the brown color, which makes them far easier to see on a variety of backgrounds.
  • The main case this is not the place is on the left sidebar, which remains the same.

• The windows behind the popups (such as in the tutorial) are now darker, to make the text on them easier to read.
  • Thanks to Admiral for suggesting.

• Fixed a minor annoyance with the bottom of windows sticking down too far compared to the content in them. And their sides sticking out too far.

• Added a new map tile type: Obsidian.
  • There's nothing much special about this, except that it cannot be smited away.
  • When ultima happens to you, or when an earthquake on hard or greater difficulty happens to you, those tiles turn to obsidian rather than just disappearing entirely.
  • This fixes ultima seeming like a bug, as well as it bringing the entire game to a standstill.
  • Also The Edge Of Civilization converts tiles into obsidian instead of marsh.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring this change.

• The tutorial has been updated to highlight key words and phrases in bits, to break up the large amount of white text and make the important things easier to pick out.

• The "build a butcher" step in the tutorial has been heavily updated in its text to be a lot more informative about finished goods and how those work.

• The frequency of woes in the second two ages of the tutorial is now equivalent to Easy 3 instead of Easy 1, because that's way more interesting and gives a better feel for the woes.

• The frequency range of woes now increases with each age you progress through, rather than staying a constant range between ages. This applies to all difficulties, although the top difficulties already have such a tight and small range that they change hardly at all.

More Player Profile Stats

• The player profile stats now include a "yellow bandits" tab, with stats in there.

• The use of god tokens and mythological tokens, as well as the placement of mytholigcal tokens, is now logged in the player profile stats.

• The kills and deaths of gods are now logged on the player profile stats.

• The total kills and deaths in general are now logged on the player profile stats.

More Last Turn Report Stats

• The details of unit deaths and kills are now logged on the prior turn report, and who killed who (in terms of unit types or woes; it doesn't show faction or unit level or whatever, as that gets into excessive detail for our purposes here).

Alpha 0.817

(Released May 16th, 2013)

• Slightly improved the graphics on the second bar at the top of the screen where the woes and tutorial stuff goes.

• While you are in the tutorial, the instruction at the top now has the added note "Mouse over to reread instructions!"

• Each town in the game is now given a unique name, making it so that there's a bit of extra character in there, and so that you can refer to specific place names when trying to talk about something going on in your savegame (kind of important). This is something that had been planned from the start (AI War planet names, right?), but we hadn't had time to get around to it.
  • The names are thankfully more pronounceable than the AI War planet names. These are actual Greek and Norse cities, although less notable ones and often ones that no longer exist in the modern world. Towns that start out as bandit towns (as opposed to being captured) choose from a selection of completely-fictional names that sound vaguely evil.

• Tried yet another tactic with the AI for units so that they should now weight units that they will do better damage to compared to what the unit does to them, WITHOUT just completely ignoring the units, which turned out to look strange.

• Ranged units no longer care about how much the enemy target damages them at all, since they can strike from range without taking a counterattack anyhow. Same for units that are immune to counterattack through some other means.

• A new line has been added at the end of the "Spend All 9 Of The Blue Faction's Action Points" step of the tutorial:
  • TIP 2: The sides are not equal in strength! The Norse have a much weaker human military, but generally stronger Mythological creatures and tokens. Plan accordingly!

Last Turn Report

• There is now a "Last Turn Report" window that is accessible from the escape menu.

• There is now a Last Turn Report button on the GUI, right above the End Turn button, for easy access.

• The resources generated and spent on the prior turn can now be seen in the Last Turn Report window.

• The units that are created on a turn are now logged in the last turn report.

Profile Stats

• The total number of barracks, archery, and siege units created for the red and blue factions are now logged in your global stats for your profile.

• The total number of uses of all the god tokens, gods, mythological creatures, and mythological tokens are now logged in the global stats for your profile.

Alpha 0.816

(Released May 16th, 2013)

• Fixed a typo in the tutorial about fish production.
  • Thanks to YoukaiCountry for pointing this out.

• When mythological creatures are extinct, it tells you so on the tooltips when you hover over them in the sidebar.

• Fixed a bug where placing certain types of tokens (those that don't wind up with a faction flag attached to them) was actually not charging you any resources!

• The resource sidebar now shows lumber, cut stone, steel, and pottery.
  • These are all the finished goods that are required in order for you to be able to place buildings, and so are the most relevant.
  • Other finished goods are certainly of note, but are not so frequently needed (and there's simply no room).

• The tooltip for the town centers now has the raw resources that are available to that faction much smaller, and in fewer rows.
  • Showing this is relevant because you can look at the raw resources of the faction you are not currently playing as, or at the resources during playback mode.
  • However, the tooltips ALSO now show the finished goods available to that town, and in what quantities they are available.
    • This is town-specific and is very useful both in terms of mental math and in showing what buildings you do/don't have in a resource-centric fashion.

• Improved the tutorial with the following text:
  • On the Light-Elf-placement-step:
    • Note! It's actually a super bad idea to place a mythological unit this early in the game, but we're going to make you do it anyway, just so you see how it works. Usually you would place these in reaction to some imbalance in the battles. Placing them when there isn't already an imbalance will cause an imbalance!
  • On the "Spend All 9 Of The Blue Faction's Action Points" step:
  • As one of your actions, you probably want to place a mythological creature on the greek side -- otherwise that light elf will make quite a mess. Normally, mythological units are quite expensive, so definitely take advantage of the setup round to counter that elf.
  • Tip: don't use Cerberus to counter the elf, because he doesn't move and thus she can go right around him. He's good at guarding bottlenecks, but you don't have one at the moment. Right now you just need something mobile to counter that Light Elf that is currently unbalancing the two factions.
  • Thanks to AlgaeNymph and Mick for suggesting that the tutorial needed to not mislead the players.

Broad Shifts To Balance Flow

• Defensive Towers no longer grant health bonuses to other buildings in the same town. This was just too abusable in too many ways.

• Cowards! Military units now act with more self-preservation in mind unless you give them a specific military commandment.
  • Specifically, they will not attack any unit that does more damage to them than they do to the unit, unless they can kill that unit in one blow or unless a military commandment is involved. Or unless the enemy unit is standing on a building and there's no better target, or unless there's no other way to path to their actual target (and thus they wind up doing the attack in order to say "move out of my way!"
  • So obviously there's lots of exceptions still, but the general cowardice should accomplish a few things:
    • Fewer horsemen attacking pikemen when there is a better target around.
    • More units running away from a big battle and instead going for the enemy towns.
    • More units having to chase down other units that are running away from them.
  • Overall this should be a pretty big shift in balance for the game, and something that should make the unit behaviors feel more sensible. There will never be a case where units NEVER make stupid decisions, but that's actually kind of part of the god game genre anyhow. But we don't want it to be egregious or frustrating.
  • Thanks to orzelek, Mick, zharmad, and others for reporting.

• Complete gods combat rebalance:
  • Gods all now have an attack range of zero, meaning they will only damage enemy units who actively attack them. It also means that god-on-god fighting is out, which is again good.
  • When gods go on a rampage from Fury of The Gods or from a god token, then of course all bets are off and they continue to work like they used to in this mode.
  • Gods are no longer allowed to move onto buildings at all, even temporarily.
    • This will probably cause gods to be stuck on some existing savegames; sorry about that.
  • New gods now spawn on completely random land tiles on the map.
  • Both god tokens and mythological tokens are now completely disallowed from being placed on buildings of any kind. This serves a number of purposes, but in particular makes it so that your gods don't get stuck not being able to get to a particular token PERMANENTLY (though of course they may be unable to get there by virtue of not having a path to the token, which is naturally a different matter).
  • The general purpose of these changes is to completely diminish the combat role of gods, which was never their core purpose in our original designs to begin with. The gods are really about their abilities and their passives; having them act as kind of an invincible barrier to the towns they are near makes it super hard to lose the game in a lot of circumstances if you are playing at past a certain skill level.
  • Thanks to Mick for inspiring these changes, although we'd also been having similar feelings before now (and actually this is getting back to our original pre-alpha designs more anyway).

• The tooltips for gods now make it clear that they cannot step on buildings, and that they do not normally move.

• All of the god and mythological tokens now have cooldowns for how many turns you must wait between using them. These cooldowns vary by difficulty, getting pretty extreme by the time you hit expert (often letting you use the more powerful stuff only once or twice per game).
  • The idea here is to increase the opportunity cost of using a token regardless of how strong your economy is.
  • On lower difficulties this matters less, but on higher difficulties this can be very challenging and thus can make you have to resort to tokens that you might otherwise prefer not to use since they are overkill (but nonetheless the only way to save yourself at the moment because of your past decisions and the woes you've been dealt).
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

Smaller Balance Changes

• Norns now cost 5 Jewelry to place, in addition to it's other costs.
• Fenrir now costs 2 Jewelry to place, in addition to it's other costs.
• Eldhrimnir now costs 2 Jewelry to place, in addition to it's other costs.
• Hlidskjalf has had it's costs increased from 5 incense to 7.
• Singasteinn now costs 50 bacon instead of 30.
• Jewelry now requires 5 diamonds per rather than 1. This makes it a lot harder to make, as it was intended to be.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring these changes.

• Longbowmen now hit for less damage, they were stronger than intended.
  • Thanks to Winge for pointing out this oversight.

• Upheaval and flood now have a MAX difficulty of medium, rather than a minimum one of that.

• Flood no longer can happen if there are no lakes, and Upheaval can no longer happen if there are no mountains.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Spies and Inside job now get substantially more difficult as the difficulty is increased, spawning lots more units in the town in question. On medium they now spawn 3, on hard 6, on expert 9. Easy still spawns 1.
  • Thanks to Mick for inspiring this change.

• The passive ability of Zeus has been changed, since it was affecting the range of gods, which are no longer a thing.
  • Now while he lives, no gods on either faction can take any damage via conventional attacks from other units or gods.

• The passive ability of Pan has been toned down a bit. Rather than doubling the unit production times, it instead goes to just 50% higher.
  • Thanks to Winge for suggesting.

• Wheat tokens now cost 2 APs to place, like the other similar tokens.
  • Thanks to Aquohn for reporting this.

Alpha 0.815

(Released May 15th, 2013)

• Fixed a bug where Hera's Diadem could swap out enemy greater gods as well as lesser ones.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• There are now some statistics that you can see about your current game when you look in the escape menu, such as what the difficulty of the current game is, etc.

• The selection of which random god you are assigned is now deterministic based on the specific game you are playing, as well. So no re-rolling the gods it gives you just by loading a savegame and retrying it several times.

• The way that special abilities are shown on units has been updated to no longer make the tooltips so wide.

• When you are loading someone else's savegame in single player, it no longer makes you change your profile to have a matching name to theirs.

• Great strides have been taken to getting multiplayer to work, although there are probably a lot of bugs that need squashing out before it will really work. We haven't gone through that pass yet, but will be in the next few days.

Completely New Tutorial

• The completely new tutorial, based around a lot of player feedback, is now in place.

• Tutorial games are now always 30 turns in length, and always use Ganan Fields.

• During the Age of Man in the tutorial, low-level bandits spawn every 5 turn and Woes are disabled.

Woes

• In sandbox mode, you can now hit the L key to bring up a menu that lets you do a few things including triggering woes directly.
  • Thanks to madcow for suggesting that the woes be directly trigger-able.

• There is finally a difference between "Easy 1" and "Easy 2" and so forth: the Woe frequency is set by this (and is shown in the tooltips when you are selecting a difficulty).
  • Note that other factors will also likely later play off of these sub-difficulties sometime in the future, though they do not do so now.

• There are potentially two woes being shown at the top of the screen at any given time: the "current" woe and the "next" woe.
  • There should always be a "next" woe up there, counting down, unless you are in The Age Of Man of the tutorial, or are in the Sandbox mode.
  • Whether or not there is a "current" woe varies heavily.
    • Some woes, like Fey Moon, are the sort that stick around affecting things for a while.
    • Others, like Flood, are an "instant effect" woe that strikes you as soon as the "next woe" counter reaches 0, and then disappears.
      • After an "instant effect" woe, you're of course still scrambling to deal with whatever it did for a while after that (while the next woe continues to count down).

• The randomness of woe selection is something that is deterministic based on the current turn and the board state in a specific game, so you can't just save-scum and try re-rolling the woe to see what you get. It will give you the same one each time.

• Once you have passed into the Age Of Monsters on Medium difficulties and up, you'll be on the recieving end of a single "catastrophic" woe pretty soon on in.

• Woes now use a sort of "deck of cards" mentality, where you can't get struck by the same group of woes more than once in quick succession, without the full list of woe types being trodden through.
  • This makes for a lack of annoying "oh this again," although of course it does put more pressure on us to have more woes so that different games play out differently.
  • That said, we also have sub-groupings within each woe type, so that there are for instance different things that impact your production, or which are related to land expansions, and these things count as a single unit when going through the deck of cards (and then the specific sub-item is chosen from among those). So that helps to give extra variety with them without having them over-saturate the types of woes you're likely to face.
  • To play the game you don't have to understand any of the above. But we figured some of the diehards would want to know.

• Your first Woe is shown right from the start of the game, during the setup phase. This adds a reason to actually vary how you start your setup, so that you can react to whatever the woe is. That way the setup phase isn't just an exercise in rote repetition once you find the optimal starting build, in other words.

• In the screen inside the woes selection list in sandbox mode, extra stats are now shown about the woes so that players can learn when and how to expect these woes, and what their parameters are.

Specific Implemented Woes

General

• Human Vanity
  • Ah, the vanity of humans. For the duration of this woe, humans decide they're not going to take orders or deign to act rationally, oh no. Instead they slowly wander around, one tile at a time, only fighting if they happen to bump into someone.

• Fury Of The Gods
  • A terrible anger overtakes all the gods of the land. Abandoning their usual peaceful-unless-you-come-near-me stance, all of the gods go on quite the killing spree.

• Collapse
  • The earth sags into itself. All mountains become hills, and all all lakes become marshes.

• Paranoia
  • Bandits, the enemy, woes: what's not to be afraid of? It's time we built some serious fortifications around here. All tiles in the outer ring of towns will be converted to defensive towers.
  • Thanks to Teal_Blue for inspiring this.

• Embezzler
  • The chief accountant at the central town center bank has made off with all your resources. There's nothing left!

• Drug Lord
  • Trouble is brewing... a shadowy figure known only as "The Boat" is gathering underground support. When his plans come to fruition, all towns that contain a Seer will become bandit towns.

• Traitors
  • Traitors are plotting to overtake one of our towns! It will soon belong to the enemy faction, and there's nothing we can do about it.
  • Thanks to madcow for suggesting.

• Revolution
  • Unrest is brewing in one of our towns! It will soon belong to the bandits, and there's nothing we can do about it.
  • Thanks to madcow for suggesting.

• Mars Ascendant
  • The "red star" shines brightly in the sky, inspiring bloodlust in all those who come out during its period of influence. Even after the red star fades, the effect remains on those who were exposed to it.

• Fey Moon
  • Lock your doors and don't venture out this night. All who do turn to banditry and evil.

• Earthquake
  • We may have dug the soil too greedily... an earthquake is coming that threatens to wipe out half of our raw-resource-production buildings!
  • Thanks to Greywolf22 for suggesting.

• Influenza
  • Illness strikes one of our towns! The people in all of our buildings except for the town center will die.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for suggesting.

• Serial Killer
  • We have a serial killer in our midst! One non-god unit is killed each turn until the perpetrator is apprehended.

Land Expansion

• Flood
  • Hopefully none of your cities are in low-lying areas near water. All of the lakes on the map flood, turning the map tiles adjacent to them into lakes as well.

• Upheaval
  • When tectonic shifts are a possibility, it's not the best idea to live too close to the mountain ridges on the edge of the continental shelf. All of the mountains on the maps expand, turning the map tiles adjacent to them into mountains as well.

Human Revolts

• Vegetarian Uprising
  • Vegetarians are up in arms and holding our butchers and some our farmers hostage! No meat or meat products can be produced or consumed anywhere!
  • Thanks to Nick Trujillo for inspiring this woe.

• Miner Revolt
  • Shouting something about hating being oppressed and having to work in the dark, miners everywhere rise up and sieze the means of production. No mining will take place, nor can mined goods be used!

• Armsmen Revolt
  • Fletchers, smithies, and smelters are all in a huff about too many lost fingers to their work. They're refusing to work!

• Woodsman Revolt
  • Woodcutters and carpenters have fled into the forests in protest of the continued brutalization of nature. They're refusing to work!

• Farmer Revolt
  • Farmers have abandoned their fields, complaining of the hot sun. They're refusing to work!

• Guild Strike
  • All of the various guilds have banded together in protest of having to make so many finished goods on such short notice all the time. No finished goods can be produced at all!

Infiltration

• Inside Job
  • Somehow, bandits have smuggled quite a bit of equipment into all of your towns. Specifically, the sort of equipment needed to make reconstruct fearsome siege weapons and wreak a lot of havoc...

• Spies
  • Looks like the enemy faction has been hard at work smuggling their warriors into your towns. Soon they will burst forth...

Cataclysmic

• Ultima
  • The ultimate magic is about to be unleashed, ripping the world apart. One red and one blue city will be spared, but every other tile on the entire map is destroyed.

• Mass Extinction
  • All mythological creatures on the board quickly die of a mysterious illness, and mythological creatures cannot be used for the remainder of the game.

• The Edge Of Civilization
  • Sometimes when civilization grows too wild, there must be a purge. All of the towns on the map are destroyed except for one random one for each faction.

• Black Death
  • The worst illness that could possibly befall us. All of our human units, dead. Everyone in all of our buildings except for our town centers, dead. Hopefully our gods and our mythological creatures can keep the enemy at bay long enough for us to recover...
  • Thanks to mrhanman for suggesting.

Alpha 0.814

(Released May 13th, 2013)

• Fixed a bug where Pan's Goat was still causing resources to fall every turn rather than just on one turn.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the passive abilities of both Thor and Athena were increasing the maximum number of turns that tokens would last.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where Skadi's Skis were not actually granting the mountain crosser ability to the units that had the ability attached to themselves.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where old savegames updated into the new version (0.813 or higher) could have runtime exceptions thrown when buildings tried to produce units.
  • Thanks to greywolf22 for reporting.

• When Hera's Diadem is used, the replacement god is now placed wherever the replaced god was standing.
  • Thanks to zharmad for inspiring this change.

• Njord's Nails no longer convert flower gardens into primary schools.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with Njord's Nails emptying the schools they upgraded.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed a priority issue where gods preferred to shoot at random targets in their range rather than making a mad dash for their god tokens, once those are placed. Now they make the mad dash and save their sniping for when there's nothing else for them to do.

Alpha 0.813

(Released May 13th, 2013)

• Some basic improvements to the random bonuses from ruins have been added:
  • The attack boost won't be granted to units without attack.
  • The auto-heal boost won't be granted to units without auto-heal.
  • The target bonuses boost won't be granted to units without target bonuses.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Mountains no longer block the line of sight of units with the mountainwalker ability.
  • Thanks to Cinth and Winge for suggesting.

• When gods are spawned at the start of rounds 2 and 3, they no longer will do so on military production buildings.
  • Thanks to Cinth and Winge for suggesting.

• When a god is standing on a tile that gets destroyed for whatever reason, that tile now turns into a marsh tile rather than killing the god.
  • This also removes any need for us to not let god tokens be placed on enemy buildings, etc (which wasn't working anyhow).

• Midgard Serpent has been made more vicious, so that it's effect is now multiplied by the number of enemy towns.
  • So if there are six enemy towns, then 30 random land tiles and twelve enemy buildings (distributed randomly through all the towns, not two per town) are destroyed.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• All gods are considered to have 999 sight range now, and their line of sight is never blocked. This helps them to always reach their god tokens no matter what, as well as making them more, well, godly!

• Gods cannot be counterattacked except by other gods.

• You can now smite buildings on any difficulty level, but smiting buildings now costs you three action points rather than 1.

• When you hit End Turn on blue's turn, it now immediately clears any floating text popups. That way if you're clicking through a bunch of turns at once, you don't get an enormous blob of text over top of itself.

• Valkyries and Light Elves are now 3x more effective than they were.
  • Thanks to Misery for pointing out that these were kinda weak.

• Changed some in-game text to say "Diplomats" rather than "Civilians", since diplomats are the only civies left.
  • Thanks to winge for pointing this out.

• God units now have a glow behind themselves so that they are easier to visually pick out of a crowd.

• A lot of work has been done to bring the buildings into a more correct perspective visually speaking. However, more still needs to be done on a number of them, including a number of the ones that we've partially updated.

Unlocks, and Random God Selection

• Njord and Hermes are now not unlocked until after trade itself unlocks.

• Apollo's Lyre is now not unlocked until after diplomacy itself unlocks.

• When rounds 2 and 3 start, you are no longer allowed to select your gods yourself. Instead, you get random gods assigned to you.

• When each round starts, you now get a non-blocking popup with the name of that round that gradually fades, rather than a blocking popup that gives you tutorial-y information. The tutorial itself will give you the info you need, and outside of the tutorial it will stay out of your way.

• Archery, siege, and barracks units that are not yet able to be produced because they are not yet unlocked are no longer shown in the tooltips at all until they are unlocked.

Lots of Fixes

• Fixed a visual bug that could cause bad overlap for the attack bonuses of things like archers in the production queues.

• Fixed a bug where Skadi was actually preventing Archery Range units from being produced, rather than making it so that they were produced for free.
  • Thanks to JAlfredGoodwin, Winge, Cinth, SRombauts, and zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the screen view would jump to the center of the world whenever the active unit died during playback.
  • Thanks to Mick for reporting.

• Fixed some crash bugs that could happen if the playback of unit actions was saved and then loaded and referenced some tiles that had been destroyed (which in itself was an error, of course; but this lets the savegame recover rather than remaining corrupt).
  • Thanks to Misery and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a few issues where entities were sometimes still able to enter tiles that had been destroyed, which led to all sorts of wonkiness.
  • Thanks to Misery and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where Heimdall's Horn was not actually working.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where Athena's Necklace was not actually working.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where Tyr's Hand was not actually working.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.
• The descriptions of "where to get fish and rice" have been fixed.

• Improved the descriptions of "where to get" moonstone and sunstone to be briefer and not bleed onto the next lines improperly.

• Fixed Ullr's Bone not working properly.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a typo on Idunn's passive ability that was showing it as coming from Tyr on affected units.
  • Thanks to Cinth and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a bug with Njord's Nails that was causing all sorts of random transformations.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a minor typo on Njord's coins.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a minor issue where the bonus from Skadi's Skis was not showing on the tooltips for individual affected units.

• The effect of Njord's Tyrfing was mistakenly being attributed to Njord himself. This made the melee units invulnerable all the time when he was out. Yikes!
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with "free resource" icons being dropped as part of Pan's Goat ability.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with auto-heal sometimes being able to resurrect units that died on a turn, to some general underlying confusion.

• Fixed Hera's Diadem not working.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed Heimdall's Hofund not disappearing after a single use.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• Fixed a bug with Apollo's Delos not working.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• The "Can be used 1 time" note on the god tokens has been removed, as that's implicit in all of them and really confusing because it makes it sound like they can only be used once per game or something.
  • Thanks to Misery and Winge for reporting.

• Corrected an oversight in the description of Hermes' passive ability that was confusing and left over from when traders still roamed Luminith.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with vain units not working properly (Hera's Peacock).
  • Thanks to Cinth, Misery, zharmad, and Winge for reporting.

• Pan's Harpe was working repeatedly. Fixed.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed Tyr's passive to clarify that it only applies to non-god units.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• When Apollo reaches his lyre, it is now consumed whether or not there are any diplomats on the board.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

Sandbox Difficulty Mode

• Added a new difficulty level: sandbox.
  • The sandbox difficulty level is purely free-play. There is no end to the game, and you can place gods and men at any time, for free, unlike in the main game. Action points don't actually get spent, and you can place buildings and other land tiles as often as you want. Great for experimenting with game mechanics or building pretty countrysides.

Crime Free!

• The concept of crime has been entirely removed from the game, as it was fiddly and didn't add to fun or strategy at this point.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• Embassies did contribute to crime previously, so those had to be rethought a bit:
  • For each embassy on the map, bandit spawn rates are increased by 1x the base rate. So with one embassy the spawn rates are twice as fast, two embassies are thrice as fast, etc.

• The function of flower gardens were previously just related to crime, and thus have been completely revamped:
  • Any non-god enemy units that cross a flower garden will "stop to smell the roses," as it were. They'll get lost in thought and will stop whatever they were doing until the next turn.

• Since Pan's passive ability was entirely crime-related, that also had to be completely redone:
  • While Pan lives, all military unit production for the enemy faction takes twice as many turns as usual.

Alpha 0.812

(Released May 10th, 2013)

• Fixed the out of date description text for Njord and Hermes, which still referenced the old trade model.

• The incorrect and confusing "building is idle" text that was showing when the building was actually destroyed has been fixed to no longer show in those cases.

• Military units that get stuck on a tile that they are not allowed to move off of were giving "infinite loop averted" messages and causing general slowdowns. These units now simply die.

• Fixed an issue where buildings would not properly repair themselves after counting down for 10 turns.
  • Thanks to SRombauts and Cinth for reporting.

All Remaining God Tokens (Yay!)

• Apollo: Delos
• Njord: Coins
• Ullr: Bone
• Ares: Serpent
• Skadi: Wolf
• Heimdall: Hofund
• Heimdall: Horn
• Athena: Necklace of Harmonia
• Athena: Owl
• Ares: Spear
• Pan: Harpe
• Hermes: Talaria
• Hera: Diadem
• Hermes: Caduceus
• Heimdall: Gulltoppr
• Apollo: Lyre
• Pan: Pipes
• Ares: Helmet
• Hermes: Helmet
• Hera: Ring of Gyges
• Hera: Peacock
• Skadi: Skis
• Njord: Reginnaglar
• Ullr: Rune Stone
• Pan: Goat

Alpha 0.811

(Released May 10th, 2013)

• Fixed a couple of bugs in the way that some of the unit abilities would show (water crosser and flying, most notably). These may not have manifested to where players could see them, but could have in the future with new abilities.

• The incense costs of the Norse mythological units have been reduced dramatically.
  • Thanks to Mick and Misery for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug that was causing you to be able to separate town centers from the mainland again in the prior version.
  • Thanks to JAlfredGoodwin and Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a confusing glitch in the "cannot do this" message when trying to place a building that is missing its prerequisite.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Building flags now fade in properly when flying in to the screen.

• The game no longer lets you create savegame names longer than 20 characters.
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

Siege, Ranged, And Defense Huge Polish

• The health of defensive towers are now 3x that of a town center, rather than being invincible.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Some siege unit rebalance:
  • Siege units can no longer counterattack enemies that attack them; this makes them more vulnerable in a lot of interesting ways, and the whole class thus feels more like siege weapons in a general RTS.
  • None of the siege units have auto-heal any more, since they have such high base health. This also plays into their uniqueness as a group, as they are like juggernauts you have to stop..
  • The health of siege units has been dropped by half of what it was in the prior version, although it's still very high.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed the hilarious "Invincible to trojan horse!? Impossible!" error.
  • Thanks to Cinth and Mick for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where units would still want to attack buildings with zero health or a white flag up.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Non-flying, non-bloodlust military units now cannot move past any enemy buildings without stopping to attack them. Thus you can use any buildings to wall off other buildings from attack, not just defensive towers; but the defensive towers obviously have way more health.

• All non-white-flag enemy buildings now block enemy line of sight.

• When buildings get "knocked empty" and have a white flag, they now darken. They also do this when they turn to a yellow flag, but to a lesser degree.

• The intelligence of all ranged military units has gone waaaay up. They'll now prefer to attack anything that they can see that is in their range (that they can damage) before they move anywhere.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• The rules for when a town center is invulnerable are now different: it is invulnerable when there are any buildings still standing in the town at all that are its same faction, rather than just any non-tower buildings that are directly adjacent. Towers, now that they are destructible, also count in this now.

• Previously, the resource buildings dying were not properly affecting enlightenment in a town, and those buildings were not getting knocked empty like they were supposed to. Instead they were converting to the attacking faction. Fixed.

Alpha 0.810

(Released May 9th, 2013)

• Put in some super paranoid error checking in CalculateDamageIDoToHim.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting, and hopefully this will solve it for good since we can't yet get a line number on this puppy.

• Put in some super paranoid checking and error prevention for an error that has been cropping up very occasionally for a while now -- this seems to be a "lying liar" line number case, but just in case it's not there is preventative code slathered all over it now.
  • Thanks to Mick and Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed the image offsets of the Akontistai, Norse Archer, and Ballista so that they look more sensible when highlighted and moving around.

Alpha 0.809

(Released May 9th, 2013)

• Knock on wood, seemingly fixed an issue that was causing us to get "lying liar" stack traces that were completely useless to us in tracking down certain bugs when they happened.
  • The problem arose from the fact that -- as we have known from some time -- anything in the OnGUI call stack in Unity 3D has completely borked error handling that does not work at all, can't be caught, and don't have valid stack traces.
  • In the skip playback and skip to next unit buttons, we were violating one of our oldest rules of not calling game code directly from a GUI button even of this sort if we want an actual stack trace from it. Knock on wood, hopefully that solves the issue, though we've not been able to repro it yet.
  • There is actually some change this might have fixed an underlying issue; some form of race condition. It's impossible to prove a negative however, so potentially we just suddenly stopped being able to repro the original issue (it was rare for us to have that repro anyhow, so it's entirely possible).

• The "skip to end of playback" button now is a button with the text "End" on it rather than a stop symbol.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting his confusion.

Alpha 0.808

(Released May 9th, 2013)

• Yggdrasil now only works on red and blue faction members, not bandits as well.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Due to an -ahem- oversight, the freebies granted by Hera, Skadi, and Norns were showing as free in the interface, and letting you place them, but then actually charging you the full amount. Fixed!
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• When the game is exited, all of the floating texts and debris are now cleared immediately rather than hanging around and finishing their animations on the main menu!

• Fixed an issue where Odin's ability was triggering based on the faction of the tile the unit was standing on, rather than the faction of the unit itself!

• Fixed a crash bug that could happen in odd circumstances where an entity had its tile swept out from under it, but the entity didin't die yet.
  • Also put in cleanup code so that these entities actually get removed during the next loop cycle.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Inhabited forests and dead forests can no longer directly be placed by players.
  • This removes a source of player confusion since those only really work when they exist in large volume (as on certain map types).
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting the removal of these.

• Rice/Fish costs for mythological units have been dropped so that they are now purchasable again with the new trade model.
  • Thanks to orzelek for pointing out that we needed to do this.

• Added a new map type: Plateau of Circumstance
  • A land of chaos and unpredictability. All tile types have equal chance of popping up as the land continues to build itself, which means that every game plays out differently... and crazily. Note that statistical clustering will sometimes make it seems like there are patterns or weighting where there is none. This is an illusion!
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• When you are panning around by holding down the middle mouse button, the tooltips no longer pop up.

• Previously, if you had all your enemy towns completely walled off with towers and other obstacles, your allied units would not move unless they happened to see something of interest in their sight range.
  • This last part is by design, but the towers causing them to not approach enemy towns was not.
  • Fixed it so that they ignore towers when considering if they can get to a town, after they try to find a town not blocked off by towers.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• All of the gods now have the flying ability.
  • This makes it so that they can easily and quickly path to wherever you place their god tokens, regardless of obstacles that hold mortal men back (like mountains and towers). This just makes good sense.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• The tooltips in the start new game setup screen now has some notes about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the greeks and norse.
  • Thanks to orzelek for inspiring this change.

• The ability to upgrade buildings has been removed, as it was not something that players were using, wasn't something that had much effect, and was something that added some negative complexity for no real gain.

• Fixed a number of issues with auto-heals that were not happening under certain circumstances, which also included some "global enchantment for a certain amount of time" effects not disappearing.
  • Thanks to Misery, zharmad, orzelek, and Cinth for reporting.

• Put in some code to prevent buildings at 0 HP from accidentally producing units or resources, just in case something slips through the cracks.

• Any buildings that somehow get to zero health without flipping to the white flag now will flip to the white flag in a cleanup check later on.

• Fixed a bug with "can this be smited" detection that was causing some really wonky "no you cannot" answers. Specifically when you were smiting something that would leave an orphan bit of land on the eastern side. Don't ask. ;)
  • Thanks to Cinth, orzelek, and Misery for reporting.

• All of the siege units now have 4x more health than before.

• All of the siege units are now ABLE to damage regular units, but should show no interest in doing so. They were getting way too distracted with regular fighters around rather than going to enemy towns to bring some pain.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• The loaded word "genocide" has been replaced with the word "obliteration" throughout the game.
  • Cyborg, Mick, Cinth, Pepisolo, and madcow for strongly suggesting.

Difficulty Level Updates

• A new Expert set of difficulty levels has been added.

• New for the Hard and Expert classes of difficulties only:
  • Veteran System: Whenever any unit kills another unit, the killer gains a level (up to the normal max of level 4). This makes balancing your sides much harder.
  • Thanks to Greywolf22 for suggesting.

• On Expert difficulty levels, the ability to smite buildings has now been removed.
  • Thanks to madcow for inspiring this change.

• Lakes and mountains can no longer directly be placed by players on Hard and up difficulty levels.
  • This puts the players a bit more at the mercy of the RNG.

• The easy and tutorial difficulty levels now has about a third lower resource costs and unit health, making it so that the battles tend to have more one-shotting (and thus unit bonuses matter less), and making economies easier to manage.

• The expert difficulty levels now have about a quarter more resource costs and unit health, making this even harder to balance.

God Tokens

• Odin: Hugin and Munin
• Odin: Gugnir
• Odin: Draupnir
• Tyr: Scales
• Tyr: Andvarinaut
• Tyr: Missing Hand
• Idunn: Golden Apple
• Idunn: Sviagris
• Idunn: Eitr
• Apollo: Bow
• Skadi: Bow
• Ullr: Bow
• Njord: Tyrfing
• Athena: Olive Branch

Completed Soundtrack!

• The remaining 9 in-game music tracks have now been added to the game!

Alpha 0.807

(Released May 8th, 2013)

• Fixed a crash bug in the prior version.
  • Thanks to Cinth, Mick, and madcow for reporting.

Alpha 0.806

(May 8th, 2013)

• Fixed an issue that could cause errors at the end of the tutorial of a new-in-this-version game if you had selected any other turns-per-round length other than 40 in past versions (easy workaround for players is just to select an actual currently-supported turns-per-round length when starting a new game.
  • Thanks to greywolf22, AragonLA, and GigaClon for reporting.

• Updated the graphics of the dropdowns to be way slicker and nicer-looking.

• Updated the tooltip text for rice/fish to reflect their current use.
  • Thanks to Mick for pointing out that we needed to do this.

• The descriptions of the difficulty groups are now a bit more clear.

• In the hard difficulty group, the bandits now all emerge with the bloodlust ability on them (ability to cross mountains and your towers).

• Hera's passive ability has been changed from allowing placement of free civilians to instead allowing free placement of all the basic resource buildings. There aren't enough civilians left for her prior ability to matter!

• Fixed an issue with projectiles not always visually rotating properly.

• Fixed an issue with projectiles not always traveling a consistent speed, but rather going faster the further they had to go.

Balance Changes

• Arsonists now have more than double the attack against buildings that they did have. They should also focus on attacking buildings more.
  • Thanks to misery for pointing out the need for this.

• Trading Posts now cost 3 Pottery and 10 Lumber to place.

• Embassies now cost 5 Horses and 15 Lumber to place.

• All the unlockable buildings now have a build cost associated with them.
  • To be clear, they still can't be placed until they are unlocked, but, now when they are unlocked, they won't be free.

• Norse Berserks have had their level 1 attack drop from 250 -> 200.
  • This is the first of many upcoming changes like this to unbalance the factions a bit more.

• Norse Hersirs have had their level 1 attack drop from 350 -> 300.
  • They've also had their auto-heal rate drop some.

• Seers now produce .75 incense per turn rather than 3.
  • The scarcity in the incense used to come from the fact that they had a very low storage value, so the seers spent a lot of time just waiting for a chapman to pick up their wares. Now that chapmen are gone, this change was necessary to ensure players aren't swimming in incense. Doing so might make them smell nice, but, it would make some things in the game far too easy. :)

Slight Redefinition Of Genocide

• Once again, the "Red's Turn" / "Blue's Turn" display on the top bar has been removed.

• The top of the screen now shows not only the population for blue and red, but now also shows the number of towns that each has.
  • If the number of towns held by red or blue drops to 0, that now counts as a genocide even if they still have other units.

Profile Levels

• The level of player profiles is now based on 1 plus the number of unique games won.
  • This means you can actually up your profile level now! It also means that you may already have some profile levels and suddenly some new unlocked buildings.

• The trading post is no longer available until profile level 2.
  • Njord and Hermes are no longer available until profile level 2, since their passive abilities have no point until that level.

• The embassy is no longer available until profile level 5.

• All of the unlockable buildings now have their functionality in place. Previously that wasn't too important since people couldn't unlock them yet!

Trade Revamp

• Traders have been removed from the game.

• The functionality of trading posts has been revamped:
  • While you control at least one trading post or bazaar, excess basic resources will be traded for higher-level resources based on the chart below. For each trading post or bazaar that you control, the yield that you get from each trade goes up by 1x the base yield (aka, a yield of 4 goods goes up to a yield of 12 when you have three trading posts). Yields cannot exceed 50% efficiency (ex: 100 of an item traded for 50 of another), and will not happen if your stockpiles have less than 300 of the resource to be traded.

• The functionality for bazaars has been added:
  • Bazaars act as a secondary trading post available in each town, for producing higher-yield trades with fewer towns.

• The passive abilities of both Njord and Hermes have been adjusted to give a 15% reduction in the cost of goods required to execute a trade.

• Since the diplomat was the last civilian, the civilians group has been removed from the sidebar. The diplomat (who is expected to survive the civilian cuts) is now to be found under the Other Town Buildings section, right next to the embassy.

• Our first stab at trade table values:
  • 100 pigs for 1 diamond
  • 200 iron for 1 incense
  • 300 rock for 1 sunstone
  • 150 logs for 1 diamond
  • 200 wheat for 1 moonstone
  • 100 horses for 2 sunstone
  • 100 sheep for 1 diamond

Building/Smiting Adjustments

• Town centers must now be placed 8 apart from one another, rather than 6. Not that this doesn't apply to yellow towns that might spring up during cataclysms.

• A bunch of building types now only let you build one of them per town, for your own sake -- so you can't build two fletchers in a town by accident, etc.
  • This is only applied to buildings that would have no added benefit to having two active buildings of their type in a town in the first place, and mostly applies to finished good producers and some of the unlockables.
  • This also has the side effect of making towns get partially disabled when a fletcher, for instance, gets knocked empty to a white flag. That means no more fletcher at all in that town for 10 turns, versus you just plunking down a new fletcher.

• You are no longer allowed to directly smite a tile that would cut a town center off from its fellows. However, other abilities like the Midgard Serpent can certainly do this.

More GUI Adjustments

• A resource bar for raw resources has been added along the right-hand side of the screen.
  • Thanks to a lot of players for suggesting this.

• The "auto follow" checkbox in the playback window has become a dropdown with the options "Auto follow" (the default), "jump to units" (works better than before by jumping at a better timing relative to the pauses), and "no follow."
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Removed the "skip civilians" checkbox since it was basically pointless now with just diplomats left (and there are never many of those anymore).

• Added a new "Pause After Each" checkbox that allows you to have the game pause after the playback of each unit, so that you can stop and take stock of what is going on if that's your style.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Added hotkeys for all of the big buttons on the playback window. The skip and end buttons default to unbound, just to be safe. But they are there if you want them.

Alpha 0.805

(Released May 7th, 2013)

• Zeus's passive bonus has been reduced from 3x to 2x, because good grief!

• Fixed an issue with unit pathfinding that was causing some strangeness.

• Fixed a small typo in the description of Pandora's Box
  • Thanks to Aquohn for this one.

• Fixed a minor draw issue with tokens, which were able to draw above entities in some places.

• Gods now have a strong preference for attacking units rather than buildings.

• Fixed a mild visual issue where sometimes entities would not draw from the bottom of the screen until they got a bit onto the screen, and then they would pop into visibility.

• The "End Turn" button now flips colors between red and blue as you switch which faction you are playing as. With it being always that orange-red color, it was really confusing as to when you were playing blue's turn.

• The word "within the two rings around the town center" are now replaced with "within two tiles of the town center," for added clarity.

• Fixed a few small typos.
  • Thanks to Cyprene and winge for pointing them out.

• While you are in the process of placing buildings, a green underlay is now shown under all the town centers where you may place these buildings.

• A bunch of tile graphics have been improved minorly to substantially.

God Tokens

• Gods now finally can be moved! When you place one of their god tokens, they will move to it and take the appropriate action upon reaching it (as those actions are implemented, anyhow).

• God token implementations:
  • Thor: Mjolnir
  • Thor: Lightning Bolt
  • Thor: Iron Gloves
  • Zeus: Lightning Bolt
  • Zeus: Cloud
  • Zeus: Aegis
  • Poseidon: Trident
  • Poseidon: Golden Fleece
  • Poseidon: Poseidon's Chariot

Playback Improvements

• Combined the play and pause buttons into one.
  • Thanks to Admiral and SRombauts for reporting.

• Made it so that you can scroll around while auto-follow is on but the playback is paused.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo and SRombauts for suggesting.

• Fixed up the skip civilians bit so that it works a bit better and doesn't happen until after you press play.
  • Thanks to SRombauts for reporting.

• The speed of each playback level has been halved, so that 1x speed is now half as fast as it was before, and so on.
  • Thanks to Admiral for suggesting.

• Right-clicking the playback speed button now allows you to go down (from 2x to 1x, etc) rather than having to always go up and loop around.
  • Thanks to Mick for suggesting.

• Between unit actions, the game now has a short pause (1.5 seconds) so that you can tell what just happened. After switching to the next unit, it has a 0.5 second pause.
  • On higher playback speeds, this gets reduced correspondingly.

• When your view is following units around, it now follows any projectiles they fire.

• When you click "end turn," it now automatically starts unit playback rather than making you click play first.
  • Thanks to SRombauts for suggesting.

• Added a highlight ring under the currently acting entity during playback mode, so that it's easy to tell which entity is acting at the moment.
  • Thanks to nas1m and GigaClon for suggesting.

Enlightenment Balance

• You can now only build one diplomat per embassy.

• For each embassy in a town, the crime rate goes up by 2x the base rate of the town.

• For each diplomat killed, you now lose 5 enlightenment at all towns on that diplomat's faction.

• Towns that are enlightened no longer produce military units from their barracks, siege workshops, or archery ranges.

Base Economy Revamp

• Chapmen have been removed from the game, as they were:
  • Boring to watch move around.
  • Cluttering to the game board.
  • Not really at much risk of getting killed by enemy forces because of the way attack priorities worked.
  • Otherwise did not contribute anything except for mild added complexity to the game.

• The distinction between "town buildings" and "resource buildings" has been completely removed. Thus you now must place all of your buildings, period, within the two rings around a town.
  • This makes for more opportunity cost with building placement, and keeps the towns more visually compact (and easier to target -- no hiding a rice field way off in the middle of nowhere, etc).
  • This is also less confusing for new players to learn, as an added bonus, but honestly this is more about preventing exploits at a more experienced level of play.

• Resources that are produced by raw resource producers are now just dumped directly into the stores for their faction.

• The way that resource drops work has been completely redone:
  • Nobody collects them now, and they are not faction-agnostic anymore.
  • They instead have a faction flag, and last for 5 turns.
  • During those 5 turns, they generate a certain amount of the resource per turn. That amount is specified on the resource drop's tooltip.

• The cost of all units has gone up from 3.5x to 6x the values from a few releases ago.
  • Thanks to Oralordos's crazy countrysides for inspiring this.

• The human military production buildings now have cooldowns on them that make it so that there are gaps between when units can pop out (no more units coming out every turn). This incentivizes using yet more of your limited town space to have multiple military production units even in a single town.
  • Barracks Cooldowns: 4 greek, 5 norse
  • Archery Cooldowns: 4 greek, 5 norse
  • Siege Cooldowns: 2 greek, 3 norse
  • You'll notice, of course, that siege units are suddenly easier to produce. This is actually a malicious motive to create more turnover in building destruction, heh.
  • You'll also notice that the greeks get quite an edge compared to the norse; as a general rule we've been giving the greek stronger human military, but norse stronger mythological stuff.

• Yellow faction military buildings are not subject to any cooldowns on unit production, so, uh, watch out for that. Heh.

• Previously, once a town building tile was knocked empty (white flag), there was no way to recapture that building until the entire town was lost and regained. With the recent changes this was far too severe.
  • Now it takes 10 turns before the buildings are repaired to full health (albeit at level 1), and returned to control of the faction whose town they are in. This is still a super long time, but at least it's not something that is permanent dead space in your town.

Game Start And Tutorial Changes

• The setup round has been changed to simply be a single turn in which you get 9 points (this is down from 5 turns with 3 each, and thus down from getting 15 free actions to 9).

• The edict selection in the main menu has been removed, and now it's just a matter of selecting a difficulty directly. These will be filled in a bit more as we get further into the design of them.

• If you select the tutorial difficulty, it now forces you to have the red faction as norse, and blue as greek.

• The tutorial is basically nonfunctional right now, but we have it set in place so that we can finish this up probably tomorrow.

Alpha 0.804

(Released May 5th, 2013)

• Points and the idea of score have been removed from the game.
  • Those are a time sink, they're opaque, and the game is plenty of fun without it. We have a fixed amount of time that we are able to work on this game prior to release, and frankly we'd rather work on all the polish stuff you guys are bringing up rather than fiddling with points for days at a time. Between the detailed stats on the profile, the challenges, the edicts, and the propositions, I think there will be so many intrinsic reasons for keeping on playing the game that a weak extrinsic motivator like score just isn't needed.

• The "Blue's Turn" / "Red's Turn" notation at the top of the screen has returned, since we again have room for that with the removal of the points displays.

• Fixed a fatal error that could happen in 0.803.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

Alpha 0.803

(Released May 5th, 2013)

• Put in a potential fix for a silly fatal error that has been happening. The stack traces seem to be lying, or something very mysterious is going on; at any rate, one way or another it should not impact gameplay now.
  • Thanks to Kjara and Professor Paul1290 for reporting.

• Five world map building tiles visually improved.

• Fixed the main cause of the "Chapman infinite loop averted!" error. It is something that may well resurface (it in itself is an error-correction procedure), but not for the same reason.
  • The error wasn't really an error, in the classic sense: when a chapman literally had nowhere to go at all because of a traffic jam of units, the chapman would not draw down movement points and thus the cycle of searching for a way to move would spin for a thousand tries and then give up with this message.
  • Now it notices better when the situation is hopeless and the chapman just simply has nowhere to go (as opposed to needing to look for an alternate route), so that both suppresses the warning message noted above, as well as makes the time it takes to process the turn way faster.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Diagonal movement is still possible -- goodness it's awkward without that -- but diagonal movement through cracks in mountains or lakes that seem impassible is no longer possible. That was awkward, too.

• Fixed an issue with negative auto-heals showing as "+-" rather than just "-".
  • Thanks to GigaClon for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with military commandments showing auto-heal popups as their "number of turns remaining" counts down.
  • Thanks to GigaClon for reporting.

• Small typo fix in the description of Huscarls.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for reporting.

• Small typo fix in the description of Sunstones
  • Thanks to Aquohn for reporting.

• Units no longer pathfind through enemy units that they can't damage at all; this makes several cases of unit AI make more sense.

• Fixed an error that would occur when clicking the "Abilities" tab in the keybindings window. The error was happening because there was nothing to go in that tab; and now that tab has simply been removed.
  • Thanks to nas1m, Hearteater, Winge, and Misery for reporting.

• Chapmen are no longer allowed to step on embassies or trading posts; traders are no longer allowed to step on embassies; diplomats are no longer allowed to step on trading posts.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• The game now disallows direct placement of entities on tile types that they could not walk through (this prevents entities from starting out stuck with no warning).

• Military commandments can now only be placed on enemy buildings and enemy gods, which was their original design. This prevents some of the abuses that otherwise were possible.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The "Red's Turn" / "Blue's Turn" thing at the top of the screen has been removed.

• The pop-outs from the sidebar now also carry the border colors of the faction whose turn it currently is, to make a much clearer visual indicator of what faction you're about to take actions for.

• The "Round 0/1/2/3" terminology has been removed.
  • Now they are instead known as: "Setup", "The Age of Man", "The Age of Monsters", "The Age of Gods"
  • Thanks to Hearteater for suggesting.

• Water crossers no longer get any speed penalty from crossing marshes.

• Flying units and water crossers no longer get any attack penalty from being in a marsh tile.

Remaining Mythological Tokens

• All of the "unit pickup" style of mythological tokens have previously been completed, so now starting in on the "global effect for limited time" mythological tokens:
  • Greek: Palladium
  • Greek: Chair of Forgetfulness
  • Greek: Hebe
  • Greek: Cornucopia
  • Greek: Labyrinth
  • Norse: Fenrir
  • Norse: Brokker
  • Norse: Norns
  • Norse: Midgard Serpent
  • Norse: Eldhrimnir
  • Norse: Yggdrasil
  • Note: these are all of the global effect mythological tokens, so that's actually the full implementation of all the mythological tokens!

God Passive Abilities

• The passive abilities of the gods are now being added:
  • Norse Greater: Thor
  • Norse Greater: Odin
  • Norse Greater: Tyr
  • Norse Greater: Idunn
  • Norse Lesser: Heimdall
  • Norse Lesser: Skadi
  • Norse Lesser: Ullr
  • Norse Lesser: Njord
  • Greek Greater: Apollo
  • Greek Greater: Zeus
  • Greek Greater: Athena
  • Greek Greater: Poseidon
  • Greek Lesser: Pan
  • Greek Lesser: Hera
  • Greek Lesser: Hermes
  • Greek Lesser: Ares

Alpha 0.802

(Released May 3rd, 2013)

• Previously, popups on a single tile could overlap one another when you were zoomed out (this was not the case when zoomed all the way in). Fixed.
  • Popups from neighboring tiles can still overlap at times, but that's a different issue.
  • Thanks to GigaClon for reporting.

• Fixed a couple of issues with the "skip civilians" logic added in the prior version, that accidentally skipped past some of the military playback also.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was allowing chapmen to stack up on top of one another.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• Civilians are no longer able to step onto military production buildings at all.
  • Chapmen are now allowed to deposit their goods on ANY town building, thus making congestion of them far less likely.
  • Thanks to orzelek and zharmad for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed an issue with Frost Giants having 40 attack instead of... 1800.
  • Thanks to JAlfredGoodwin for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where resource drops could be placed on buildings, which then led to other issues (this was not supposed to be possible in the first place).
  • Thanks to AlgaeNymph for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where bandits could spawn on blockade tiles.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the image for Hippo-Toxotes not being found.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• The health of all units has been increased by 3x of what it previously was, so that units in general are more sturdy and not dying instantly. This makes the combat bonuses more meaningful, since attack powers have NOT increased.
  • Going along with this, the resource costs of all units have gone up 3.5x of what they previously were, so that there are also a lot fewer units on the board. Previously there were far more units moving around than we had intended. The idea is fewer units, each of which is more meaningful. This is easier to tell what is going on, as well as quicker to move through on each turn.

• The inventory sizes of individual chapmen have been doubled, and their movement speeds have been increased by 50%, to again account for needing fewer of them.

• Given the other recent balance changes, adamantine now only spawns 10 angry bandits rather than 20.

• More mythological tokens implemented:
  • Greek: Nemean Lion
  • Greek: Pandora's Box
  • Norse: Hlidskjalf
  • Norse: Singasteinn

• Land tiles can now be placed anywhere, including right up next to your town center if you want. Sometimes it's really useful to be able to just place some fields for your guys to have more moving room; you can always smite them later if you need the space.

• While you are placing units or buildings, it now keeps their flag in its base color. That way you can easily tell if you are placing a red or a blue person/building as you are doing it.
  • Thanks to Aquohn for inspiring this change.

• While you are placing units or buildings, the tooltip shown relating to them is no longer giant and overpowering the screen.
  • Thanks to Aklyon and Cyprene for reporting.

• Previously, the "Jump To Units" option did not work when "Auto Play" was also enabled. Fixed.
  • Thanks to GigaClon for reporting.

Alpha 0.801

(Released May 3rd, 2013)

• Updated the trader logic such that there is now an increasing chance of getting awesome items the longer they wind up doing nothing with their accumulated trade value; and the chance of them doing something with that value also goes up correspondingly.
  • This fixes the bulk of the last thing that we felt was really weak with the trading model as it stood before.

• Removed references to a DLL for window-focus-detection that may have been causing freezes on Windows 8.
  • Thanks to iozay for reporting.

• Made the "Entity is already at the target tile!" error message a lot more informative so that we can track it down, although we can't yet duplicate it.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a really stupid issue where lesser and greater gods were throwing issues because of some changes we made to support Cerberus fully right before we went to alpha.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Greek Lithovoloi now have sensible attack numbers.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed a typo where the word "hill" was used in the marsh tile description instead of "marsh." The description was accurate other than that, though.
  • Thanks to zharmad for reporting.

• Fixed a minor typo in the "Ruins Rush" map type mouseover.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Added a new "Skip Civilians" option on the playback menu.
  • Thanks to zharmad, nas1m, and orzelek for suggesting.

• Fixed a minor typo thing with some Valley 2 notations still being in the keybindings screen.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for reporting.

• The turn no longer automatically ends when you are out of action points. This is super confusing and leads to mis-placed buildings.
  • Thanks to orzelek for inspiring this change.

• Right-clicking now cancels the current order you are in the process of giving, same as hitting Escape does.
  • Thanks to orzelek and nas1m for suggesting.

Skyward Collapse