Skyward Collapse:Pre-Beta Release Notes

Alpha 0.819

(This hasn't been released yet. We're still working on it.)

• 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.

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