Changelog v0.88

Notable additions

Reduce online loading times in general
40 new random events for Barya
Reduce online loading times significantly when loading a saved game
It is now possible for your wielders to move through other friendly wielders
Improved how skills available in the skill pool are chosen on level up to make them more evenly distributed (where previously not so random as they should have been)
Updated Random Map Generator
Reduced save game size (most noticeable on large maps)

Notable bug fixes

Fixed the issue causing Chain Lightning to create soft locks at the end of battles
Fixed Bug causing enemies turn to last forever
Fixed bug creating an exception when you quit to Main Menu

Adventure

It is now possible for your wielders to move through other friendly wielders
Random artifacts on maps are now much more random/evenly varied than before
Entities that reward artifacts or troops now give the same reward to all wielders
Improved how skills available in the skill pool are chosen on level up to make them more evenly distributed (where previously not so random as they should have been)
Fix so town settings carry over when being converted to another team by razing
The tiny creatures that once surrounded your towns and settlements have returned!
Roads are now always drawn on top of decals fixing the issue of them sometimes getting obscured
Fixed wielder buffs that last for a certain number of battles expiring after an initial quick battle and not being available in a manual battle do-over
Added a Fortified Banner to the Lotteamteateah Excavation building since it was missing
Add expanding town list when player has more than 18 towns
Pillaging neutral troop dwellings now give 250, 500, or 1000 gold depending on their size

Battle

Restore essences to tooltips for battle troops without a wielder
Don't show attack preview for sweep attack on friendly troops
Changed Silvermane’s trait from berserker to Stealthy

Common

Framerate is now limited to 60 in all non-gameplay parts of the game unless set otherwise in video options
Many miscellaneous changes to tutorials

Map Editor

Fix the issue with the Artifact selector not being visible on team game criteria “Artifact Count”
Chimney smoke is no longer emitted if an object is placed underwater
Made it possible for Wielder Game Criteria to check against a Wielders total army value
Made it possible for Wielder Game Criteria to check against a Wielder level
Made it possible to teleport a specific wielder instead of just the one that walked onto the trigger
Add buttons to copy & paste the properties of a map entity to the clipboard in the operating system when selecting a map entity
Add sorting order to the Color Tint object for better control when using many of them

Modding

Fixed exception when loading a custom wielder’s artwork

Multiplayer

Reduce online loading times in general
Reduce online loading times significantly when loading a saved game.
Fixed issue with the online status menu softlocking the online game if you killed the last living player and ended the game
Fixed the issue where you could not connect with game code in the game list view if you were connected to a different region than the host

AI - Adventure

Removed legacy map editor feature of (AI) Blocking Points. Stop sign should be used instead
Commanders retreating (due to threat) is more likely to result in a recruitment
Lessened the pull towards temporary buff entities
Commanders acting as mules can act before warriors giving them a better chance of catching up
Entity needs scoring tweaks on the map. I.e troop rewards when low on troops bumped
More careful when selecting regions to explore (trying to avoid threats)
Troop recruitment tweaks
Optimizations related to time and reduced FPS drops

AI - Battle

Change how AI score spells to use a fuzzy value of their converted essence cost as tie-breakers
AI playing defensively will no longer attack immobilized enemies with melee troops unless they have a range over one, or there are other allied troops that can attack with the same restrictions
AI will immediately change the role of all protectors if there are no longer any ranged troops to protect
AI will not cast Quicken spell on a troop that has been immobilized
AI will no longer cast Arcane explosion unless it can hit at least two targets
Make AI less likely to cast Clouded Vision spell on a low-value target
AI will avoid casting entangle on an enemy that is unlikely to be able to reach and attack a target
Make AI more likely to use Fireball spell on high-value targets even if it can only hit two
Make AI more likely to use Justice spell on a high-value target
AI will not cast Lethargy spell on the last enemy if the enemy is already immobilized
AI will not cast Aggression spell on troops that can't reach an enemy
AI will not cast Rupture spell to kill off a stack if it wastes too much damage do so
AI will not cast Sabotage unless it has enemies that can be reached
Increase the score for protecting ranged troops

Random Map Generator

Fix to prevent pickups from spawning behind towns/settlements which in some cases caused them to be unreachable
Add hostile restrictions flag to layouts. This flag will override the restrictions we use when spawning hostiles to prevent them from spawning near towns and settlements and can simply be used by adding “hostileRestrictions”: false to the main scope in your custom layouts.
Fix road connections to towns and settlements and roads should in general look better overall on all regions of the map. Some entities will now also try to connect to the road network if they are close enough.
Fix guard tier synchronization for grouped connections in layouts
Add support for multiple guard tier entries in custom blueprints i.e. you can now set “guardTier”: [“Medium”, “High”] to have a chance for medium or high tier hostiles. This also supports single entries so your already existing layouts should still be viable with this update. Note that this change doesn’t include support for multiple entries in your layouts.
Add competitive grouped regions flag to layouts. This flag will override the strict spawn restrictions for grouped regions, i.e. all remaining spawn points which failed to spawn anything during the synchronization will be filled with random entities from the default value in the blueprint. To set this value add “competitiveGroupedRegions”: false to the main scope of your layout, the default value is true if left out
Add support to set different road types in layouts. The previous version of roads took a true or false value which only resulted in the lowest tier of road while set to true. This has now been changed to take an integer instead, 0 = no road, 1 = dirt road, and 2 = cobblestone road. This is backwards compatible with old layouts using the previous version so your custom layouts should still work as intended.
Add support for player-owned towns/settlements in child regions in custom layouts. This can be used by simply adding a player to the child node which has a primary building of any type of town or settlement
Add extended layouts for the official 8-player layouts. The result should now be a lot more varied than the previous version. A similar update for our other layouts is also in the pipeline.

Misc

Reduce save game size (most noticeable on large maps)

Known Issues

AI budgeting is sub-par, affects town building and army recruitment mostly.

Makes it hard to break out from some maps (sometimes)