No way! Woohoo.
Yeah, haven’t checked out what changed, was checking out Planetfall.
Wow, it’s a big update with a lot of very interesting changes.
Beta Build 1.1.56
Hi everyone
We’ve released a new beta build (finally!). The changes in this update are too many and too diverse to highlight anything in particular, so here are the full update notes:
1.1.56
• (2020-02-17)
• Added “road_wall_or_army_prevents_lair_spawn_distance” to game_settings.txt, to change the distance at which lairs are prevented from respawning near roads, walls or armies.
• All Lizardmen fighting units can now choose Water Travel as a level up choice at level 5, allowing travel over water on the world map (at the cost of a level up choice!).
• Tooltips will now appear over units in the Units list panel and the Active Army panel, showing various info about the unit under the mouse.
• World spell casting will now default to the last recurring spell clicked on. Recurring spells are: Increase Meditation, Increase Battle Mana, (ie Increase Mana Pool), Consume Souls, Increase Magic Research, Expand Item Vault.
• Added units Leviathan, Electric Sea Snakes.
• The Lizardmen Kraken can now choose Shocking Strike at level 10, and can evolve to a Leviathan at level 15.
• Added spell Spawn Electric Sea Snakes.
• Added attacks Water Spout, Leviathan Lash, Small Bite. Water Spout shoots in a straight line through targets, gives water spheres to targets it hits, and replenishes ammo each turn the unit is in water.
• Added abilities Water Regeneration.
• Fixed a bug with Ice Shield not working correctly in some cases, and changed the behaviour to “Place a protective shield of ice around a friendly unit. The shield absorbs up to 2 physical damage per attack, and absorbs up to 50% of cold damage taken. Once 20 (plus 5% per magic level) damage has been absorbed, the shield is depleted. The physical absorb amount increases by 1 per 10 magic levels of the caster.”.
• Fixed the mana cost of healing spells cast on the world map. Their mana cost is now increased by the same amount as other (non-healing) spells when cast on the world map.
• Fixed display of mana cost in the battle panel in the top-right of the screen during battle.
• Tweaked spells Disintegration (now higher spell level, slightly less damage) and Meteor Strike (now lower spell level, slightly more damage).
• Fixed bug with potions disappearing when wearing items that increase potion storage.
• Pain Spikes spell can no longer be resisted.
• Item enchantments may now grant abilities, or spells that have a chance to cast either “on-hit”, “when-hit” or “end-of-turn”. Old item enchantments will migrate to one of the new ability or spell procs.
• Fixed bug with Water Walking items not working correctly.
• Items destroyed may now yield magic gems, mithril or adamantium.
• Item enchantments which the player doesn’t currently have the resources to create will be greyed out in the Create Item window.
• Interacting with the Armies List window should mimic the Units List window UI interactions.
• Added game option to limit the display size of units on the battlefield.
• Items can be now sorted by item attributes.
• The item list window will now appear once you are done creating an item (provided it was initiated from the item list window).
• Dungeons now have a set number of levels. The loot on the last dungeon level has been increased in quality, and at least 1 item will be on the last level. The max level can be changed via game_settings.txt.
• Units that counter-fire will now gain xp if they land the killing blow.
• World-Map/Overland walls outside of city range will now remain controlled by the last deity to travel over them. Overland walls outside of a cities range will not block neutral armies when the setup option “Traversing walls requires war” is selected.
• AI deities should no longer roll the Egotistical personality at game start if they have no material unit.
• Walls on the worldmap within range of a city will no longer slow the movement of the city owners armies, even when an enemy army is on the wall.
• Added option to pin Notes to the world map. This can be accessed by right-clicking on a tile (or hitting F2 when the mouse is over a tile). When a note is set, a pin appears on the world map where you set a note. At the moment notes are shared between all players in a multiplayer game
• Added a graphic alternative to the blinking army/unit. This can be changed in the game options.
• The AI will now traverse down dungeon levels. This can be toggled on/off in the game options.
• You can now have up to 1000 units per army by editing the keys max_ai_stack_size000 and max_human_stack_size000 in game_settings.txt. You cannot set these in the setup options, and trying to change them in the setup options will cap the stack size to 18. While setting the limit above 18 should work fine, we will not be offering support (in particular we will not be addressing performance issues, or doing AI tweaks/changes to facilitate larger army sizes!).
• Cities will now lose buildings proportional to the population lost when they are conquered.
• Fixed a bug that could occur causing a lockup if you use the “toggle_ai_control” cheat during a game where you have setup the AI max army size different than the human max army size.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a game lockup if you modded a unit to have the tranport ability, but didn’t give it the boat ability.
• Fixed a bug with the Level Up screen appearing for units when no level-up options exist for the unit (specific to units with the Supply Unit ability).
• Created items are now etherealized for at most 2 turns.
• You can now destroy buildings in a city you control. To do so open the building tree and right click on a building. Then click on the Destroy Building button. All buildings beyond it in the tree will also be destroyed.
• Added spells Illuminate, Magic Torch, which add 1 to a units spotting in dungeons.
• The behaviour of the Reveal spell has changed. The new description reads “Enemy units that are in the affected tiles when the spell is cast gain the revealed buff for the duration of the spell, even when they leave the affected tiles. In addition, enemy units that move into or remain in affected tiles will become visible. Lastly, the spell allows friendly units to see the affected tiles in dungeons, even when out of spotting range.”
• Increased the spell level of Reveal from 6 to 11.
• Added game options to allow choosing from different preset color/font UI schemes.
• Fixed a display bug which showed that units could equip items that require an ability when they could not.
• Added increase_meditation_is_constant to game_settings.txt. Set this to 1 and the spell “Increase Meditation Skill” will no longer increase in cost as meditation skill increases.
• Fixed AI/automated workers/prospectors not building roads/improvements on the same turn that they move.
• Added spell Enthrall Creature. All deity units have this spell inherently. When cast on a friendly battle summoned creature (that would not normally persist after battle), this spell makes the creature join the caster’s army permanently. Note that etherealized deities cannot cast this spell.
• Added key starting_item_vault_size to game_settings.txt.
• The spell Expand Item Vault can now be cast instantly by materialized deities, bypassing meditation but requiring much more mana pool.
• The experience stars of battle summons are now drawn smaller and darker on the battle map, making it easier to tell which units are battle summons.
• Added abilities Deity Mana Channeler 2/3/5, which allow a unit to increase its Deities meditation while the unit is alive. These abilities have been added to a number of units as an available level-up option.
• A message will now appear when the last defender on a dungeon level is killed (unless you have selected the game option to obscure enemies remaining).
• Added spells Corporeal Exchange and Swap Places, allowing two friendly units to change places during battle.
• The Lizard Queen Ssassrah has been added as a unit. This is the deity unit for the Lizardman race.
• Multiplayer games should no longer end when the first human player is defeated.
Also, I really like the new item vault.
Ok, have to check that out, the old one felt clunky to me the way it worked.
edit: yeah, that is nice, descriptions with picture of the unit.
P.S. can someone talk the dev into incorporating wabbit’s batch of graphic enhancement mods into the game because I honestly could not go back to playing it w/o them.
Yes that’s WAY better than before.
I see there is now a “sentry” option for armies in cities that pops up when you select the army.
Speaking of selecting, I quite like the new effect when you do that.
Wow, lots of good stuff here, and not the sorts of things I ever expected to see in this game. Some of this looks like polish!
Anyone know for sure whether it breaks saved games? I have a particularly fun game going that I wouldn’t want to ditch.
Thank you so so much.
This is going to affect me. I had been abusing this in the early going. Level up important units by letting enemies attack with spearmen in the back row. But I always thought this was an abusive exploit.
The implication is that all dungeons have the same number of levels. I wish that were somewhat randomized. But not a big deal.
Another big thank you.
I like that!
Probably the most important change to me, in terms of gameplay. A very big deal if considering keeping my deity materialized beyond the very first turns of the game.
Dungeons having set levels is the one thing I was really hoping they’d do design wise, and was worried they were married to the infinite depth. Awesome!
Now I hope they take the next step and make different dungeons have different depths. Like it would feel really good to have the ability to fully clear whatever on the map be milestones in the progression of a game, rather than hitting one huge inflection point where now you are gunning for all the dungeons.
I didn’t know Counter Fire didn’t give XP before, that’s a good change.
Now the one I really want to see is battlefield summons should give XP to the mage that summoned them (so I’m not talking about the ones your deity summons). They “steal” a lot of XP and makes me not want to use them.
I don’t think it does. I was able to load and run mine fine and they haven’t broken compatibility with past updates.
No, I don’t think they do. I think it is indeed variable. There are two settings in the file affecting this:
max_dungeon_level = 65
max_dungeon_level_skew = 3
From that I assume it’s now a random number of levels with an upper limit of 65. You can tweak both to make it more variable or limit the deepest possible level. I think we can test this out pretty quickly to see.
There are also a few others that folks here in the thread asked for:
Added a graphic alternative to the blinking army/unit. This can be changed in the game options.
Someone here had complained about the blinking.
Added spells Corporeal Exchange and Swap Places, allowing two friendly units to change places during battle.
Someone here had asked for this. @Galdred Maybe?
Added game option to limit the display size of units on the battlefield.
Someone here had complained about it being hard to click on big units.
Also, I really like that they added the ability to sort items in the vault. All in all, a lot of QOL improvements and some nice enhancements.
I hope everyone will try out my new color/font theme they added to the game settings (down toward the very bottom). They added 2, mine and one from a Steam forum player.
I don’t think they can. I think they would if they could because they certainly have added other fan provided mods into the game. I believe the issue is that wabbit scavenged the images from somewhere and they don’t personally own them. It’s okay to use them in a mod but the devs would have to acquire permission to use, or rights to the images from the owner(s) before they could incorporate them officially into the game. At least that’s what I think is the situation.
The devs are not artists and contracted for the current game art based on what they could afford. Hopefully someday a great artist somewhere will love the game so much that they will create a graphics mod that can actually be legally incorporated (hah, right).
Agreed. I just made the argument for adding this over on the Steam forums. We’ll see what happens.
Can confirm that each dungeon has a different number of levels now. But, you’ll have to start a new game for it to go into effect globally. If you continue your current save game and mouse over a dungeon it will show the number of levels as 999. I’m assuming that those were created previous to the patch and when new dungeons spawn in your current game, those new dungeons will have a number of levels between 1 - 65.
I may be blind, but I cannot find this on the list of options.
I like it!
That was my hope and I made that request in the Steam forum. Weird that it is a spell and not a perk but it is a step in the right direction, ahem.
Super cool!
Awesome – great job!
I’m thinking it might have been for technical or UI reasons. It’s a “Spell” units can get but it costs no mana.
Question. I have summoned baby red dragons on the world map. Will these guys ever level up to an older dragon, or will they remain a baby?
Looks like I’m starting a new game anyway. I need to change a key strat.
Baby dragons evolve into young red Dragons at level 10. The young red dragons evolve into adult red dragons at level 10 or 15 (I forgot), and the adult dragons can level up into ancient dragons.
Yeah, neither could I so I asked the question on the Steam forum. Got this reply back from the dev:
Oh I see it wasn’t added to the game options. We will add it in the next update.
For now you can edit game_settings.txt, it is the key:
max_unit_bmap_display_sizeYou can set it as small as 50 (which will make all units appear smaller than a goblin during battle). As always you can only reliably edit game_settings.txt when the game isn’t running.
Nobody has mentioned this change but it should allow you to increase your meditation when materialized depending on how many of these units you can get and level up. Combined with the other (thrall) change that will basically allow you to recruit baby dragons even when materialized, this could be a game changer and it could be really fun to have a materialized deity now.
Yeah!
One of the bits of the design that I’m not fully comfortable with is the way meditation <> materialization works. Being materialized means you’re not meditating, so you’re giving up on a fairly significant growth multiplier. Much more significant than the XP you’re forgoing for your materialized body while etherialized.
As things stand at the moment, you really only want to be materialized when your deity puts you over the hump of clearing some dungeon/lair/combat that you really need, which is going to unlock a new city site or whatever. Which, conceptually, yeah! Totally fits that I pop a corporeal body to lead the armies when the objective is super critical, otherwise I’m fucked off into the clouds doing god things. That part totally works. What doesn’t quite gel, I think, is that the cost to materialize feels so significant that I’d rather wait the 10 turns or whatever to get out a couple more units to accomplish whatever military objective rather than give up the time and mana meditating.
I’m in full-on armchair designer mode, fwiw, and haven’t spent the time elbow-deep in the game to have any kind of strong, definitive conclusions.
But wtf, it paid my salary* for 10 years, so why not?
/* not much of a salary tbh