Welcome, my friends, once again to the sausage factory.  While Fallen Enchantress continues forward internally, we also continue work on War of Magic.  Right now, we’re working on the betas of v1.3 which are known as the 1.2X series (1.2c being the most recent beta).

Having programmed most of the changes myself and gotten to play around with them at length as well as listen to feedback here are some of the thoughts I have in no particular order:

1. Despite the considerable work I’ve put in to the new population use system on improvements, I think I’m going to have to yank it out. The problem is that it quickly becomes incredibly difficult and not-fun to manage when your kingdom gets large.  This is a classic case of “kill your darlings”.
2. The game mechanic I am interested in seeing is one that rewards the player for intelligently planning out their cities. I.e. better to have fewer, better cities than more, wimpier cities.
3. The default of having 4 guys in a unit is good. But needs more balancing.
4. One of the objectives is to make it clear that champions (and your sovereign) are a very big deal so we want those 4 guys to be mowed down.  However, the weapons they carry make them glass canons.
5. Need more random events.
6. Need more variation on what the goodie huts give.
7. If I don’t get to redo that tactical battle AI code soon I’m going to die. It makes me cry every time I see the AI sovereign run at my guys stupidly.
8. I am getting dehydrated from crying.
9. I need to get in the reward system so that players get more champions.
10. The game mechanic I am considering is having is using quests as the means of getting champions

I’m glad to hear that the beta itself is stable crash-wise. In fact, I haven’t seen any reports of out of memory issues so it’s possible that this problem has been eliminated in this series.  There is a crash problem with the AI thread and the main thread when they’re looking at tiles. The easy solution would be to use a critical section but I don’t want you guys to find the game choppy between turns. So I’m still looking at it.

I also want to get more AI time on it.  I’m scheduled to be full-time on Fallen Enchantress later this Summer.  Unlike War of Magic where I only got a very limited number of hours to work on the AI by release, with Fallen Enchantress I get a lot more time. But I can use v1.3 of War of Magic as an opportunity to try some new things.