–RELEASED 03/12/2015–

Sorcerer King Beta 5 is now available! See below for details on Remnant Champions, the quest system overhaul, and more:

• Major Updates

  • Remnant Factions overhaul

    • Diplomacy UI available from World Report button

    • More quest variety

    • New Remnant Faction champions awarded when allied

      • Korthox the Ice Lord

      • Esperaza the Necromancer

      • Silindros the Avenger

      • Adam the Swamp Giant

      • Ifris the Engulfed

      • Giott the Crossbowman

      • Xii the Archon

    • Share sight of capital and units when allied

    • Insulting Remnant Factions more quickly results in them siding with the Sorcerer King

    • Battles against enemy Remnant Faction cities now involve their champion and an army of their units

    • Polish pass on quest writing

  • Quest system overhaul

    • Quests give armor and items more often (instead of usually just crafting ingredients)

    • New Quest art

    • More quests with secondary locations

    • Starting Quests that give initial goals and Sovereign XP bonuses

    • More intangible rewards (courage, cowardice, wisdom, etc.) and corresponding choice unlocks

    • Quests now play background ambience

    • Quest objective display is now smaller, so 3d location on map is visible

  • End Game Stats Screen

    • More detailed end game stats

    • History of past game stats

    • UI support for SK online stat site

  • Main Menu Reskin

    • New UI style throughout

    • New Sovereign images

  • Lot of new gameplay and visual variety in units

    • Ogre Warrior

    • Fire Drake

    • Ice Drake

    • Fire Warlock

    • Ice Warlock

    • Bandit Lord

    • Bandit Lord Rider

    • Bandit Raider

    • Bandit Archer Raider

    • Harzarene Spider

    • Rabid Wolf

    • Prowler

    • Tyrant Warg

    • Tyrant Thug

    • Tyrant Urxen

    • Tyrant Trog

    • Logistician

    • Imperial Bowman

• UI improvements & additions

  • Crafting ingredients and items now grouped and sorted

  • World Report screen improved

    • Better organization of information

    • Quests descriptions consistently displayed

    • Quest ‘Go To’ button now works

  • City HUD now displays City Enchantments

  • Improved display of Enchantments List (so you don’t have to tooltip over everything)

  • Improved champion skill tree art

  • Cities and Outposts now red on clothmap (makes the reach of your Kingdom easier to see at-a-glance)

  • Tweaks and improvements to clothmap art

  • Added missing Frozen Realm clothmap art

  • Revised Remnant Faction descriptions and capital names to better match up with lore and shortened to fit in game UI.

  • Doomsday, SK Threat, intangible resources, and Sovereign Skill awards/penalties from quests now have clear icons

  • Improved descriptions on many units and items

  • UI art for tabs more prominently ‘clickable’

  • More unique art for city improvement icons

  • Single click to go from city list window to city

  • City Screen: added tooltips to food/production/essence displays

  • Moved notification assets to bottom right side of screen

  • Fixed a bunch of graphical/design issues with the help screen. streamlined it

  • Polar vortex ability icon added

  • Turn button notification for needing to choose a spell to research now says "Research Spell" instead of "Choose Spell"

• Other New Content

  • Enchanted Lands now visible as magical trees on tiles

  • Lots of new sound FX

  • New particles and animations

    • Added new pikeman kill attack because everyone watching the stream pointed out that you don’t slash with a pike.

    • Unique idle animations for Pikemen, Battlemage, Keplin, and Knight

    • Explosive Shot has new particle

    • Archers have cast spell animation

    • Wild Drake has new idle animation hooked up

    • Rabid wolf is now properly setup to have particle inside its mouth

    • Air elemental summon particle adjusted to look correct

    • Added new awaken animation for emberling

    • Revision to the Warlock Hut particle.

    • Update to Ice Lords City particle.

  • New assets for Harvest Forest and Harvest mountain loot drops

  • Polish pass on random maps

  • More variance for Empire of Shadows areas

• Misc features, balance, and additions

  • The player's 'Enchantment Slot' ability now defaults to 0, Sovereigns will have an early/mid game 'Enchanted Forge' ability that unlocks item Enchanting by boosting this ability to 1

  • SK balance

    • Sorcerer King units get more moves as the doomsday counter grows

    • If player threat is 0 and the player attacks an SK unit it will bring up a dialog warning them that this is an SK unit. If they say yes, Threat level increased to 1

    • SK units will now attack shards if they can't find a player unit or city that they can take out

    • Killing LT only increases threat by 1 instead of 2

    • Stronghold battles get significantly stronger as they level up

    • Attacking SK city increases threat by 1 instead of 2

    • Removed despair from SK unit

    • Buffed some of the SK higher units to be more beefy

    • Slightly reduced the number of SK max units

    • Fixed issue where SK garrisons were leaving and terrorizing the countryside

    • Beefed up SK forces when doomsday counter is >100

    • Reduced SK forces when threat level is 0

    • SK will on normal and lower diffculties no longer generally attack player if threat level is 0

    • At harder difficulties, threat level starts at 1

    • Number of monsters the player will face in the end battle is now affected by the DOomsday counter and world difficulty

  • Map Size adjustments

    • Tiny map size renamed to Arena

    • Tiny map size increased from 4 x 3 to 5x3

    • Small size map increased from 5 x 3 to 6 x 4

    • Medium size map increased from 6x4 to 7x5

    • Large size increased from 8x5 to 8 x 6

    • Huge size increased from 9x6 to 10x7

    • Changes made to map sizes because tiny maps were crazy hard

  • Better distribution of spells between spell books

  • Hunting Grounds now have 10 turn cooldown

  • If player loses a battle and they had a champion die, we now deduct a maximum of 25 doomsday points from the battle no matter how many champions fell. (was 10 doomsday per champion, and happened whether you lost or won)

  • Units that are weak to an elemental attack type (Fire, Ice, Lightning) will no longer be able to Resist a spell of that type

  • Previously the calculation for the prediction of a "flawless victory" tactical battle, was that you need to be 3x their battle rank AND their battle rank had to be lower than 15.  I removed that second check

  • High level cities now provide some logistics

  • Ceresa no longer gives out wraiths to allies

  • Full rebalancing of the crafting enhancement system (too many changes to list)

  • Changed "Other" to "Crafting Ingredients" label for inventory items

  • Increased goodie hut numbers

  • Eliminated annoying warning about running low on mana

  • Magic shrines now produce 5 instead of 4 magic

  • Flawless iron provides 1 defense, not 3 as an enhancement

  • Generally made recipes require more ingredients in order to balance the power level of the enhancements (lest everyone just crank out endless rings of defenses)

  • Reduced training time of Archon and Battle Mage from 500 to 300

  • Same for paladin

  • Removed "dodge missiles" from bandits as an ability

  • Nerfed the Nymph

  • Reduced some of the level up bonuses on units that are summoned

  • Magic is now referred to as Shards in world

  • Monster lairs can be within 2 tiles of each other now instead of 3

  • Doomsday increment from a shard being destroyed increased from 40 to 50

  • Harvest Shadow land cost increased from 5 to 15

  • Enhance land is now a universally available spell to research

  • Magic level determines shard count on a map (along with map size)

  • Monsters that are really close to your city are now likely to attack the city

  • City Details window now displays what level the city is

• Bug Fixes

  • Major annoyance fixes

    • fogbugz 104202: fixed issues with unit path-planning (ex. enemy unit in the way on a road, you're trying to set a destination beyond him, would have to manually move around the enemy)

    • Ranger: Fixed "Quickfire" ability (rendering Archers useless)

    • Fixed gameplay issue where the player would be notified of the same unclaimed resources in their ZOC every turn.  Now, if they dismiss the notification (via right-clicking it), they will never be notified about that/those resources again.

    • Fixed Bug: "Player no longer has Reduce Doomsday spell."

  • Fixed issue with high DPI monitors displaying incorrect UI element size

  • Fixed unit images not showing up in Select Target prompt

  • Fixed incorrect display of production stats on city screen

  • Fixed incorrect display of magic stats on manage magic tooltip

  • Dwarf Lord: Fixed "Merciless Strength" to not stack post-battle

  • Fixed Items that give City Resources to be properly factored in from Stationed Units

  • Summons now play awakening particles properly

  • Map Generation: Terrain placed under rivers in the map editor is retained when stamps are placed

  • Map Generation: 'Beach Edge' tile is replaced with Grassland (all this is to make sure the stamps are placed as they are created)

  • Fixed Bug: "Tactical battle - Dark Wisp- Curse not removing defense"

  • Guardian Sovereign: Fixed Sniper to properly be unlocked via Bastion.

  • Fixed Bug: "Tactical ability - Naphaz - Deadly favor - stat mismatch" Now inflicts the proper HP cost

  • Fixed Bug "0.79 - Sovereign Ability - Betrayal - Not resetting threat level" - Now reduces threat

  • Fixed Bug: "Casting Inspiration with 0 Thralls Incorrectly Buffs Logistics"

  • Fixed Bug: "Bleed / Hobble still lands if the hit misses"

  • Fixed Bug: ".796 - Mibly/noble legacy burns spellcast at battle start"

  • Courage Spell now gives +5 HP and Spell Resist to ANY friendly unit (was limited to Champs)

  • Winter Wind text fixed to match the effects of the spell

  • Alphabetized the various lists (improvements, spells, items, etc) on the Help Screen.

  • 0.793 - Commander Tree - Healer's Guild - Description Doesn't Mention Improved Heal Rate

  • 0.793 - Commander Tree - Guild Master III

  • Arcane - Raise Skeleton (Not subtracting correctly)

  • Fixed Icon for "Amulet of Flames"

  • Fixed "Amulet of Souls" to no longer give a "130% off mana Costs" buff.

  • "Haunted  Army" spell can no longer be cast on water. It now has a slightly lower mana cost (25 from 30) and can only be cast on

  • Removed some Logistics prereqs for units that shouldn't have required Logistics (units given to you from the Minor Races)

  • Removed Casting Time and changed it to a 2 turn Charge Time (Trogs now have to wait 2 rounds before they can use 'Battle Cry').

  • Pyrebrand: Fixed to use the proper Shard tag in the calculation.

  • Fixed bug that prevented enchanting items if switching items during mid-enchantment process

  • Fixed bug that allowed stacking more than max enchantments of same type on items

  • Fixed bug in DXAtlasWin where force regen wasn't working

  • Fixed bug where selection cursor sometimes disappears

  • Fixed bug where Tactical Abilities couldn't be disabled via modifiers

  • Fixed daze particle from floating in the air

  • Ranger: Fix "Master Stealth" to work with unit stat

  • Keplin: Fixed "Swiftness" and "Greater Reflexes" abilities

  • Fixed bug where doomsday decrement bink would play when loading a game

  • Burst of fire ability now plays particle

  • Fixed bug where units got stuck between tiles

  • Tweaks to idle animationss to make them loop better

  • Added our standard button click soundfx to several screens where it was needed

  • Fix bug where Minor Races were being incorrectly placed on the borders of Pre-made maps

  • Fixed "Eternal Supply" to work as described. Now takes an Essence slot.

  • Cave Bear given the non-summon skin, hooked up to necessary goodie huts and starting units

  • Fixed bug where Unit Details Screen was not showing tactical unit's current health info, when in a tactical battle.

  • Remove 'Slow' as a default skill - Add effect to "Eight Eyes Hypnosis"

  • Fixed some Modifier code that was causing Mods to be applied 2 times

  • Quest Items should now show up properly as Quest Items in the Player Inventory.

  • Revised Remnant Faction Quests so that they properly remove Quest Items from the player's inventory when the Quest is completed.

  • Random event with SK now longer ends with a blank dialog

  • Crash fixes

    • Fixed a very common shutdown crash in the destruction code for the Main Game Window, identified by Steam crash reports.

    • GWG - old crafting item persists - add enchantment to non-existent item

    • Story-Teller Camera - Low Angle Rotate and Zoom

    • Quest lookup crash

    • Adjusted code to be more thread-safe in various places (player resources, city resources, unit stats) after investigating crash reports from QA

  • Tons of typo fixez