I was chatting with a friend of mine yesterday about what we like to do.  He likes to design games and make mods and such.

For me, I'm in it for the community. To be honest, I'm in it for you guys.  The only coding part I enjoy is the AI. I don't like designing games really. I write design documents and such for our games but I don't enjoy it. It's a chore.  I'm mainly interested in participating on the forums and talking to other gamers.

Elemental's initial release was, as we all know, something of a disaster. It wasn't intentional. We thought it was ready. People really have no idea how crazy it is to release a brand new game in 2010 onto the PC -- especially if you're making your own engine. So much of my original design for Elemental had to be modified to deal with engine limitations and the like. It almost makes me miss DOS. (who remembers monkeying around with QEMM386?).  

But we're with you guys for years to come.  We're not a publicly traded company.  I'm the only stockholder. I'm glad we've been able to start bringing back people we laid off. The Elemental team is actually larger right now than it was during peak development.  But why? It's because of you guys. Elemental: War of Magic will never make big bucks. That original PC Gamer UK article killed us commercially - before a single review hit. But it doesn't matter. 

Even as I type this, the whole team is working on all kinds of interesting things. Cloud saving for multiplayer games. New modding features for cloud uploads. I spent the day monkeying around with the AI (I found out an interesting thing for other developers reading this - edit and continue in visual studio does not work if you're running it on an external drive). 

What got me into writing software in the first place was the community aspects. I like making stuff with other people. Our most popular consumer product, WindowBlinds, is all about making stuff with the community.  Over the next several years, I'm excited to see how various versions of Elemental grow and change. I'd like to see the game broken up into DLLs so that people can mod not just with Python but with C++ too (Civ V's SDK can do this btw).  

For those of you not into game development, you'd be surprised how close knit our industry is.  That's why we get upset when people rip on Civilization V.  These are our friends. It hurts us when people criticize Civilization V. You might as well be ripping on us directly. The distinction between Civ V or AOW or FFH 2 or Elemental -- to us -- is very blurred.  Many of you would be shocked about how close we all are. I think people often mistake the PC TBS game industry for other "big" industries. It's not like that. It's a handful of people across the board. Behind the scenes, all of us hang out in the virtual sense. Yes, Jon, Kael, Soren, etc. We're all friends in varying degrees in real life.

Anyway, my main point is that our primary motivation on these games is you guys. Not your money (though we need it obviously to keep making stuff) but your comradery. If I had my way, I'd make a game based on a Wiki page from the community. People who know me can tell you that I really have no ego to bruise. I have a lot of OTHER failings (I'm ridiculously obtuse) but there's no idea, big or small, that I'm not interested in. I think of the community as part of our team.

Too much of our industry, IMO, is based on "cranking out the game" and moving on.  But not all of us are this way.  I pushed back a future GalCiv sequel to make sure we do right by you guys. It's not about the money. It's the principle. It's the community. It's you guys.

So right now the team is working on getting v1.09 of Elemental out this week.  I’ve been working on the AI which continues to generate a considerable amount of pain for me but it’s getting better but as I’ve gotten better at the game I’ve found it very problematic at certain things.

What I’m working on tonight is a detailed user manual update that will be based on v1.1 of the game (global mana and population as a resource).  Population as a resource was something discussed in the beta a lot and was one of the core design elements of the game got lost because, at the time, the engine didn’t support non-storable resources (i.e. resources that are calculated each turn).

Playing Civilization V

I’ve been playing a lot of Civilization 5 recently. I am enjoying it quite a bit and I really really wish the Civ and Elemental communities would cease sniping at each other.  It may seem hard to understand this but Stardock and Firaxis are on the same side.  We’re not competitors. We’re friends. I think I can safely say that we want Civilization V to succeed and Firaxis wants Elemental to succeed. What neither of us want is for everyone to just throw their hands up and decide that Elemental II/Civilization VI should be a first person action game.

Anyway, my point is, please don’t use our forums to criticize Civilization V. Given the state Elemental launched in, it makes us wince (glass houses, stones, etc.). But flaming Civilization V is about the same as flaming Elemental to us. They’re our friends. Please back off.

Elemental UI

Now, a lo of people have been talking about the original Elemental PAX Beta UI:

So why did we change from that to our current UI?

There were a lot of reasons but a big one was, at the time we had to do a UI, performance. These are development journals so one assumes some of you guys like technical details. But basically, at the time we had to finalize our UI, we couldn’t support having a context-sensitive detached UI like this (the highlighted object would bring up a context-sensitive mini UI where the current item was).  It also required 1280x1024 which  we weren’t prepared to require as our minimum resolution.

After Elemental: War of Magic, we’ll be able to reevaluate what the engine can support.

Other Ramblings

So v1.09 is still mostly about bug fixing, memory optimization, etc.  A broken API got fixed that made the AI considerably better but it’s still way way too unaggressive.  Having a non-cheating AI kind of stinks sometimes because the AI doesn’t usually know how weak your cities are.  In GalCiv, the AI could come up near your planets and see how poorly defended. But the same technique fails in Elemental because they don’t get close enough to your cities to see how weak they are and then coordinate.  So it’s something I’m still trying to deal with. But if anyone wondered why the AI wasn’t “aggressive” enough now you know. It’s something I’m painfully aware of. 

Demo version

The demo version won’t come out until v1.1 and will be based on that.

Best Buy and Walmart content

v1.09 will also coincide with the special content for people who bought the game as Best Buy or Walmart. They get their own special quests.  That said, we will be providing this content for free to all users 90 days after their availability to those users (they paid for them so don’t feel like you missed out).

Similarly, if you bought the book Elemental: Destiny’s Embers, the full map of Anthys, will be released this week for those who bought the book.

The book is at a bookstore near you. We’re pretty happy how it turned out and the book takes place 800 years AFTER the War of Magic so you can get some hints and allusions to things coming up in the game world over the next several years.

For those of you working on mods, we’ve added a new mod area called “other” that you can upload pretty much anything you’d like.

https://www.elementalgame.com/mods

Greetings!

v1.09 work

The team is hard at work this week on v1.09 which we expect to put out next week. It’s mostly fixes, memory optimization, performance optimization and hopefully some updated AI stuff from me.

v1.1 development

At the same time, we’ve been combing the forums and looking at all the suggestions to see the game from different perspectives. A lot of these ideas are going to make it into the first major game play update (v1.1) which will also serve as the basis of the demo version.

The biggest changes, as previously discussed, is making mana global rather than a per unit.  This has been one of the most challenging issues both in terms of balance and AI programming (since players could imbue heroes and then have each of them had their own mana pool and enchantment slots).  The global mana system is a lot closer to our original concept and that of Master of Magic, our original inspiration. Summoned units will have a mana maint rather than using an “enchantment slot”. Once you have such a concept in there, we can start to look at things such as cast times (spells that take N turns to cast, counter-spells, etc. for the future).

The other modification is returning population back towards a resource. Ironically, population is supposed to be a resource now but it is currently treated like metal and materials – you can spend population on troops but they come right back ala GalCiv II.  This is something we’re addressing with v1.1.  You’re essentially going to be having to choose between guns and butter (or swords and butter in this case) on what to do with your population.  

This will allow us to cut down on the special resources since now success in the game is much more dependent on player skill rather than luck of the resource distribution (we’ll still have cool resources, they’ll just be rarer and be more like their original intent – cool stuff you occasionally see).

There’s a lot of other changes scheduled for v1.1 which I’ll get into as we get closer but we wanted to give you a general idea on what we’re doing there.

Stepping Back

One of the internal changes going on is that I’ve moved back towards my traditional role as a executive producer / AI coder rather than as a general programmer (which is what I did throughout Elemental).  We’re expanding the Elemental team (in terms of personnel) starting next week to make up for my changed role (so I’ll take on the same role in Elemental going forward that I did in Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod, and GalCiv II where I’m providing feedback, design help, or more depending on what’s needed) except for the added part of AI programming which I will be spending a lot of time on.

I’ll still be out on the forums and such but you’ll be seeing a lot more Stardock people posting journals, especially as more mod tools get released since they’ll be the ones explaining how they work.

The Expansion Talk

I want to address one issue that there’s been a lot of misunderstanding about.  Today, we have Elemental: War of Magic.  While v1.1 will be making a lot of major changes to the game play, it’s still fundamentally the same game.

What we are interested in doing in the future is making more radical changes to the game design based on a lot of hard knocks we’ve picked up recently. But we want to make sure that players who enjoy Elemental: War of Magic v1.1 can continue to play that game with that design and get support for it going forward. 

So we’re going to branch in two directions starting with v1.1. One branch will continue forward with v1.2, v1.3, and so on.  The other branch will become an expansion with some pretty radical changes to the core design. It’ll include Book 2 and a lot of content too but our main concern and the reason we’re calling it an “expansion” is simply because we don’t want to “bait and switch” the people playing Elemental: War of Magic.  This micro-expansion will be free to everyone who has Elemental so players can go back and forth between the two and play the version of Elemental they want.

At some future point, we’ll then do a second micro-expansion which will add Book 3 and be more of a typical expansion.  If you’ve ever played any of the Sins of a Solar Empire micro-expansions you get an idea of what we’re doing.  Except here, like with Dark Avatar and Twilight of the Arnor, we’ll be also adding new story-driven content as well.  This will also be free to people who currently have Elemental as a token of thanks for sticking by us.

Hopefully that clears up any misunderstandings on the expansions.

In terms of details of each expansion, we’ll provide a lot more detail as it becomes more relevant.  For now, our primary focus is on Elemental: War of Magic and making sure our customers are taken care of.  So we want to stick to talking about what we’re delivering in the near term rather than talk about futures.

Have a great night!

Here's our schedule for updates to Elemental for the remainder of 2010. This schedule is subject to change and will be refreshed as we near the end of the year to detail updates for 1Q2011.

v1.09

• Memory Optimizations
• AI Updates
• Bug fixes
• Performance improvements
• Minor balance tweaks
• Due: September 30, 2010

v1.1

• New Magic System based on a shared mana pool.
• Refresh of all magical spells
• Major AI Update
• New global resource: Specialist Slots (allows more choices between guns and butter for players)
• Refreshed User Interface
• Due: October

v1.A (Expansion 1)

• New Combat System (To Hit stat with damage being rolled separately, lots of other changes)
• New Tactical Battle System (removal of action points, combat speed determines initiative and how many times a unit gets to perform an action in a given tactical turn)
• Tutorial
• Visual Overhaul
• Lots of other goodies which we'll discuss later
• Due: End of November
• Free to everyone who buys Elemental: War of Magic

V1.B (Expansion 2)

• Due: 1Q2011
• Free to everyone who buys Elemental: War of Magic by October 31

Beyond v1.B:

• Regular updates are scheduled (budgeted) for v1.x of Elemental for calendar year 2011.

This is by no means a complete schedule as minor updates may occur in-between these milestone builds.

http://gawker.com/5641211/steve-jobs-in-email-pissing-match-with-college-journalism-student?skyline=true&s=i

A woman buys an apple from a local farmer. The woman now has an apple and the farmer has money. Both parties have made, what they believe, is an even trade.

Yet, time and time again we see people who feel entitled to something beyond the original trade. In this case, the woman buys an apple and now expects the farmer to help her out on something unrelated.

What amazes me is how quick the media is to sympathize with the one asking for something beyond what they paid for simply because the other party is a CEO.

We don't normally release a Friday update but given the significant improvements in 1.08 we didn't want them marred by a few oversights.

Here's what's new in Friday's update to v1.08 that should be live by 10pm EST.

Friday update:

****** 
* Gameplay / Balance * 

+ New Sovereign Ability: Wealthy +1 gildar per turn 
+ New Sovereign Ability: Green Thumb +2 food per turn 
+ Organized Sovereign Ability removed 
+ Shop Costs moved to be a formula (unless specified in the XML) 
+ Research costs increased 
+ More balancing of initial resource seeding 
+ Fertile land availability increased 
+ Long Bows now cost 40 gildar to construct 
+ Default shop values on weapons and armor removed from XML (you can overrride the formula still) 
+ Teleport/Blink mana cost increased from 5 to 15. 
+ Eliminated criminal adventurers (caused confusion amongst players) 
+ Pioneer Kit Gold cost reduced from 10 to 5, Materials cost increased from 1 to 10. 
+ Organized ability added to general special abilities 
+ Late game monster respawning reduced. 
+ Increased movement speed of units in tactical battles
+ Lots of spell damage tweaks. 

****** 
* Bug Fixes * 

+ Added logic to stop spells from dealing max damage every time. 
+ Restored old terrain/tile movement costs until that can be better addressed. 
+ Adjusted the combat speed from 2 to 3 for the base male/female sov units. 
+ Fixed bug where Karavox, Magnar, and Verga sovs only had 1.0 for combat speed. 
+ Fixed bug that made it not load any maps except mp maps 
+ Fixed bug resetting default map size to tiny 
+ Fixed bug where rapidly clicking the fortify action for a unit twice or more would cause the game to hang 
+ Fixed bug where, after unhiding the game lobby wnd once, human players would get assigned team 1 when joining a custom game, instead of an unused team ID 
+ Fixed crash when restarting new campaign after you load a saved campaign game 
+ Fixed bug where Cancel button would not show up on mutliplayer Join Game with Password screen 
+ Fixed an error where old saves with old data had logic conflicts with new code that made spells miss.

I'm putting up this thread as a way for us to just generally talk about the game, brain storm ideas for the future, etc.

So here's my stream of consciousness to get it started:

What I'd like to see happen is for Elemental: War of Magic to continue to be refined with its existing game mechanics largely intact other than the change to the mana system and UI update scheduled for v1.1.

Beyond that, the evolution of the Elemental TBS would be delivered via expansions, sequels, etc. like every other traditional game. This way, we can introduce pretty substantial gameplay changes without people feeling like the War of Magic version is some sort of test tube of game design experimentation.

For brevity, call these A, B, C where A is Elemental: War of Magic and B and C are some sort of future expansions.  B would be free to everyone and C would be free to those who own the game by September 30th.

So with A, the game mechanics revolve around exploring the world, exploiting world resources, expanding your control, and exterminating enemies. A will evolve as we go to 1.1 with more techs and improvements that let players convert 1 resource that they have a lot in to one they are lacking in. Spells will draw from a global mana pool and the UI will be cleaned up and content across the board expanded on. For good or bad, minus bugs, A is what we originally conceived of for War of Magic and it should rise or fall based on that.

B will be a new Elemental title (an expansion pack ala GalCiv II: Dark Avatar). It is important that B come out sooner rather than later. Users who like/enjoy A can stick with A but users who find the combat in Elemental too simplistic or are unsatsified with some other core game element will hopefully have much of this addressed in B.

C will also be a new Elemental title (ala GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor). C involves more wholesale gameplay changes and would take quite a bit longer to come out.  A and B would continue to be supported (just like we did with GalCiv and Sins) but I would picture C adding a great deal more depth to the overall game across the board.    

So as we move forward, when people say "I think something should be like this" we will think about those requests and put them either in the A, B, or C buckets.

So for example, a user commented today that the combat should support flanking and there should be taxes and that there should be easy ways to convert resources and such.  If we concluded that this is a direction we'd want to take the game into, it would go into the C bucket.  It's way too radical for A, not doable for B but would be doable for C.

On the other hand, having the tactical battles eliminate "action points" but instead go with initiative on a per unit basis is too much for A (that's not the system we had in mind for War of Magic) but is something we would do for B.

And so on.

So feel free to use this thread to talk about pretty much anything you want. It's just a back and forth with us.

V1.08 is up as well as v1.08B which turns on MP.  The MP version is only listed as "beta" because we want players to know that we're going to be adding AI players as an option in custom games which should be enabled in v1.09 (next week).

Here's a running tally of what we're tweaking for Friday's (today) update:

1. NPC Recruiting behavior change better communicated
2. Organized talent is being removed
3. New talent: Green Thumb: +2 food per turn
4. New talent: Wealthy: +1 gildar per turn
5. More consistent starting resources
6. Look at why custom made maps aren't showing up
7. See about the tiny maps always being the default (I think it's a MP thing)
8. Reduction of equipment costs in shops (the eco balance is the first step to having weapons and equipment more consistent in cost)
9. Tweak of monster spawning
10. Option for animation removal in tactical battles
11. Pathfinding/Terrain tweak/fix
12. Longbow costs 40 not 4 now.

---------------------------------------------------
----------- Elemental v1.08b Change Log -----------
---------------------------------------------------

We are on the process of putting up v1.08 of Elemental: War of Magic.

Here’s a change log over v1.07:

+ LOD optimizations across improvements and tile designs
+ Continued memory optimization
+ AI handles its sovereign more intelligently
+ AI more effective at going after targets of opportunity
+ AI sovereign is more careful about going into enemy territory
+ AI has new APIs for determining whether there are targets of opportunity in the area
+ Balance pass on resource distribution
+ Base tech cost changed from 4 to 5
+ Merchants/Money Changers now require 1 food to construct
+ Study/Archivist now require 1 gildar per turn to maintain
+ Gildar deposit now seeded near starting location
+ Tracker talent cost changed from 15 to 10
+ Organized talent cost changed from 10 to 20
+ Combat Rating calculation altered in an attempt to be a more accurate gauge of lethalness
+ Fewer resources spawned per 1000 tiles.
+ Fewer minor factions spawned.
+ Added scalars to attack and defence for units who are in home territory or foreign territory, modifiable in ElementalDefs.xml
+ Territory scalars now work as Empire v Fallen (e.g. Kingdom guy on Fallen territory gets penalty, etc).
+ Updated formula for gildar given when killing a given unit
+ Child essence is no longer modified by spawn rating, but is instead a value between 50% and 100% of the more powerful parent's essence.
+ Updated TerrainTypes.xml to make Forests and Swamps take 2 moves
+ Changing the “IncreaseMorale” modifier attribute to “AdjustMorale. It’s more clear for the modders.
-Revamp of the way offensive spells hit/miss and deal their damage
+HIT/MISS is deteremined by an attacker roll (minDamage – maxDamage) and by the defender roll (0-DEF)
+Values can now be specified as a MinValue and a MaxValue rather than just a Value (support for constant value spells is still supported)
+If a MinValue and a MaxValue is specified, the Value is defined by a rand roll between the two numbers based on the modifiers internal rand roll.
+Updated descriptions for all core spellbook spells to show bonus damage from INT and bonus damage from shards in the spell description.
+The SpellbookWnd has been updated to properly display the damage range if there is one, and the constant damage if there isn’t one.
+All core spells that were using stats to calculate the value but didn’t have a ValueOwner specified have been fixed.
+The elemental shards unit stats now default to 0 instead of 1. The calculations in the existing spells have been redone to reflect this.
+ Fixed BURNING BLADE spell to appropriately increase attack.
+ Fixed SHIELD OF FIRE spell to appropriately increase defense.
+ Fixed CRUSH SPIRIT spell to appropriately decrease morale.
+ Fixed BRAVERY spell to appropriately increase morale.
+ Fixed DRAIN LIFE spell to appropriately transfer HP from target to caster.
+ Changed the display code for the main UI bar to round attack and defense rather than truncate.
+ Hooked up the CTRL+ARROW and SHIFT-ARROW camera rotation and movement hotkeys to tactical.
+ Added save game descriptions
+ Fixed bug where dialogs from triggers in the campaign (like moving beyond where you should build a city) would pop up many times when a unit moved into that tile.
+ Fixed AI bug where it was doing deficit spending and creating units still
+ Removed the max spell points entry from the affected stats in the level up wnd, since it isn't affected by any unit stats anymore
+ Fixed bug where non-aggression pact wasn't being checked for when left-clicking on a unit in attack mode
+ Fixed modifier in Refined_Economics_Amarian_MP to modify A_Gold player ability instead of A_Wealth (which doesn't exist)
+ Fixed golem animation pack (commented out an animation that was missing and causing t-poses)
+ Fixed crash when making a mountain in map editor
+ Fixed trading your spouse (if she was a recruited NPC) in the regular unit trade
+ Perceived value stuff gets hidden when arranging marriages, instead of showing whatever was selected last
+ Entries for kids when arranging marriages now use a male and female icon to denote boy and girl, instead of the words in parentheses after the name
+ Fixed "..." from string overflowing for the divider title when trading or arranging a marriage
+ Fixed the divider title not ever changing from "And" once the arrange marriage screen was shown
+ Fixed display of tooltip text and color text on Customize Faction window
+ Tweaked SetToolTip to calculate the necessary size of the window more accurately, to fix bug where tooltips were sometimes being truncated
+ Fixed bug where clicking a new destination while the unit was moving would cause the unit to get a free move
+ You can no longer set a units destination while it is moving
+ Fixed Refined Housing and Refined Economics techs (and their fallen equivalents) so that they correctly provide the bonus they say they do
+ When a unit inside a city or an army is selected and asked to cast a spell, that is the unit that is used for spellcasting now, instead of having it just fail (in a city) or try to cast the spell from the leader of the army
+ Fixed bug where summoning a unit while in a city would cause that unit to be summoned in an army with you within that city (causing weird behavior), now just stations the unit in the city with you
+ Fixed bug where raise land spell would not work on all land category terrain types, like swamp or rugged terrain. Now, if a land tile is not hills, it raises that land to hills, instead of checking for only some terrain types
+ Fixed a bug where, in the faction editor, you could select ability bonus options for free by selecting and deselecting them, and then spinning the race spinner, caused by deselection not updating the faction config correctly
+ Fixed units that finished training on the same turn as an autosave not being there when the autosave was loaded
+ Fixed players not being able to select their city level up bonuses or tech breakthroughs on loading an autosave if they were earned that turn, by having the local player mark themselves as needing to get user input for these things instead of unhiding the windows to allow the choice right away during CWorld::EndTurn, and not letting the user choose until after the next turn starts and the autosave has been made. If one of thses autosaves is loaded, the local player will be allowed to choose their tech breakthroughs and city bonuses once the map is unhidden. This keeps us from having to delay an autosave and the start of the next turn by waiting for the user to choose their bonuses, instead making that choice part of the start turn logic after the autosave has been made and saving the mark saying the player will get to choose at the start of the next turn.
+ Fixed treaty turn counts not matching if an autosave was loaded
+ Based on confusion in the forums, removed ability to automatically unlock a spell in the learning queue if it makes it to the front of the queue when the player has enough research to buy it, so that users rearranging their spell learning queue don't have their spell points silently taken away while shuffling spells around, if they didn't intend to learn that spell next
+ Now it always takes at least one turn to learn any spell
+ Fixed bug where tile highlights in tactical battle would disappear after an ALT+TAB
+ Fixed bug where trees would not look correct in all cases after loading a gamesave.
+ Fixed an issue that was allowing counter attacks against units with abilities of type DoesNotProvokeCounterattacks.
+Fixed an issue that was causing modifiers applied in tactical battles to persist after the battle.
- This fixes the bug that causes XP and Gildar rewards after battles to be negatively skewed if the enemy unit combat rating was lowered due to debuffs.
+Fixed an issue with skipping turns in tactical battles that would cause a stuck turn if done when the unit being skipped was in motion. - Pressing spacebar now sets a tactical units moves to zero AND cancels their destination.

For those who want to play v1.08 in multiplayer mode, you will need to set Impulse to show Pre-release versions:

We designated multiplayer as “beta” because we disabled playing against AI until next week. I had written a lot of AI code this week that is in the single player version but had not been adequately tested for MP. We didn’t want to give players the impression that was considered the feature set in multiplayer as being all that’s coming.

Next week we anticipate releasing v1.09 which will continue to address issues that were not found in the initial release, improve computer AI further and provide it and other new MP features.  After that, we will begin focusing on v1.1 which will be the first post-release update that is designed specifically to extending game play.

Anyone who has performance or technical (stability) problems with this build please make sure you you let us know. At this stage, the technical issues that were present at launch should be fully addressed. If this isn’t the case for you, let us know as much as you can about your system as we will personalize our efforts as much as possible.

We are anxious to move forward to begin our traditional policy of extending the game to suit the desires of the gaming community. 

Other notes:

1. We have implemented an option for quick moves in tactical battles but it was not checked-in in time for this build.
2. We intend to provide an option for the amount of gildar that will be present in the world (both in terms of loot and the amount of gold that gold deposits provide). We dramatically reduced the amount of loot that monsters provide because it was not intended for players to run their economy "harvesting" wolves and other creatures but rather supplement. We recognize that others enjoy this and will address this as an option in future versions.

Version 1.08 is now available

Known issues:

1. If you are loading a saved game created with a previous version, there may be some anomalous behaviors in tactical battles with direct damage magical spells (we may release an update to address this).
2. Some outlaw adventurers are appearing as if they are recruitable, this is a UI issue that will be addresed in the next update.

Friday update:

******
* Gameplay / Balance *

+ New Sovereign Ability: Wealthy +1 gildar per turn
+ New Sovereign Ability: Green Thumb +2 food per turn
+ Organized Sovereign Ability removed
+ Shop Costs moved to be a formula (unless specified in the XML)
+ Research costs increased
+ More balancing of initial resource seeding
+ Fertile land availability increased
+ Long Bows now cost 40 gildar to construct
+ Default shop values on weapons and armor removed from XML (you can overrride the formula still)
+ Teleport/Blink mana cost increased from 5 to 15.
+ Eliminated criminal adventurers (caused confusion amongst players)
+ Pioneer Kit Gold cost reduced from 10 to 5, Materials cost increased from 1 to 10.
+ Organized ability added to general special abilities
+ Late game monster respawning reduced.
+ Increased movement speed of units in tactical battles
+ Lots of spell damage tweaks. 

******
* Bug Fixes *

+ Added logic to stop spells from dealing max damage every time.
+ Restored old terrain/tile movement costs until that can be better addressed.
+ Adjusted the combat speed from 2 to 3 for the base male/female sov units.
+ Fixed bug where Karavox, Magnar, and Verga sovs only had 1.0 for combat speed.
+ Fixed bug that made it not load any maps except mp maps
+ Fixed bug resetting default map size to tiny
+ Fixed bug where rapidly clicking the fortify action for a unit twice or more would cause the game to hang
+ Fixed bug where, after unhiding the game lobby wnd once, human players would get assigned team 1 when joining a custom game, instead of an unused team ID
+ Fixed crash when restarting new campaign after you load a saved campaign game
+ Fixed bug where Cancel button would not show up on mutliplayer Join Game with Password screen
+ Fixed an error where old saves with old data had logic conflicts with new code that made spells miss.