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[Zangi]

Cannot for the life of me figure out how to move my Grand Army.  General was assigned.

You need to select it on the right of the screen (There are both your fort and Grand Army in the starting tile.) Then rightclick on the hex you wish to travel to.

Hmm... might be a technical problem then, cause I'm pretty sure the Grand Army was highlighted and stuff.  Tried shift/ctrl/alt clicking both the right and left all over the map.
(I think the cpu is windows 8 or somewhere there.  Does the game need to be run in admin mode or something?)

[Ludorum Rex]

Hmm... might be a technical problem then, cause I'm pretty sure the Grand Army was highlighted and stuff.  Tried shift/ctrl/alt clicking both the right and left all over the map.
(I think the cpu is windows 8 or somewhere there.  Does the game need to be run in admin mode or something?)

Did you have "Simultaneous (Order) Mode" checked on the game options? With that setting, move orders will not be executed until "Next Turn" is clicked.

Otherwise, when an Army is selected, you should see a green/red line when you move the cursor around the map. Green indicates how far the regiment can move this turn. When right-clicking the movement will be executed.  I have not been able to replicate your issue, but hopefully it was just the unintuitive UI (which will be improved). Having a general assigned is not a prerequisite for moving the army, but good thought on testing if that made a difference.

I've genned some bad worlds (1st one was me and six hexes on an island, 2nd had no populations in the starting province and all the adjoining provinces) but the games playability is shooting up quickly.

Will file some reports after a bit more play.

Edit : Unexpected error dialog after I click to build a marketplace when I have the neccesary resources (game does not exit though.) 2nd Edit : The game will partially freeze and lots of the tabs at the top plus the end turn button will stop working though. 3rd Edit : This also happened with the Burial Ground - I expect this is a building - wide effect.

This also happened when I completed my Third Quest by summoning some Giant Eagles.

More positively, Gold is definitely easier to come by, and Dungeon Diving seems to work fine.

I have fixed the bugs you found for the build which will probably go up tomorrow. As for the bad starting points you generated, an island start should be less punishing once the maritime mechanics are added/tweaked, and empty provinces will have the advantage of making early territorial expansion/kingdom-building easier.

Between coding, testing and creating content, I will try to find time for some "developer diary" style updates, where I can go into more detail on what various mechanics. The first one will be the current research tree, and what parts of it are implemented, which are pending and where there are still creative holes to filled. Would be very happy to get feedback and ideas from those of you have shown interest in that part. I will post here when I have written the update. The point is also to make the game very moddable, and give players the ability to add new spells, change research trees, etc.

[Wysthric]

Great stuff, Rex. I'll test it as soon as it comes out. Really enjoying the game.

One idea I was thinking of is "Cross-techs" - I.e. using two (or more) techs to unlock special abilities. For example, Fire and Air could give you a Flaming Tempest Spell, whereas Nature and Divinity could give you the ability to read the guts of animals to scry. Stuff like Beast Mastery would be very open to Cross-Teching.

Another, more useful in the short - term addition would be to tell the player what benefits adding a follower to an army or city would provide.

[Zangi]

Hmm... might be a technical problem then, cause I'm pretty sure the Grand Army was highlighted and stuff.  Tried shift/ctrl/alt clicking both the right and left all over the map.
(I think the cpu is windows 8 or somewhere there.  Does the game need to be run in admin mode or something?)

Did you have "Simultaneous (Order) Mode" checked on the game options? With that setting, move orders will not be executed until "Next Turn" is clicked.

Oh, this might be it.  But... the current orders found at the right never changed from 'none', no matter what I did.

[Wysthric]

I've got Double Followers appearing on the Followers Screen again.

Is there any way to build on mana nodes / tactical resources, or is this not implemented yet?

[Ludorum Rex]

One idea I was thinking of is "Cross-techs" - I.e. using two (or more) techs to unlock special abilities. For example, Fire and Air could give you a Flaming Tempest Spell, whereas Nature and Divinity could give you the ability to read the guts of animals to scry. Stuff like Beast Mastery would be very open to Cross-Teching.

Another, more useful in the short - term addition would be to tell the player what benefits adding a follower to an army or city would provide.

The cross-tech capability is something that I did add already, but I haven't added any spells or mechanics using this yet. The main problem was the spell research UI, where the tooltips are already getting quite large, so I wanted to avoid even more text. When the research UI (and magic UI in general) is improved, I will be adding more of this. Also, as many other parts of the game, the research trees will be moddable. I would assume that tweaking, rebalancing, expanding or even completely rework the tech tree would be important to someone creating a mod.

I've got Double Followers appearing on the Followers Screen again.

Is there any way to build on mana nodes / tactical resources, or is this not implemented yet?

Fixed the double follower bug.

Farms, vineyards, mines, quarries, hunting lodges, etc. can be built on overland hexes to gather resources. Some of these require the presence of a specific resource, others will just benefit from it. Workers are needed to build these and maintain them.

Mana nodes can be bound by a wizard, so the mana can be harvested. The mechanics around this are currently quite simplistic, and they are slated to be expanded at some point: spells for cloaking mana nodes from rival wizards, moving mana nodes, creating/destroying/growing/reducing them via powerful magics, building special arcane structures on them, more events related to mana "leaking" and affecting the surroundings, etc. Even further down the road, I would like to add ley lines mechanics, possibly optional.

My main focus during February is AI, diplomacy and espionage. This should make the game more responsive and add some challenge.

[Frumple]

... so, if you don't mind answering, how do you get the workers and get them to the resources to build the resource collectors? Know a version or two back I couldn't figure that out, and I had two workers in the starting hex and resources in adjacent ones. Seemed like all I could do was assign the workers to the tower to do... well, nothing, as near as I could tell, since I didn't have gold and whatnot to build things :V

[Wysthric]

I'm curious about this as well.

Will test the new build tomorrow.

[EuchreJack]

I would also like to know how to bind mana modes.  I have no idea how to actually do that.

[Ludorum Rex]

Building resource sites is done by right-clicking on the map, "Build Farms", "Build Vineyards", etc. will show up as relevant in the context menu. The same with Mana Node binding. However, testing it a bit, a bug is making it act weirdly. The allowed construction types don't really match the resources in the hex. Binding mana nodes requires researching Mana Nodes, so they become visible on the map, and then sending a hero there. Seems to be affected by a different bug.

I will put a new build up tonight with these bugs fixed, and better UI for resource site construction and mana node binding. It shouldn't require searching in context menus with the right thing selected.

Edit: New build up. Also made some resource sites available via research, as worker skills are culture-dependent and not upgradeable at the moment. So if you don't have any workers with Prospecting, you researching Lesser Earth Magic will open up construction of Mines without the requisite worker skills.

[Frumple]

Definitely seems to be going better now (though I've had three game-ending bugs in a row* ). Still have no idea how to get more workers, heh. Blundering my way around town management, too... can sorta' guess what everything does, but it's hard to figure out how to just make the ruddy things give me more gold, ha. Also not quite sure what's going on with the construction cost/production things in the building descriptions... they seem to be identical, so I'm not sure if that means that once built they'll start outputting what was put into them or what. And... is there a way to delete/remove armies? I end up with regimentless ones laying around fairly often and it's somewhat annoying, heh.

Sorta' bug... researched (minor) golems again, but I wasn't given a base golem regiment to recruit (ala starting... sorcerers, I think? The 2 granite recruit cost ones.) and trying to make a plain regiment via create new regiment spits out "Construct customization not yet implemented." and doesn't give me any golems. E: I've just noticed there seems to be a similar problem(?) with minor necromancy -- research is complete, but I don't have skeletons/zombies to recruit. Bit different in that they're not even showing up as a new regiment type option, unlike the golems, though.

Also, are grey oozes supposed to be completely free? No cost, no upkeep. They're kinda' puny, but when you can build several dozen and drown the world in slime, well..

Current thought is that it'd be really nice if you could just set a follower (or group of them) to keep exploring a dungeon, so you don't have to constantly reassign them once their fatigue is over.**

Also, with regiment transfer between, being able to move multiple ones at once would be very nice. Shift or ctrl-click functionality, or at least a transfer all command. When you've got a bunch of slimes (or skeletons, or whatever) you want to move from new recruits to a proper army it would save a lot of clicks.

*That I forgot to properly document, which is a bit of a "my bad". Still, rough memory wise, first was... I forget, I think just a regular messageless CtD? Second was a hard hang going into a battle, caused by I don't know what and couldn't find logging etc. saying anything notable. Battle engine flatlined on CPU use and the unity window wouldn't respond, so I had to kill it, which caused the world map et al to turn unresponsive.

Last was an error on turn end/processing that made the game uncontinuable (end turn button stopped working after I tried to continue past the error) that said... something about dungeon.site, I think?

E2: Also have noticed that if I have more than 6 followers, I can't seem to scroll down to see the rest. Scroll bar moves, but the displayed followers don't change.

And... just got an event message about a party of adventurers forming in one of my cities. Message says I should hire them before they scoot, but I have no clue how to actually do that. I'd like to, but...

E3:** Speaking of that, if you're not already considering it, an option to group up followers would be pretty helpful for minion management. As an example, most of my kinda' useless followers (the various martials with no command/training/etc., and so on) I've just been using as dungeon fodder. Being able to give 'em commands en masse would save hella' mouse clicks.

E4: Also, optimization thing... when the game's not focused (i.e. you have it in the background while you're typing on a forum :V) it really should not eat CPU if at all possible. Game's using about half my CPU power, which can cause heating/performance/etc. issues over a prolonged period, and being able to just minimize/do something else for a while without that resource use happening would be quite nice. I can do it manually by suspending the process (via process explorer), but I'm not sure how much problems that would cause -- quick test showed the game came back from a short suspend without much trouble, but I know doing that can cause things to go funny with some programs. Much better to have that functionality native to the program, yeah.

E5: Made it over a hundred turns, ahaha! Couple things I've noticed for consideration for future implementation, if it's not already thought of: Flagging a resource (jewelery, ferex) for automatic selling on the market would save a tremendous amount of clicking, which would be good. Similarly, an option when building stuff (in town or tower) to automatically buy (and maybe calculate the gold cost for you of) needed resources on the market would also cut out a huge number of clicks. Related, having an indicator inside the market of how much of a resource you have (for ease of selling) would be very useful. Displaying the income for resources (lumber mills, jewelery shops, enchanted gardens, etc.) inside the resource menu (or somewhere else, not really something you need to be terribly picky about) would be nice, too.

E6: Aannndd last edit before I go to sleep. Just checking, but the city-targeted spells (e.g. Scales of Justice) aren't implemented yet, right? Was trying to cast them, but nothing was happening -- could get into the target selection part, but when I clicked on one of my cities it just did... nothing. No mana drain, no effect on the city, no error, just nada. Figured it just wasn't in yet, but just to be sure...

E7: Ah, finally hit the game ending bug. Made it to turn 233 this time, though! Fully developed wizard tower (mystic furnaces apparently completely negate gold issues :V), looked like I was getting close to researching everything that didn't say TODO, conquered and fully developed four cities... good stuff, really. Error* popped up on turn processing, continuing just leaves me with a non-functioning end turn button, so good night, sweet... alchemist? Yeah, ooze pile, it was an alchemist. Which doesn't seem to be able to do the material transmutation yet? Doesn't really matter once you get mystic furnaces** up, but it would have been pretty nice beforehand, since I was consistently drowning in mana just about the whole time.

*... which I have apparently lost. Seems like I copied over the error details while typing, and there doesn't seem to be a way to retrieve it >_<

Is the program logging these things somewhere outside the main game folder?
** Seriously though, 30+ gold/turn per furnace, selling the apparently currently otherwise-useless eternal flames on the market. One of them outperformed my four cities (including the jewelry production that was in all four! Think they were putting out somewhere between 18 and 28 (8.8 + 1-2 jewelry/turn)) in gold production. And the tower ended up having three.

[Ludorum Rex]

That's a very detailed and in-depth testing, Frumple. Very much appreciated. I have implemented several of your suggestions: multiple selection of regiments when reorganizing armies, automatic repetition of follower tasks, rebalanced the free slime horde a bit, and will work on the other things you pointed. A lot of very good points. Even though proper balance is not a main goal yet, the mystic furnace is over the top with the default market price of eternal fire, and the market should adjust to the massive supply of eternal fire and lower the price. New build should be ready  tomorrow or the day after. I will make sure to get the application performance/resource usage when not active adjusted to more reasonable levels.

[Lukeinator]

Does anyone have any screenshots of this? Looking to check this out.

[Frumple]

I... could probably make some real quick?* If you're looking for fancy graphics you're definitely looking in the wrong place, though. They're pretty functional for what they are and decent enough (and I'm personally pretty content with 'em, but I'd also be pretty content if it was raw ASCII, soo...), but it's still about on par with 2D late 90s/early '00s indie windows project, or thereabouts, if one of the better examples of such. Pretty easy to tell what stuff is, but not much beyond that (which is good, to me, but I'm fairly fond of less fancy graphical assets). In any case, it's free and the download isn't terribly large (~40 megs), so it wouldn't hurt too much to just have a go, heh.

And happy to help, LR. Just sorry I kept missing those bug reports, heh. It's been a fair bit since I did much of that, so m'a bit out of practice and kept doing silly things that lost the error logs :V

*Sure. All the weird stretching/resolution strangeness is entirely on my side of things, trying to make sure I don't spam the forum with giant images. They look better in game, mostly.

Spoiler: Overworld, where you'll spend much of your time (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Wizard selection (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Research, each option has tooltips (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Military recruitment (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Creating new regiments, equipment varies based on culture, traits on various stuff (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Managing your tower, each square has various buildings, upgrading unlocks more squares (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Managing your followers, they can do a bunch of different stuff and have unique traits (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Current manual combat, fairly adhoc graphics wise, combat's pretty straightforward (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: City management, pretty simple, but a fair amount of decisions to make (click to show/hide)

[Wysthric]

Game seems to run a lot better than it used to! One thing I'd like to note is that all my recruited regiments show up in my Wizard Tower, and not in the towns I designate them in - is this intentional? If not, should I be able to recruit Lizardmen Archers in a Gray Orc town?

Edit : Also, in addition to what Frumple said : Can we have empty armies deleted automatically at the end of each turn?

Edit 2 : When I build a stables, I get some default "Cavalry Units" added to my roster. However, I don't seem to be able to add horses to unit's equipment - is it not implemented yet?