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[Frumple]

It passed by the time I woke up, fortunately. Just indigestion of one sort or another, heh.

I bring more stuff, too, ehehe. Not too many this time, though. Spent a fair amount of playtime passing turns to see if something went weird with dungeon exploration, wizard tower expansions, and market prices, rather than ranging more widely to see if anything breaks.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Split army thing is great. Probably need to be able to choose which regiments split off, at some point in the future, though. Getting a particular regiment out of a larger stack can end up with five or six armies in the hex, heh.

One of those idle just to check thoughts... is getting at dungeon bosses not implemented, yet? Fully exploring dungeons gives you that "we've opened the path to the boss room" message, but then you can't really seem to do anything with them.

Not sure how/if intentional, but assigning your followers to lead a settlement doesn't appear to give XP. Can't help but think it might be amusingly appropriate in particularly figure-heady/incompetent leaders, but it seems odd otherwise.

Huh. If you tell a town to start construction when the build list is empty (i.e. you've already built everything the town can build), you can press the start construction button and it'll let you build the last thing built again _{and again, and again, and...}

I... have encountered what appears to be a ghost army. Named <town> (not literally, but the town's name doesn't really matter) Defenders, it has 0 units, 0/0 movement points, and is owned by me despite me having never built them or the town itself not producing it while under my control. Apparently, the 0/0 movement means infinite movement, too, and despite being some kind of non-army populated by nothing, it still seems to reveal hexes just fine. What I think might have happened is the town had an affiliated army of one sort or another traipsing about when I rolled over 'em, so the army changed owners but the regiments... didn't. Or something along those lines. Definitely a titch odd anyway. (see phantom army, below)

Definite thought for potential addition to the market buy/sell tooltip: Price when you last bought or sold, possibly with a turns since and/or a few instances back. Very minor, far from necessary, but it would make market manipulation not much need notepad open in the background, ehehe.

Ah ha, it does take 400 mana in the bank for the 3rd level upgrade button to show up. Now I have to figure out how to do that with something that isn't channeling trait+crystal vault.

Idle thought: Some kind of current strength summary for armies? Like, 14 units, total strength X/max Y (condition %). Along those lines.

Well this is odd. I'm looking at a town's construction list, and I just noticed their temple options appear to be from the pantheon of my last game, not this one. They're certainly not the gods in the encyclopedia for this world. Now I'm kinda' curious if by building one of these things, I'm going to be opening the doors to a divine extraplanar invasion...

Ookkaaay, yeah, besieging/assaulting enemy wizard towers is causing something to flip out. Definite replication of what was mentioned earlier; conquering an enemy is doing weird stuff. Army that did it isn't recovering movement points, the turn counter isn't incrementing, I am getting new events after I hit the end turn button (but it takes clicking on something to get the event messages to update), and the cursor is in perpetual X mode, probably some other stuff I missed. Don't think this is just an ancient evil deciding to come by for tea and cookies, heh.

Ah, and before I forget, probably worth noting/re-noting things seem somewhat wonky with upkeep costs. Biggest offender I've noticed is skeleton archers, which claim a 2 mana upkeep on the recruitment screen but in practice have a 0 gold upkeep even if you're not undead or whatev'. Which is kinda' nice from a playing perspective since I can flitter around with 8+ regiment armies (plural, several) of skeleton archers, but probably not intended

Spoiler: phantom army (click to show/hide)

That stuff aside, how do you increase your mana reserves, anyway? Right now I've figured out you can reach tower 3 if you take channeling and build a crystal vault, but even building the second vault the third level opens up for you only gets you about half way to the mana cost on the forth level, and as near as I can tell anyone that doesn't take channeling is out of luck to get even that far, and woe betide the poor soul that doesn't build the vault. No way to deconstruct those expansions, heh.

[Hanslanda]

Ptw sounds like a masterpiece in progress from what I am reading

[Frumple]

Ah, 'nother update. Few more bug reports for the latest version, 'fore I go to sleep. Probably actually few this time, since I spent most of today's laptop time watching breath of the wild streams rather than playing games, heh. Spoiler'd as usual.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Just in case it wasn't known/was intended to be fixed, the issues related to market hired followers still seem to be there.

Huh. Giant albino alligators have a training time of... -1 turns.

When gift of unlife kills someone permanently, you don't seem to get a message for it. Also take a turn for the outliner to notice the critter kicked it.

Pretty minor, but having NYI in the spell's tooltip rather than the message you get after you cast it would probably be nice, heh.

Seems like it takes a turn for the outliner to notice autoassigned workers? Event granted one, it immediately assigned itself to my tower, as I told it to, but the outliner didn't notice until the next turn.

Hrm. Not sure if this actually happened, and it's a pain to test, but it kinda' looks like you can short circuit a party's recovery time, at the absolute least with dungeon exploration. If you have a party with members fatigued (or possibly wounded, I've already forgotten if one of 'em were), it looked like assigning a fresh (idle) follower to the recovering party caused it to immediately go for another round of exploration the next turn, rather than continuing to recover as appropriate. Will say again, I'm not actually sure this happened, and I may have just been seeing things or misinterpreting what I saw, but that's what looked like happened. Idle followering joining a recovering party, party immediately does another exploration. Having trouble replicating it, though. Might only happen if you try it the same turn you get the follower, rather than subsequent ones? Or I just immediately misremembered what the outliner was saying about the recovery time, which is both possible and plausible. After a few more failures to replicate, I'm pretty sure this is a false alarm and it was just mean failing a perception check. Either that or it only works when you add a call of heroes follower into a party consisting of all (three of) your starting followers.

Weird. It seems like removing workers from sites (or, at the least, a platinum mine on this particular map) doesn't actually remove the worker. It changes the icon appropriately, returns the add worker button to you, and allows you to actually add another worker, but it doesn't remove the previous worker, leaving you with two workers where only one should fit and not many ways to pry them out.

Tower upgrades complete quiet? Doesn't seem to be an event message whatsit, at the absolute least for later levels.

[ChairmanPoo]

I've been somewhat off due to some still-ongoing life-trouble. I've gotten started today.

Can't seem to build anything though. The game always says I'm missing gold even if I have 500 gold or so, so I can't really build anything

[Frumple]

What are you trying to build? 500's low for a number of sites, town structures, or tower expansions.

[Ludorum Rex]

Hmm interesting. Perhaps the initial gold needs to bumped or there needs to be more cheap early-game stuff to build. Especially as I just fixed a bug (for the coming patch) which caused dungeon exploration to give too much gold when the party was unsuccessful, which is indirectly a gold income nerf.

[Majestic7]

I've been playing this on and off for a while, but haven't really encountered bugs worth reporting.

I noticed that the newest version has popups for hero abilities. That is good, it was sorely lacking. I suppose there are more such coming, including for units and sorcerer abilities and so forth?

Suggestion: I think the dungeon exploration would be more fun if it was shorter and more decisive. Instead of endless turns with light wounds and stuff, pop up a few event windows where you can decide how to proceed. That in turn will affect results, like whether the followers gain items or money or just get snot kicked out of them.

[Majestic7]

Played some more; is there any consequences at losing battles, other than losing troops? I had a manticore come and eat my guards, but it didn't attack the tower. So there wasn't any consequences for it, really. When I trained new troops, it came and ate them too, but again, no harm to the tower.

This leads to a suggestion - maybe patrol stance should make the army intercept enemies entering hexes surrounding the hex it is placed in. When wandering monsters start pillaging improvements etc, this would make defending your emplacements less of a hassle. For balance reasons, maybe armies just sitting in their hex instead of patrolling should get some sort of defensive bonus.

[Ludorum Rex]

I noticed that the newest version has popups for hero abilities. That is good, it was sorely lacking. I suppose there are more such coming, including for units and sorcerer abilities and so forth?

Yes, adding tool tips and more advanced popups where ever it makes sense is a continuous process, and something I'm setting aside time for in every update cycle.

Suggestion: I think the dungeon exploration would be more fun if it was shorter and more decisive. Instead of endless turns with light wounds and stuff, pop up a few event windows where you can decide how to proceed. That in turn will affect results, like whether the followers gain items or money or just get snot kicked out of them.

Indeed, dungeon delving is too boring, grindy and without impact at the moment, and as Frumple mentioned earlier the boss battles are not implemented/active (I did a first iteration on boss battles, but wasn't happy with it). The current system is the result of several design iterations, and I hope to do a further iteration very soon, where it will be more like you describe: Instead of the constant cycle of light wounds+loot+recuperating, the party will stay at the dungeon for an extended period of time, with events, a visible measure of progress and more decisive results. It should be interesting and exciting what the exploration will yield. Currently it is just a mildly hazardous gold mine with convoluted mechanics.

Speaking of visible progress meters, this also something I will be adding for other multi-turn task. Searching a province is a very opaque process at the moment, and there is no hint as to how much progress has been made. I am finding this really annoying myself when playtesting - I could imagine someone less familiar with the game would doubt whether the search is actually working at all.

is there any consequences at losing battles, other than losing troops? I had a manticore come and eat my guards, but it didn't attack the tower. So there wasn't any consequences for it, really. When I trained new troops, it came and ate them too, but again, no harm to the tower.

Rampaging and wandering monsters will not attack your tower, and neither will unaligned marauders. This will change to depend on strength and disposition of the creature(s). AI warlords, wizards and some other factions will try to conquer/destroy/raid cities/fortresses/towers. I also want to add some kind of stealth mechanic to the tower, in addition to more fleshed out fortification/garrison mechanics, in order to make a wizard tower something that requires a major effort from the attacker. Damaging it, economic disruption, etc. can be easier to achieve, but I don't want wizard players to be forced into keeping a major garrison at the tower.

This leads to a suggestion - maybe patrol stance should make the army intercept enemies entering hexes surrounding the hex it is placed in. When wandering monsters start pillaging improvements etc, this would make defending your emplacements less of a hassle. For balance reasons, maybe armies just sitting in their hex instead of patrolling should get some sort of defensive bonus.

Great suggestion, thanks. Currently, Patrol is connected to the province and territorial control mechanics, but I think that it would be very logical to also make it away to intercept marauders that otherwise might be really annoying to chase down/mop up. I'll add some intercept mechanics in the next build, including a mechanism to set thresholds for how powerful forces you want to intercept. A defensive bonus for stationary/fortified armies is also a good idea.

Not sure how/if intentional, but assigning your followers to lead a settlement doesn't appear to give XP. Can't help but think it might be amusingly appropriate in particularly figure-heady/incompetent leaders, but it seems odd otherwise.

Yes, the experience gains in general need some work - too many tasks don't give any xp and the gains are not consistent enough over the various activities. This also goes for traits - sending someone really unsuited to be a diplomat can cause them to become depressed. I want to have more of these kinds of events, not just for diplomats, but also for the other activities.

[Frumple]

Heh. That last bit has me imagine a future where you force a scribe or somethin' an opposing force sends you as an emissary into dungeons until they commit suicide from the stress.

... which is rather morbid, now that I think if it. We totally need a way to assign followers or enemy diplomats to work in the mines at some point in the future, though. "To show your sincerity, you must mine 20 units of adamantine from the blighted ore mines of the burning hills with your own hands. Return once this is done and you will receive an audience."

[Ludorum Rex]

Well, one of the Steam achievements I'm working on:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

50 Shades of Wizardry
As a Grey Wizard imprison a character with the Lusty and True Grit traits.

[( Tchey )]

I may have missed it, but i cannot find a link to test the current version. If i understand it rignt, it's possible to test ? Onr maybe not. Thanks.

[Radsoc]

Strindberg is a Dwarven Noble !

[Ludorum Rex]

Strindberg is a Dwarven Noble !

A rather versatile fellow, that Strindberg - pretty sure he has acted the part of everything from an Insectoid Cultist to a Halfling Mathematician.

I am using classical portraits which are in the public domain for some portraits, and truth be told, I don't know their identities, apart from Maria de Medici being one of them. Thanks for pointing out another.

I may have missed it, but i cannot find a link to test the current version. If i understand it rignt, it's possible to test ? Onr maybe not. Thanks.

There was an open alpha a while ago. Early Access is right around the corner, but I'm waiting for some annoying paperwork to clear, which through a combination of unfortunate circumstances took a lot longer than anticipated.

[Majestic7]

Mm, it would be interesting if incompetence was itself a resource in some circumstances. So you could send a blundering drunk as an envoy on purpose to fuck up your diplomatic relations with a faction, perhaps to provoke them into attacking you instead of being the aggressors yourself. Stuff like that.