It took me all night but it was worth it. That was a city. Brigands took it out.

There were so many checks to make sure that “monsters” don’t attack your city that had to be taken out in order to make the monsters have teeth again.

So we’re going to create a new option “World Difficulty”.  If World Difficulty is normal or higher, then monsters and other such things will take out players if they can.

Before, monsters were prevented from even going into your zone of control.

As we clean up the bugs in preparation for beta 3B (due today or tomorrow) I have some pretty serious qualms still that need to be addressed before release which I’ll outline below:

#1 It is NOT engaging enough. The UI, over the months, got so streamlined that there’s just not enough interaction between your Kingdom and you.  There’s a lot to do but little game-provided direction to take you there.  The pieces are there but the player is left to just “know”. That’s bad.

#2 The UI requires far too many steps to do stuff. It just needs a lot of love still.

#3 The magic spells aren’t compelling enough yet.

#4 Tactical battles require too many clicks (you move your guys each turn to the tiles they can move to, you don’t “auto pilot them”).

I am pleased to say that tactical battles are pretty decent, though visually buggy (it’s very difficult to choreograph all the animations and strikes in an interesting way. This is the first game Stardock has done that actually has animation like this and unfortunately, it shows. 

We can do idle animations great and we have a lot of great animations. It’s the fighting choreographing that we’re sucking at. We want battles to look good but believe it or not, this turns out to be very very hard if you want to have any sort of complexity.  I now know why so many games have such repetitive attacking. When there’s two objects (attacker and defender) it’s nasty stuff.

I miss phasors.