So what's the ETA on this?  The weekend is here and I'd like to actually play.

We need a fix for archers. They're solopwnmobiles for now.

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It'd be cool if they incorporated Organized and Adventurer into Sovs. Seems like they would sort of come along with the job.

Also, I've noticed that I can't buy unlocked armors for any of my sovs or champs since 1.08. Is this intentional or a bug?

My hope is that when they have a bit more time, there will be 2 sliders: combat animation likelihood and spell animation likelihood, so you will occasionally get the extra flair of the full animations, as often as you like but pseudo-randomly (abort-able with a click, of course).

Best of all worlds!

I'm not in agreement with the removal of organized. 

I've played a couple of games where I went without it because I know it is overpowered at present.  What I ended up with was chasing mobs that I couldn't catch unless the AI decided that they'd just sit there for a turn.  That's ok when the AI is incredibly stupid.

But when I get to multiplayer and everyone moves 2, how the hell are you going to catch anyone who isn't in your territory (and thus in teleport range)?  When you are in a late-stage game and your influence goes out 4 tiles from your cities, how the heck is someone going to get the drop on you?  You can still teleport in your stack of doom and destroy them. 

I don't like organized very much.  It's way overpowered, especially when you can get your SOV to level up a few times and get some items and all of a sudden you are moving 7. 

Better solution to me is making all champions organized, taking out 90% of the move items, and disabling the ability to improve movement with level-up.

We might still be able to balance Organized.  How about finding a special in game unit to acquire that has the organized trait?  They'd have to be hard to get like the dragon.

The problem with that is it has to the squad leader that has it. That means your sovereign can never be a part of your doom stack.

You realise that this is Organised...? =P

What I'd like to see is Organised being changed. Make it live up to it's name.

The stack moves at the average speed of all units in it.

So simple...

A single slow (summoned?) unit would still slow down the whole stack but with a few fast units in there, it would be... somewhat okay.

Boosting the sovereign's movement speed would still speed up the whole stack but it would take an increase of +6 sov speed to speed up a stack of 5 by 1 movement point.

If you try to exploit it by having 6 fast champions in the stack to "turbo charge" it - guess what? You only have space for 6 regular units, not 11, and they would still seriously slow down the stack.

I like your idea of averaging the movement rates of the units in the stack!  This way, you still get a movement bonus with a slow stack, and you now have a reason to buy the +1 move boots for everyone, as well as mounts.  Yeah, it'll still be sort of an uber stack, but an expensive one to equip at that (assuming horses still cost around 100 GP each).

I was having a very enjoyable game with 1.07.  I had 7-8 longbow equipped npcs/units in my stack, along with some tougher units to run interference.  Yeah, the Archers were only causing a little damage about 33% of the time (my 8 man archer units were doing better of course), but I was having to whittle down the enemy before they closed to melee and whacked all my heroes.  The fights were definite nail biters.

With 1.08, my 8 man archer units are suddenly causing 88 points of damage with every hit (less against seriously armored opponents).  I had two of these units in my stack, and quite frankly, they have been mowing down the enemy in short order, with my Sovereign doing mop up of the smaller enemies.  The fights went from challenging to cakewalk in one patch!

I dunno if bows were intended to be this powerful, but I DON'T like it!  Any way I can unpatch to 1.07 until this is fixed?

BTW, I was seeing several crashes (every turn or two) with my saved 1.07 game under 1.08, but the crashes seemed to go away after a few turns of playing.  I zipped through numerous turns without an additional crash, after getting over the 'rough part'.

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.

10pm EST.

Looking forward to it; get it out the door so you can go enjoy your weekend!

What about the bug where a foreign caravan got stuck in your city with 0 movement.  I mean, he just won't leave or can't.  In order to get rid of him you have to kill him.

+ Fixed an error where old saves with old data had logic conflicts with new code that made spells miss.

Woot, thanks! I didn't want to have to give up my old game

the patch is online

Downloading update now 8:28 EST

8.69mb 8.31pm est, stayed on preparing dl for awhile.

well, I know you're listening.  Again, hitting the main points of my last post.

But simply turning off organized is... childish.  It's the same as doubling the cost, and does not address the underlying problem.  I'm becoming quite disappointed in seeing that the quick fix (and often childish at that) is being employed over actually resolving issues.

which reminds me, taking away the ability to re-click destination while in movement... why?  a previous point in the change log noted that you had eliminated the ability to get free move by doing so - great i'm all for that.  that is an actual exploit-bug.

the problem is, the game is actually quite picky on where you click... and since you can't rotate map view, it can be exceptionally difficult to click the proper spot.  The mouse cursor as well does not accurately represent where you have clicked.  So... taking away redirect seems a bit like punishment.  It would be nice to have highlighted paths (as a pre-cursor to waypoints) and a move-confirmation (toggle-able).

Elemental was the game that broke me from mmo... but since 1.08, it's beent he other way around

Childish?  Maybe it is a quick solution until they figure how to balance it?  Silly comment to make.

Middle click drag to rotate the camera, it works in 3D view, cloth map and tactical maps.  Fairly standard interface design with most software I use so it seemed obvious to me. 

Wait, I thought this had to do with Icecrown's Spell mod.  At least players reported that deleting the mod fixed this issue.

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It was for me....perhaps they found old saves as well?

It seems to me they just moved it...

+ Organized ability added to general special abilities 

I don't know what you mean. I can rotate the map view. Just hold down the middle mouse button.

Huh, just use the middle mouse button or control and the arrow keys. Map rotates fine.

With all the recent improvements, and big changes coming in 1.1, this game is really starting to show its potential.

Nicely done SD!