Regarding the strategic spell known issue- do you have a plan for that?  If not, I'd suggest the AOW2/SM UI for that- worked perfectly well in that.

by the time I can get archers i don't bother because my magic is so powerful.

Just tried again with the archers. Got to longbows, fought against leather armor dudes (~8-9 armor). I was doing light damage, even though I had the best bows in the game (which I shouldn't have obtained this early, but it's a different issue), at least 2 tech levels above leather. Against plate and heavy plate... it'd be just pointless.

Crude bows are on the same tech level as leather, and I can send you a savegame that shows you how weak they feel. 3 crude bowmen against one dude with 14 HP and 7 armor. They got massacred without even hurting him.

Edit: okay, it's not as bad as I initially thought (it looks like armor doesn't have that 50% min on the rolls, only damage. Good), but bows and some early-mid game weapons could get a (large) bit of a buff to reduce those "blocked" against same tech level armor; longbow is on the same tech level as heavy armor, and there's not way it can even scratch heavy armor. And, of course (but I understand it's happening already) late game armor is quite too strong.

The war council improvement has the prereq of Tools_Of_War_Trogs, it should be Armies_Trogs.

Out of interest sometimes I use the adventure resource techs yet no resources show up. Is this why you have reduced the spawn distance of these techs down to 12? If this solves the issue thats great news.

Great to read that you have already fixed issues, i ran into while playing.

There are two things i´d like to see that they get fixed....

- the problem with the messages at the same time like idle city, new tech, new spell etc.

- pls. find another way to manage city lvl.up. I would like to have the possibility to take a look at the city and then i can decide wich bonus is useful. Something like that...

Did this correct the issue with lev 5 city pop re-setting to a lower level when you load?  It was causing me major gold issues after crashes since suddenly my population would be dramatically lower.  It was not because the saves was several turns old as i set it to auto save after every round and my gold income was high and positive at all times until the crash.  Upon reloading my lev 5 cities would have a listed population of 670 but the population bar would still be full.  The population would then grow normally until another crash, after which it would be reset.

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that the process that spawns things randomly places it on a tile within 20 tiles away from the players capital.  Because there are many more tiles in the outer 5 rings of that giant square than there in the first 5 rings, its incrediably more likely that whatever is being spawned will end up far away from the player.  Usually so far away that the player doesn't even now it was dropped.  Thats what I initially thought but after some playtesting with some cheats enabled I found out it does always spawn its just across 3 mountain ranges and an ocean.

So I changed the function yesterday to allow us to pass in a range for spawning stuff.  Before everything was just 20.  Then modified the functions passing to it to include a range of 12.  The default is still 20 (if the calling function doesn't specify a range) so that I don't break any existing calls that were using that function.

Way more detail than you wanted I'm sure.

That was the perfect amount of detail. I am always interested in the thought processes and codeing challanges that you guys go through.

I isn't an issue.  We know how we want it to work.  The problem is that spells hook into a lot of places so thats a fairly large feature (one of the strangest things of game design is that some requests are super simple and others very complex just because of the way the system was implemented, but you would never have guessed it from the description of the features).  We are in lockdown right now (only bug fixes) so that issue is on the edge of not being included in 1.1 just because I can't have a new feature that makes a lot of changes added in at the last minute.

It is our grey line issue at the moment and it will probably slip to 1.2.

Is it possible to have resources spawn at the begining of the game in a future patch, and the techs only reveal them, Civ-style? I mean... it's kind of weird to have techs *create* resources all over the place. I know it would require quite a bit of code change, but maybe for 1.2?

If the stuff was there but not visible before you got the tech then you would just run into odd areas that you could not build on, or you would destroy resources by building.  I think spawning near your hometown is better.

I'm a big fan of this, as well.

With revealed resources, the value of territory changes dynamically, creating the opportunity for interesting emerging conflicts. Spawning resources available for instant use just seems kind of dumbed down to me. But, there's probably a large segment of the player base that prefers it this way, so...

Unfortunately for AI, I also happen to benefit from sometimes getting their gold mines, orchards...

That's my point. Although iron, food and gold are vital resources you should always have (but you don't have to make them spawn near the players, just make them more common), crystal, ventri ore mines and lost libraries should have entire wars fought over them, and should never be placed conveniently at the doors of your empire. It should be so that if you have one in your territory, other factions will get envious and will want to steal it from you.

Yeah, agreed. That's the point. If revealing depends on a certain tech, it's not like they'd be able to use it, or even that it would be "your" resource, really.

Case 1: Tech spawns stuff that may or may not appear in your land.

Case 2: Resources are hidden and need a tech to make them appear to your eyes... they may be in your territory or they may be not.

Only difference, is that with Case 2, the enemies cannot see/use the resources until they get the techs. With Case 1, they can see/use them (depending on spawn) and plan accordiingly to the situation (and later add more resources with their own tech).

I get the feeling that I'm totally missing yer point. For that, I'm apologize.

Yeah, I'm talking about Case 2 here. It's just personal preference, I understand that there's a case to be made for either that or the way it is now. It's harder for me to see what the arguement for Case 1 would be.

Edit: By "the way it is now," I mean the 12 tile spawn, not 20 tile spawn.

Right now, you can have more of a resource on the map because someone else discovered a tech. Either it's spawned very close to his territory, or even inside, and they I think it's making the war for rare and powerful resources a lot less interesting, or it's spawned randomly on the map, and then it becomes kind of weird (in a bad way) to have stuff spawn because of techs other people discovered. "Hey, someone else discovered about rare resources just like we did previously, and suddenly lots of other of those rare things appeared in the world that weren't there before ! And it's not because we didn't see them, since we *had* the tech to find them".

Seriously, if possible, in 1.2 or later, it'd be much better to go for a Civ-style thing where everything is placed at map creation. Just make it so that if someone places a city on a resource, the resource is found even if the tech hasn't been obtained yet. We can live with that.

In the real world we keep discovering new "sources" of resources we already knew about. Why cannot be the same for Elemental where explorers (invisible, abstracted little guys that roam the world without us noticing) can find new places where that resource can also be exploited? "See this map sir! In this place we had previously visited, this time we explored a cave system that was there and found a gold deposit that we could use!"

I don't mind Case 1 or Case 2. But Case 1 includes some random spawn of resource types which makes it "better" for me. But that's talking preferences which shouldn't be the point.

Couldn't this be an arguement for either Case 1 or 2?

Yeah, I agree. The one thing I'd add is that the reveal method adds an incentive to research the tech early, to better direct colonization. Not a huge deal, I know, but maybe something to offset a warfare tree rush?

I've been asking for Case 2 since launch.  It's one of my biggest complaints about the game, and I think it devalues adventure tech- as you can benefit from your opponents research instead of doing it yourself.  I only ever research it if I"m 100% desperate.  I am really not a fan of the way Elemental does this right now, though it isn't gamebreaking.

I would suggest the following adjustments to case 2:

Improved resources are visible to everyone.

I think it's likely there would be an issue of players/AIs building the wrong improvement on bonus tiles, and the GC2 AI had an issue with building the wrong thing anyways.  Some possible ideas based around there.

Case 2a) Player when they try to build on the tile, discovers the resource

Case 2b) Player when they try to build on the tile, destroys the resource unknowingly (they never find out it was there)

Case 2c) Player whenn they try to build on the tile, cannot

Case 2d) A random selection of the above.

I don't particularly like case c, If I was Kael, I'd implement d) with a 50-50 chance of a or b

This is something I flat-out want implemented later on.  It's #1 or #2 on my personal dislike list about the gameplay right now.

You may be running into the invulnerable unit bug.

As someone has said if they where in position at the start of the game how do you stop people building other things on them. And from a player perspective there is no visible difference if they spawn at the time or just become visible. In both cases they appear on the map from the players point of view and in both cases the in character explaination is that you discover them once you have the right tech spot and use them...