We're getting a snow day so I'll be able to spend the day on AI instead of yucky business stuff.

Snow is awesome (for once)! 

Recommended reading:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/404770

Also regarding AI building from Demandobot thread: 

nitey47, HeavenFall: AI creates too many monuments. 8 or 9 in a city, each taking 10 pop.

Looks like the AI may be getting a bottleneck with certain resources because it's spending them in unnecessary stuff.

Can we expect some Demandabot inspired changes then?

Hi Derek,

Since 1.19 is about UI, will you please add a scroll bar to the cities and armies on the left side of the screen like you did on the right side event pane?  Will you also please highlight the active city or army in that pane on the left side as well?

https://forums.elementalgame.com/404772

Thank you. I appreciate you changing the influence tag and cleaning up arrogant. Influence actually adding +1 radius makes it a must-have for every custom sov. At some point, you may want to consider rebalancing it to cost more than 1 point.

I suspect the tech stuff will be harder to clear up, since they have a balance component. I also don't know what you want to do with the "Stupid" trait, as it appears to do nothing right now. Maybe replace it with the arcane research penalty?

I am reluctant to ask for more, but if we could change what unit qualities bonuses are (so I can make legendary 5x HP and so on), it'd be even better .

Now that you're working on custom races, could you fix the custom colors that don't save? The one's affected are primary color, clothes color 2 and secondary color (can't remember exact names but they are the 3 in the middle). You can check by going to that screen, then switch to the screen to select traits, go back to color screen and they will be default again. If you save while on that screen, they will be applied to that game but will be defaulted in the next game. Very annoying! Also, it would be helpful to color code the empire and kingdom techs so the player knows which techs apply to her faction.

I noticed last night while playing 1.19 that for some reason the data displays (selection of research results, selection of battle options, display of character information, ...)  all lsot their backgrounds and became almost unreadable.

Not sure what to do, and I don't have a save that shows it (since a reload clears the problem.)

Yours,

Joel

Can we please, please get the Crystal Mine improvement for Empires moved down the Tech Tree?  Right now it is sitting 1 tech level deep for Kingdoms and 4 techs  deep for Empire.  Am I missing how that is balanced?

Consider you also need some techs to get Shards, spellbooks, etc I think moving Crystal Mine to be something you get with Arcane Experiments (2 techs) would balance this out nicely.  Currently I am usually ignoring crystal mines as Empire, since I have to devote so many rounds of research to actually get the resource.

Just a few things I've picked up since playing 1.19:

1) I've had crashes for the first time.  This seems to happen right after a battle when I'm in cloth map mode and after the battle I zoom in.

2) AI heroes don't appear to use armor, at least in the games I played.  They all had huge hitpoints and large attack numbers though.

3) The new select a unit dialog when casting a spell on a group of units is great.  However, I cast flame blade, got the popup and selected my sovereign to cast it on.  Then I cast flame blade again, but this time the popup didn't appear.  It just cast flame blade on my sovereign again.

4) The AI has a group of units with a pioneer that just seems to stand on the border of my country.  I know that it wants to claim a spot that has a resource next to my capital, but there is no accessible path to that spot, so it shouldn't try.  They just sat on my border for ages and I got sick of looking at them and killed them.

5) I was at war with a faction, and while I'm fighting some of their armies, they send a lone hero through my territory to go claim a level 1 treasure on the other side of my empire.  I picked him off quite easily.

6) Sometime you get hit by too many popups.  I can get a city popup, a research tech popup, and a battle popup all at the same time.

7) I researched adventuring (or whatever it is to reveal level 2 treasures) and no level 2 treasures appeared any where that I could see.  However a few level 3s were around.

8) I've mentioned this before in a post, but when you choose a distant location for a unit to move to, it doesn't seem to calculate the quickest path.  The unit will tend to move through a forest rather than go around it.

9) The last one probably isn't an issue, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.  I was playing the Expanded Factions mod, which I noticed Heavenfall said isn't compatible with this version.  However, I attacked the Angels and was advancing into their territory and I noticed that they had two pioneers in the ocean.  Probably something to do with the mod.

Thats all I've noticed for now.  However I do think the tech tree needs to be thought out a bit differently or armor needs tweaking.  It seems too easy to get to leather armor quite quickly, which is overpowering.

Armor is only over powering if your enemy is not using any. Didn't you say the AI was unarmored? I am confused about what to post AI wise since we found out the AI tags (much of its smarts) are not properly functioning.

What else is going to be in this patch?  Did we fix the XML tagging so that the AI will work properly?

Ok. it is 2/3/2011 now. Where is this patch?

Been playing the game a lot despite the OOM errors. Would like to actually finish a skirmish game sometime.

Spent a winter around 1972 in Salt Lake City.  The worst snowstorm since 1944.  -13 at night, -4 daytime high.  That was enough for me, back to the San Francisco Bay Area.  You snow people are a hardy breed.

It was -10 this morning, and about a foot of snow.  Can't wait till for summer when it's over a 100 with a humidity of 90%.  No idea why people live here...maybe they like to dodge the tornadoes in the spring?

My bus doesn't get me home till 5. Why bother releasing it until I get home. Don't you realize what you are doing to me? Can someone post about it before I leave? I need to live vicariously on some feedback here. I been jonesing for 1.19a since Monday. I need an EWoM fix ASAP.