Well, I downloaded it, but now the game won't run. It gets to that first big dragon screen and then just sits there, forcing me to ctrl-alt-delete my way out of the non-responding program.

Crap...

Sounds like it's compiling the XML. So hang tight on that dragon screen.

I'm getting a issue where the AI is not building huts. Ill keep playing and see if they still do it, and if it effects Empire.

Edit: They seem to want to only build houses in their capital. Their other cities aren't being developed properly.

Edit2: After quite a long time they are know building huts outside the capital, but it took like 50 turns.

1. Much improved pathfinding for AI.
2. No more AI suicide pioneer units.
3. AI is usuing magic; however, it casts Arcane Arrow at a  high hp combat unit, not my spell casting spell blasting Sovereign that is doing 15 points a turn in damage to his entire army.
4. I really like that spell casting demon that hops around the battle map - he's hard to catch.
5. Teleport is still a life saver.
6. AI appears to be less aggressive.
7. Nerfing bows makes tactical battles much better, since the AI never builds archer units.
8. Still able to steamroller AI with one powerful army. AI does not ally against most powerful kingdom or attack where my army is not.
9. Sovereign appears to be gaining points very fast - 5 points after each major combat. I put it all into intelligence.
10. AI does not attack my spell casting sovereign. It chases melee units around the map while my sovereign destroys them with spells - Arcane Arrow or Spell Blast.

Perhaps, AI Magic Research priorities needs to be refined to include: Spell Immunity (protects 1 unit vs magic), Spell Blast (30% damage, area effect spell), Spell Entrophy (30 points damage), Wind Shield (for use when facing human archers). AI sovereigns should put skill points into Intelligence if they will be casting magic in battle as damage from arcance arrow and spell blast are based on intelligence and minimal intelligence = minimal damage. Ai sovereign should protect self with Spell Immunity (Wind Shield) if enemy is casting magic (using archers).

Posted this in the changelog - should have posted it here I guess:

Started a few games but haven't got very far into any of them yet. There are a few things I've come across so far:

Turn triggered automatically even if some units can move. This is the annoying one so far. If you have a number of different units positioned around the map turns seem to be triggered as soon as any unit finishes its move. If other units have stored movement objectives it will play these out - but if a unit finishes its turn somewhere you need to specifically find it to give it new orders.

Bug with movement points when combining units. I've had units combine and the unit that walked into the stack still had full movement points. I didn't check if this was because a new turn was triggered of if the points were reset.

One-turn construction really doesn't feel right. This insta-build doesn't work for me. Would much prefer 3 turns at least for these.

Units don't path through cities. The quickest route is through entering a city at one end and leaving at the other. The pathing doesn't make use of this. I'd be happy if a unit entering a city lost its turn but I don't think this is the case (hard to tell because of the automatic turn problem mentioned above).

Borders don't update until a turn later. I had a series of resources become build-able even though the borders of my city showed otherwise. Next turn the city grew and the resources were within the borders. Think this is tied into the turn-ending bug.

I'll try to keep playing but I'm really not enjoying the movement micromanagement this version requires.

Got a DX Invalid Call after alt-tabbing out.

Technology does't update the turn it's researched, it applies the turn after. Because of this, I could research all 5 tech areas, but then apply the done research to a different category by switching the focus before hitting the end turn button, effectively being able to gain 5 research levels in one area for the research price of researching 5 level one areas.

I like the one turn construction because it doesn't allow the citizens to build a tax base, so you'll start losing gildar if you build too fast. It does lead to city spam though after that initial holding back.

Trying to build pioneers is weird... you can't select "one unit" unless you de-select the town and then select it again (provided pioneers were last selected). Accidentally built a 4-unit pioneer this way and wasted plenty of resources. 

A couple of turns my empire borders disappeared, then reappeared the next turn. Also the aforementioned border issues that wait until the next turn to update.

Was having lots of fun until the crash! 

I'm getting an issue with automoving units. For example, I set a unit to move across my kingdom which will take 10 turns. It only actually moves every 2nd turn, so the trip takes 20 turns instead.

Played a little deeper into the game now. I'm wondering if threading is the cause of the turns working out of sync. Seems that most of the issues are due to the turn processing while the turn is still being played out. Caravan limits are also flagged on the turn the last one is built even though there are no others in the queue.

Some other issues:

New designed units are starting with 3HP while Peasants start with 5HP. XML issue perhaps?

Faced a rogue wizard who didn't use magic.

Tactical battles feel like they are heading in the right direction.

Overall this is much more enjoyable than previous versions - but still not really close to being a 1.4 release candidate yet.

I tried again today, and this time it loaded most faster. Hm.

Anyways, here are my observations after a first playthrough:

1) So far seems stable, I haven't run into any crashes or bugs. Whew!

2) The low cost for initial improvements is nice and helps speed things along. It is a bit jarring though when you go from a hut at 1 turn to an inn at like 10. Might need to balance those times out a bit.

3) It takes a turn foe certain things to 'fire'. For example, a town will level up and you will get the icon on the right, but it will take a turn to get the city level-up window. Same for tech. It seems to take an extra turn to get the new tech selection screen. When you fill up the meter nothing happens until the next turn. Is this new?

4) The additional HP helps and makes battles a bit more interesting, especially early on. Now you can actually slug it out a bit.

5) I've also noticed the auto-move weirdness.

Battle:

-AI still does the 'follow a single enemy around the battlefield' thing, ignoring closer enemies. This wouldn't be so bad if it had enough action points left to chase and attack, but it just chases and thus can be kited and slaughtered easily. I suggest switching to some kind of 'attack closer enemy' tactic.

- The 'ghost' counterattack is still there, and I'm fine with it, but we need a way to show it. It is confusing to just have the HP of my unit seem to vanish and a player that doesn't understand what is happening will be really thrown off when their unit seems to have suffered damage out of the blue.

Random Spawns:

-Can we seperate out different types of random enemies? I hate when the human bandits and spiders and stuff all end up in one stack with a pet bear. Just seems weird.

Champion AI:

- AI champions aren't using skill books. In current game, I see an enemy sovereign, Level 1, with 2 of those insta-level XP books and one stat booster. This makes me think that she was questing and getting loot, but isn't using the books. She would jump to at least level 3 just by using those books.

Overall:

I'm enjoying the game, especially since it seems nice and stable. I think we are on the right track here, we just need further polish and balance. Thanks for the hard work!

The Good:

A lot of small things are coming together. These little things used to drive me nuts and really detract from the game, but now they are fixed.

The economy and the balance between improvements and natural resources is one thing. You don't need natural resources but they are helpful. Food is the exception unfortunately.

The increased importance of materials is another thing. 4 strong groups forces you to build more then 2 or 3 workshops.

The limit on unlimited improvements actually works quite well. Although I wouldn't mind trying out a version where the limit is on the improvements in total not on specific ones.

The reduced build time on improvements is interesting and does make the game faster. However maybe a small increase to 2 or 3 turns. Right now it is a little to instantaneous. It feels kinda weird.

For the first real time WoM has a functioning and deep Economy, and it makes a huge difference.

The Bad:

Lots of little pathing issues. Sometimes units don't continue paths from other turns, and they don't enter cities etc...

Monsters are too weak. My Sov got a cloak from a box and I bought him a padded chest piece. He then proceeded to wreck hordes of monsters by himself without taking damage. I got level four cities way before the monsters got tough. I invested quite a lot in adventure tech but by the time second level monsters started spawning I had light plate! Plains Wargs do like 7 dmg? That would barely hurt someone in padded armor! Monsters need to level faster and they need to be a little bit tougher. A lot of them just don't have the attack power to hurt units in even basic armor.

Boy was I surprised when I completed the Knight quest by going back to my capital, is that ever explained?

I got a message saying I had inherited an Empire but it was actually another AI player who had.

AI seems to develop none capital cities extremely slowly.

I think I've seen the auto moving weirdness too.  Will look into.

Some more bugs:

AI massing monuments(ie dozens), even though city level pretty fast naturally.

AI is building all his houses in his capital and very rarely building any in his other cities.

You can still build unlimited Libraries, loreshops, master archivists, embassies, and monuments.

AI building granaries in places with no food.

AI building a lot of small towns beside say a single mine. No the smartest way to play because of food limits.

Unit stats are displaying as group totals which is confusing.

Once you get some civ tech and a city to level 4 it starts producing humungous amounts of resources, more then you can possibly spend. Nothing late game really consumes large amounts of resources.

Ventri Mines are too plentiful and give to much metal.

I will reiterate the monster thing again. Even Trolls and Shrill lords cannot hurt even light plate. A monster boost is needed.

Boosting monsters etc is a bit of an ad-hoc approach when trying to balance the damage/armour in the game. Instead could all the numbers please be looked at holistically. WoM has really suffered through patching problems rather than really addressing the cause of these problems in the past and now we have a good direction it would be a shame to make that mistake again.

A big 'enjoyment' issue has always been that you only ever need one stack to conquer the world. It makes the game really boring really quickly - and even with all the great changes for the game this version is addressing, this problem is still with us. The AI sits patiently is his cities with their forces all nicely distributed while you just roll through with your mega stack. Keeping a single unit or two in your cities is all you need to protect them because of the bonuses to defence. This defensive bonus was introduced to patch the problem of cities being too easy to conquer.

I picked up Hegemony the other day (awesome game BTW) and the way they abstract siege warfare could work very well for WoM as well going some way toward fixing the problem mentioned above.

In Hegemony cities are either walled or un-walled. In WoM we have different classes of wall for cities which is fine.

In Hegemony walls need to be reduced before you can attack. Unwalled cities can be attacked right away. Reducing the walls takes time. While walls are being reduced the besieging units take attrition damage at a steady rate. The more units besieging the city the less time it takes to reduce the city and so the less damage is accrued to units. The more units defending the city the longer it takes and so more damage is accrued to the besieging units. Siege warfare weapons give bonuses to both the defending damage attrition if they are on the defenders side or shortening the wall reduction time if they are on the attackers side.

This could work very well for WoM as well. This whole siege side of things is missing from WoM but the above model is entirely abstracted so it would require very little in terms of art assets etc and when a city battle takes place - it is simply the battle once the breach has occurred. So even the current tactical battle maps would be OK.

Introducing something like this would go some way to addressing the formulaic approach players have for playing WoM and make it a little more strategic.

There are 4 main reasons this happens from a strategic point of view:

1. Teleport is cheap and easy and allows you to retreat to defend anything in your territory.

2. The AI does not attack your weak points. If the AI was in the habit of attacking undefended cities people would garrison more and blob less.

3. Monsters are not a threat to cities with even one half decent garrison unit.

4. AIs don't team up on strong players.

If the AI was in the habit of declaring war if it noticed all your units were far away from your mutual border and that a bunch of cities were undefended then that would be in even better. Really any AI that is not your best friend should ruthlessly attack any city that is weakly defended on the border unless there is a huge strength difference between you, even if your not at war. They should also only declare war after they have troops in position, and none of that bus fare home for peace stuff....

DsRaider and Das123, nice summary of major issues with the AI. This is the reason why I rarely play the game - too easy to win as AI does not present a challenge for a player that uses one large army with archers and a spell blasting sovereign to launch a conquest steamroller.

The question is how to solve this problem? What logic rules should the AI follow? Should Teleport be nerfed (as was bows) by having two spell; one for just the caster (Level 2 and it costs 25 mana) and the other for an entire army (Level 5 & it costs 250 mana)? How should the AI team up on stronger players? How should the AI decide to attack a city? Should the AI build its own steamroller - instead of fielding several small armies that have the same target destination?

Proposed Teleport: Level 5 cost of 250 mana is 10x the cost of just teleporting the caster (Level 2). Why? Teleporting 500, 1000 or 2000 warriors should consume more mana than teleporting 1 person.

I've been playing a decent amount of MOM lately which has given me a good compare/contrast. I'm in a current Impossible game as Sorcery using Beastmaster race. One of the opposing factions already has stack of doom invisible sky drakes and I'm rolling with Minotaurs (have Adamantium though). On top of that the same wizard has suppress magic on so I can't cast a damn overland spell. The AI has me by my balls. Have never experienced that kind of spanking with WOM but I'll be damned if MOM Impossible isn't a real challenge. If I end up winning this game I'm buying a lottery ticket. I WANT EWOM to kick my ass like this.

Below are some off the cuff gut feel solutions that may possible for Brad to implement. I'm purposely ignoring things that I don't think will be possible for Brad to do as a 1 man show.

• Just as with boats, if the AI can't use it, nuke it. Turn off teleport. Make us players play by the same logistical rules as the AI. Our stacks of doom can still be formed but if we overstretch our "supply lines", we can't just teleport back with the stack of doom. Make it painful to be overzealous and ensure the AI can sniff the weakness in our defensive border. Want to take that stack of doom out? Well, the second you do that other faction you're at war with flanks your stack and rampages behind you.
• To offset the lack of teleport, ensure the amount of movement points feels right to compensate.
• I know Brad knows this but diplomacy is horrible atm. The wizards need to feel like they have personalities. MOM does a great job of that.
• Recalc the HP #'s and dam/def including monsters. Multiply everything by ten or something and adjust.

Actually, I think this is pretty much what Dsraider said, lol.

We just need to realize what is doable and not doable since Brad is the only resource.

But Brad has always been the only AI guy.

Also I Imagine that most the work on the AI here will be brought over to FE as well, and work on the FE AI back-ported probably as well eventually. 

About how to make the AIs work better together I suggest three concrete, very specific, and relatively easy measures. If they already exist they should be made stronger and much more noticeable.

1. Any player who is at war gets a diplomatic penalty with all none allied players, so that they are more likely to get double teamed. This is also very realistic. War tends to be contagious and spread to multiple fronts.

2. AIs will seek to ally against the strongest team. I know the AI asks you to fight other players but do they actually do it amongst themselves? If one player is strong the AIs should be going for mutual protection treaties amongst themselves to form a bloc.

3. AIs should fear imperialists. If the strongest player is at war then they get a huge diplomatic penalty.

Played a few hours last night and so far I like the short build time for improvements. The step from 1 turn to 10 on the larger improvements is a bit steep though. I also liked that I could scout with my sov for the first turns without having monsters razing my town.

* I have an idea for caravans. If a caravan is killed (while on an already established trade route), it should be restarted automatically after say... 3 turns? I hate that I have to rebuild caravans and send them down the road manually, it just sucks.

* Units put on "guard" should not show up when I cycle through units with TAB.

* I still want more HP.

Well I have played my 1st game with this new ver and everything went well but one crash. Much better now and keeps getting better.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15383583/Paul-PAUL-PC-09.02.11-logs.zip

hope this helps cheers.

Pet Peeve #1: My Sovereign in leather armor and a lone peasant combat unit faces off 3 powerful attack units with 29 HP each on a map with fences. What happens? The enemy AI units follow my combat unit around the map, ignoring my Arcane Arrow costing sovereign. The AI units move past my sovereign ignoring him. The AI units never catch my combat unit and my Sovereign dispatches them with Arcane Arrow spells which he casts 10+ times.

Partial Solution: If AI unit is next to sovereign attack sovereign unit.

Pet Peeve #2: AI sovereign only casts Arcane arrow in combat. Does it not research and know Spell Blast (AOE spell),Spell Immunity or Wind Shield?

Pet Peeve #3: My companies of Longbow archers decimate the enemy whose sovereign never casts Wind Shield to protect his troops.

Partial Solution: If AI Army is facing army with Archers equipped with bows that real damage (i.e. not the weak bows that do no damage against armored units) then Sovereign should cast Wind Shield.

Idea: Spice up combat with recruitable magic casting heros that know one tactical spell from a single spell book - Earth, Air, Fire, Enchantment, etc. Encountering an AI army accompanied by a spell-casting witch that knows Pull of the Earth or Haste would spice things up and make combat less predictable.

Just rewrote the way the AI learns spells and working on how it decides which ones to cast in tactical battles.

I'll post screenshots here as soon as I start seeing results.

Most Excellent.

Suggestion: You may have to look at how the AI levels up the spell casting sovereign. If he is a magic focused sovereign he should be putting most, if not all of his stat points into Intelligence to boost the damage done by Arcane Arrow (Dam: 50% of Int) and Spell Blast (Dam: 30% of Int) - the two most commonly used damage dealing spells.

Example: While my sovereign is doing 10 points of damage with Spell Blast to six units, or 15 points of Arcane Arrow Damage to one unit the AI sovereign was continually casting Arcane Arrow for 5 points of damage (due to Int of 10). Apparantly, this spell casting Sovereign never put any level up points into improving his Int stats - and thus was a wimpy spell caster.

With such a low Int stat the AI sovereign would have done better charging into battle to attack my spell casting sovereign or casting buff spells such as Spell Immunity, Haste, or Wind Shield (if facing archer units).

Idea: What spells the sovereign casts should be a function of his intelligence - higher intelligence should tend toward damage dealing spells, while lower intelligence towards spells that buff a unit or all units.

Idea: If AI faces a wimpy opponent it should conserve its mana and not use magic in the battle.

Have Sovs started to use points at all from leveling up?  Last time I played their stats never improved when they leveled.

One Ui thing that I've changed because it's buggy is forcing there to only be 1 pioneer.

Instead, I've made it so that you can build groups of pioneers (and caravans) and you simply get a bonus (like a higher initial population) for building bigger groups.

I've also redone how the AI chooses city upgrades to be a bit mroe intelligent about it (it was just random before).