Frogboy

Heh, deviantART. Some of us have been there since its founding... http://frogboy2.deviantart.com

Well, one thing you guys aren't going to see is much marketing until the beta is in your hands. The reason is that we need people who have the game on hand able to say "Yea, they're delivering the goods." NO faith requirement. ASSUME it will suck and give you cancer. Make Stardock prove it'll be awesome.

[quote who="Das123" reply="1" id="2993225"]Looks interesting. But base of 6HP has me worried.[/quote] Not really 6 as the minimum number of units is 3 in a group which means 18.

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

Beta of 1.4.

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

It's now available.

The new beta should be out now.

Awesome. I'm feeling pretty good about the new beta that should be live for you guys tomorrow.

[quote who="Heavenfall" reply="46" id="2989642"] 6. Make AI perform better with magic in battles. Sorry on this one, this is going to be tough to do in WOM as well as it should. The code is good (kudos to the Stardockians who wrote it) but I'd need a lot of APIs written to make the AI do better in tactical battles and all the coders are on FE. So I can improve it quite a bit but I'm not going to rewrite it. This is surprising to me, as the AI never use spel

Hmph. I had a big long response put up yesterday and it disappeared. Let me summarize where things are as of this fine Monday morning: The focus of v1.4 is: 1. Fix lingering stability issues. This should be something that is very apparent even if I released an EXE today. The game shouldn't crash. Ever. On any system ideally. I found that v1.3 was effectively buggier because it ran a lot faster. v1.4 should address this. 2. Fix bugs (see

Attack (and defense) rolls are now bell curved (rather than rand()%max damage. That means that rolls are much more likely to occur roughly in the mid range. This is an over simplification but a weapon with an attack of say 8 will typically roll a 3-ish. A weapon with an attack roll of 30 will roll around a 10 (still way better than 3 but not nearly as lethal.

Sure. Also, I don't think v1.4 will be the last update I work on. I am starting to think about a v1.5 also. Just depends on where FE is in terms of needing me.

Champions need more HP.

I was easily able to smack down the AI. For some reason, the AI units being sent home are not being put into the city, they're outside the city so their sovereigns can't defend. Also, in tactical battle, the AI unit isn't using spells. :(

Going to just send this group to conquer the AI and see if I can do it. If I can, then I have my work cut out for me this weekend.

Here's the world I'm testing with for today. I used one of the random terrain maps (rather my own testing maps) to get better real world conditions to see if path finding works the way I would expect. I'm at the bottom right. Everything is on normal and I've toned down the AI XML advantages

It's really unfortunate that our industry has a distinct lack of network programmers and thread developers. I was talking to some of my friends at Firaxis recently about this recently. Finding good network coders is difficult now and the ones that are out there have migrated to the MMO companies.

[quote who="scifi1950" reply="18" id="2988779"]Thanks for the update. Any idea when you'll release a 1.4 beta? As you can see by the response to your post there are still quite a few of us more than willing to take it for a spin. [/quote] I want to get the first beta out right away really. Not for the game play reasons as much as for stability. v1.3 was a lot more multithreaded so that people with more cores could take advantage of the game better. How

My guess is Fall 2011. Once the decision was made to move towards a full blown sequel rather than an expansion pack the budget changed (translation: Impulse sale to GME provided a lot of capital and we decided to spare no expense).

[quote who="kapeman" reply="9" id="2988405"]Brad, Are you only focusing on bug fixes or are you looking for suggestions? If so, are you only going to do mod-type fixes and no interface changes? Thanks![/quote] Just gameplay. Only things that I can do. I can't change UI. Often times, there's a handful of "simple" things that are really destructive to gameplay. Let me give you

It was supposed to be released with v1.2 then v1.3 broke it internally and so I'm having it sent to me so that I can work on it and v1.4 at the same time to make sure they get along.

Fixed a crash issue caused by multithreading.

Thanks!