Mephistopheles

Hello,

I am pleased to announce that we currently have over 17,000 downloads and around 100 concurrent users (peak 137 users). That is AN ASTOUNDING ACHIEVEMENT - The Age of Fear: Free World is still going very strong!

Over the last two weeks, we have applied a number of patches and improvements which are detailed below:

• NEW: Demon Pact - we have introduced a way to recruit demons! (aside from paying them thousands of gold). You heroes (but non-Holy ones only!) will have the opportunity to meet Mephistopheles himself and sign a Demon Pact...But whats the price?
  
  
• NEW: Dominate Mind - an interesting addition to demonic magic available exclusively to the Demon Mistress. This spell works in a similar way as Time-Shift - it grants a selected unit an extra turn, but in exchange said unit is damaged. However, unlike Time Shift, it can be casted multiple times on a given unit.
  
  
• NEW: Djinns unit - the Djinns Lamp quest has been expended and the Djinn himself can now join you! Will you release the poor creature from its golden prison?
  
  
• NEW: Skeletal Beast - this has been promised a few months ago and during the last weekend we received the completed graphic assets. The Raise Dead spell will raise this fast unit from dead animals like Wolves, Spiders and Rats.
  
  
• UPDATE: Wave icons - we have replaced another set of icons, for example here are new waves:
  
  
  
• UPDATE: Team Size - when starting a random battle, the dialog specifies how many units will be deployed. Please note that units can be exchanged with reserve in the first turn (same as items).
  
  
• UPDATE: AI performance optimisations - it was highlighted several times that the AI is sometimes slowing down. This is the result of all the new mechanics and spells we have added - The AI is evaluating all tactical options available before deciding what to do next and this is computation-intensive. To counter that we optimised and refactored many helper methods and achieved ca. 30-40% speed up in those calculations.
  
  
• UPDATE: Raise Dead spell was nerfed a bit - raised units now have their corpse upgrade level minus one.
  
  
• NEW ITEMS: a few more treasures and other items have been added for variety: Sapphire, Sea Shell, Black Pearl, Ring of Poison Resistance, etc.
  
  
• UPDATE: Transmutter Laboratory now also upgrades Sea Shells to Pearls. The upgrade price has been raised to 2,000 gp.
  
  
• UPDATE: Units in Nairi's campaign cost gold. Campaign has been updated as well to include gold prizes.
  
  
• UPDATE: Troll Throwers can now use melee weapons.
  
  
• BUGFIX: occasionally unit xml files were not loaded correctly and this was crashing the editor. Those were the remains of localisation-related code refactoring and should be fixed now.
  
  
• BUGFIX: Fallen Knight Hero was not initially upgraded to Black Knight. We have fixed it and introduced a routine to backwardly update all Knights.
  
  
• BUGFIX: A number of bugs related to Coward, Demon Heart, Survivor, Battle Forged have been fixed- those can be actioned outside battles and it was causing bugs.