• Game settings now have a panel for modifying mechanics in the same manner as mods can do. This includes constants related to mana nodes, road building, character hire pool and more.
• Mods can still modify mechanics. The order of priority is 'Game Settings' > 'Mods' (by load order) > 'Built-in Defaults'.
• Export button available during setting to export currently overridden mechanics to a text file, which can then be used in a mod.
• Additional options for custom units, such as lances for cavalry (not taking up a weapon slot), holy warriors, fleet of foot, berserkers, unyielding, etc. Availability depends on cultural factors.
• Custom unit types that are not available to lacking city/fortress/tower upgrades are now listed when 'unavailable' is toggled in the recruitment panel.
• New special culture weapon variant: Hornbogi.
• New construct/golem material base templates: Copper, Crystal, Gold.
• Break Defense now has a wider and more smoothly scaling ability to reduce the effectiveness of defensive abilities/equipment
• Melee fend/parry chance is now impacted by additional equipment traits/abilities and unit abilities. This applies to source and target of an attack both (depending on abilities/traits).
• Crystal Deposits can now spawn from additional events
• Population alignment variation/overrides now affect grouping/description in various places. For example, instead of '2 Ogre Noble' where one is good and the other default neutral, the game can now show '1 Ogre Noble, 1 Ogre Noble (Good)'.
• Wizard Templates can now be cloned.
• More detailed unit round results can now be shown during grid battles on unit selection.
• New spells: Voltaic Blitz (Air), Chime The Bell of Unity (Celestial), Intractable Infection (Pestilence)
• New (unit) Mark type: Vampirism. Exists in Lesser/Normal/Greater versions as the other Marks.
• New custom unit special options: Shadow Warriors, Old Guard, Druidic Warriors. These are available based on cultural traits.
• New item: Ring of Futuresight.
• Added more Divine Favor Boon options for some domains.
• Some ranged attacks now have a minimum range (in addition to maximum) within which they are usable. This is to represent various arcing attacks or similar, that simply aren't usable at short range.
• Attack Reach now has a greater impact on battle resolution. Not quite as much as I'd like, but closer to that point.
• Mythos Editor can now import directly from a save game file, allowing a randomly generated mythos to be saved for reuse in another game - and modified (although not for the actual on-going save game) if desired.
• Added a filter toggle to the Spellbook panel to hide/show battle/world spells as relevant.
• New game setting options for Favored character mechanics and loyalty impact added. This range from free use of Favored characters to limited use - and from high loyalty impact to no impact.
• Fixed a bug causing custom unit type designs to not be deleteable under several circumstances.
• Fixed a bug sometimes causing save game corruption during autosave. It could range from inconsistent or missing data to creating completely unloadable save files.
• Fixed a bug causing empty dungeon expeditions to linger and cause various confusing messages and/or error prompts.
• Fixed a bug causing weapon variant tags to not apply correctly
• Fixed a bug causing equipment melee shock modifiers to sometimes not apply correctly
• Fixed a number of text/spelling errors
• Fixed a bug causing Set Defense to sometimes reduce defensive effectiveness rather than the opposite
• Fixed a bug causing custom unit types to sometimes not be recruitable at sites they should be.
• Fixed a bug causing multistrike to not be considered correctly in AI considerations of attacks and expected battle outcome.
• Fixed a bug causing battles to sometimes not end when they should due to a stalemate.
• Fixed a display bug related to city culture and effects.
• Fixed a crash bug involving custom unit design.
• Fixed a bug relating to a unit being affected to resistance and vulnerability to the same damage type (from effects, etc.) not always resulting in the correct combined outcome (ie +2 and -1 should yield +1).
• Fixed a number of bugs causing missile attack range to incorrectly calculated and allowing for attacks at outside the allowed distance, or sometimes not within the allowed distances.
• Fixed a number of attack resolution bugs that affected both auto and manual resolution making some units less effective than intended by not triggering some abilities and inherent attack bonuses.
• Fixed a bug causing faction alignment override to not always be applied as intended.
• Fixed a bug related to Wizard Tower upgrade slot unlocking.

It's available on the beta branch, and will be put on the main branch tomorrow. This includes some of the patch notes for the latest main branch update, but I got the notes messed up, so I have to merge them into a single update. The last update, which is thus included in this, took a lot longer to release than expected. Quite to an extreme degree, really. A very nasty save game corruption bug was discovered, and it took a long time to identify - and then an almost equally long time to fix. Hence these patch notes are also somewhat sparse. But save game corruption is a really horrible thing in a game such as this, so I didn't think there was any way around giving that particular issue my full attention until fixed - even if it was relatively uncommon to encounter the bug. Especially when it turned out the risk increased the longer the game had gone on and/or the large the game world you're playing in was. I'm really glad it is fixed now. I also spent the time creating new ways to debug and troubleshoot save game problems, which will help if/when future bugs occur related to save games. Although I really do hope nothing like this bug turns up soon - or even at all. It was quite a tribulation to identify the flaw in my save game code (for those interested in the technical details it was related to some thread synchronization problems when autosaving in the background, and one thread erroneously assuming the save was done and letting turn processing continue while the other thread was reading the game state).

[ 2022-09-06 18:04:23 CET ] [ Original post ]