Not sure how I feel about animal intellence creatures being able to cast summon spells. Glad to see weapon damage getting buffed, not nerfed!

Oh well, the world has gotten a lot more dangerous.

"Hoarder Spiders can summon Gatherer Spiders into battle"

"Giant Ravenous Harridan can summon Ravenous Harridans into battle"

We generally Nerf more than Buff because our default is to lean toward making things as overpowered as possible and then Nerf them down if they are to good.

In this case the later game weapons were buffed to reduce the midgame slog.  We want more advanced units to be more effective against earlier units and monsters.  We want the players to feel more progression, be more afraid when they see advanced units and be able to kill off enemy empires with less friction if they field armies with more advanced tech and resources.

Interesting. Could you also please have a look at the Crushing Blow ability? I still feel very strongly that 100% extra damage is far too high and the damage increase should be lowered to 50%. Most of the time the enemies can't even retaliate because they are dead after one hit so the sensible downside of losing a turn does not come into play.

Well, think of it as those monsters not actually casting a spell but simply calling for minions of their species.

Thanks for the reply. Makes total sense. ... ... in theory.

+1

I've made this change to my games with remarkable success (imo). Sure if you think about it, having only 150% attack means you are losing 1/2 a turn and it doesn't seem efficent. However, if that added bonus is enough to dispatch an enemy before they do stupid stuff...like heal....or DESPAIR....or attack....then it's worth the exchange.

In addition, I've said it before, but I'll mention it again: I've removed the +1 attack bonus from the Swarm ability and have been very impressed with those results aswell. Swarm in it's original form is way too overpowered. While the attack is removed, the increase chance to hit is still there....turning Swarm into a flanking bonus. More balanced imo.

Not much chance I'm afraid.  If you look at the old videos were they show off the Stardock offices you can see they have monitors acquired from the African surplus dumps back in 1968, so they just don't noticed that there is a problem.

When additional units are summoned, do they also provide XP when defeated when the battle is over?

Interesting question.

On a similar note: 

When you tame a monster, does the XP you are suppose to get from defeating it get removed from the XP you get when the battle is over? (ie: can it please be removed?)

Now, choosing beast lord has become even more OP!

not sure if this was a stab at me or not...

I was asking that XP be removed from the end amount for each tamed creature....tamed.

This would not make Beast Lord even more OP. This would help balance as your heroes would level slower and you would need to rely on beasts more.

we on the same wavelength? 

why would you want to remove the xp from the battle?  You defeated the monster using a spell, you should get XP.   It doesn't matter HOW he was defeated.

I wasn't even thinking about xp when I made the comment.

Now you can get two beast for the (manna) price of one.

How cool is that!

derek, regarding the ongoing issues regarding the tactical map move visibility issue (ie at present it is hard to bloody impossible to see the valid move areas(and I have a fairly good range colour vision)), the simplest suggestion I can make is to 'invert' (ie change the sign of each of the three colour numbers (red,green & blue)) this would put a light outline on dark squares and a dark outline on light squares as well as it beig a high contrast colour difference that most vision imparements could probably detect, unlike the current 'method' that a lot of people can NOT detect.

harpo

because right now Beast Lord is the strongest build to go with. I think it does matter how he was defeated.

In effect, the beast was not defeated. The beast joined your cause. There is a big difference between the two. So, in effect, why would you get kill XP when you didn't kill the unit? It just doesn't make much thematic sense to me.

Yes. I do see you point in that a spell (tame) is part of your arsenal of tatics to use against your opponent and that an XP penalty to the combat could be seen as cheaply taking away from that arsenal.

Maybe the Tame spell should be redesigned to only provide the tamed beast during combat. Once combat is resolved and thus the threat is overcome, you receive the XP. You do not receive the beast permanently. That way you would not feel cheated from XP at the end and would not have overpowered beasts under your control. 

However, out of the two balancing choices presented, I would like to see the uniqueness of the Tame ability maintained as an alternative way to produce a fighting force.

They just need to reduce the transparency, the color itself isn't the problem. The indicator overlay is probably at like 90% transparency right now, which is why it's so hard to see on so many maps, if they drop that to like 40% or 30% the underlying terrain wouldn't matter much, even better they could redesign it to be not transparent at all, because honestly the terrain means nothing so it doesn't matter if it's hidden while you are making move orders.

For my part, I don't care how or what they do.  All I want is, to be able to see where it is that I am bloody well going.  Not a lot to ask is it?

Adding fluffy slippers and bobble hats, when there is a issue with the game that can often allow the player to lose his, well thought out, tactical battle.....no competition, none at all.

Derek, we really need to fix/rework crossbows. In my current game, Gilden is fielding huge stacks of Marksmen armed with crossbow, which constitute bulk of his force. These guys cannot do more than 2-5 damage on ANY of my units. As I am starting to field plate mail paladins, he wont be able to hurt me more than clink-2 damage.

Should he be fielding bows, I could have taken at least some damage and casualties. But with crossbows? He´s essentially a paper tiger, nothing else.

Can we fix that, please? In my vision, crossbows should have:

- higher damage than bows (realistic)

- higher initiative penalty than bows (realistic - slow reloading)

- some armor-piercing ability, lets say 20%? (realistic - crossbow´s main purpose was to counter heavily armored knights)

- keep Powershot ability

This would essentialy make crossbowmen slow, heavy hitters usable againts armored targets. It would be also very interesting to implement some kind of range limit for crossbows in t-battles, which would mean you get heavy damage - armor piercing unit, but you need to move it close to frontline, which means higher risk of being caught in the brawl. But I am realist...so even the previous points would be fully sufficient

Please consider this...thx!

That i would like as i want to mod this game but just want to do small tweaks to lots of stuff, not replace everything. That also makes it easier to merge mods when we see right away what has been changed because the rest insn't included.

I also think the crushing blow ability is way too strong; so long as you hit them first you are almost sure to win. It's not rare in game that i dispose of a whole enemy force on my first move (using rush ability) because crushing blow just destroy them in one hit. I think it's a cheap way to win battle. 
 

I second this. Crossbows in real life were the bane of knights in armor because those bolts would pierce their plates with ease and any peasant could be proficient with them (crossbows are much easier to aim than normal bows, they requires very little training).

Edit: they could also have a special ability that would mimic their real life counterpart; Preloaded. Preloaded would just mean crossbows have no initiative penalties on first turn because they are loaded in advance (something you can't do with bows), thus only need to pull the trigger to shoot. 

OP updated - the v1.4 beta is now live for anyone who wishes to opt-in.

Sweet.

I'm a little disappointed to see very little/no UI updates/improvements. 

Am I reading the changelog wrong? I mean, 1.4 was supposed to be the UI patch...

I don't mean to look to gift horse in the mouth...but?..

Patch isn't done but it is somewhat discouraging that there aren't any ui improvements listed yet.

^ Agreed.  I wonder how much longer they plan on neglecting that notorious 'changing cursor' bug...