RedShirt - Speaking of hijacking threads, perhaps you should post this in the support forum.

version 1.09p

2 games, Medium Map, Max Factions, Played as a Custom Empire/Custum Leader

 So far been testing out the Hero~Zerg strategy for starting games.

   Both games were played on normal & hard. My empire dramatically outstrips the AI players in terms of Faction Power rating without ever building a single Unit. By turn 20-50 having 15+ heros and 1,ooo+ gilder & 500+ surplus ore was easilly acomplished. Generating gilder, tech & lore due to recruited Hero abilities kept maintenance costs at nearly nil for those 50 turns. Earning 20+gilder per turn this way seemed easy to do in both games. The AI response was better than previous versions, especially for defending the capital. However, diplomatic AI is still severly lacking. It is still possible to Declare war on a faction numerous times within a single turn. And doing this via Diplomacy for Gilder & Resources again dramatically increases your Empires/Kingdoms treasury (* see crash note #1).

   I see a faction agreeing to that Peace treaty multiple times in a turn or even over the span of several turns as an exploitable feature of diplomacy. But it sure feels godly when your that powerfull that early in the game; >','<

   Also note that it is still possible to buy items from a rival faction shops without agreeing to a NonAgressionPact. Simply move your Hero unit adjacent to said rival faction & wait for the area of influence to overtake the square your they are in. Then buy everything you need & leave or camp that hero & trade those items to another hero 1 square away for transport to your main host.

Crash notes & other Bugs during those 2 previous games:

1; Save Game Killing Crash after declaring war on 1 faction 9 times in 1 turn for gilder & resource rewards from 9 factions. Crash persistant on End Turn even after successful save game after 9 diplomatic Was Declarations. Save Game crash avoided by simply spacing out the war declartions over 2 turns. This exploit was repeatable every turn afterwords as well. With very few corrupt games metioned above. Seemed it was simply 'luck' that determines if the save game killing crash occurs.

2; Game crash after Capturing an enemy capitol while the hero of said city was 1 square outside the factions zone of influence & wedged between another factions zone of influence.

3; Strange resource spawn bug, saw 11 Darkling Camps spawn near the Kraxis faction in the 2nd game over the span of 9 turns while looting that factions Goodies Huts. Only played that game till turn 56, no crashes yet in that one, but I'm guessing having that many camps may have led to a game crash in late game play. Will play a later game on max dificulty to late game stage and see if it happens again.

4; Strange Goodies Hut spawns. In both games those wandering hero's of mine found patches of Goodies Huts tightly packed. 10+ in both areas. all level 1-3. loot was phenominal but felt strange to find and loot.

5; Recruited Hero disapeared from map & from the hero bar on the left between End Turn click & start of next turn. Reloading from the previous turns auto save restored the missing hero. This happened on 2 occasions after completing a low level quest with a recruited hero.

6; Recruited Hero is selected & attempts to move itself out of Sovereign stack while inside a factions zone of influence. Note, during this bug the faction was not hostile at the start of the move, the move itself was a hostile act. Doing this made the hero attempting to move disapear from game. Reloading turns auto save restored the hero. Moving the whole stack causing war made that same stack bounce 1 tile away from the target. it did not bounce the stack out of the Zone of influence.

General Impressions on version 1.09p

   Overall:   thumbs up for this patch/version

   Alot of changes if your jumping straight from 1.09e like I did. Felt a little strange getting used to all the changes. However I must add my opinion that it has been a major improvement to E.WoM since so far I've only expereinced those 2 crashes in 2 games over many hours of game play. And 1 of those crashes was due to my test to see if the AI was changed regarding the above diplomacy exploit.

   Magic had been dramtically altered. At 1st this change did not sit well with me. But in hindsight for potential multiplayer battles I now think its a very good thing. In version 1.09e it was very easy to create 8 or more Imbued Heros all of whom could have upwards to 50+ mana. My fear was that it would be a trivial thing to assinate enemy Player soveriegns with mages. Now it won't be that easy to do the same. Just takes some getting used to. As for low level attack spells, researching lvl 2 spells and Mind Thrust seems to not take all that long and with 20+ Int it does some good damage early on in the game. Duh, and its all prettier.. hehe.

   The creature spawn is also a nice touch. So far my 3rd game on rediculase has seen my soveriegn killed numerous times & my single city empire wiped from creation by those roaming beasts. LOL... about time I got a little worried about them. I'll be trying that dificulty setting again tonight. Want to see if the hero~zerg works in that mode as well.

    All in all, Stardock has not disapointed me in regards to its continuing efforts to make this game better & more enjoyable to play. So eager for multiplayer to get all its kinks worked out. Hmmn, multiplayer, drooool.

   Have fun everyone.^^

Great improvement over all, still some bugs though:

* Sometimes a unit who is killed in a fight is still alive when your back on the main map.

* Load game from within game crashes the game one time out of three (Sort of)

* Demon gate crashes the game

Regarding the build queue, I think we need "trade goods" and "housing" ala Master of Magic. Trade goods could boost gold income in the city by a simple percentage, and "housing" (or call it something more like "Development") would boost the city's prestige by +1 while it is enabled. This would go a long ways to help out in those times when we can't afford to put anything in the build queue (or can't/don't want to for whatever reason), and open up a lot more strategies in empire development--wouldn't have to see the build notification screen all the time, either.

Give an option to default to one of these when the build queue is empty, that way the notification doesn't keep popping up.

This would really add the missing element to the build queue.

One issue I noticed is that in tactical combat, if you have an opponent exactly two square away from one of your units/heroes and click directly on them to attack, the unit will move into the adjacent square and attack for a total of 1 action point. The AI appears to still have to spend 2 action points to move into the square and then another to initiate the attack. This gives the player a major advantage if they position effectively, and is rather broken in conjunction with the Dominate ability.

I've had a few games were there have literally been no monsters on the map at all. Plenty of adventurers to recruit and the AI were building their empires up, but no wandering critters to fight in all my explorations.

I just won a game with a spell of making victory.  A medium size map with almost full factions. For obvious reason I went diplo tech. Gotta say that it's quite possible to kill people by influence pushing now. Just build townhalls, missionaries, palaces, etc. Several of my opponents border cities were completely surrounded and cut off. I managed to get the necessary shards just because my influence enveloped every freestanding shard on my half of the map, and resources too. I don't however think this is overpowered. I put alot of tech and money into influence spreading, it's just that right now AI's don't counter this strategy at all.

So Frogboy if your looking for was to improve the Ai it would probably be a good idea to make  them react to players influence pushing and push back or attack you.

I think HeavenFall has a real point here and it is important that it is addressed. Yet, I think it is really two points. The first is simply a lack of late game gildar and materials sinks. If you look at the Library, the new upgrade for the study, you can see that this building is simply 2x better than a study in every way but there is no additional cost for this boost. The building does not use more specialists, nor does it cost more maintenance. It is just not a very good resource sink. This is fairly true for all improvements and units, and so as the game progresses, the player simply amasses more and more of these global resources which can simply be thrown around the kingdom at will. While I think it is cool that improvements are going upgraded versions, I think it would be far more interesting if those improvements also forced the player to make real choices with how his resources were used. For Example, instead of an autoupgrade improvement like the library that is 2x better, you add a new building that uses 2x pop and 2x maintenance for 1.9 resource. Now, some may say "why build this structure at all since you would get more simply building 2 studies?" If we consider a city which has reached its tile limit, it become obvious that why one would make a real choice to either expand his tech resource or use the pop and gildar for something else.

The second point is simply that magic is too easy to get and require almost nothing from the reset of the game to get. I think it would be interesting to mix city improvements, tech research and arcane research. Like one can only upgrade their spell level and research spells of that level if they have build the correct improvement in one of their cities. These improvements could then be part of the arcane tech path. This would add a level of difficulty as well as strategic value to protecting your spell centers. So if you have an opponent who likes to cast nasty level 5 spells but has left their city with their level 5 spell center unguarded, you can gain a strategic advantage by razing that city to take away his level 5 spell casting.

Answer to your third point - I think Sovereigns have always got some XP from all winning battles from your side (or at least hero battles).

Best regards,
Steven.