Dev Journal #28: A Preview of v1.1

When we shipped 1.0.3, the team sat down and made a list of the things that were nagging us. Not big design questions. Not roadmap items. Just the stuff that, after a long play session, you start to feel. A few systems were slower than they had any right to be. Some encounters didn't reward you the way they should. The item pool felt thin in some places and oversaturated in others. A handful of bugs had been on the "we'll get to it" list for too long.

v1.1 is the result of getting to it.

This isn't a feature release. It's the kind of update that makes the version of the game you already own feel better to play. Here is what is in it.

Now, before I start, I have a minor rant about AI I want to get off my chest. I write these by hand. I enjoy writing them. But every app I use now, every editor, etc. offers to edit it and as soon as I let it, in come the em-dashes and the stupid, pithy, punchy writing style. It’s what’s ruining YouTube. My kingdom for something that is better than a spell checker but won’t turn my writing into AI slop. Ok, rant over. Let’s keep going.

More Items, Better Items

One of the things that has bothered me for a while is that loot in Elemental was a little predictable. By the end of a few games, you knew most of what you were going to find. That is a problem in a game built around exploration and reward.

The good news is that we did not need to invent new art to fix it. Stardock has been making fantasy games for over twenty years, and the art vault is enormous. Swords, axes, staves, helms, cloaks, rings, amulets, trinkets, oddities. A lot of it is genuinely great work that just never made it into Reforged because the original Elemental shipped with a smaller item set.

In v1.1 we have uplifted a substantial chunk of that vault into the game. New weapons. New armor. New accessories. New crafting outputs. The variety is not just visual either -- most of these come with their own effects, and we tried to give each one a reason to exist rather than being a stat bump over the last thing you found.

A few things I want to call out:

• More tiers in the middle. A common complaint was that you would find a starter sword, then a great sword, with not much in between. We have filled in the middle of the curve so progression feels more continuous.

• More flavor at the high end. Late-game items lean harder into doing something interesting rather than just adding numbers. Following our internal rule that items should do one thing -- sometimes two -- and do it well. See those em-dashes? I did that. Sorry. Moving on.

• More reasons to open every ruin. The pool of possible rewards is wider, so the ruin you ignored last game might be the one with the thing you actually wanted this game.

Fewer Items You Already Have Too Many Of

The other half of that conversation: variety only matters if the existing pool is not crowding it out.

If you played a few games of 1.0.3, you noticed it. Tilda Herbs everywhere. Splintered Staves on what felt like every other monster. Guiding Spears stacking up from goodie huts. Those drops were not bugs exactly…the likelihood values were just too high, on too many sources, all at once.

So we did the audit. For v1.1:

• Tilda Herbs drop rate is roughly halved. 36 monster treasure entries got rebalanced. The average likelihood went from 42 down to 21. They still drop. They just no longer take over your inventory.

• Splintered Staff drop rate is roughly halved. 21 monster treasure entries rebalanced, average likelihood 40 down to 20. The +15 Dodge accessory remains a great early-game find, but you should not be equipping four of them on the same team anymore.

• Goodie hut spear oversaturation is on the list for a follow-up: the root cause sits in the goodie hut rolling code rather than in the drop tables themselves, and we want to fix it properly rather than paper over it.

We also did a pass on item descriptions. Some inherited from FE:LH had unfilled template tokens or missing words. The Hunter's Short Sword, for example, has been sitting there reading "The was discontinued when much worse things than bears began killing the warriors" is now fixed.

Performance

The other thing the team has been heads-down on is performance. Elemental is a game where, by turn 200, a lot is going on. Dozens of cities, hundreds of units, an AI thinking about all of it, a tactical battle system sitting in the wings, and a world simulating itself underneath you.

We went through the parts of that pipeline that were costing us the most and tightened them up. Where you’ll notice this stuff the most is when you zoom out and see the cloth map. The cloth map was doing a lot of calculations.

The short version: turns are faster, battles load quicker, and the late game does not grind the way it used to on modest hardware. It wasn’t GPU, it was pure CPU stuff.

Bug Fixing, Big and Small

Some of these you noticed. Some you did not.

The big ones:

• Horse and warg counts now work. The top bar was showing you a stable; the unit-training screen said you had zero. Both were right. The data was desynced. Fixed.

• Units no longer render one tile offset from where they actually are. You can retire the "click the unit in the panel, then right-click to snap it back" workaround.

• Map seeds are honored on the new-game screen. Type a seed, get that seed.

• Two tactical autoresolve crashes in the post-battle elimination path, both with surgical fixes.

• Bishop's Ring works. Two empty stub definitions at the bottom of CoreSpells.xml and CoreUnitStats.xml were silently overwriting the real spell and stat. Last-write-wins is a brutal rule when the last write is empty. The ring now charges on melee hits and releases the charges as healing.

The small ones: dozens. Tooltip fixes. UI alignment. Spells that did not match their descriptions. AI decisions that did not make sense in specific edge cases. Audio cues firing at the wrong moment. Cropped portraits on four golem variants because they were sharing a Stone Golem Hero camera framed for a much taller model. v1.1 closes a lot of tickets that have been sitting too long.

Balance

Balance is the part of any strategy game that is never finished. We made passes on a few areas where things were either wrong or misleading.

Spells:

• Regeneration was telling players it fully heals the target each season. It does not, and it never did at this value. It grants +4 Health Regeneration per season. Some of you reported it as broken. You were right that the description was broken, even if the spell was working as designed. New description matches reality. We may revisit the value itself. For now, we are at least no longer lying about it.

• Elixir of Essence now works for non-sovereign champions. Previously it was sovereign-only, and when used through the found-item popup it fired twice and granted double essence. Both fixed. The same fix caught a separate bug where new army members started with HP higher than max for one turn.

• Enchantments and city radiance now agree between UI and rules. Cities with fractional radiance below 1.0 (some campaign cities like Kilford generate 0.3) used to let you sneak exactly one enchantment in even though the UI showed no slots.

• Bishop's Ring – See above. Charges on melee defense, releases as healing.

Combat and Items:

• Loot rebalance pass. Tilda Herbs and Splintered Staff drop rates halved across the board.

• Core Armor tweak. A small but felt adjustment to base armor values.

• Treasury Vault finally shows its actual percentage benefit instead of "+0%" in tooltips. It had been silently missing its ResourceMultiplier modifier.

Economy:

• Festival now provides 40% more food, up from 10%. The improvement was always supposed to be a meaningful growth bump for a celebrating city. At 10% it was flavor.

• The improvement modifier double-count bug is fixed. City Food, Gold, Mana, Production, and Storage totals are no longer counting tooltip values twice. If your economy numbers look different in v1.1, that is why. The new numbers are the correct ones.

The goal was not to overhaul anything. It was to look at what players were actually doing, which spells nobody was casting, which improvements were quietly broken, and either fix the bug, fix the description, or fix the value.

When

v1.1 will roll out as a free update for everyone who owns Reforged, and it arrives NEXT WEEK!

As always, thank you for the feedback. Most of what is in this update came from things players brought up on the forums, in Discord, in reviews, in bug reports. We are paying attention. Not in the stalking you on your computer sort of way. I mean, not yet. Soon. But not yet. But we are trying our best to make sure we are adding the things you (and we) want to see to keep making the game better and better.

Stay tuned!