Gettino close to the finish line now! Hope the rest of development goes smoothly! Looking forward to the final product. As I've said many times before, this easily ranks among the best fantast 4X games of all time. That's not hyperbolic.
That being said, I think 5.4 was a move in the wrong direction. Weapons balance has swung too far in the negative, random mobs are ridiculous, flagons are nearly non-existent, and the extra Urxen for the SK leads to non-existent chances for actually expanding, as my three games have proven. Scouts being targeted is much more of an issue than you'd think, as the constant need to fight and escape is mana draining and the alternative, letting the scout die, ruins any chance you have at scouting out areas before the SK colonizes. Not to mention that it further handicaps the player by making Rival faction discovery very difficult and finding heroes to recruit just as much so.
Speaking of Rivals, they're now even less likely to expand (and they were already very unlikely to expand) because the SK is busy gobbling up EVERY SINGLE SETTLEABLE AREA, so that new mechanic meant to create tension is nearly non-existent.
Also, there are too many shards being spawned at every level. I can't possibly defend them all when there's 17 on a small map with "few shards" selected. Why was that changed the last couple builds? 7-8 on a small map is much more feasible and fun.
Speaking of crystal shards, as has been reported already, attacking enemy mobs that sit on shards is impossible and moving your armies to do so does not initiate an attack, but rather stacks your army on top of the enemy army. Big big and pretty frustrating.
Laaltly, I continue to see the FOW bug where sometimes (too frequently) when a game is saved and reloaded, the FOW disappears and even reloading doesn't fix it. Hell, you can load an eearlier save of the same game and the problem persists.
Unfortunately, this patch was a bit of a step backwards and some of the changes really don't make much sense to me. What's the plan moving forward?
