AVWW Post-Release 1.056-1.057 "Brimstone Highlands" Released!

This one does yet some more polish/fixes, as well as adding some new content.

The largest bit of new content is an entire new region type/biome (for the first time since beta started).  The visuals and feel of this new region type (craggy highlands) are already really different from the other region types, but they'll get even more unique with time in terms of specific buildings and such.

Additionally, continents in general now have more water breaking them up, making for interesting barriers you have to cross more often.  And with the two of these changes combined, continents are now all-around large even starting with the first one.

Beyond that, there's been a pretty hefty rebalance of all the spells to get them to a better place.  Feel free to look at the AttackInfo.csv in the RuntimeData folder after you run the game once and let us know if there are tweaks you think we should make to our formula for determining the relative power of spells.  Balance can never be reduced to an exact science, but we're much closer now than we were prior to this week, which is great.

And that's not remotely all!

Now settlement structures all give minor continent-wide buffs to your civilization as soon as you construct them.  All the settlement structures have always had a purpose, but it's a long-game sort of purpose and presupposes that you plan on using guardian power scrolls and improving the skills of NPCs in the related professions.  Now you get an incremental immediate bonus just from building the structure itself, which should help to erase the sense that some people had that buildings were "pointless" if they weren't playing a scroll-focused style.

Another biggie is the addition of randomized enchant-style stats that are hardwired into individual characters, making them more unique.  This is something that players on the forums were really excited about a few weeks back, and we only now have had time to implement it.  But it means that now aside from the name/portrait/time period specific stats/base stats variance, there's now a completely random extra-bonuses variance with each character.  The idea is that if characters are more unique (in the sense of hard to replace in an exact sense), that helps players to care more about them in a mechanical (as opposed to an emotional) sense.

Oh, and we added a new monster and a new miniboss.  The new monster is specific to the craggy highlands (except when migrating or as part of battlefield missions or anachronism missions, of course), but the new miniboss shows up in about half of the region types.

Aside from last tweaks and bugfixes, this really is winding down toward 1.1.  I'm not sure if that will be on Monday or Tuesday -- that depends on how fatigued the press seems on Monday, as well as how many bug reports/change requests come in for us over the weekend.  But aside from this last jolt of new content to make 1.1 even more exciting, we're definitely trying to wind down and keep the bug count as close to zero as possible, so that then we can move on with larger new features for 1.2 after that.

More to come next week.  Enjoy!

UPDATE: 1.057 is now out with some bugfixes.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.