I have been working towards Hero's Hour v04 for a long time, and now it is done. It has all the features I wanted: More control over battles, music, sound, and a better, polished game feel. Compared to v03, there's also four new hero skills, 70 new artifacts, and so much more that comparing the two games hardly look the same at all.

version 04 - musical command

FEATURES in v04:

• Position your units before battle starts by dragging around groups of units
• More fine-grained control of units in battle with a new command-system - just right click in battle
• 2 new hero skills
• Royalty
• Combat
• 70 new artifacts
• Artifacts that give skills
• Other new artifact effects
• 3 artifact sets with unique set bonuses
• Music
• 3 castle soundtracks (castle, inferno & necropolis)
• 1 track each for battle and adventure music
• more to come!
• Sound effects
• Options menu to adjust sound and music volume

POLISH/CHANGES in v04:

• Every single unit has been rebalanced - largest changes are:
• nerfs to gremlins, pit thralls, goblins, shaman and magma elementals
• buffs to titans, spectres, grotesques, air, thunder and rock elementals
• Retouched the text in hero icon showing lvl, also writes out tired if hero is tired
• Retouched hero levelup-screen, fixing various graphical text bugs and adding a stat icon
• Fixed pathfinding not updating after picking up a treasure chest
• Fixed graphical bug that, when choosing XP from a treasure chest, would not display the correct amount of XP when using Learning
• Amount of gold gained through plunder has been reduced for large armies
• Buff spells have been made stronger
• Chain Lightning, Flame Strike and Icebolt have been changed so that they do not take into account cost of units they deal damage to
• Increased range of mana costs for each tier of spells - and adjusted effectiveness accordingly. All spells have increased strength as if they cost one more mana.
• Summoning spells have had their previous nerf revised - instead, the increase from the summoning skill has been halved. It still stacks with for instance Fire Magic skill for Summon Imps and Elemental Fire
• Stacks of rare resources now give at least 2 resources
• Dwellings have a smaller force guarding them
• Fort, Citadel and Castle each give +20% unit growth instead of +25%
• You can now right click units in a castle’s garrison to create regiments
• Neutral armies now use a random grey colour
• First aid tent will now prioritize larger units, and have increased healing speed
• Enemy AI is now less interested in attacking heroes without any army
• Enemy AI now better takes into account the strength of their hero
• Learning skill has its XP-rate bonus reduced from +25% to +20%
• XP needed to level up has been slightly increased for higher levels
• Big creatures now push small creatures aside in combat
• Option to change size of unit colour effect in battle and toggle it off, which might help slightly with slow battles
• Message showing that there is no possible path if there is no possible path where you’re trying to go
• You can no longer be offered three Unit Expert when your town levels up
• A fanfare (like the one when the hero levels up) also plays when towns level up

BUGS FIXED IN v04:

• Fixed graphical bugs in the level up screen skill selection
• Equipping a skill-altering artifact would later on disrupt certain skill bonuses, such as gaining a new spell when leveling up a magic skill
• Fixed a bug that would crash the game when an AI battle started
• Artifacts that should give resources did not give resources - now they do
• Player pathfinding would not move around friendly units, instead triggering army exchange when undesired
• Fixed player and enemy colours not working correctly in battles
• Fixed wrong building turning up in combat when several were close
• Fixed artifacts being able to teach hero skills beyond the max 8 skills
• Hiring a slain hero now correctly places them as visiting that town
• Healing Skill did not do anything - instead, healing bonuses were granted by picking estates
• Healing has had its effect reduced, and there is a new limit that you can never heal more than 80% of lost creatures

There was a prerelease of version 04, so it has actually already been updated to version 041. Yay. For instance, the game download size has been improved between the two versions, and a few other bits and bops.

Now, there's not much more left to do before v1. The current roadmap looks as follows:

• v05: Obelisk and treasure hunting system
  • Different map types
  • Save file overhaul (multiple slots)
• Future
  • More music and sounds
  • Combat optimization and more creature abilities

And then the game might be done and dusted!

Thank you everyone for playing! If you have any ideas (or bug reports), please share them! The game can be improved greatly with just a bit of help from you. Especially when it comes to gameplay balance.

You can follow the continued development on Twitter and by following me on itch.io.