Welcome to Hero's Hour as it was always meant to be - a game with a unique identity and not just a clone of Heroes of Might and Magic. The Identity Update brings with it sweeping changes to gameplay and to the 7 playable factions (3 of which are in the free demo version).

MAIN FEATURES

• 6 unique faction mechanics
• Changes to unit tiers and resource costs, forcing strategic decisions
• UI scaling and compatibility fixes
• And much much more

What's this? A premium version?

I'm holding a poll over at twitter, where almost nobody voted for me to continue giving the game out for free. And I guess I've put enough hundred of hours into the product for it to be valuable at this point.

Still, I don't want the game to be locked behind a paywall, and the premium version is only an option, not a requirement to enjoy the game. The "demo" version has all the same content as the premium version, apart from only allowing you to start as 3 of the 7 factions, and disabling the town conversion feature. Everything else is the same. There's still hours of fun to be had in the demo.

The game is still under development of course, but really, it is pretty close to its v1 release.

And then see below for the full patch notes.

FEATURES in v08

• Scalable UI and window size options
  
• Toggleable strategies dealing with sieges
  • Opening the gates when defending a siege
  • Letting flying and jumping units scale walls before they’re breached
• Option to skip battles (“auto combat”)
• Each faction has unique unit progressions (strengths and growth numbers)
• Each faction has a pair of mutually exclusive creatures - i.e. you can either choose Cavalry or Priests as the Order faction
• More units cost secondary resources, and those resources make sense
  • This gives faction-specific challenges with certain resources
• Gems have been removed from the game
• Class specific skill learnsets
  • Pick starting skill when you start the game
• Six faction-specific mechanics with buildings
  • Conscription Office
  • Elemental Gate
  • Arcane Spire
  • Soul Beacon
  • Infernal Gate
  • Nomad Hall
  • Fortress’ new mechanic has not been implemented yet
• The Arcane faction now has its town theme track
  • Like the other town themes, produced by the magnificent Tundralaks

POLISH/CHANGES in v08:

• The Druid and Warden heroes now start with Rangers instead of Dwarves
• Magic Arrow and Iceball now additionally deal 20% damage to enemies close to the main target
• Tiny maps with all the rare mines in the starting area now have slightly larger starting areas
• AI now spends less time on picking up units from their castle
• AI will now prefer to pick proximate goals
• Unit colouring was removed from the options menu - can still be changed by editing the opt.txt file - though I don’t know why it was ever made an option. It has very little influence on combat speed with all the optimizations I’ve done
• Magic-oriented heroes now act as ranged units
• Graphical updates to several projectiles
• Removed “daunting” threat level category - the rest have been changed slightly
• Which elements your Mages’ Guild, magical Shrine and magical Temple specializes in is now preset per faction
• Improved the unit number overlay when placing battle groups
• Fleeing with your hero and ending up at a town without a hero in garrison puts the fleeing hero into garrison
• Enemy AI are now named after their factions (seen during turn end)
• Units you can’t afford now have their cost written in red
• Undead units can no longer be raised with the Necromancy hero skill
• Town conversion feature is currently not updated for the Identity update, so expect strange results when using it
• Amount of XP used by the Demonology Hero skill has been reduced from 100% to 50%, but the rewards have also been nerfed slightly
• XP gain from easy battles is now less diminished
• Save files can be deleted

BUGS FIXED IN v08:

• When loading the game from before version 07, you no longer get 200% sound
• Fixed a part of the AI helping code that was broken
• Dead heroes still moved on the battlefield while the game was paused (a purely graphical bug)
• Fixed a bug that would crash the game when Necromancy triggered on certain elemental units
• You will always have visual access to the most recent save file

Here you see the three factions available in the free demo.

I'm hoping to do a game design focused devlog about the choices that went into the Identity update, such as why I made sets of mutually exclusive creatures, why I removed gems from the game (hehe), and the philosophies behind designing the faction mechanics.

As always, shoot me a mail at thingonitsown@gmail.com or leave a message here with suggestions or bug reports. You can follow the development at twitter, where I'm pretty active.

Have fun!

- ThingOnItsOwn out!