Whether or not I do devlogs for these smaller version updates changes quite a bit, but looking over the patchnotes, I thought I kind of had to. There's just so many changes, big and small. Nonetheless, it's still save-file compatible - so if you had a game that was stuck in a crash situation, you can return now. Woo!

FEATURES in v082:

• Two new music tracks, one for adventure map, one for battles. There’s finally three battle themes - one for battles against the AI, and two that will alternate for other battles
• Optional small town management screen, automatically enabled when using UI scaling above 120%
• New marketplace screen
• Artifacts can now be dragged and dropped - old, instant-motion function now is triggered with right-click
  

The point of the small town screen is that the game now (almost) fully supports UI scaling up to 150%, though I would recommend staying at 140%. While remaking the town screen, I also went and fixed several other small, old UI decisions that could make do with a do-over.  Like adding a new marketplace and making unit recruitment use larger buttons.

POLISH/CHANGES in v081+v082:

• Faction specific buildings now have descriptions
• Units now write their tier in the description - these, however, are approximate since the actual tiers are numbers like 2.4, which is rounded to 2 when drawn
• Heroless armies can no longer claim mines or interact with adventure buildings
• Game version now written in top right corner of main menu
• Rate of artifacts in mapgen has been increased by 33%
• Infernal gate is draw twice as big on the battlefield
• Enemy heroes now flee more intelligently from battles that they are losing
• Unit costs now draw as red if you cannot afford them
• Unit hiring buttons are now much bigger and arranged differently
• A lot of changes to various menu screens to allow better compatibility with UI scaling up to 150%
• Fixing adventure buildings having text going beyond the borders of their text windows
• Saves will now keep track of what version they were saved in. v082 is compatible with v08 and v081, but this might be important for v09 if whatever changes made before then will make savefiles incompatible
• Enemy spellcasters cast spells earlier and more often
• Enemy players are now less likely to buy more than two heroes
• Enemy heroes will now update their goals each turn, making them no longer run straight into battles they can’t win
• Heroes now draw their top skills in the army overview - both friendly and enemy
• Mouseover and button click sounds have been updated
• Heroless armies can no longer claim buildings or pick up artifacts
  • A message is displayed when one tries to do this

BUGS FIXED IN v081+v082:

• Fixed Arcane Spire being able to give spells to heroless armies
• Fixed a bug that crashed the game when an enemy hero cast a summoning spell against an army with no hero
• Graphical error in Arcane Cloister
• Obstacles added to battlefield from less of a distance
• Fixed a typo in the description of Idol of Fortune
• Fixed a bug that sometimes crashed the game when capturing a town
• Fixed a bug that crashed the game when defeating units defending buried treasure
• Fixed a bug that made saving and reloading make some buildings accessible more than once a week
• Fixed heroless armies being able to pick up artifacts
• Units defending buried treasure had the same colour as the player
• Fixed free version of game still giving premium factions when playing as a random faction
• Fixed exclusive units becoming locked when starting a game with heightened starting development
• Fixed a pathing bug that had units walk into walls during sieges
• Fixed a bug that would make the headline of the Elemental Gate draw wrong when there was no elementals left
• Fixed a bug that left enemy reinforcements just outside of their castle
• Fixed a bug that made enemy heroes gain empty skills

The last feature I implemented before testing and uploading v08 was the Nomad faction mechanic - and that was a bit silly. A lot of crashes have had to do with code-changes relating to that feature. I think there was like a 30-50% chance of crashing when capturing a town and a 100% chance of crashing when defeating creatures defending hidden treasure.

I still have quite a few items on my todo list, so expect a v083 in the next couple of days. I don't have any headline features for v09 apart from the Enclave faction mechanic, so I might just make a smooth transition between the two as I try to polish up everything and improve AI as the last things before release.

As always, thank you for following the development of the game! You can get in contact here, on twitter or at thingonitsown@gmail.com.