I've been hard at work throughout the week, doing many small features, changes and fixes. The sum of the parts is, er, an absurdly large amount of stuff? There's a lot of Quality of Life features, such as the caravan that automatically transports units to towns and armies. There's a major rework for the Decay faction, adding two new buildings. The other factions only receive one new building each. That's still a lot! Three new creatures. 

And much more than the features listed here are the tons of changes. So many. It's ridicolous. 4 pages of changes, my document says.

Well, let's see if we can't make that a bit more manageable.

FEATURES

• Each faction gets a new faction specific building in town
  • Order gets the Hostler
  • Wild gets the Grizzly Den
  • Arcane gets the Aether Forge
  • Decay gets Soul Transmuter and Throne of the Dead
  • Hell gets the Chamber of Rituals
  • Horde gets the Sky Pillar
  • Enclave gets the Incubation Chamber
• Recolours for all units, every fourth unit in battle getting the recolour
• Soul Beacon (Decay faction mechanic) rework
• Town Conversion has been redone and now works correctly
  • Town is rebuilt randomly with the resources spent on the old town
• Caravan system
• Better telegraphing of battle effects such as luck and morale
• Updates to the Enclave hero portraits, hero animations in battle, town visuals
• A third battle theme
• Improved graphics for the demon portal, and it can now be manually placed on the battlefield

DECAY FACTION MECHANIC REWORK

• Soul Beacon can now be built at town level 1
• More enemy units defeated enter the Soul Beacon
• Units raised through the Soul Beacon instantly join the Garrison without having to spend any gold
• Instead, Beacon Power is used. The less Beacon Power, the more slowly the Soul Beacon works - but even at negative numbers, the Sould Beacon continues churning out new undead soldiers
• The upgrade path of the Soul Beacon now goes Soul Beacon > Soul Transmuter > Soul Siphon
• The Soul Transmuter unlocks Bone Shooters, a new early game ranged unit only accessible through the Soul Beacon mechanic
• It also allows you to spend Mercury to regain Beacon Power
• The new building for the Decay faction is the Throne of the Dead, which will allow you to turn living creatures into undead ones, supplying extra beacon power at the same time

CARAVANS

Dwellings on the adventure map spawn new units each week, as you may know - you may also know it as tedious to have to move each and every one of them. Thus, Caravans were introduced. They function exactly like a normal army, and can be turned back into one at the click of the button. However, Caravans automatically move towards the nearest town or army and will join up with them. No need to do all that micromanagement! And if you do want to micromanage, turning a caravan into a normal regiment takes just a single click.

Okay, so thank you for reading through guided tour of the main highlights of the update. The main weight of it though is still to come, though. No handholding. Only minor features and changes, as far as the eye can see:

MINOR FEATURES AND CHANGES

• Great Demons and Arch Demons have had their “teleports constantly” ability reworked into “teleports when they want to”
• Resource change signs now count up/down to the value displayed
• Press Flee to instantly exit a duel
• Fixed a bug that made units coming from the same reserve share orders even when they shouldn’t
• Duels have been rebalanced to have a less steep curve
• Importance of a units rank on trigger chance for debilitating unit abilities (confusion, petrification, fear), meaning that elite units are less easily neutralized
• Elite and boss units now show health-bars
• Hydras no longer inflict fear
• Made first aid tents prioritize raising permanent and high-rank creatures
• Unit recolours now apply to every 4th creature in a stack instead of 25% of creatures
• Hellhounds and Lavabeasts are now fast
• Spiders and Ice Elementals now have a chance to slow attackers
• Added the Hostler to Order towns, giving permanent +4 movement to heroes and regiments
• Arcade now gets their Mages’ Guild, Temple of Air and Shrine of Water each one town level earlier
• Mages’ Guild, Temple of X and Shrine of Y are cheaper, especially the latter
• Added the Grizzly Den to Wild towns, which gives Grizzlies over time, rate of which is increased by having Anima and Forest Spirits in town.
• Added the Aether Forge to Arcane towns. 
• Slightly lowered the rate of buildings having requirements (making long chains less likely)
• Rewrote the systems for putting units in the infirmary so that the mechanics are identical between normal and auto-battle
• Made casualties from autocombat more random on a unit-by-unit basis
• Upgraded units will no longer have less health or damage than their unupgraded versions, even if this screws up balancings
• Heroes can now fight unaided by an army
• Heroes now have a significantly higher base health and deal twice as much damage in battle
• Forest Spirits have been made stronger and Anima have been made weaker
• Added the Soul Transformer to Decay towns, which allows you to raise Bone Shooters from the Soul Beacon. Also allows you to exchange mercury for more Soul Beacon power.
• Added the Throne of the Dead to Decay towns, which allows you to turn living creatures into undead ones - and additionally gives Soul Beacon power when doing so.
• Added the Chamber of Rituals to Hell towns. This gives any visiting hero a free level-up.
• Added the Sky Pillar to Horde towns. This gives two free Thunder Elementals each week. Additionally gives any visiting hero +1 luck.
• Added the Incubation Chamber to Enclave towns. This gives free worms when you sacrifice artifacts to the hydra god. Additionally boosts growth of worms, swamp arrows and lizgionnaires.
• Heroes now always show healthbars
• Satyr Minstrels now spawn 2 Anima on death instead of three
• All units have been rebalanced. After limiting upgraded units’ strength to their unupgraded version, some units, as expected, became OP.
• As a temporary function for the Aether Foundry (which will have a different use later on), now gives +1 knowledge and +1 spellpower to any visiting heroes
• While holding shift, units close to your mouse will show health-bars
• While holding alt, all units will show health-bars
• Hero portraits have been changed, reduced to a smaller, higher-quality pool.
• New Enclave hero portraits (before, there were only 4 in total) - thanks to Krisys as well as IKnowKingRabbit
• Enclave now have animated hero sprites in battle like the other factions
• Melee heroes now attack all enemies around them
• Damaged units will no longer be healed by several healers at the same time - and that healing may no longer bring the unit above max health
• The slow effect that Bone Shooters, Spiders and Ice Elementals get now decreases speed less
• Spiders and Ice Elementals now correctly have written in their descriptions that they slow enemies down
• Bone shooters now fire bones
• Regiments now show up with their ragdoll on the HUD instead of portrait
• A larger area of the world map is now visible at the start of the game
• Hero portraits now have outlines
• The Gryphon Tower now is protected by Hatchlings, Friars and Gryphons, and spawns weekly gryphons instead of knights
• Reinforcements spawned from Adventure Map dwellings now start as Caravans, which will automatically move towards the nearest town or army. They can be diverted at will
• Once more synchronized town perks with visual upgrades of the towns
• Demon Portals (Hell’s faction mechanic accessed through the Infernal Gate) can now be moved around on the battlefield at the start of the game and will avoid intersecting with battlefield obstacles
• Demon Portals now have a maximum number of summons, triggering between 10-30 times.
• Demon Portals have improved graphics
• Demon Portals no longer trigger at the same time when both sides of a battle have access to them
• Demon Portals now have a larger rate of summoning higher tier units
• Morale and Luck triggers are now more clearly telegraphed
• Several unit effects (protection, ethereal, etc.) are now more visible
• When manually moving the camera, automatically disables the camera following moving armies for 3 seconds
• Upgrading a unit in town now merges it with stacks of the upgraded version in the same army
• Disabled the Training Grounds working on bosses (hydras, dragons, etc)
• Ranged creatures flee for less time before starting to use melee attacks instead

And look, now you can see much further at the start of the game. What you can also see is the new Gryphon Tower, which gives Gryphon Hatchlings now - tiny Gryphons - which specialize in eating bugs:

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a bug that made charging and leaping units deal damage relative to the opponent’s damage rather than their own
• Fixed an exploit that could give you infinite money in Duel mode by selling more creatures than you had
• Fixed a bug that had elementals in Duel mode be hired as upgraded versions (though there is no upgrades for elementals)
• Fixed Raise Dead and Resurrection crashing the game
• Fixed a bug that disabled war machines if hero had too high a level of engineering skill
• Fixed a bug where units taking damage from poison or fire inflicted their own attack statuses on themselves
• Removed a colour palette from the Enclave unit spritesheet
• Fixed an exploit where you could hire infinite units by saving and reloading on day 1 of the game
• Fixed a bug that crashed the game when interacting with an obelisk spawning treasure in a desert in Spanish
• Fixed pairs of mutually exclusive buildings where one would have the other as a requirement
• Fixed some bugs in how units spawning Anima were treated by the balancing simulations
• Fixed a bug that made certain units not show up in micro armie
• When forfeiting a duel by pressing Flee, dying Wild units will no longer spawn Anima
• If a hero wins combat without any units left, they will no longer be seen as defeated
• Fixed a bug that would cause minor AI heroes to get unreasonable amounts of units in late game when the AI controls several towns
• The “go here” buttons above towns and heroes in the UI now correctly only work while not within an UI window
• Once more, rate of fleeing has been increased
• Fixed a bug that could leave a stack of zero units in the Soul Beacon
• Fixed a bug that would sometimes make elementals draw as the wrong elemental including Hatchlings
• Fixed a bug that made converted towns move their access point to their top left corner, and others bugs dealing with converted towns
• Fixed a bug that made the game crash when sacrificing an artifact to the hydra god from your bag
• Fixed several bugs from builds between v091 and v0931

And finally, that's it.

I really want to do new features, but I also really want to reach the v1 GAME IS RELEASED WOO state before adding those new features. What's missing until I'm at v1?

• 8th faction
• More polish
• Tutorial
• More music by Tundralaks
• Perhaps roaming armies feature and other requested features that are small enough to be done in less than a day

And that's a lot of work, I guess. One bite at a time. And seeing how much has been done in just the week since v09, it makes me optimistic.

Thank you all for following the strange journey of my silly little game. And I'll see you soon!

- ThingOnItsOwn out!