Alright! This update is a huge step towards the completion of Hero's Hour, and I plan to after this get right into the meat of v1 release features. It's an exciting time! v1 will be a really exciting update! But don't worry. v097, the so-called "penultimate" update holds some really neat stuff, too.

LIST TIME!

FEATURES

• New day counter
• Tutorial
• New unit abilities
  • Flying units grab enemies
  • Several units now cast spells
  • Elite ranged units get a new AOE attack
• Camp: Heroes can enter a defensive camp, boosting stats and increasing resources from a nearby mine
• Roaming Armies: Neutral heroes that roam around the map, rarely attacking. Defeating them gives extra XP and artifacts

The new day counter reminds you each day how close you are to the end of the week.

Camps allows your heroes to enter a defensive position to guard a piece of land. Guard range increases to 5x5 tiles instead of 3x3, they get extra attack and defense. Additionally, your hero will double the output of the nearest controlled mine every second day, so it also makes useless heroes more useful.

There's a lot of game design decisions here, such as making it easy to go in and out of camp-mode - just click a button, that's all. Hero's movement is tapped fully while camped - but you can go into a camp and change your mind and take them out of the camp again before end of your turn and still be ready to move next turn.

Another requested feature - roaming armies! A lot of design choices here. For instance, the original prompt was that they would take control of your mines, but there were some differing opinions on that. The final design is a bit more free.

There will be a few roaming armies on all maps - just one per region on small maps, and several per region in large maps with few regions. They generally only attack your heroes if your heroes are very weak and close, or if it's a fair fight. They move 5-7 steps each day. And they're really useful, since they give 150% experience, and also drop artifacts and other goodies.

So instead of this being a frustrating feature, it's another venue to go treasure hunting!

Nonetheless, I am looking for feedback on how this feature feels.

There's now a tutorial in-game! The tutorial takes place on a normal map with some slight changes, and it will guide you through the first 9 days of the game and then let you play out the rest of your map as you want. It takes around 10-15 minutes to complete. There's a lot of steps introducing a lot of features, but at a pace one should be able to follow along with just fine.

There are also new unit abilities in the game which make combat a lot more exciting. They're pretty difficult to show off here, so you might have to play the game yourself.

But here you the battlemages about to cast a spell on the besieged Enclave defenders. Exciting!And then there's a bunch of changes:

CHANGES

• Every single unit has been rebalanced
• More open areas on maps (less obstacles, still same density of objects)
• Minor, Major and Ultimate Shrines now give the same spell to different visiting heroes when possible
• Changed the way fog works on battlefields, making it much less likely to obscure the view of battle
• Updated shiny text has been added as header to tooltips
• Fire elementals have been recoloured to be brighter and more distinct from Efreet
• All hero names have been changed, and hero name, portrait and specialty now always fit together the same way
• Heroes for hire will now, if possible, avoid generating with the same specialty as a current hero
• Several hero portraits have been altered
• Several hero classes have been renamed
• Hell faction has been renamed to Pyre
• Changed the way hero stats are granted, giving a unique path for each hero class with parts that are random and with preset gates at level 3, 13, 23, etc.

BUG FIXES

• MAPGEN: Made it less likely for walls to be where they shouldn’t
• MAPGEN: Made it less likely for paths to be where they shouldn’t
• Cursor no longer changes to the Attack cursor when mousing over an undefended town
• Fixed a bug that made the Plaza (first tier of income building) sometimes cost gems (that have been removed from the game)
• Fixed a bug that had the treasure hunts generate a treasure spot on the coastline, crashing the game
• Fixed a bug that made pathfinding not avoid enemy armies
• Fixed a bug that might make the game hang on mapgeneration completion
• Fixed a bug that made the AI ignore spawned resources
• Fixed an error where the descriptions for infirmary and hospital were switched
• Fixed a bug that sometimes made the game hang while generating a map

EDIT: v0971 has been uploaded adding fixes:

• Removed a potential infinite hang bug relating to AI pathfinding
• Hopefully ensuring that Roaming Armies cannot freeze the game
• Mapgen fixes to make sure all mines are reachable
• Crash bug relating to putting Goblins into the Death Throne

Alright! I think that's it for this week. I'll do a short preview of what's planned to come for v1 update.

First of all, I'll be working on implementing 16 class-specific Hero Skills:

So all Generals will start with Basic Rallying, and only Generals can learn Rallying. Etc. etc. Some of these skills are simple and passive, others much more involved, like for instance the Enclave skills, Hunting and Taming. The skills come in sets - so though Generals learn Rallying and Clerics learn Blessing, they have similar effects though accessed differently.

This will all make more sense once it's in the game.

On top of those hero skills, there will of course also be an 8th faction added to the game for v1: The Lament faction!

That's still a lot of work, so I should get back to it. I hope you get to try out the new features, and I'll see you all here next week for the next update!

- ThingOnItsOwn