So how is v1.4 coming along?

I'm working on v1.4 today.  I'm improving the way the AI makes use of spells which, as you can imagine, is tricky because it's very subjective.

The AI was mostly just using arcane arrow for instance because it's cheap and usually works. The AI wasn't valuing the importance of killing players quickly (just efficiently) thus would end up getting creamed in tactical.

I wish I had a couple months to put into WOM's tactical battles but realistically, I can either work on WOM or Fallen Enchantress. The FE tactical battles are totally different so it's an either/or thing.

Frogboy,

I know I'm just a lowly user, but if I could offer a suggestion, what 1.4 needs more then anything else is just a couple of bug fixes.  There are several bugs that each are not necessarily that terrible, but together they make the game feel broken.  I posted a list earlier of three that I thought were critical.  I really feel that this is more important to making 1.4 work well then changing how the tactical AI works.

Do you have a specific example in mind?

As a human player I can roll over the AI with just 3 spells; Arcane Arrow (50% dam), Spell Blast (Area of Effect), 33% dam), and Touch of Entrophy (30 points of damage); however, for this to be effective the Sovereign needs to put all of his level up points into Intl to generate the maximum amount of damage. If the AI does not boost its Int this strategy is useless for all you have is Arcane arrow doing 5 damage and Spell Blast doing 3 damage. The AI could counter my spell blasting sovereign with Spell Immunity; however, it never does so.

If my AI did not have a high Int I would focus on using; Spell Immunity (if facing a powerful enemy spell caster), Wind Wall (if facing strong archer units), Dodge, etc.

If i had to choose between new features versus bug fixes, I vote for bug fixes as well. Modders can change the diffciulty and stuff like that, but often can't fix bugs.

(for the record, I dislike advocating the Oblivion-style "let the modders fix it" mentality to developers, but in this case, I agree).

I actually stopped updating a mod (and playing the game) just because the game (1.3) had so many bugs in it. So yeah, I would say bugfixes > game tweaks.

I've been fixing bugs as well (hopefully noticed in v1.39 already).

I'll look at item 1 mentioned.

Item 2 isn't really a bug, it's just saying that when a unit goes into a city, it takes time for it to rest.  It's the difference between living "in the field" and in a city.

Item 3 I've seen reported but haven't been able to reproduce.  It should be easy to fix though once I figure out what precisely is the problem.

is there a specific example of something on the main  map that isn't showing up on the cloth map?

Of course item ¤2 is a bug, you directly end up with a weaker unit just because you place it inside a city.

Goodie huts are the things that don't show up on the cloth map that appear on the zoomed in map.  I often have the experience of stepping on a seemingly empty space on the cloth map, and getting the message that I've just stepped on a goodie hut.  More distracting is to zoom in after moving a unit a ways, and see that they walked by one or more goodie huts, because they weren't visible on the cloth map.

(this one has been hard to report, because, I believe, that if you save and reopen the game, the hidden huts reappear.)

Isn't unit damage = damage per person x healthy members in the unit?  If not, then it's just a jarring interface issue and it makes sense to be relatively low or never on the change list.  However, if that is how damage is calculated then losing a significant chunk of attack capability when I move into a city to defend it from the rampaging Foozle that's about to attack... seems like a problem.  And by problem I mean bug.

[Edit]: Heavenfall beat me to it - and more succinctly, too

I really feel that fixing some of these bugs will get you more bang for the buck in terms of making people feel like 1.4 is better then anything else you can do.

By the way, thanks for listening!

Like I said, *most* of the things I've been doing are bug fixes.  Some obvious, some not.

The UI stuff is something I've been working on for 1.4.  The cloth map stuff is something that I'm not seeing.

This Thursday's update hopefully will get us a lot closer to a final release of 1.4.

As I think the majority of us have said, please focus on FE even if it means abandoning WoM completely. I really don't see anyone going back and playing WoM once FE comes out. Your efforts on WoM have made improvements in some areas, and are greatly appreciated, but FE deserves every bit of effort. Working on WoM while you waited for FE to get to the point where you could start contributing on AI and whatnot made sense...but if it has come to the point where it is an either / or situation, please don't waste a second of your time on WoM.

Um, really? This sounds suspiciously like the ridiculous Paradox Interactive 'it isn't a bug it is a feature' silliness that they are well known for.I don't really understand the explanation for this one. 

frogboy, there is one (bug/issue) that I have found ie a hero/sov can still enter shop and buy items even when the faction has NEGATIVE gildar. this has been in each of the versions since I found the exploit (from memory 1.1x and possibly earlier).

possible fixes are either

(1) prevent going to shop when gildar negative(quick & dirty fix),

OR 

(2) in the shop if gildar negative block all buyable items, just leaving item selling(prefered method).

harpo

The bugs that "bug" me in 1.39 are

1:  Units sent to a distant location forgetting to move, as others have mentioned before.  Happens with new caravans sometimes, and is most bothersome there because of other issues with caravan management.

2:  Old issue where to try to look at a caravan and the the info on the last caravan you looked at.

3:  Occasional freezes in tactical battles, requiring autoresolve.  Not new, but more bothersome now because high hit points make battles take longer, leaving more chance for this to happen and more time lost when autoresolve turns into autolose.

4:  Autoresolve new issue deciding when to retreat and say I lost.  I actually had one autoresolve "loss" when my side (consisting of 1 very well-equipped hero) didn't lose *any* hit points, while the bad guys lost a lot.  So I was winning even by the autoresolve's own combat mechanics, so why did it decide to make me withdraw???  I've also had several losses where my side lost maybe 20% of total hit points, while the opponents lost 70% or more before the autoresolve decided to retreat me.  This is new to me in 1.39, and is separate from the old (continuing) aggravation of having units take too many hits because autoresolve mechanics don't value mobility and non-retaliate attacks.  (Note: my armies are almost exclusively well-equipped heroes -- I suspect this might never happen to anyone with a different play style).

5:  Occasional map jitters, which continue until I exit and restart.  I suspect that might happen when the baddies cast some spell like maybe "earthquake" ?

6:  Screen not updating right away.  Like eating salted pork in combat and your hit points don't reflect the first meal until you eat the 2nd, always staying 1 behind.

Not a bug, but it would be nice if autoresolve was smart enough to let heroes whose hit points get too low eat some of the (vast) supply of salted pork I always have mine carry.

PS:  not sure how much code will be in common between WoM & FE, or how many of the issues in WoM are due to the Kumquat engine, but I would have more faith in FE (regardless of feature set) if WoM bugs were fixed.  I will be bummed if, for example, FE still has units forgetting to move and screen info not updating when it should.   Fix it in WoM and I can almost take it for granted that it will be fixed in FE.  Otherwise.....I have to assume the worst.

Possibly related question:  when/if improvements are made to Kumquat, will WoM get the new version and might that fix some WoM issues???

I would agree that FE > EWOM. I'd hate to see "guys, the AI isn't that good in FE because I spent too much time on EWOM." Doh.

[Edit] And I say this as someone who tested the hell out of the game for several months... nowhere near to some others but my point is; as painful as it is to move on, it's time.

I think at this point that WoM and FE are different enough that there isn't a great deal of commonality in the bugs and whatnot. They have basically been on different tracks for many months now, while tinkering with WoM continued, which saw the addition of recent bugs like the 'move every other turn' or whatever bug on the strategic map.

Correct me if I am wrong on this.

I agree that 2) is a bug:

'2)  When you move a unit into a city, they change their hit point count based on the defense value of the city, and this can change the number of men in the unit, and make it take a long time for the unit to heal.  This also feels really broken.'

What I've seen is this.  The units take a city over or return to it to defend and if they are normally 10/10 hit points outside as soon as they enter they become 10/18 hit point units (for eample).  This has the combined irritant of also dropping 1 of a 4 unit off as well since it is below 75% of the units new total available points.  I think entry & exit from cities should be as a % of health not as a set value.  If I'm at 100% health (10/10) before I walk into the city then I should be at 100% afterwards (18/18).  It also works in reverse if you exit and are injured to 11/18 points you are now fully healed at 10/10 outside (all 4 of teh squad are alive again).  If should drop me to the 61% of 10 (6/10) points not fully heal me.  I can see how round off could result in a gain of 1 point here or there depending on how the numbers worked out but maybe if the number was always rounded down the the nearest whole # then it would work out.

Looking forward to trying the next release...

I hope so... if the "tactical battle freezing" bug and the "goodie huts on the zoomed map don't always show up on the cloth map" bugs are still in EFE, I'm going to be pissed.  They've had 1+ years to fix those and they still haven't.

I just finished a very long game today (allied victory) without any problems in tactical battles.

I see an endless number of things that could be improved in the game (as is always the case) but I think v1.4 will be the build I have to let be the definitive version of WOM.  The question in my mind is, would most people who buy WOM off the shelf and play v1.4 be happy and I think the answer is quite definitely yes.

I am still not happy with how the AI plays in tactical battles at all nor am I satisfied with how the AI units choose to level up their units (heck, I think it would do a better job just doing a rand()).

I got a little extra time with WOM because there's some changes being made to FE's economic system that I'm waiting on.

I have to say I think it's a damn shame to consider the version we have now the last patch of the game.

First, what's going on with prestige? I have no idea how it works now. Everything just gives me a percentage - a percentage of what? And the UI does a terrible job at explaining it. I had 12.1 prestige in a city - I was gaining around 5 population every turn. Okay?

Second, spells are badly in need of some love. Almost none scale with shards or intelligence. Those that deal damage are woefully underpowered to deal with units. And, as you noticed, the AI isn't casting spells after soon a year of patching.

And this new limit you've imposed on workshops and studies and such. I just don't get it. I'm constantly lacking in materials now, even though I build a workshop every time I can. It makes metal a lot more important, because that's realistically the only way you're going to get some military units out there. And that's about the only good thing which can be said about this new system. The bad thing is that it greatly encourages me to cityspam tiny cities, fill the map with them, just to get a few extra materials and research points every turn - can you say boring?

Not to mention a huge lack of polish. There are several technologies that no longer do ANYTHING because of changes to the game. And - just to mention a few - libraries and loreshops can still be built in infinite quantities. And there are still silly bugs such as Pariden getting 50% more food from every world resource. Let's not mention the fact that their "faction bonuses" still have inaccurate text from - literally - before the game was released. And really, I'm scratching the surface.

I played a game where I had one sovereign, and a 4man squad with warstaffs and cloth in a city. 6 tiles away, the enemy had a city with 8 units with equal or better equipment. The enemy was on hard, so each of his units had around 50% more than my units. The enemy declared war on me, then camped his own city for 150 turns before I volcanoed him to death. AI? What AI? It is absolutely terrible at putting together offensives.

By the way, one of my tactics to get out of the deadlock with a vast enemy army was to research some fun new world resources from the Adventure tree - you know the ones that spawn new resources X tiles away from your first city. I sighed deeply as the ventri ore spawned - you guessed it - one tile away from the enemy city I was unable to approach.

We feel your pain, HF.  I appreciate the longstanding efforts to improve WoM, and the most recent patch is all goodness.  Still, even given that E:WoM still has a lot of problems, I think most people (myself included) would rather have Brad working on making FE an awesome game (which is looking possible and even likely) instead of making E:WoM an o.k. game.

I am also in the "just move on to FE" camp. But I'm sorry to say, E:wom is absolutely not in a finished state. And I'm not talking about the things that "maybe" could be somewhat improved. I'm talking about things that are flat out broken, and make the game unworthy of a customer.