Latest Release Notes (0.9.132.2)

[Ludovic]

• Characters now have opinions about each other in addition to being able to have various relationships (rival, friend, animosity, etc.)
• Character Opinions are based on several factors such as personality, alignments, factions, certain relationships/events and more. The values and the contributing factors can be inspected from the Followers window.
• World generation now has a wider variety of pantheons, mythos templates and deity domains. A slightly higher number of deities with a higher number of domains will also be generated, making for more interesting dynamic pantheons and cosmic forces.
• Expanded the specialized culture/religion/race logic for the major non-standard races: demonic/faerie/celestial/elementals. This will improve any mechanics interacting with these concepts for characters/units/factions belonging to the mentioned races.
• Added dynamic relationship events to character AI routines. This will allow friendship and rivalries to form. For now, the chances have been tuned low and the pool of considered characters restricted. This is to avoid performance issues and event spam. With future updates this will be tuned to more common, while not impacting performance too much.
• Characters now have desire values for various offices and tasks. This can result in character discontent depending on the strength of the preferences and character personality traits. Worst case, this can cause characters to leave a faction.
• Characters can now be Assigned Tasks directly from the follower window, opening up a window starting with categories and then drilling down to the specific available tasks.
• Fixed Warding mastery not giving correct resistance bonuses in some cases.
• Added Zombie Beasts unit type.
• Added Zombie Critters unit type.
• Research projects can spawn various quests. This is still a work-in-progress feature, so many of the quests may not function correctly or even be completeable. Research can still continue as normal, and the quests will made be fully functional as soon as possible.
• Completing Research will now increase Mastery progress in most cases. The masteries affected depend on the nature of the project, and the amount of progress is a function of the current mastery level and the project power level. An expensive and difficult project will give more progress and be useful at higher levels, while more basic project will mostly affect low levels of mastery and have strong diminishing returns at higher levels of mastery.
• Not being able to pay upkeep for characters will cause discontent, which can eventually make them leave.
• During world generation the grouping of deities will consider aspects/alignment to improve the theme and consistency of groups.
• Improved dynamic unit type generation with better variety and more naming templates.
• Added a few UI tweaks to spell casting during battles to make it more user-friendly.
• Fixed an update bug during battles where the magic section didn't update on all interactions.
• When starting a new game a random Wizard template is now chosen as the initial selection.
• Construct mechanics gained via Mastery progressions is now displayed in the relevant UI when inspecting Mastery types.
• Ressurection spell no longer has an unimplemented effect and will actually ressurect casualties during battle.
• Mass Ressurection spell no longer has an unimplemented effect and will actually ressurect many casualties during battle.
• Fresh Meat: New Necromancy spell which buffs and heals a Zombie unit by consuming corpses from the battlefield (which makes them unavailable for ressurection).
• Fixed a bug related to the Animated Weapons spell.
• Deity/Religion and Alignment interaction logic implemented to improve available options for proselytization, the resolution of various events and general mechanics regarding characters and religion.
• Deity group and relationship tracking improved to improve resolution of several cosmos/religion mechanics.
• Assignment of characters to city/camp leadership is now impacted by culture and tribal mechanics. In some cases assigning a character with the wrong culture will now be blocked.
• Improved dynamic text generation to better handle some aspects of grammar.
• Added numerous new tooltips and expanded the breakdown/descriptions of many mechanics and calculations.
• Fixed several crash/hang/savegame bugs.
• Increased the variety of flag colors/symbols for minor realms.

[hooster1]

Ah, that's what the battle magic line of spells do.

Perhaps a note in the spell description would make this a little more intuitive, or when you hover over the amount of mana in the battle window, show how the total is achieved.

Base mana 20
Minor Battle spell +10
Lesser Battle spell +15
Medium Battle spell +20
Other spells +40 (there will be other spells, right?)
------------------------------
105
Wild magic -50%
----------------------------
available magic 53

[Ludovic]

The battle magic spellcraft aren't spells as such, it's more of an arcane tech tree. The bonus from traits is shown on the Ruler tab under Quests & Victory Conditions. That's probably not an optimal location, and the entire calculation really needs to be shown somewhere. Another source for battle magic that will be added is Mastery, where high levels should give either a straightforward battle mana bonus or one reserved for spells of the specific mastery, although that might overcomplicate things. Perhaps the same effect could be accomplished through something like "one free spell of level X or less per battle".

As for the relevant UI, I am consider merging the Magic and Quest/Victory Conditions into a "Faction/Wizard/Empire" window (with relevant tabs) to have a better home for information that sits somewhere between Magic and Ruler/Empire.