Welcome! 

Below are the changes I've added with the last update.

Faction Effects

The biggest thing this update is Faction effects, which are an attempt to differentiate the factions from one another other than map position. The core direction in the back of my mind with this was don't just create meaningless stat boosts. So of course I initially basically did just that 😅...

I started with each faction effect being 1 thing, 'improved infantry attack',  'improved towers attack', 'improved archer defense', 'longer siege times', etc., which would then be mix and matched for every faction. But this lead to every faction having a unique combination of stats. You might think, "great every faction is now super unique", but it is actually just a large burden of information to parse and remember.  "Was this the faction with 'improved infantry attack' and 'improved towers attack'? or was this the one with 'improved infantry defense' and 'longer siege time'? does it even matter?"

It was too much to remember, so I ended up combining all the little separate effects into faction specialties, 'Defense Specialty' or 'Infantry Specialty' or 'Archer Specialty', which would combine multiple effects all aimed at improving the same category.  This allows you to better predict faction effects for multiple factions who share the same specialty and have a better intuition for what collection of effects it has. It also makes Factions more unbalanced leading them to be more unique in their play style in general.

Along with faction effects I also added faction personalities to adjust how aggressive or defensive the faction is. (However this is really a placeholder for the future updates since it only affects how armies auto move if they arrive to a shared territory)

Selectable Armies

After many bugs, you can now select armies outside of a territory by clicking on their flags (if they are in a territory it will select the territory instead).  This gives you more control and allows you to redirect them mid travel if you want to change plans. 

Before this update an army had to be on a territory for you to select it. This was a very intentional design decision to make the gameplay more decisive and simpler. The only thing you had to consider for interaction was the territories (simple) and when you sent off an army to attack, well..no turning back! (decisive) The only problem is, I don't think this is the best player experience, it feels unnecessarily restrictive compared to other games and is not very intuitive. Deciding to change this seems simple but it lead to a lot of design questions to solve such as "how does the army figure out where it is?", "where does pathfinding start from?", "does the AI redirect armies and how does it decide when/where?", "how does the UI know what's going on?", all of which and more were reasons it was territory based before.

Other changes to armies involved tightening up combat especially between the different speed settings.

•  Fixed archer combat discrepancies at faster speeds (gravity was not getting calculated right)
•  Projectiles "hit" according to total travel time instead of proximity to the target
•  Projectiles "hit" their planned target position instead of where the object ended up
•  Increased arrow hit radius
•  Fixed some melee combat discrepancies where getting a new target mid attack would cancel an attack
  
•  Fixed bug where units could not re-target other units

Stronger Rebellions

At its core, the rebellion mechanic is meant as a challenge to "snowballing" that happens in most strategy games and a way to add surprising twists to the game where a dominant faction is cut out by the knees to allow others to get a chance to rise up (including the player). This has to be balanced or a problem arises, if rebellions are too strong then they become too punishing for the player and feels unfair.

Right now rebellions generally seem to be effective before the mid game at shaking things up, but after that, they are inevitably crushed by the larger factions. You may think, "well in the later game of course you should be able to crush a rebellion and should not be able to lose all your progress", which is valid, but then the rebellions are not really doing their job as a mechanic to challenge the AI and the Player from snowballing and getting bored.

Rebellions end up being weak because:

1. The territories that are prone to rebelling are less developed from back and forth war.
2. The rebel armies are weaker since they draw on the less developed territories.
3. The rebels spend their money building up territories it is not strong enough to defend long enough.

These changes aim to make rebels a bit stronger,

• Territories with over 70% unrest will flip to the rebel faction without a siege (this does not affect the army that was there)
• Territories captured by rebels have a lv1 castle automatically built so units can be built right away
• Lead rebel units start at lv2 so rebel armies are a little stronger
• Monthly unrest now calculated as (castle level x 2)
• Temples are stronger, reducing current unrest and max unrest by -25 instead of -15 to account for faster unrest accumulation
• Faction Revolt Risk is scaled up as a  faction gets larger making them trigger more frequently
• Rebel factions will inherit faction effects from a base faction and pick a random personality

Other Changes

• The mouse cursor is now context aware and will change depending on what is selected, what is hovered, and what you are doing

• The AI will now consider unit type when sending its armies to attack
• Removed coin spinning animation in UI
• changed the main menu audio to some calming gongs
• Turned off outline on building buttons to make it more clear what you can click
• Towers will not be degraded when destroyed in combat
• Towers will rebuild automatically over 30 days except when the territory is under siege
• Towers will now attack the correct unit target
• Towers will not randomly stop attacking units sometimes
• Tower attack/def calculations are more similar to units
•  Added icons above the army flag pole to indicate army level

WOW you made it to the end 😮 .... what are you waiting for, go check out the updated demo 🙂