Compatibility

• WQHD / QHD (up to 2560 x 1440 / 2560 *1600) native resolution display support (the Black & White boxes and blurry text should disappear). Fix has been verified to work up to and including a resolution of 2560×1660.
• Fixed an issue for people using Intel HD Graphics – specifically for HD4000 and Surface 2 Pro – in combination with certain driver version, that caused a crash when opening interface screens – e.g. starting the game, opening options menu, skill book, etc.

Performance

• Fixed frame drop when armies were selected.
• Fixed decreasing frame rate occurring during extended play, particularly in longer battles.
• Fixed a memory leak when Windows was locked.
• Optimized a feature effecting maps with water, which should now show increased framerate.

AI Improvements

• Fixed some cases where the tactical AI would come out from behind the walls of cities and fortresses too soon.
• Stopped the AI spamming disjunction, so players can now use global magic more easily.
• Fixed an issue where the tactical AI would cast a resurrection spell on an invalid target.
• Made ‘squire’ AI easier to beat.
• AI settings for players were changed to compensate for this change, to keep the same level of challenge on normal difficulty.
• Using the ‘restart’ option in a campaign map now returns the player to the briefing, allowing map difficulty to be changed.

Scenario & Campaign

• Campaign: Heroes being mind controlled no longer causes you to instantly lose a campaign map if you rescue them by the end of combat.

• Campaign: Heroes which are protected by the ‘resurgence’ effect – e.g. the theocrat’s ‘rebirth’ spell – can now die in tactical combat without causing you to lose the campaign map, as long as you win the battle that they die in.
• Blightmouth Crater: Closed a gap in impassable mountains.
• Blightmouth Crater: Removed two superfluous hearts of the blight.
• Blightmouth Crater: Fixed the behavior of independent armies.
• Elven Resurgence: Player 6 now starts with more gold mines, making the starting positions more balanced.
• 4th Elven Court map: Independents no longer interfere with one of the starting quests.
• 4th Commonwealth map: Fixed a message that missed an icon under specific circumstances.
• 5th Commonwealth map: A ‘defeat leader’ quest no longer reveals that leader’s position.
• 5th Commonwealth map: Fixed a story message that had overlapping lines of text.
• 6th Elven Court & Commonwealth maps: Prevented story characters from dying when you are victorious.
• 6th Elven Court and Commonwealth maps: Added a few building upgrades to starting cities to give the player a better starting situation and more options.

Other Fixes.

• Fixed settings – e.g. graphics settings – not being saved when using the ‘guest’ profile.
• Fixed an issue when logging in with usernames of two characters.
• Fixed the stack confirm movement button being disabled in some situations when a stack was auto-moving.
• Fixed a rare crash caused by a player razing a city with a heart of blight, tropics, etc in its domain
• Fixed an issue where a backstab bonus wasn’t being correctly applied. This led to situations where a unit could backstab a target without flanking it.
• Fixed a crash triggered by clicking on a “You lost your throne city!” event.
• Fixed a crash triggered by selecting a ‘Egg has hatched’ after loading the save game.
• Fixed the ‘Remove army from event list’ shortcut key function so armies are properly removed from the list.
• Fixed an issue where the ‘Protect your leader and throne city’ quest failed to complete on victory.
• The game now ignores controller input, to prevent camera drift when a controller is plugged in.
• ‘Spring of life’ now rewards units when explored.
• When creating a new custom leader, the field for setting a name is now left empty by default.

Balance:

• ‘Shrine of smiting’ is no longer ‘Devout’, nerfing ‘Shrine of smiting’ doom stacks which relied on stacking ‘Devout’ bonuses for the ‘Smiting prayer bolts’.
• ‘Shadow stalker’ now does cold damage. This fixes an issue where rogues had limited options vs. blight immune troops.
• Increased the research costs of skills to slow down progression through the skill tree.
• Increased cost of racial tier 3 unit building to 300 gold and 100 mana.
• Decreased the base production of cities.
• Fixed issue with ‘Libraries’ and ‘Observatories’ generating too much knowledge.

Features:

• Added buttons on either side of the city name that cycle through cities owned by the player.
• We added a quick save option, bound under CTRL+S by default.
• Added extra text to the preview popup when attacking a city wall. Players can now see the hit points the wall have remaining as they plan their attack.