Talk:Bugs, Issues and Support/@comment-122.148.239.150-20140308160700/@comment-5395153-20140309145045

Hi Vuk11,

For the stuttering issues, have you turned Particles down to Minimum or off altogether? Aside from that I've got little idea sorry :( (Espee/Faestus might know what's going on though I haven't seen him anywhere for at least a couple of months).

There were so many new items made; I couldn't list them very easily :S (it would also take aaaages to do and I haven't the time at the moment). It is possible to see them in the Items.xml file though (within Items.xcr) if you'd like to see what they do.

Thanks for pointing out the lack of documentation, I'd never noticed. I think I made it more of a changelist instead of a readme which wasn't intentional. Anyhoo, at least it's possible to see the gist of things on the patch's download post on this Wiki :). Other than that, much of the balancing changes were made as a result of PvP and PvE playtesting by those credited.

I don't think Charisma or Dexterity have changed since 1.03.24. To my knowledge heroes have always had a sped up conversion speed based on their level.

I'll try to explain some of the major changes though (restricted Generals, superpowered Titans, the change to Temples and some of the new Items which are particularly special):

Anyway, hope this helps and apologies if the explanation is a little opinionated (I haven't much time to write correctly at the moment). If there's anything else you want explained, feel free to ask :).
 * The first of the big changes (it was also amongst the first changes to be made before the patch was released) is the restricted generals. This change is also probably the most controversial change. A restriction of the number of generals a player could have out at the same time was desired (but not as desired as no conversion abilities but resurrectable heroes), but that required access to the source code so the production throttling of generals was done instead. There were at least three particularly important reasons this was done. Firstly, it was so that the 'spam generals' strategy didn't exist anymore. Secondly, it was immensely unfair to the poor Undead and particularly Dwarves which could only produce their generals at their actual level 5 keep, which proved to be a catastrophic disadvantage compared to the Reaver and Minotaur King spams of other players. Thirdly, it was because their conversion ability was spammed and abused to death - which made normally tactical conversion and counter decisions mean nothing. I dare say it was even more expensive to actually defend mines because the generals themselves were powerful enough to go through towers and even defensive positions (particularly the Minotaur King). Also, the AI were very abusive of generals as well (the higher level AIs still do somewhat if they can level multiple keeps to 5).
 * Superpowered Titans were an easy change - they should now be capable of felling armies instead of succumbing to them. They used to be pathetically weak, often being downed by a small group of missile units or even a single Warrior Hero. With their new toughness and power, they can now act as they should and as they were originally concepted - as game changers.
 * The changes to the Temples were made partially because access to another race's arsenal nerfed those races a bit (particularly the Ssrathi), because the Temples also provided an unfair advantage to the Ssrathi (if they captured a Snake Temple, they got access to most of their race's units. Can't remember if the same thing happened with the Daemons and the Infernal Temple or not too) and because it was possible for Archons to actually rush bases at the very start of the game when playing with low level characters (particularly the bases which used fire towers).
 * Some of the new items are particularly important. The most important new line of items though are the Crystals of Power, which effectively make Intelligence relevant to wizards which want to use two or more spheres of magic. The Crystals raise Mana Regeneration at the cost of an increase of Spellcasting Failure. This means it can't really be easily used by wizards which only have one sphere (because they'll lose the ability to cast higher level spells usually), but can be for those with more than one because the lower level spells are much easier to cast (a high Intelligence stat will compensate for the Spellcasting Failure of the Crystal. Normally there would be little need for a high Intelligence stat if the spell could be cast at 100% chance anyway).