Today’s my last day in California. In the next few days, the previews should start showing up at which point I’ll be free to tell you about the fairly massive changes to the game between Beta 4 (the public build) and Beta 5 (current build) as well as what’s coming up for release.

The high level changes are:

• The finalized Game UI
• The finalized Empire Tree (ala Sins of a Solar Empire)
• Finalized City and Unit UI
• Finalized Tactical Battle UI
• Finalized Font Display (i.e. the replacement of the placeholder fonts with the final game fonts)
• The Finalized Technology Tree
• Civilization, Warfare techs are fairly similar to what they are now except there’s a few more of them.
• Adventure allows players to uncover rare resources, world awareness, and a number of other things.
• Diplomacy uncovers various levels of recruitable units that you can train – i.e. make friends with special races that you can then train at associated settlement.
• Magic tree lets players magnify the power of their spells if they have the appropriate shard (i.e. Morrigan’s Hammer does N damage normally but if you control an earth shard it does 2N damage, Maelstrom will do 1 tile of harm normally but do N radius out for every air shard you control. Moreover, the Magic tree will allow players to discover the special abilities within their own champions beyond their inherent ones i.e. You’ll be able to see what they are in NPCs as well as your existing ones suddenly discovering theirs).
• Zillions of other tweaks and refinements.
• Random House descriptions replacing placeholder text.
• The Finalized Tactical Battle System
• Number of Action points a spell takes to cast is based on the caster’s wisdom.
• Tons of other changes too long to list.
• The Final Quest and Notification System implemented
• Basically nearly all the quests and notable locations from the beta are gone, replaced with the final ones we’ve been working on.
• Hundreds of other game play tweaks and changes.
• And of course bug fixes galore, especially on memory (this got fixed in beta 5, I was quite concerned on this one, but thanks to users helping us, we were able to track this down to our effects system not deallocating properly and on certain newer ATI cards on 64-bit windows it could lose 100 megabytes per turn).
• The Campaign which is made entirely with the mod tools.

So in the next week or so the “gold” version will go out to manufacturing and then we’ll spend the subsequent 2 weeks polishing and enhancing for the release version that will go to users and reviewers.

I’ll go into more detail on these things in about a week. In the meantime, I’ll get back to the mods and such when I have a chance.