The board explains itself
The Compendium now explains how a dungeon crawl actually works — what torches are for, what fleeing costs you, how a party goes deeper, how many units you may take, and what becomes of the rest of them if your hero dies down there. Plus 25 more changes. Game engine 57 → 61. In-flight games were migrated automatically.
New
- The Compendium now explains how a dungeon crawl actually works — what torches are for, what fleeing costs you, how a party goes deeper, how many units you may take, and what becomes of the rest of them if your hero dies down there.
- The public Compendium now lines up any factions you pick side by side, so you can read the same unit stat across all of them at once.
- The Map key now has a Controls tab listing everything the board responds to — press and hold to inspect, how to merge, how to pan, zoom and turn the camera, and the keyboard shortcuts.
- Every faction on the new-game screen now has an ⓘ that explains who they are, how they play and what units they field, before you commit to one.
- On a phone, the Army and Building switch now sits in the drawer's header row instead of taking a row of its own, leaving more of the drawer for what you are looking at.
- Tapping one of your armies or castles on a phone no longer covers the board with the details drawer — it raises a small bar of icons for merge, disband, inspect and deselect, and the drawer only opens when you ask for it.
- The event log now opens from a bell on the map controls bar, and that bar can be collapsed out of the way on phones.
- You can now set your own map size when you create a game, anywhere between the Small and Massive boards, and the form tells you what the limits are.
- The Compendium's Units tab now compares factions side by side — pick a stat, toggle the factions you care about on or off, and read the same number for each of them at once.
- The stats page now has a calendar of every day Bannerfall has been played, shaded by how many orders were given, so you can see at a glance when the world has been busiest.
- Verdant, arid and tundra are now chosen when you create a game, and the map is generated to match — tundra is a flat, treeless, boggy plain, and arid is dry and open.
- The board now shows the grid coordinates of the square you point at or tap, with a switch to turn it off.
Balance
- A shrine deep in a ruin now mends your party up to full health and no further, so a unit can no longer walk out of a dungeon carrying more hit points than it is built for. Crawls that leaned on that extra point are harder to survive.
Fixed
- Zooming the board now homes in on whatever is under your cursor or between your fingers, instead of sliding toward the middle of the screen.
- The home page no longer counts a game you were eliminated from as one that is waiting on your move.
- On a phone, the city, army and hero controls now sit in a full-width bar tucked under the top bar instead of a floating panel over the map.
- A game you were knocked out of now tells you that you were defeated, instead of calling it abandoned.
- Bug reports can capture screenshots and video again in Firefox and Safari, and the picker no longer re-opens when you cancel it.
- The New Game screen's option buttons — difficulty, map size, turn clock and the rest — now fit on a single line on a phone instead of spilling onto a second.
- While the computer opponents take their turns, the ring beside the waiting banner now fills one segment per opponent, so you can see which one is moving and how many are still to go before your turn.
- A hero carrying several artifacts no longer has their stat line drawn over the artifact names — hit points, movement and mana are readable again.
- Alert cards no longer stack up over the board — queuing a unit in a city raises none at all, and a message that repeats refreshes the card it already has instead of adding a copy.
- Your account is now one tap away in the header on a phone, so your saved NPC generals are no longer reachable only through the New Game form.
- The Small map can now be played with any number of opponents, up to a full table of eight, instead of refusing to start with an error.
- Your armies no longer always start on the right-hand side of the map — every new game places them somewhere different.
- The move preview now follows roads, so the route it draws and the tiles it says you can reach are the ones the game actually uses.
Compatibility
Game engine 57 → 61. In-flight games were migrated automatically.