Shadows of Forbidden Gods News

A variety of small but very necessary changes made here. Firstly, madness has a new victory art screen for people to enjoy. Nice and purple. To allow this to actually be reachable without extremely fiddly and tedious messing around, the way victory points for the madness ending are computed has been updated. Shadow should no longer be as much of an issue for achievement seekers.

UI also gets a bit of polish, with drag-and-dropping being added to item trading. Hopefully can make it to minion rearrangement pre-combat in the next patch.

Changes in detail:

Gameplay:
-Victory for insanity buffed: The SUM of both insanity victory point gain forms (enshadowed and not) now must be your highest contribution (so they don't work against each other). Buffed to 3 per ruler/hero and 5 per ruler/hero
-Lay low buffed, now gives a full 1 point of menace reduction in cities (going up to 3 if enshadowed+infiltrated) and 2 in non-human settlements (going up to 4 if infiltrated). Profile reduction now always equal to menace reduction
-Dissident's "A Better Choice" now works on Elves, and in fact instantly sets the sovereign. Requires no sovereign to exist (presumably due to assassination or death in battle)
-Elven Arrogance's gain from menace and world panic is reduced based on ruler shadow (to zero at 100% shadow)
-Heroes will spend longer before disrupting again
-Heroes will now disrupt one another exploring high allure ruins (especially if they have personal grudges)
-Rebalance Enshadowment Victory Points to allow specilist victory types (for achievements and cool end game art). VP from Enshadowed % changed to "Enshadowed % outside of Dark Empire". Dark Empire VP gained buffed (3 -> 5.5) to maintain the same point total. Should allow (hopefully) people to reduce the 'Enshadowed population %' VP contribution, by putting some population into a Dark Empire, and so allow a different source to be the top scoring one at the end.
-Elves will now call themselves "Dark Elves" if they form the Dark Empire (new saves only)
-Elven preference for humans (both positive and negative) majorily reduced in frequency
-Holy Order prophecy item "from a village" will no longer appear, as heroes don't spawn in villages

Other:
-Implemented drag-and-drop for item trading
-Victory screen for madness added

Bugfixes:
-Fixed graphical bug where selected unit wasn't displaying in masked view
-Orcish armies should no longer join humans in battle when fighting their orcish kin, nor should humans join forces with orcs (unless they are dark empire or ophanim theocracies).
-Fixed bug in lay low, where it would occasionally apply on the first turn
-Fixed UI issues with lay low challenge
-Fixed unexpected behaviour with regards to dissident's "A better choice" (as described above)
-Mammon's smuggling power now works properly when at max range
-Fixed bug in which heroes would get stuck waiting to explore high-allure ruins
-Fixed bug where clicking "re-enable all suppressed messages" without a game started would throw an exception
-Elves can now employ their national action "Join Dark Empire" again, following a bug disabling it
-Elves no longer incorrectly believe themselves to be human when they are born, so won't all have a major obsession with elves as they will no longer briefly believe they are elves born into human society
-Shadows created by the snake god can no longer have children
-Witches "Arbormancy" motivation fixed to prevent them entering an obsessive cycle
-Fixed rarity of item dropped in ruins exploration event
-Orcs should no longer auto-expand into wonders they can't hold due to 0% habitability
-Mammon's "Gift from the mountain" now only works on agents
-Dissident now correctly uses both command and intrigue in the seperatism power
-Rulers bringing a new faith to a location remove temples of oppositing faiths
-The Entrance's random teleportation can't teleport you to your own location any more

A new tutorial has been added, following feedback as to what the next thing players will need to master will be after the first tutorial. This one focuses on using two agents in tandem to distract while shadow is spread. It's a bit more freeform than the first one, and hopefully serves as a better preparation for the full game. Still doesn't touch on 'advanced' features such as magic, Holy Orders or Orcs, and these may be the subject of further tutorials.

Along with this, bugfixes for the bugs:

Gameplay:

Other:
-New tutorial added

Bugfixes:
-Reworded achievement "28 turns later"
-"Assign guard" power of the Insect God can no longer assign a guard to an enemy hero
-"Assign Guard's" ability to exceed normal command limit added to description
-When drones gather population from a city with 100% infection they won't reduce infection (which would correspond to somehow curing some of the population) (scales with population until previous behaviour at 0% infection)
-Infected Agent starting XP changed to 127
-Fixed typo in Haemophage power
-Added description to Insect God's "Infection" trait
-Cordyceps Insect God can no longer infect elves
-Drones no longer have preferences
-Attacking drones no longer has menace/profile/infamy gain associated
-Drones now require 1% infect populace at least to begin harvesting them
-Drones will no longer path through armies when trying to get home

Recently I was contacted by the publisher of "We the Refugees: Ticket to Europe", asking to bundle Shadows with their newly-released game. The issue is close to my heart, and so Forbidden Oak Games Limited has donated 1000£ to the UK-based "Choose Love" refugee charity.

Shadows may be about utterly obliterating humanity, but hopefully we as a community can try to make the world a better place whenever we get the chance, esepecially in these turbulent times.

Alongside this, a critical bug has been fixed: The game was losing progress when people were winning as Iastur, requiring them to then re-win as She Who Will Feast. This should be fixed, with the game now loading the achievements file from your saved game folder to check a second time (the issue was the settings.txt file being corrupted). This means that lost progress should, in principle (and in testing on my machine), be restored, without you needing to get another snake win.

Patchnotes in detail:

Gameplay:
-Expell Deep Ones can't be used in locations with Abyssal Faith, religious fish won't leave their temples

Other:
-Re-added title theme to main menu

Bugfixes:
-Fixed major bug with file loading, which caused tutorial to fail to load sometimes
-Fixed game losing progress sometimes, progress hopefully restored
-Fixed description of Mammon's "Wealth Creator" trait
-Vinerva's "Black Forest" power can't be infinitely cast any more
-Fixed Crusader Faith behaviour and description to match. Can now be used on any city of the faith, but only those following the faith
-Using the "repeat challenge" now correctly marks challenges as claimed by your agents, preventing double-usage
-Elven arrogance still applies even when the elven leader is out of their city

Gameplay:
-Appoint state religion AI no longer assigns a "religion" tag to each religion which would be removed
-Madness outcomes now can't kill evil things, such as vampires or your own agents, and can't kill targets more than 5 links away

Other:

Bugfixes:
-Fixed UI scaling issue in windowed mode
-Fixed Ruins exploration only producing the Vinerva outcome
-Fixed bug where national action to join the Alliance would process international relationship incorrectly

A few more bugfixes, and some much-needed text being finally added to the Insect God.

In detail:

Gameplay:
-Dissendent "seperatism" distance requirement reduced to 5
-Black Forest can no longer be cast on 100% enshadowed rulers

Other:
-Added text to flavour and descriptions for Insect God

Bugfixes:
-Dissident seperatism power now can't be used on useless locations (non-cities)
-Agents will no longer take actions due to insanity
-Improved Vinerva ruins exploration, giving number of seeds remaining
-Fixed game crashing on defeat
-You can now rob Acolytes
-Fixed bug in "Temptation of Eternity" which prevented it being used if the ruler had 100% shadow
-Fixed description of outcome of plague ships