Five new card abilities, a lot of card balancing, culture-based card art and a smarter opponent with its own personality.
Gameplay
- New ability Foresee: look at the top cards of your deck and choose which of them to discard.
- New ability Keep: choose cards in your hand and on your board to hold on to until your next turn.
- New ability Steal Resource: take a number of resources directly from your opponent's pools.
- New ability Ban Enemy Card: pick a card in your opponent's discard pile and remove it from the game.
- New ability Market Modifier: push market prices up or down for the current turn.
- New ability Update Event Turns: cards can now shorten or extend how long an event stays in play.
- Removed manual card locking. Holding cards over to the next turn is now a culture-specific ability instead of a universal action.
- Fixed foes being purchasable through the free-purchase ability.
- Fixed a selection prompt being skipped when entering the main phase.
- Selection prompts that could never be completed are no longer created, so you are no longer shown an empty picker.
Cards & Content
- Units, buildings and commanders now use culture-based card borders, so a card's culture is readable at a glance.
- New artwork for a range of cards, including Cunning Wolf, Devious Fox and Apple Task Force.
- Reworked cards: a lot of cards now have different abilities.
- Fixed Plague adding Prestige instead of removing it.
- Buildings no longer provide a base +1 Zeal.
- Events now always run for an odd number of turns, so both players are affected by them equally often.
Opponent AI
- The AI now has personalities, one per culture. Each one prefers cards of its culture and is biased toward buying them.
- In Skirmish, the AI picks a random commander and a matching personality, so its card preferences follow the commander it plays.
- The AI now trades resources to afford cards or to push through an attack.
- The AI now uses its commander abilities when they are available.
- Fixed the AI failing to select cards when fewer cards were available than it was asked to pick.
Quality of Life
- Cards with manual abilities are only highlighted when the ability can actually be activated. Previously a card could look ready and do nothing when clicked.
- Card tooltips no longer block mouse input, so moving across several cards in a row feels smooth.
Interface
- "Choose" abilities now read as "choose to X or Y" instead of just "X or Y".
- New board background.
- Brighter Prestige token texture for better readability.
Tutorial
- Fixed the tutorial being impossible to finish. The buying and trading lessons asked for resources a first turn cannot produce, so both are now taught on the second turn, where your hand can pay for them.
- Fixed the tutorial's card stock referencing three cards that no longer exist.
- The tutorial opponent now follows a fixed script, so the lessons play out the same way every time regardless of AI changes.