Yeah I gotta say I personally have been enjoying the 30 pop cost, as jirkaesch said it presents a real tough/interesting strategic choice.

Does cause a problem with outposts though.  Need to be able to build them with less of a cost.

Not sure about it hurting AI, will have to take other word for if it hinders AI.  I still get my butt kicked anyway!

Have we just given up entirely on the idea of calling it "gildar"?  Because I'm fine with that if we have.

On higher difficulty levels, the AI gets tons of free gold, so with a 30 gold cost, the AI players can just spam Pioneers without a care.  With so many Pioneers, it makes it easy for the AI to just send them out randomly and hope for the best, like ants, rather than putting any thought into what it's going to do with them.  

With that in mind, while we could make a mod to change the Pioneers back to a Population cost, and make a separate unit that can create Outposts, the AI might not understand what's going on, and either not make any Outposts (if that ability is removed from Pioneers), or it'll just continue to use the Pioneers to make its outposts at increased cost to itself over the cost to us.  I'm not sure if this can be controlled from the XML.

Changing it so there's a 30 population cost on the Settle action would probably work for the AI, so it could still spam Pioneers to its digital-heart's content,  but still pay up in population when settling, and you could also solve the issue of over-costed Outposts by making the Outpost action have a different cost, maybe 30 gold, or 10 population, or something.   I'm not sure if this can be changed in the XML for a mod, either.

Another vote here for this idea. Also the population should be reduced only after the pioneer has been created not while the pioneer is waiting in the production queue

Anyone know what day is usually patch day?

Cheers

Indeed, Pioneers costing population is no longer the hinderance it was, as you will experience sudden rapid growth from your relative food surplus skyrocketing. On the other hand, the change to using gildar instead makes Wealthy even more mandatory a pick for custom Sovereigns.

Thursday 

cheers

Something should probably be done about Champion EXP.  Right now, I gain champions and then I send them to search or sit in my cities doing nothing.  Why?  Because early in the game, I usually don't have enough troops to support or monsters/quest to fight to level more than one champion. Anyone else end up playing like this?  

I play with dense monsters, and go ahead and pair up max two champs.  It cuts exp in half, but seems to be a good balance.  Once I get a third, then fourth, they will become another duo.  The monsters are nearly endless...mid game I had yet another army stack and still had creatures to fight.

 Oh, and I support using pioneers using population and scouts using gold for outposts.  I hate pioneer spam and really feel it can't go back to the way it was.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!  Would you settle for a compromise?  15 gold and 15 pop?

So, Kael/Derek, what is the goal with this beta? 

I guess my main question is whether or not the LH beta is content complete? Are there plans to add more heroes, add those last two factions back in, add more skills, add more monsters, & add more battlegrounds?

Or are you just looking to tweak existing content and possibly mess with skill trees?

It seems that the pioneer cost is too excesive for the outposts. I suggest instead of changing the cost of the pioneer, buff the outpost to justify the cost of the pioneer. That I think would be a better solution to the problem. Under the current circumstances the outposts are good for their purpose, but maybe add something to their functionality.

Can we have the fix to the BuildingRequirement Prereq type in the XML? It'd help a lot when modding.

Is the scenario going to be restricted till 1.00 release again??

(cause that didn't work out so well the first time around)

Thanks god

Strongly agree that changing pioneers to cost gold instead of pop is a huge step backwards.  I really like the strategic choice we have with pioneers costing pop.  Plus it finally makes food production worthwhile, which has been sadly lacking before pioneers cost pop.

If pioneer-pop is hurting AI by their producing outposts, the fix is to, as firefly and others propose, make outpost creation separate such as by using scouts.

Having pioneers make either outposts or cities seems a poor game design, as outposts are vastly inferior from cities.  So, the cost for making outposts should be much less.  Plus scouts makes sense, as outposts are kinda a building version of the scout unit.

So please to rethink this.

One thing -- I'll often create a pioneer when I don't plan on making a city, if a city is nearing max pop while still accruing pop, and I either can't or won't be adding +food buildings/techs in the near future.  I don't want the +pop accumulation 'go to waste' so creating a pioneer knocks down the pop so it can then regrow while the city is doing other things.  These 'surplus' pioneers are perfect for outposts.  Still, I'd rather see Firefly's above scout-outpost suggestion implemented.

The AI just does not expand well with pioneers costing population, making most games very easy to win.  Unless that is fixed somehow going back to pioneers costing gold is a better option in my opinion.  Its a single player game if you don't want to spam pioneers then don't.

30 pop to build an outpost is too much, especially in the early game. 30 gold is about right, but ridiculously too cheap to found a new city.  I think this change is going in to fix the issue in 0.50 with the AI's cities never growing.

I think the pop cost for pioneers is really a fun change.  I have very much enjoyed it, but it has definitely meant that I don't build outposts until I'm done expanding (Which I don't think is the intention). 

If you don't want to do a separate unit for building pioneers, perhaps just have the population return to the nearest city when the outpost is founded.

What are the odds that Brad's trying to get the AI to work on an internal build that has pioneers costing pop?  Meanwhile, they'll get us play-testing the beta with changes that will make the AI more competitive so we can find bugs in gameplay that wont show up if the AI isn't competitive.

Fixed an issue that could cause multiple Guardian Statues and Assassin Demons to show up to defend a city

*claps* Yay I can finish my game now! I cast another vote for Firefly's idea, leave Pioneers costing Pop, give Scout the Create Outpost ability.

An alternative to Firefly's idea is to refund the population cost to the city controlling the outpost. Then the cost is mute for the outpost building, but could also provide a different mechanic of transfering a population. Also, it could cost to build an outpost 30 gold and still refund the population back to the controlling city (this alternative will be a feature request, as I don't think it can be modded).

I think balancing the paths and making them more interesting is easier if you use this suggestion: https://forums.elementalgame.com/441857

Oh noooooo (But of course the AI has to learn to live with it)!

But I can't see it on the patch list. Am I blind, or just not seeing it because I don't wan't to see it?

&

"Mounts add additional training time to units trained with them"

- My God, I love this change. Hopefully it will help vs human horseunit spam.

I don't really give two shits if Pioneers cost gold or population, but I am clearly in a minority...

so Is this pushed to us via steam on Thursday?  Just thought it odd we had patch notes but when I played last night I was on version .50 I think.