I do see the performance issues, it definitely gets laggy at about 90 units per army, i think you could solve this by combining units, maybe 3x for large battles. Btw the Friars seem to be a bit overpowered, when an army consistently has about ~30 or so on the field they are a bit too capable of support, i think this would be best resolved by reducing their spawn by ~30%.
I like how you added variety to the building tree, it'd be cool to see that expanded more.
I did come across one bug i think, you see the pixies cannot be built, I believe it was excluded due to building the tavern, which really is a critical building for a first castle, this left this castle quite weak early on. https://imgur.com/a/zA0XI1Y
Hi ctxpcs! Thanks for your bug report - I see now that if you start with minimum town development as wild and purchase either dwarves or satyr before pixies, the pixies are errantly excluded. This will be fixed.
I've been battling lag in battles just as well as I have been battling too many units giving a more chaotic and less interesting to follow and less possible to order around battle scene. I once did a poll, where the reserve system won out as the most popular option. The one about unit stacking was quite unpopular though it was my personal favourite. Reserves helped, but people often talk about the two other methods. Perhaps one of them will be called upon one day.
You are correct, Friars currently stand out at 66% winrate and will thus be continually nerfed until they fall in line.
Thank you for playing and for giving feedback! I hope you'll follow the development of the game as it continues on.
Thanks for making such a fun game. I just finished a playthough on the largest map with every faction. So i had a few more minor bugs to point out.
There was one time where I had my knight diagonally positioned on the left to access my castle for recruitment, on the AI's turn they moved to the point diagonally to the right of the castle port, when I accessed the castle, my knight was no longer in the bottom slot, so I couldn't reinforce the knight further, or get the knight to be defended in the castle walls.
I suspect you're already familiar, but in rare situations sometimes there are issues with the large battles ending. I had a necromancer in a castle who was able to rez skeletons consistently enough that he managed to destroy all of the enemy units, but all of his original units had died, this resulted in the battle being declared a victory, however the knight was dead, and the castle was lost, and the AI lost their knight as well. In a similar situation I red was battling blue, my original units were dead, some spawns were still alive, and somehow i had some units that were not my race (i dont know how i acquired them during battle), the blue bar for the AI, spread horizontally across the screen farther than its supposed to, but defeat was not called for 5-10 min, my surviving spawned units did not die, and the enemy units seemed to dance, and occasionaly there were attacks and explosions but i don't think they were directed at my summons.
Minor bug, I had the terrain randomizer on, the neutral border unit was passable diagonally early allowing for an early second castle, I've noticed the AI take advantage of this several times, I think the easiest solution would be to increase the unit area of attack on the border units.
On my play on the biggest map, actually I expected to lose, the AI had a much more powerful army than me about 3 times as many units and more castles. However it made many mistakes. I noticed after the borders are down the AI stops ever attacking neutral units, it makes sense they are mostly a waste of units at that point. But it also meant they stopped attacking the neutral border units and did not perceive threats there, so they left their rear castles defenseless, further as I attacked those castles one by one, they did not defensively attack me, they focused on attacking me from only one front. Then as I had more and more castles I had more knights, I always have 1-2 per castle, The AI did not do this, mostly having less knights than castles. It resulted in them not capturing resource points. I regularly controlled resource points in enemy lands for weeks without the AI bothering to capture them.
Regarding the unit stacking, I wonder if it would be reasonable for you to make it and other performance tweaks like max units on the map options that the players can pick in order to eliminate lag or have insane battles as they like.
Also with the premium edition I had several crashes in a play through, all draw errors, i lost the screenshot.
Btw, my favorite unit is the beholder, do you have the stats for those win rates public somewhere?