Are you familiar with the 'Elric of Melnibone' fantasy series? The overarching plot of AoW1 with the humans, the Elves, and the Highmen - the transformation of a magical world with fantasy races, to a more lawful world dominated by humans - comes from Elric of Melnibone.

Sounds like a cool campaign idea to follow the introduction of Humans to a world.

I've never heard of Elric of Melnibone before but reading the Wiki page I can see how it has influenced AoW. Apart from the AoW lore, my campaign will draw inspiration from Markus Heitz' Die Zwerge as well as some Greek epics and the LBA collapse.

New AoWEd features:
- Memory allocation info in the status bar
- Additional HS info in the status bar
- Developer resources (campaign portraits) can be freely used

Now that I think about it, perhaps I will build a version that allows for larger maps. I tampered with this in the past and was able to increase the map size only to something like 140x140; maybe I should have another try and see if I can't get really large maps to work.

Will you add the inverted terrain to your AoWEd?

Context:

http://aow.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=1017&ci=a7f527b420ac38fea8fc4c3e9803fe15YToxOntpOjA7YToyOntpOjA7czoxNDoiU2VhcmNoIFJlc3VsdHMiO2k6MTtzOjQyOiJsaXN0ZXIucGhwP3N0YXJ0PTAmYW1wO3NlYXJjaD1NQVAgQURESVRJT04iO319

You can already use the inverted terrain with AoWed by just having that ruleset active, though?

I was just thinking that if And G has figured out a way to free up the campaign portraits without touching the release.hss, surely that means that other features could be made available by default too.

Something that came up in the past is item balance and the impossibility to export/import item sets, to any readable format. Is that doable? That would make it a lot easier to balance maps - play around with a set in excel then import it.

We have an excel which translates the characteristics into item costs by some formula for example.

That sounds like a huge amount of work, so no.

The patch is basically finished and will be uploaded within the next few days. I was considering a last-minute diplomacy overhaul featuring asymmetric relations, but then I remembered the reason why I didn't do that in the first place was that the AoW lore is at times self-contradictory and the alignment system makes it difficult to deviate from the good-vs-bad dynamic too much. Which is a bit of a shame considering the campaigns are about forging alliances, yet going by default relations the Keeper respectively Cult races are essentially already allied.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that when you start a map without leaders, AI heroes will simply sit in the cities where they emerged and not do anything?