This is apparently coming to "other platforms" (meaning non-Steam, so would include GOG I presume) "very soon" (as of yesterday). I know no more than this, I'm just hanging for it since it makes some really cool changes, like actually making soldiers be able to hit something with an arquebus - well better than a doctor/scholar anyway. Also increased the arquebus damage.

Also making the calculations for hunting take into account the number of people who actually hunt!

Plus made Hispaniola a little easier.

Here are the changes for version 1.4.5 (taken from Logic Artist's forums):

- Updated engine to Unity 4.2.
- Implemented missing Evaluation Screen tutorial in all four languages.
- Added an event in Santo Domingo that allows the player to heal injured followers inside that town.
- Changed the Meat calculations from Hunting again: it's now half your full Survival stat rounded up plus 1 Meat for everybody you send to hunt.
- Critical success for hunting: You get your full Survival stat in Meat if your Hunting probability is 5 times higher than the random roll.
- You can now have three Sergeants if you have no Lieutenant, making it possible to promote somebody new past two existing Sergeants.
- Fixed an exploit where moving one step at a time on a path did not count as movement.
- Made the Esteban fight in the mines slightly easier.
- Made the Diversion random guard failure event never trigger until you have at least 600 Total Experience.
- Set up an easier version of the Diversion battle to use in Hispaniola.
- Removed the 1 point Leadership bonus for Veterans and reduced the Lieutenant's bonus from 5 to 4.
- Raised Arquebus damage from 30 to 35 and increased its Crit multiplier from 1.5x to 2x.
- Correspondingly increased the bow's accuracy slightly at long range.
- Raised the maximum shoot distance for bows from 20 to 25.
- Suck It Up now also halves damage taken from spike traps.
- Good Patient now also reduces the injury level after combat by 1 level (to a minimum of Harmless).
- Aim Low proc chance increased from 10% to 20%.
- Scholar movement increased from 4 to 6.
- Soldier base ranged accuracy increased from 30 to 40.
- Warrior base ranged accuracy increased from 40 to 50.
- Fixed a typo "food" instead of "fool".
- Fixed your scout giving you the wrong directions to the Totonac ritual site.
- Fixed a graphical glitch caused by full-screen effects being drawn in the wrong order in Mexico.
- Camera panning is now framerate independent.
- Fixed music starting at maximum before changing to the user selected volume.
- Fixed a typo in Bonita's personal random event.
- Fixed three references to "seven warriors" in the Escaped Slaves event when there are only six.
- Fixed a bunch of choices not being displayed in the Coyotl vs. Cacama random event.
- Fixed typo in the cairn collection goal using the Italian language.
- Fixed bug that prevented from camping at the begining of Mexico.
- Added a new mountain pass marker in Yucatan.
- Reduced the size of an inexplicably huge Go Fishing trigger in inland Mexico.

Sounds like they are making the right changes. I found Hispaniola to be much harder than Mexico. Thanks for doing the research

No probs - I've been lurking on their forums since I happened to find out about the 1.5.0 patch - which is practically the same as the 1.4.5 one except it also had German localisation (which I don't care about anyway). What happened is that they released 1.5.0 (on Steam), but the German localisation was causing massive bugs, so it was pulled hours after it came out.

So then they figured they'd release the changes minus the localisation as 1.4.5, and I've been hanging for that ever since - mainly because they're fixing lots of things that, to my mind, really needed fixing.

It also looks like it will make it significantly harder to get high morale - typically it wouldn't be unusual to get 20+ morale for almost everyone in Mexico if you had a Lt, 2 Sgts and the rest veterans, and you could do it without really paying attention to it. I even had a diverse range of troops (aggressives, pacifists, open-minded, greedy, altruistic, etc) and had no real issues, and that was with Leadership at the default of 5. Will be interesting to see how a diverse bunch pulls up now... :)

I agree that Hispaniola was harder than Mexico in some ways. To be honest I didn't notice as I was playing through it - I just figured that I didn't have my guys leveled up enough at that point - but looking back it definitely was the case that the toughest battles were the Esteban mines and the final Santa Domingo battle, so this rebalancing makes sense.

I like the hunting change, as it was rather frustrating to have two people bring in roughly 7-8 meat on average, while 6 brought in about 9 meat on average.

The rest just seems to make the game even easier. Most of the time the enemy just rushes towards your line, with increased arquebus damage and accuracy you can just set your soldiers to intercept (not that I did something else before) and severly weaken the enemy on the approach.

The hunting change definitely was necessary - agree it made little sense before, made extra hunters basically pointless. Actually it made extra hunters COMPLETELY pointless since 1.4.0 used your main character's survival only to calculate the meat values - the total was ignored for normal hunting.

Having completed this on Insane twice now, I agree that once you get used to the game it's pretty easy to win most battles. The Santa Domingo ones near the end of Hispaniola were a challenge (especially if you didn't have lanterns or enough barricades/traps - but they'll be easier now), and the random guard failure ones were nasty, but that was pretty much it.


Despite that though, I think the Arquebus changes make sense. It made no sense that so-called professional soldiers were just as useless as Doctors and Scholars at shooting, only capable of hitting 1 in three shots at point blank range. I know the weapons weren't accurate, but THAT bad?

To compensate, they should have massively increased the enemy's numbers - ideally doubled (but then slightly weaker enemies to compensate). I wanted to feel like a Conquistador - which I always imagined would be overpowered but massively outnumbered. I reckon that would have made it a bit harder, since the AI just rushes you anyway - so if they're going to do a "zerg rush" they should have Zerg numbers! Unfortunately they have no plans to do that, which is a shame.

Having said that, I would also have preferred that the AI behaves "defensively" when appropriate and just hides behind its barricades/traps - which they kind of do in one or two of the final battles in Mexico, so it's not like the AI is completely incapable of this. The only time there's an incentive to charge forward is with the missions that have time limits - while I don't mind these, it's kind of an artificial way to add difficulty.

Seems strange that the concept of intiative / synchronized attacks is such problem for recent games.

E.g. the AI for FTL suffers the same problem - while the player will synchronize his weapons to break through defenses and do some damage, while the AI will just fire weapons whenever they are available.

With Exp:Conq it seems to be the same - the AI does a passable job on the individual level (as long as there is no doctor around), however it will not draw its forces together prior to engagement, it will not fortify chokepoints when it has ranged superiority (which it has quite often), it will not try to create pressure points, etc. This is sometimes alleviated by the inital (manual?) deployment, however especially in the third and second to last battles in Tnnochtitlan the shortcomings of the AI are really glaring.

Even games as far back as Dune 2 or C&C had the decency to send (ineffecitve) groups of units against you.

I think with FTL that was actually a conscious decision by the developer so as not to make the battles turn into "a battle between who can get the first shot in quickest" (paraphrasing). I don't agree with it though, as in FTL it actually drives me nuts watching a ship that should be able to go toe-to-toe with mine (or possibly beat it) do something as hairbrained as firing it's beam laser straight into my shield, and THEN firing its other lasers to take the shield down! That's just idiocy! I've whinged a bit about that on the FTL forums so I won't go on much more, except to say that FTL uses a special brand of bad AI.

OK, also to say that the other bad aspects of the AI (such as targeting rooms randomly) probably do fall under the developer's idea of not turning battles into what I described him saying above. But they should at least coordinate their beam/lasers, even if they target separate rooms!


As for the enemies in this game - not standing your ground when doing so would provide an advantage is a bit jarring. I did notice that some of the limited turn battles they do stand their ground a bit better though - but then they don't move at all, even when doing so would provide an advantage. But I can understand that would require a higher level of tactical thinking.

The enemies do appear to sometimes concentrate their attacks, but this is probably more a coincidence. Simply by moving a wounded guy out of harm's way, as long as another one of your guys is closer, the enemy is almost guaranteed to attack the closest enemy. I can understand that if the enemy is in melee range, but this appears to work for any range.

Have you ever encountered the hilarity of the AI with fire? In the Santa Domingo battle (defend the palace) I once used lanterns to fry about 3-4 hexes, which were two spaces away from my barricades. The enemy would, every turn, send their hunters/trappers THROUGH the fire, into a hex in front of the barricade (which was not on fire), take the shot, then go BACK THROUGH the fire again! One of them even FINISHED THE TURN in a hex that was on fire, despite moving out of it to take his shot! Eventually two of their guys died due to flames - I'd only hit them once or twice each with my hunters prior to that - they did around half the damage to themselves!

In the same battle, there was a soldier who was fighting me. He was on fire, as was the doctor behind him. For all the turns the fire raged, they didn't move. The soldier would attack my guy, the doctor would heal him or cure him, but they'd both stay in the fire hexes. The doctor didn't even have any of my men blocking his way!

Having said all of that, it's pretty rare for a game to have challenging AI no matter when it was made, whether turn-based or real-time - unless they have crazy numbers (like RTS games, or Incubation - that single player campaign of the expansion was brutal!). Even Jagged Alliance 2 didn't have AI that was that brilliant, although the 1.13 fan-made patch improves it a fair bit (now they flank, at least).

Actually even Close Combat 2, which was damn good, only had challenging AI when playing as the allies. It seems in that one, playing defensively worked well for the AI, but when going on the offense the AI was terrible. Full Spectrum Warrior:Ten Hammers is one of the few where the AI could be a pain, as they'd flank you pretty quickly if you weren't careful.

How do I install just the patch? It looks like the new file added is the whole downloader, is just the new patch available?

No, apparently the changes were big enough that a patch would have been almost the same size as the installer anyway.