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Spent the past week or so getting the site (and these forums) back in proper working order after my host screwed everything up while migrating to a new server--but with that done, it's back to developing! Gave artist feedback on some new work-in-progress 3D terrain today.

-- posted a Kickstarter update summarizing many of the development milestones I hit over the past year: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1426761469/telepath-tactics-a-strategy-rpg/posts/1781158

-- added a defensive facing algorithm to the AI; AI-controlled characters now turn their backs (if they can still rotate) to protect themselves against backstabs at the end of their turn.

-- fixed a thing in character generation such that characters of classes without physical attack skills will no longer be generated with a Strength growth above 0.

-- player characters can now level-up during the enemy turn; the game will pause while you review the changes, and the enemy turn will resume thereafter.

-- the game now gracefully handles characters leveling up after they deliver a match-winning blow; any level-ups happen first, and only afterwards does the victory box appear.

-- you can now add an [E] to the end of an item name within a <Unit> tag in a map to have the game spawn that character with that item already equipped.

-- tweaked Engineer character generation so that all Engineers start level 1 already knowing either Build Wood Bridge or Build Barricade.

-- fixed a bug that was causing unique portraits to not display for characters loaded from a saved game.

-- fixed a bug in how the level-up screen displayed stats that both received a proficiency boost and increased by normal means.

-- fixed a bug in which generated characters that came with generated equipment would start off auto-equipped with them even if they lacked the necessary masteries.

-- fixed a formatting issue where the last line of each stat tooltip was sometimes getting cut off, depending on display settings.

-- annoyingly, I had to redo all of the male frost spriggat rest and walk sprite animations for some reason.

-- the game now checks victory conditions (Defeat Army / Kill-All Victory) and loss conditions (Protect Char / losing all of one's units) whenever characters die in combat and at the start of each new turn. If one of these conditions is found to have been triggered, it then displays the victory screen (or a defeat screen).

-- clicking the Victory Box now takes you directly to nighttime.

-- when units are defeated in combat, they now take a hit to their morale. (The damage to the unit's morale is equal to 2, plus 1 for every two Wound Levels they've taken, to a maximum decrement of 6.)

-- implemented the Delay Maneuvers condition in battle.

-- there is now a New Turn pop-up that shows up onscreen to let you know when it's a new player's turn.

-- there is now a Victory pop-up that shows up onscreen at the end of a battle to let you know which player has won the battle.

--for units with low health, the AI now calculates a "bonus" based on each destination's proximity to allied healers when scoring long-range moves. The more badly injured the unit is (and the more that that particular AI cares about healing injured units), the more heavily it will weigh each potential destination's healer proximity.

-- after shuffling a unit's skill progression order during the generation process, the last skill in the character's progression is now removed. This will cause each character of a given class to be more distinct, and will leave more room for characters of the same class to teach each other skills if they grow close over the course of the game.

-- there is now a half-second delay when moving the mouse to the edge of the screen before camera panning kicks in. (This ensures that the camera doesn't move around from incidental, unintended mouse movement.)

--the AI will now have a unit grab the item sack on their space if they've moved onto a space with an item sack.

-- the cursor now changes to an hourglass when entering an AI-controlled player's turn, and returns to an arrow when that player's turn ends.

Yesterday and this morning were devoted to AI!

-- finally forced myself to sit down and code the AI routines for determining how a unit should move when there's no target currently in attack range. Such units now find a destination scored by its proximity to the target, by the target's value, and by the relative safety of the destination space.

-- did some more work toward creating custom AI profiles for different commanders in battle.

-- coded a "dumber" AI routine in the style of the original Telepath Tactics, where the game just randomizes unit order and finds the best move for the next character in order without ranking the value of its best move against those of any other character in that army. (To be used on the lower difficulty settings.)

-- characters no longer counterattack in response to backstabs (both making backstabs more tactically useful and making counterattacks more useful as well, as counterattacks will no longer make the counterattacker vulnerable to multiple melee-range backstabs in the same turn).

-- units can now level-up during nighttime.

-- added support for the Escape hotkey in nighttime, where it now advances dialogue or closes the level-up screen when pressed (and if there's no dialogue or level-up screen, it advances you to the next narrated activity)

-- the nighttime activity Treat Wounds now hastens the recovery of all characters with a Wound Level greater than 1. It now cannot be chosen unless at least one other character has a Wound level greater than 1.