I'll be typing a lot less in this report, just the bare essentials so you can get a feel for what's going on. Feel free to ask for elaboration.

Setup

Seravy has given me green lights to change the format of the info threads to be easier to read.
First and foremost, I plan on doing this by adding spoiler tags. For example, the race post would look like this:

Barbarians

I decided to run some tests with the self-playing patch to see how much the AI expands on Myrror. Always huge map and impossible.

These are the screenshots at turn 100 :

   

The Myrran AI clearly didn't do well expanding here (purple). Playing Dwarves who grow slowly and have expensive settlers which might explain it.
Red has nearly as many cities as Purple even though they came from Arcanus - Barbarians break towers easily and spread quickly as well. They are at war with purple, which probably slowed them down further - in fact some of the red cities might have been purple originally.
Yellow sent a lot of units through Astral Gates, but no settler managed to reach Myrror among them, as they were produced in cities not equipped by the spell or blocked by ocean. If they hit the neutral on the continent, they can start spreading.


   
This time it's much better - using Draconians-, but they still managed to fill only about 35-40% of the plane.

   
About the same as the previous, but a lot of space taken by an Arcanus wizard.

I'm not so sure if the AI is doing a bad job with settlers - sure, it didn't fill the entire plane but is the expectation to do so even realistic? 15+ cities in 100 turns is a lot. Either way, the next 3 runs will be these exact saves, but with a higher settler limit to see how much difference it makes.
A more alarming thing I see here is how 2 out of 3 games broke a tower before turn 100. We might want to strengthen those further? (Impossible of course means they do it earlier, but still it seems to early to me?)


With 4 settlers per continent and 6 per plane

   

Don't see any significant difference here. While Red hasn't taken away nearly as many cities from purple yet, the war has been declared and they'll be taken soon, resulting in the same game state as with fewer settlers.
It seems, for dwarves, the speed of producing settlers is more limiting than the number they can have at the same time - not that surprising.

   

Some improvements here - the territory filled is the same, but there are no gaps between cities, bringing the total cities to 5 higher than before. Unfortunately, the quality of these spots are horrible - they were left empty for a good reason, so it's not a real improvement.
...and now I realize draconian settlers fly so the continent limit wasn't affecting them much in the first place - it's unlikely for them to head to destinations on the same continent at a rate larger than 2 at a time anyway. ehh. Might as well not bother running the third one as that wizard was also a draconian. What a waste of time.


Instead, some dark elves, with the raised limits


..in the next post as it seems I can't attach more then 5 in the same one...

I don't think I ever actually posted this so here goes, including today's changes :
   

Following my success in the last game, I want to see if I can come up with a consistent strategy that works no matter how the dice fall. I also want to see if it was heroes or strong normal units with buffs that did it.

Barbarians
I ended up changing my mind again. This time I'll be gambling on heavily enchanted cavalry and later berserkers, counting on them to be an invincible war machine around turn 40. With Endurance, Heroism, Holy Armour and Resist Elements I think even 2 units can take out most enemy wizards early on. I just ran 36 turns with Awareness on a random game, and sprites are exceedingly popular fortress defenders. Enchanted berserkers will chew them up for lunch.

4x Life

1. Endurance
   
2. Heroism
   
3. Holy Armour
   

1. Floating Island
   

I missed the sign up for 18, anyone willing to play another round now that it's over?


Teams:
Blue:
WK
rho21
DaveV
sunrise

Red:
El Grillo
Bob
Dp101
Jkaen

There are spells capable of killing heroes on the overland map.

Final Wave : First, the items are removed from the hero and stored in a list, but the slot is not marked empty, instead "item 0" is placed in them. This explains why "item 0" gets corrupted in some games - a bug I already fixed by making the game never generate an item with that ID. Then the hero dies and finally the items are presented to the player to redistribute.
Great Unsummoning : same as above, except first the items are given back then the hero dies. This makes the hero still show up alive, and wielding 3 copies of "item 0" - after my fix, these appear as blank swords with no names. The player can then remove the invalid items from the hero, and equip it with something else, only to have them disappear when the hero is deleted.
Fire Storm, Blizzard : These do the same thing as Final Wave, except they gather all items from all the heroes killed at the same time and give them to the player at once. The list capacity is 18 items, which is the maximal amount you can have on your 6 heroes at a time, so this works correctly. It's worth saying though that the ORIGINAL game only allowed up to 6 of those items to actually show up on the player's screen, the rest got forgotten - not deleted but not returned to the player either. Fortunately this has been fixed a long time ago.

So I present two options :

1. Items on "unsummoned" heroes get erased. It's a "Banishment" type spell - all other, combat versions of this effect cause irrecoverable damage and the items cannot be regained.
2. I try to somehow rearrange the code to execute in the correct order (this is hard to do).

Note that the only way for Great Unsummoning to affect a hero is if the hero is Chaos Chanelled or Undead. The Chosen does not count as a fantastic unit on the overland map - he/she does in combat though.
The other two spells work correctly and need no changes except from replacing "slot 0" with the correct -1 constant for an empty slot.

I. Possession and Creature Binding timing
Current behavior :

If the defender casts these spells, they can move the stolen enemy unit immediately, as the attacker hasn't taken a turn yet. The stolen unit can immediately attack the remaining enemy units, significantly increasing the power of the spell.
If the attacker casts these spells, the unit already moved during the defender's turn and cannot be moved. The enemy gets a turn first, and can deal with the stolen unit before it gets a chance to attack - as an example, the stolen berserker won't backstab two units of magicians in this scenario, but get killed by them.

...do we like this?

Pros :
It provides advantage to the defending player which is a good game mechanic.

Cons :
It's inconsistent - the player often expects to be able to move the unit even if they are the attacker.
The defender already has an advantage by taking the first turn, so an additional, spell specific advantage is redundant and overkill.

Solutions : either make the unit always lose movement so it can never attack, or make it refill their movement to max so they can always attack (I think I prefer this one). Note that Confusion doesn't suffer from this problem - the effect is rolled at the beginning of the next turn, and if "change control" was rolled, it cannot be moved by the other player even if they get their turn first.

II. Confusion timing

If the defender casts confusion, the attacker can still use the unit for that turn without being affected. The effect is rolled at the start of each new turn, which isn't until the attacker finished their moves.
If the attacker casts the confusion, the end of their turn ends the entire turn so the defender already suffers the effects of confusion.

A similar inconsistency as the other two spells, except the benefit is reversed : The attacker gets a free turn to remove the confusion from their unit before they do harm, while the defender does not.

Solutions : The only one I can think of is making the spell force a roll when applied immediately, so it has effect on the attacker.

III. Dispelling

Confusion can be dispelled, regardless of which side the unit is on, and by the correct player. Dispelling it returns the control of the unit.
Creature Binding and Possession cannot be dispelled, except by the one who cast them but even then the unit won't revert control.

Solutions : None that I know of, dispelling for these two spells is not implemented at all and it involves a lot of code (display of "has been dispelled" windows, a resistance roll, etc) which there is no space for. I do like how control changing spells are an "upgrade" to "target unit dies" spells anyway - not only is the unit irrecoverably dead for the other player, but you also get to use it against them for the battle. Creature Binding is a level higher than Banish in the same realm so if it came with the drawback of dispelling, it wouldn't really be all that good as it's supposed to be - a Banished unit is gone and can't return to the enemy side. Possession has a similar relation to Black Sleep, although the sleeping unit does need to get hit once to actually die and it can be raised.

Edit : It seems to be Creature Binding only  - Possession cannot be dispelled.
Edit 2 : The loop for dispelling checks 14 effects, but there are only 13 spell IDs stored for it. If Possession is on the creature, it'll also get dispelled (it's the 14th spell flag) but the resistance roll will not look at Possession itself, instead it'll use an unset variable, so both the resistance and spell name to display will be undetermined - I'm surprised this hasn't caused crashes so far, and might be another source of the "None has been dispelled" messages.

IV. Regeneration

Confused units disappear at the end of combat and cannot regenerate.
Bound and Possessed units do so only if their new controller's side wins the battle. If they lost (died but regenerated or battle timed out), they return control to their original owner.

Solutions : For consistency and also for the same "control change should be superior to killing" reason Bound and Possessed units also die and cannot regenerate at the end of combat. This is already done and ready for the new version. It looks stupid when the enemy regenerates your unit and then gives the control back to you after they took the effort to steal it.
However, if the spells were dispelled, this effect cannot trigger - and as the spells can't revert control without being there, the unit has inconsistent owner data. I have no idea what happens in this case - either it crashes the game, or the unit stays in play under the control of one or the other player, but it certainly does not die unless already dead and has no regeneration. To fix this, the buggy dispel of the spells needs to stop happening.

I think the amount of gold rewarded by this is too low.

It's 100+5*random(100) so 105-600 gold. Compared to the gift event handing out 2k value swords and a lair with a few war bears having this much or more gold, I'm pretty sure it should be higher.

(compared to pirates which is a set percentage of your gold, so often thousands, it feels even more unfair)

I'm thinking about making it 500 to 5500. (5*(100+random(1000))).

(note that events cannot happen before turn 50 so the high gold won't give a too unbalanced start to any player)

I found how the game sets which unit is shown on top for stacks.

It's the unit with the highest BASE (attack+ranged) stat, but transports add +50 to it so they are usually show on top. That's all. Levels, equipment, enchantments are ignored and I don't think I can add those.

Do we want to add any improvements to this?
A few I can think of
-show heroes on top?
-show spirits on top? (so they can't hide among units and meld nodes unnoticed)
-show most expensive unit instead of strongest attack power?
-show settlers on top?
-Use a predefined priority order, like X unit is always on top of Y unit? If yes, what sort of order?