As we continue our journey to improve and polish The Fertile Crescent, we're releasing 0.4.3, the Balance and Polish patch. 

Rock-throwing villagers

Villagers are now better at defending themselves. They throw rocks at enemies from a distance, so they no longer have to engage in melee combat to damage enemy units.

You used to be able to scout your enemy without any consequences, since Scout is the fastest unit in the game and villagers couldn't catch up, but you will have to be a lot more careful from now on.

Balance

Apart from rock-throwing villagers, we've made some important balance changes. Rushing with a group of slingers has been the most powerful strategy in multiplayer games by far, and some players felt that a game was determined mostly by how early one trained them. We've therefore made some additional changes to address this.

Explore map after multiplayer game ends

This feature was requested by our friendly community. Now you can explore the map without fog of war and see everything that was going on, after a multiplayer game has ended. Especially if you're on the losing side, this is very useful to see how your opponent set up his or her base.

Health regeneration

All units now slowly regenerate health when out of combat.

4K monitors

The UI used to be tiny on 4K screens, so we've scaled the UI for 4K monitors to address this.

Where is the tower!?

We've been working on a defensive tower for this update, but we haven't decided yet how to implement it and it will also need a fair bit of testing. Our programmer is going on a holiday in a few days and we wanted to release this update before that, so we decided to wait with the tower for another update. 

Change Log 0.4.3

Improvements 
- Added 'Explore Map' option on multiplayer end screen so you can explore the entire map without fog of war
- After 5 seconds since last hit, units start regenerating 1 health per 5 seconds
- Added 'Raze' button for buildings
- Improved UI scaling for 4K monitors
- Double-clicking control group NUM_KEY will now move camera to group
- Multiplayer games no longer end the moment a Tribe unit or Tribe Center gets killed or destroyed (added 2 second delay)
- More obvious when Villagers are carrying Metal resource
- Increased Large map-size from 120x120 to 130x130

Balance changes
- Villager now throws rocks at enemies for 5 dps
- Villager siege damage reduced from 3 to 2 (was incorrectly set)
- Villager attack damage is no longer improved when equipping copper or bronze spears in Furnace
- Slinger damage reduced from 12 to 10 (from 6 dps to 5 dps) 
- Spearman speed increased from 280 to 300 
- Swordman wealth training cost reduced from 45 to 35 
- Axeman health increased from 190 to 210

Bug fixes
- Health bar no longer flips when unit faces another direction
- Pressing 'T' to open Tech Tree while in place building state will now cancel place building state
- No longer playing selected unit sound if creating selection box but no units get selected
- No longer playing selected unit sound when selecting control group with no units set
- Fixed game not stopping and showing 'out of sync' error message when multiplayer game goes out of sync
- Fixed image and text describing where to place Clay Pit on How To Play page

Language
- Title and play button now contains word 'Alpha' instead of 'Demo' to better represent game state in Main Menu
- Renamed Small Map to Normal Map
- Fixed a UI typo