1. I read (for the first time) the fifth, sixth, and seventh Harry Potter books during the last week - the fifth took me two days; the sixth took me two days; the seventh took me seven hours.

2. With all the contests done or just beginning, I have a bit of time for work on DoC. I've restructured all the building objects, ironing out inefficiencies and making the model easy to expand; in particular there's no pause when building chains of roads now.

3. I'm also working on remaking the building placement process, which I think is a bit stiff. Particularly, I'm trying to take building placement off the 16x16 grid it's been on so far - making it freeform. It's working semi-well so far, with the one major drawback being that it only makes road tiles. Oh, well.

4. I've also updated a few of the art resources - in particular the dirt and road images now fit better with the terrain.

4. Down the pipeline a bit are perlin-generated terrains (craggy mountains!), more-involved gameplay, and (possibly) a change of scope. More on this in 5.

5. The biggie of this update: Villages and global scope.

A relatively major flaw in DoC's design has to do with the scale - it's got to be large enough to be realistic (currently a 256x256 tile map) but not include long travel times (At the moment, siege weapons take several minutes to travel halfway across the map).

There are several workarounds I percieve for this. One is to focus more highly on the city-building and make army control into almost a secondary feature. That is, you'd select an army, order it to move to an enemy city, then forget about it until it gets there. The problem with this method, even if well designed, in the current context is that I want to integrate combat and city-building, rather than separating them into different time slots.

The second alternative is to abandon realism in unit speeds. By making everything move extremely fast, I can lower army travel time to a reasonable amount and make battles faster. The downsides to this are that it lends the game a "toy army" feel and no real sense of epic struggles.

Thirdly, I can add extra objectives to the game, to decrease the feeling of doing nothing and waiting for armies to move. A prime example of this is the addition of AI-controlled villages which launch periodic raids against enemy forces, can be captured by the players, and send vassalage (tribute) to their owners. This gives the player something to do in the interim (build a vassal empire rather than just attacking the enemy main city) and potentially puts his centre of operations closer to the enemy while not losing the sense of being part of a vast world. The disadvantage to this method is that it would constitute a relatively large performance hit - something that I can't easily afford.

6. UR has been released on 64D - not too many people have replied, though.

7. Same spot, second scene.

This image was taken in the same location as the previous one - the only coded difference is the addition of three mysterious floating black things. This picture clearly illustrates the presence of a unique, dynamic day/night cycle in the project.