Hi, we're excited (and slightly nervous) to announce that we have the first version of online multiplayer ready to be tested by the community!
The main purpose of this test is to catch all remaining critical bugs and to get to a stable version that can't get stuck in a battle etc. It's definitely recommended to save your game before any big battles with other players!
Hopefully this will already be quite fun, but please adjust your expectations! :) On the other hand, we should be able to quickly update the beta with any important fixes!

To join the test, just go to the game in your library on Steam, select Properties, Game versions and betas - and choose beta branch "multiplayer-beta".

Known issues and unfinished features

To give you a better picture, at this point the core of the multiplayer system is in place, with a few specific features missing or still WIP (hopefully arriving in an update next week), but you should be able to play most of the skirmish (or even random) maps with a friend or in a group! This version also contains most of the other changes we've been preparing for 1.0, so feel free to let us know if you encounter any issues not directly linked to multiplayer.

• LIMITATION The host currently needs to select all player's factions plus assigning players in the UI is currently only based on the order of joining
• NOT YET AVAILABLE Official team (co-op) game support (a few final touches to the fog of war handling and it should be ready, for example gifting resources works already)
• LIMITATION Saves will be under the singleplayer/autosaves folders
• Joining friends-only lobbies: go to friends overlay, find your friend who is hosting and select join
• New texts are currently only available in English, Hungarian and Brazilian Portuguese
• NOT YET AVAILABLE Special multiplayer game modes and simultaneous turns are not in yet, currently in design/evaluation stage
• Arcane controller ability is broken

Testing and bug reporting

• Please join our Discord and have a look at the bug-reporting forum section!
• To help us investigate specific issues, the last save/autosave file and logs from both sides will help a lot!
• Typical bugs will most likely manifest themselves as 1) the game disconnecting or 2) by getting stuck in combat and quickly switching who is the active player back and forth
• What will most likely cause bugs that we haven't caught ourselves yet? Big battles and siege battles, abilities and units with special features, unexpected combinations of skills, equipment, consumables, abilities etc.

Our questions for you :)

Last but not least - we're interested in your general feedback too! Did you finish a game? How did it go?
Plus, a few topics we've discussed and would like to hear more opinions about are:

• Speed: should be always set to max?
• Simultaneous turns: how important do you find this feature/what are your best examples of games where it works well and doesn't get interrupted very early?

New content notes

• A few new buildings and items
• Updates to the AI (also WIP)
• Some of the new maps for 1.0
• There are achievements, not yet sent to Steam

Thanks in advance and have fum!