First thing, the improvements are fantastic. The snow and ice terrain features are great. You have roads, dirt, grass and pine trees with snow as well as snow itself. The ice terrain looks great next to cliffs and around bodies of water. I doctored up one of my Charlemagne scenarios in which he is traveleing through the Alps with snow and ice and it looks marvelous. You can copy snow trees onto the mountains and cliffs as well. One thing you have to do is replace any buildings you have with new ones if you want them to have snow on them. The snow only affects larger buildings…not houses, lumber camps, etc. You also have a new road terrain called fungus road that looks really cool with bits of weed and stuff stuck into it.
The new triggers for changing names, HP and Attack work really well. I placed an archer on a test map and changed his name to Bob the Archer then gave him 500 HP and 500 attack. He was taking down paladins with a single arrow. Pretty cool huh? The damage trigger works great too. You can select individual objects or entire areas to give damage to. Too bad you weren't able to key in a percentage for damage instead of actual points but I guess that would be too hard. So be careful using select area because it'll affect every object in that area. To get a TC or a barracks to look damaged you need to take away about 500 points. But if you take away 500 points from a house or a villager, they will be destroyed of course. Still, it's an extremely cool trigger. There's also a trigger called 'reveal map' that I haven't figured out yet. Anyone that knows how it works let us know.
The new units are all there including a lot of new GAIA 'other' eye candy such as roman ruins, statues, road signs, etc. The rocks have been drastically improved (graphically) and look much more realistic than the old ones. Lots of new heros as well including some that I find a bit bizarre such as 'Furious the Monkey Boy".
Also, the editor seemed much less bug prone to me. Example being, I had absolutely NO CRASHES on a scenario that I had much trouble with before. I tested it several times after making many changes and it worked fine each time.
There was one annoying bug however that I must mention. In the opening scene of the above mentioned Charlemagne scenario, a monk comes forth to warn him of highwaymen in the mountains. Well, the monk had been replaced by Hrolf the Ganger. What the heck's that all about? And the triggers recognized the change. Oh well, I suppose we'll find more bugs as we go. At least we can use the new changes on old scenarios.
Well, that's about it for now. Tell you more as I discover it.