Having just gotten my copy of the new patch, I want to be the
first to congratulate the developers on the excellent work!
I love the way the VQ is a non-issue now. Getting rid of all the other pretenders was a stroke of genius - hardly anybody was using them, and now that everyone has to take the VQ, they can't complain about someone else using them also.
Same goes for the solution to the "Mad Castling" issue. Now that you can't build temples, there isn't as much reason to build castles to protect non-existent temples. Of course, losing your temple on turn 2 with a Luck-3 setting is a little more of a problem now, but it gives an excellent opportunity to excel. "I won a 17 player game with no temples! Ooorah!"
And the updated text mode. Making all the units show up onscreen as upper/lowercase letters, a la Angband? Awesome. Lets imagination take over. And getting rid of the graphics modes means more concentration on gameplay.
Not so sure I like the way Wish was moved to being lvl-3 research though, but at least Arco starts with it as a national spell now, which is cool.
Great work!