We have been hard at work on the 1.1 patch. Today we built an internal alpha which went to our testers and they began reporting issues, bugs, etc. Our feature list isn't completely implemented yet, there are still a few things to checkin but I expect that they will be all in by Monday. The team has been told to focus on bug fixes and polish between now and next Thursday (11/18/2010) which we are targeting as the date for the release of the public 1.1 beta.
What is coming?
Toby already posted about the two major changes coming in 1.1. Global Mana and Population as a resource (in that improvements consume population). Global mana is a significant change to the magic side of the game, and all the spells have been adjusted to account for it. Population to improvements is a significant change to the economic side of the game, forcing players to balance their population between economic, production and military goals.
There are a lot of UI improvements, one of my favorites is the city idle popup. You now get warned when a city has nothing let in its queue, and you have the opportunity to jump right to it.
