It's been a long time coming - 2 months since the last update. A fair bit of work has been done on several different fronts.

Terrain

First up, there is a new terrain rendering system. The grass terrain has been moved over to this. It still uses tile sprites in a 2D+height style, but now these can be combined with a larger texture. This helps break up the large, monotonous sections of map:

and we can get a hybrid of a hand-drawn feel along with precise tiles.

The dirt terrain is currently moving across to this. You'll see some artefacts now as its tiles haven't been properly converted over:

but once its done it should be another improvement, especially on maps with loads of dirt like the Tar map.

Tornado

The tornado sprite finally got completed. To see it animated you'll have to go in-game, but here's its new look:

Attack animations

There is now both melee and ranged attack animations. Melee attacks cause a semi-circular slice through the air between the units. Ranged attacks shoot a faint bolt.
This still needs some refinement, with some ranged attacks being slightly offset from where they should be. Also the bolt is a bit oversized and will be shrunk at some point.

Tree Spirits

Four Tree Spirit champions are in and can be viewed in the deck manager. Again, more work needed to fix some bugs on their signature ability of possessing Tree champions but that major work has been done. I'll be putting some time aside before the next update to get them ready, including more than the single sprite they currently rely on.

Single player

The single player (Academy) section has been put on hold while it gets an overhaul so that narrative events can fire within a running game. Still, another piece of work on it has been completed with one of the "talking heads" that set the missions:

The Academy is going to be set in a training ground for the Hominid theme. So humans and apes. This guy is running the show, and his side kick will probably be a human veteran.

Other stuff
These are other updates on my list. It's possible that some of these appeared in the last update but I think most are new:
- Terrain animations or sprite colourings for Burning Bars (fire), Tar (mud), Blinding (fog)
- Champion damage keywords show up in the deck manager
- Minor improvement to AI positioning when it has a local advantage
- Paralyzed will no longer be removed by Psychic damage. This is to help with future Sleep effects (which interact with Paralyzed).

- generated impeding terrain (lava/mud/vegetation/water/snow) lasts for 5 turns. The only exception are the terrain generator relics.
- generated non-impeding terrain (ice/dirt/grass/sand) is always permanent
- generated aerial terrain (fire/fog) have been left alone, but can last up to no more than 5 turns
- Menacing Maze no longer messes with return to play conditions that have infinite timers

- fix for Sympathetic Binding
- fix for crash when Dragging (or any movement condition) applied to a killed unit

I expect the next update will just be polishing many of the things listed here. So dirt terrain and Tree Spirits should be on the cards.