What the playtest found
Five of us played for an evening and wrote down 41 things. Three of the fixes, with before and after.
On Monday five of us played Eras together for the first time: a long evening in the shared world, then a party Skirmish. We came out of it with a list of 41 things, from "nobody understood how a battle is won" to "the canoe looks rough (fun to use)". Much of the list has shipped since. Here are three of the fixes you can see.
Houses on a hill
A building in Eras sits on a grid, and the ground under it is rarely flat. We used to stand each building on the highest ground under its footprint and give it a deep plinth, so the low side never showed daylight. On a gentle slope that was fine. On a steep one, the hut sat on top of a dark box a person's height tall, and it looked like it was hovering.
Now the building sits a little into the hill, about where you'd dig a terrace, and the low side gets a dry-stone footing: courses of rough stones, each a little wider than the one above, stepping down to the ground. Every building's stones are laid a little differently. On flat ground there's no footing at all.
While we were there, we made the rules agree. A tile could take buildings and then refuse a settlement as "too steep", because the two checks measured steepness differently. Now both ask the same question: could a hut stand here?
A dugout
The canoe was half an ellipsoid: a long, smooth bowl with round ends. The Primitive age would have paddled a dugout, one log hollowed out. So the new hull is lofted through U-shaped sections. It tapers to raised, pointed ends, keeps a thick wall with the cut top showing pale, and stays solid at both ends where the log wasn't carved.
The bow that was never quite a bow
Someone said the bow "looks bad", and they were right in a way we hadn't seen. The bow's stave is an arc of a ring, turned to center on the grip. Since the day it was made, it had been turned the wrong way: by an eighth of a circle instead of three eighths back. So the stave curved up and away from your hand, and the string hung on its own beside it, joined to nothing. It took a playtest to see it.
The rest of the list went in too: relaxed hands, a run that stands up straight, a new hairstyle of tight coils, walls you lay in runs at any angle, a stone axe, and a battle screen that finally says how a battle is won.