December 16^th, 2004 (1:35pm) - Illwinter Game Design has released two new upgrades to their fantasy strategy game Dominions II as an early holiday gift for the game’s fans.

The first upgrade release is the new Oceania mod. What this mod does is replace the game’s Atlantis realm with Oceania, which actually acts as a "preview" of the underwater nation that will appear in the upcoming Dominions III.

The second upgrade is actually a patch that upgrades the game to version 2.15. The patch is necessary for use with the Oceania mod just mentioned. It will tweak some gameplay features and takes care of a few pesky bugs. The tweaks include a couple of new mod commands, some spell modifications, and more. Bugs smashed include network issues, the end of underwater wolves (hoooowwwlllll…glub glub glub), a crash involving multiple games receiving the same temp directory, and a few other fixes.

As in recent patches, saved game files from previous versions are fully compatible with the new patch, so there is no need to worry about invalidating older saved games. Everyone in a multiplayer game should be running the same version, otherwise battle results can get loopy. Additionally, if the Oceania mod is enabled by a player in a multiplayer game then all players must have it enabled.

You can download the Oceania mod and version 2.15 patch at: www.shrapnelgames.com/Illwinter/d2/6.htm