GameSpy.com's Etherlords Developer Diary Volume 10 offers thoughts from Nival Interactive's Andrey Emelyanenko on the tweaks they've made to the gameplay in Etherlords as a result of beta testing. Some of the factors that have been altered based on testing are the speed of combat in the turn-based game, of which Andrey says "I can confidently claim that we haven't received a single complaint about the combat part being too slow or tedious," the addition of a "surrender" button, and learning the significant impact AI has upon the pace of gameplay, which lead to the creation of their "expert evaluation system."