The early game was actually balanced to some extent...take the Orc warriors-chain-tactic for instance

No, it wasn't. A few people wished for that to happen. And the early game has changed a lot.

It has been a while since 1.2.1 was released, but I don't remember suggesting there would be more races or houses (and I can't think what they would be). The early game has been changed quite a bit with the new monsters -- many other monsters have been moved up or down 50 or 100 ft, and have had some minor tweaks to adjust for this. I'm not sure if it is a bit easier or not, but would welcome feedback for the inevitable 1.3.1 balance tweak.

I like the early-game, and especially moving the serpents up. They add some variety to the "orcs-everywhere" of earlier versions.

There's not really much scope for adding more races while remaining true to the Tolkien mythology. I guess there could be Ents (though I'm not sure enough of the timeline to know if they existed at the time the game is set.)

The other possibility would be Maiar, for which there is at least some kind of precedent, as Luthien was the daughter of a Maia.

Avari Elves? Dunno how to make them interesting beyond being kinda sorta inbetween Sindar and Edain in power level though. Goodish stats without affinities coud work as a "vanilla" challenge race perhaps?

Other possibilities include

• Laiquendi, the Green-Elves of Ossiriand
• Druedain (like Ghan-buri-Ghan from Lord of the Rings)
• Easterlings (the people of Bor were faithful to the Elves, as opposed to the people of Ulfang)
• Ents and Maiar as mentioned, but to handle them with the sort of faithfulness Sil has shown so far would be difficult
• If you allowed peoples from outside Beleriand, the other houses of the dwarves, potentially other humans, or even proto-hobbits

That said, even the best of these are a bit marginal compared to the existing options; and one of the defining characteristics (in my view) of Sil is the fact that it hasn't expanded in the ramshackle way that *bands (particularly Zangband and its derivatives) have.

Game crashes when trying to add additional windows (Character, messages, monster list) from the visibility menu. Windows 10. 1.2.1 is able to show/hide windows without issue.

Manually enabling them in the ini file works but it would be nice to not have to edit a text file.

Just now seeing the good news! Congrats on the new release.

Does this bug still happen if you wait until you are in the dungeon before enabling the windows? Crashes before that (on Mac and Windows) are a known bug. Of course I should also fix that bug at some point if it is not too hard...