Yes, another lovely undocumented feature. They mentioned it in the patch notes in the "coming soon" section - but with all the hoopla over the NPCs I think it went unnoticed.

I emailed Dawnseeker and Thalin 4 hours ago asking them to respond to this - and nothing so far. Once again, the devs are ruining the game for people who use strategy. Battle and scouting must be too hard on the servers, and they want us to sit in our cities all day doing nothing.