Month: March 2019

Another patch was applied today, adding new piracy countermeasures that i’ve been working on this past week. 
This is mostly to prevent illegitimate copies of the game to access legitimate servers (as it only took a few days before it started spreading fast).
So… thank pirates for even slower development, as i doubt this will be the end of it!

This should also reduce the usage of multi-accounts, as they’re most likely relying on the use of pirated versions as well. 
I might start researching on how to limit this in the near future as it threatens the game balance, if it starts spreading on official games as well.

This update also adds bug fixes on the server side, still in an effort to increase server stability.

Most of the next patches will probably keep focusing on bug fixing and server stability/management and networking, so don’t expect much new exciting features for now!

v0.1.0.31
– added piracy countermeasures to protect legitimate servers
– increased production of directly exploited metal ore tiles
– increased efficiency of furniture makers, and required workforce to produce furniture -> increase wealth from furniture makers.
– set realtime games character limit to 1.
– fixed invalid preview of generated resistance when claiming an occupied territory
– changed -1 resistance decay to a proportionnal to population decay ( 1 per 100 resistance )
– fixed bug of units deploying on the edge of the map

It’s been a rough week. Never had so many urgent things to deal with at the same time… 
For the next weeks, i’ll probably be focusing mostly on server management, stability, and bug fixing, so don’t expect new exciting features for a while.

Server and client bug fixes
Here is finally the first patch of fixes following the release, with mostly server related things.
Notably it fixes the 2 infamous issues of the primitive tribe claims, and the carriers engaging enemies.
Barbarians activity in Solo and Realtime was also reduced.
Server can now auto restart on error, which should reduce downtimes greatly as well and increase the quality of life. 
Next step is to find a way to do an emergency save when there’s an error, to avoid the weird ‘rollbacks’ that happen on error. 

More servers
Besides that, I’ve been started renting a professional dedicated server. All official servers will be moved to it shortly, and a new ones will be started (offical 5 or official 1 ). 
The previous official 1 is renamed Official test server, and will remain on the Tester branch, running on my own home server.
Official servers will now be located near Dunkirk, in the north of France, which is also near the Atlantic internet cables if that helps! 😀
I should be able to run eventually up to 8+ on that dedicated server, with much better performances than with my laggy home server. I hope it will reduce ping timeouts and connections issues greatly.

Worldwide lobbies to see all servers
It was also discovered that steam lobbies were filtered by region by default, which is now fixed and will allow users to see all servers worldwide , especially the official ones for people outside europe.
That will reduce the issue of server shortage especially for players in the Americas.

Piracy
And lastly, it didn’t take long for piracy of the game to spread. I thought i’d have more time 🙂
That can never be avoided, however the fact that pirated copies can access legit servers is a big issue, and this one can be fixed.
I’ve been working on it for the past 2 days and a fix for that is coming – although not on this patch yet .
I will increase measures to counter piracy with additional checks.
Eventually every player will probably need to authenticate its game at least once in online mode. Offline mode should of course still be possible.

Patch!
v0.1.0.19
– errors on client now invisible, and dumped into an error folder in the “cache\logs\client\error” folder.
– errors on server now silent and combined with an immediate auto-restart, improving uptime ( also dumped in “cache\logs\game\error” )
– server list will now show all worldwide servers and not only the regional ones
– lowered realtime respawn timer to a base of 10 min instead of 1hour
– fixed exploit allowing to claim tiles of primitive tribes
– added popup warning when attempting to move primitive tribe when starting
– added configurable autosave frequency in server ini files
– reduced barbarian activity in solo and realtime, less frequent and slower difficulty increase
– fixed issue of own character showing up in diplomacy menu
– fixed pathfinding issue with buildings, in battles
– fixed battlecode error on server
– primitive tribe rebellions: fixed primitives deploying inside defensive zones
– “stand ground” units will switch en “engage” if fired upon by range units in same defensive layer
– fixed infamous bug of carriers being in “engage” mode in battles ( and hunts )
– fixed speed settings icons not combatible with CJK font
– fixed some localisation issues
– fixed multiple server side crashes
– fixed crash on worldmap when worldmap quality at minimum

 

This is the last update before the release!
Actually it’s not really and update but more of a summary of all the successive hot-fixes that have been applied since the last patch while preparing for release.
It doesn’t add any new feature in particular, but many fixes and re-balancing of various aspects of the game.

 

The pre-release update
v0.1.0.x
– trade routes pricing is now fully dynamic and can go down automatically ( and not only up as before ). Minimum price is the production cost of the exporting territory.
– added more UI price details to the Resource menu
– fixed issues with market study not taking into account multiple resources competing for the same need (leads to global decrease of food prices).
– added side pannel with Resistance details in the Loyalty tab of the territory menu.
– lowered resistance growth in occupied territories by 2.
– added UI honor warning when converting an occupied territory
– removed resistance penalties when transfering ownership of occupied territories
– fixed display bug of units in high altitude ( hills or mountains )
– increased distance penalty on required cargo amounts for trade routes
– fixed purchased resources on markets not being state owned
– fixed bug with world pathfinding, rights of passages, and national armies
– auto shut down of all trade routes after an invasion
– all resources are now state owned after an invasion
– added tutorial toggle option in the main menu
– added basic camera key bindings
– fixed issue of doubled AP costs in battles
– fixed case of infinite battle
– placing some infrastructures now require profesionnal builders
– added missing income taxation to sales profits of producers whn selling resources in the market
– reduced palissade cost to 1 wood.
– reduced fuel cost to refine gold.
– reduced state power cost of subvention and state workers policies
– fixed issues with demand/ideally needed/sold in the resource distribution
– resources pricing: profit marghin is now proportionnal to production costs (+20% of production cost) instead of being always +1.
– fixed UI issues with nation names
– rebalanced resistance
– lowered resistance by 50% when transfering culturally integrated cities within a nation (cities that have been in the nation for a long time)
– adding social buttons in the main menu (porcopedia, discord)
– lowered honor penalty of losing to partisans by 60%, but still capped at 50 honor.
– improved decision making of the population to decide when they rise to help defend their territory.
– changed windowed mode to borderless to circumvent an engine issue that had no solution (glitched display espcially visible with fonts)
– fixed issue causing freezing at the end of a battle
– new mission to assist with barter transition now converts all resources to state owned as a reward.
– fixed merchant building not unlocking when adopting barter until the game was restarted.
– added auto creation of market stands when adopting barter
– fixed bug with price arbitrage and world area prices
– reduced UI flickering when opening or refreshing some tabs.