Month: May 2020

The resource hiding update

This new update adds a long-needed small feature: the hiding of undiscovered resources.
This has been needed for game balance for a long time. The problem was that all resources being visible from the start, all territorial conflicts would occur mostly in the beginning of the game as every player would naturally try to secure all the needed strategic resources, then turtling for the rest of the game.
Now, multiple resources are hidden until the tech associated with them is discovered: for example, iron ore only gets revealed once Iron working is discovered. 
With this, new conflicts will arise as techs unveil resources throughout the game’s progression and thus re-balances the strategic desirability of territories. It will also make it harder for experienced players to optimize and game the tech discovery mechanics.

Besides that, this update contains many fixes for reported issues as usual, and notably a few improvements of the battle AI. 
The behavior of troops seeking the shortest distances when travelling through water had been broken by previous patches and was fixed in this update but also improved so that they will now also seek the embarking point closest to their predicted point of disembarking instead of embarking from the closest point of their final target (as in some specific cases these can be rather different locations).
On top of that, proper support for combined siege points as been added: water shore + palisade,  water shore + cliff or  cliff + palisade will now be properly accounted for. The issue of palisades on shores being ‘ignored’ by disembarking troops is therefore fixed as they now have to breach it from their embarkations.

 

The resource hiding update
v0.2.5.x
– Resources related to undiscovered techs (ex iron ore to iron working ) are now invisible until the tech is discovered.
– Added encryption to some client side cached files (-> in case of retroactivity issues, clear your AppData\Local\Ymir\cache folder)
– fixed issue with barbarians present on a primitive tribe location during player spawn & triggering a battle
– fixed issue with the wildlife leaving event.
– fixed buildings not being destroyed during pillage
– fixed troops retreating on a tile occupied by enemies not triggering a battle
– battle AI: improving behavior when retreating to stop ignoring everything else no matter what.
– battle AI: improved pathfinding to further minimize travelling distances through bad layers (ex water)
– fixed battle AI issue where range units in defensive mode kept trying to target out of range units instead of in range ones.
– check global banlist immediately when registering new character to prevent banned accounts from exploiting the grace period on new servers
– unconfirmed fix of odd issues with corrupted territory claims unclaiming or changing ownership for no reason
– decreased construction time of builder buildings
– fix bug being able to recruit troops during ongoing battles
– fixed issue with claims of evacuated cities
– fixing calculation issue in leader contributions from privileges
– fixed owner-less annexes not showing up in red in the annex tool
– fixed server issue with exe arguments when auto-restarting
– fixed problem with treaties being sometimes ineffective (trade, passage… )
– fixed issue causing deployments to still fail in some cases
– fixed being able to claim sea tiles

Here is finally another update with miscellaneous bug fixes, exploit fixes, and general rebalancing!
As always, this news also includes in its changelog all the previous hotfixes that were published since the last news.

Notable changes:
– Wild animals now leave territories of growing cities above 800pop after a small grace first because it was absurd to hunt animals in the middle of a city, and also because it will make meat more scarce and thus valuable.
– Waste was slightly reduced but it now applies on market sale’s profits as well (and not just trade routes) to counter exploits taking advantage of this.
– Many issues regarding the infamous strategic tool have been fixed and improved to prevent mistakes and strategic changes not being effective.

What is going on besides that since all this time?
Besides these fixes that constantly come up, I’m working in the background on multiple long term new features, none of which is completed now unfortunately. 
There is the “end game event” for a start, but i’m also working on a weather system and on a new Culture tab which will work in a way similar to government policies.
With cultural traits players will be able to specialize their people and therefore they’ll have make choices about things like what resource they can consume and produce, but more on that when these new mechanics are completed! This new cultural mechanics will in turn allow to finally add many more new resources and industries into the game.

 

Another Multifix update
v0.2.4.x
– fixed resources not in alphabetic order in the “allow” button of storage permissions
– fixed claim action being available on tiles occupied by enemies
– fixed pacific actions not cancelled when target tile turns out being occupied by enemies
– reduced waste from total population to +1% per 65 hab. instead of 50.
– applied waste to market sales profits
– strategic tool: fixed issues with default defensive zones around formation camp
– strategic tool: fixed not being able to deploy in neutral territories
– strategic tool: fixed UI problems when deleting a defensive zone.
– strategic tool: fixed being able to assign a troop to a defensive mode when deployed outside of it, leading to deployment being ignored.
– strategic tool: deploying troop in a defensive zone will now auto set it to defensive mode by default.
– fixed problem with destruction tool that could trigger destruction on invalid coordinates.
– increased research speed in realtime mode (doubled)
– fixed problem with trading agreements and market trades allowing trades between 2 parties not having a trade agreement.
– fixed trading bug where new sell offers wouldn’t auto adjust price to match the best buy offers if the inputted sell price was lower.
– fixed Migrants formation troops no being able to be disbanded independently (empty action menu)
– fixed free claims not working when administration is negative
– new event of wild animals leaving cities above 800pop after a 48h period
– cities and capitals now get 8 free claims
– added possibility of free claims to territory statuses
– fixed not beign able to build height 2 stone platforms
– fixed bug with construction speed of platforms
– restored ability for buildings to modify the grass density around and below them
– improved field graphics to better reflect their current state
– migrants will now spawn at 100AP when territory evacuation is completed
– only occupied territories may now be “renounced”
– increased AP regen in cities by 2
– reduced home distance malus for AP regen from 3 to 2% per tile
– fixed bug with annex tool locking up the UI
– fixed problem on client side battle pathgrids having incorrect values leading to wacky movements through fields
– Representative money wealth no longer provides a linear amount of wealth, but provides a % bonus applied to the produced wealth of every territory. 10 gold = +1% produced wealth.
– fixed crash when exiting region view with the annex tool opened.
– fixed state ownership problem when cancelling trade offers
– fied missing 25honor commitment in colonial treaties on the colony side
– fixed exploit of bypassing building’s minimum distance
– added failsafe for animal spots: unbuildable & undestroyable
– fixed instaresearch exploit
– Migrants now transfer local culture when settling in a city
– Overall redesigning of ideas triggering mechanics to fix tech stagnation on servers
– increased resistance decay speed
– decreased foreign cultures decay speed
– excluded salaries and subventions from deductible expenses in territorial statuses
– fixed dismantling causing crash when applied
– fixed exploit with rounding prices in market orders
– fixed battle pathfinding bug causing occasionnal server crashes
– fixed problem with market offers depleting state owned resources
– slowed down the evolution of intelligence of population classes