The Civilization Points Update

Adds Cultural policies, resource consumption choices, production specializations, battle balance improvements, and server performances improvements.

 

Civilization Points and Cultural Traits
This update adds a significant new long-time planned gameplay mechanic to the game: Cultural Traits.
Cultural Traits are like Policies but for Culture. Unlike Policies, they are – at least for now- permanent once enabled, and they require “Civilization Points” to be enabled.
Civilization Points are earned in 2 ways: one can earn them by completing the early missions or by levelling up your culture.
This happens in a similar way as an RPG game: the ‘XP’ is the State Culture all your cities are producing and everytime the XP bar is filled you gain a new level and unlock an additional Civilization Point.
As with RPGs, with every new level it requires more State Culture to be produced before reaching the next one.

This update comes with 2 cultural traits: consumption customs and production skills.
– Consumption customs represent the adoption of a resource by your population and the cultural custom to consume it.
Indeed, from now on, distributable resources are no longer automatically consumable by the population. Each resource needs to be adopted with a custom costing 1 Civilization Point, although some common resources have the special property of not requiring a cultural custom (ex: the Doctor service).
– Production skills unlock the ability to produce a resource. From now on, like the consumption of resources, a cultural trait is required to enable their production. Like Customs, some common resources also have the property not to require a cultural skill to be produced (ex: tools).
However, unlike consumption customs, production skills have up to 5 levels: the first level enables the production while investing additional Civilization Points will increase the productivity of the resource and reduce its material costs or increase the natural sources productivity (depending on the resource type).
The result is that it now costs a minimum of 2 Civilization Points to enable both the consumption and production of a resource, and it is also possible to choose to only adopt the consumption or production of resource types, or to invest mode points to specialize in the production of a specific one.

The reason behind this system is to favor specialization, trading, and teamwork against players trying to do everything by themselves.
It will now be much harder to hoard all food types right at the game start, and players working together to specialize in complementary resources will be necessarily more efficient than someone spreading Civilization Points to produce everything.

Battle improvements & anti-small troops rebalancing
Besides this new system, this update brings significant fixes and improvements to battles and server performances.
It aims to fix the recent overused practice of making many troops with only a few units instead of a single maxed out troop, as it turned out to provide an absolute advantage versus the bigger troops.
It also aims to improve the resolution of larger battles that, combined with the practice of using many small troops, have caused huge strains on the servers (and even causing Server 5 to be shut down unable to resolve a giant battle taking place there).

Many things have been modified to re-balance big troops versus smaller ones, especially for range units who now get a ballistic malus below 5 units, and extra attacks for larger troops. 
All troops in general now cost 1 extra coin of upkeep, so that using multiple small troops comes at as more expensive as well.
Cavalry has been significantly buffed with the addition of a special “melee mobility” property that makes them considered as ‘in movement’ even when engaged in melee. This gives them an extra advantage against range units, because moving units benefit from a bonus proportional to their moving speed against missile attacks (harder to hit). The ballistic range of mounted archers was also increased, and a bug causing their attack rate bonus to be ignored was fixed.
On top of that, troop mass now plays a significant role in melee combats at every turn and not just during the initial charge. This also strengthen the melee advantage of larger troops versus smaller one, as well as cavalry units in general.
Mounted archers should now be a much better anti-archer unit  (although they still lack a skirmisher movement ability to avoid being engaged in melee).

Least but not last, infrastructures such as walls are no longer allowed on inaccessible tiles and will self destruct on inaccessible tiles.
This will put an end to the practice of the ugly ‘grid wall’ forts made with walls stuck together without any spacing or access.
Yes, this will cause counter intuitive issues in some specific cases of placing walls on cliff edges, but its a price i’m willing to pay to put an end to the practice of these forts which were common due to their cost efficiency.

 

The Civilization Points Update
v0.3.0.x

– Introducing Civilization Points, used to enable Cultural Traits
– Implemented Cultural Level, which levels up from total produced State Culture and where each level unlocks a new Civilization Point.
– Added new Culture tab in Government Menu for Cultural policies
– New cultural trait: consumption custom, needed to unlock demand of a resource by population
– New cultural trait: production skill, needed to unlock production of some resources + allows for production specialization
– added self-destruction of infrastructures on inacessible tiles (ex walls)
– added visual icon to tag inacessible buildings & infrastructures + delay before making it effective
– penalty of ballistic skill -6% per unit for range troops below 5
– range units +1 attack per 5 units in troop
– +1 upkeep per troop in a formation
– adding ballistic skill malus to range units firing at an enemy that is engaged in melee (-50%)
– improved behavior of range units in open field defensive zones and collisions with enemy troops
– fixed pathfinding bug causing units to sometimes ignore stoping at x distance from path target (ex for range units, causing them to run into melee)
– fixed bug where formation redeploys on territory edge if a 2nd battle happens after it moved into it in a battle
– fixed bug causing some units to have incorrect attack speed (ex mounted units missing extra attack)
– increased ballistic skill of mounted units
– adding “mobile attacker” property to mounted units, so that they benefit from moving cover against range attacks even when in melee
– added melee skill modificator based on the ratio of attacking troop mass to defending troop mass: gives a strong melee bonus to larger troops vs smaller troops.
– added random anim offset for siege rams to prevent all sounds from adding up at the exact same time
– fixed battlecode issue where troops navigating between defensive layers would not see existing wall and gate breaches, causing them to make more useless breaches.
– fixed battlecode bug where stairs on cliffs would have a very high pathfinding cost in siege, causing units to alway climb instead
– fixed battlecode bug where troops have incorrect siege priorities in forts with more than 2 layers (gates)
– server optimization: battle pathfinding avoids calculating same path twice if 2 troops share the same exact path
– server optimization: refreshment of light regions improved to reduce loading/unloading region data frequency
– server optimization: reduced frequency of light regions refreshing and reducing it when there’s ongoing battles
– fixed bug allowing to accept a treaty twice in a row
– fixed a possible server crash happening during a rebel leader spawn if multiple rebel armies are present on spawn location
– colonies income modififactor increased from -75% to -85%
– fixed bug with loyalty not being reset in secondary cities in a succession spawn.
– made separate project and trigger to allow for horseback riding tech out of camels only
– fixed bug causing issues with Goldsmithing tech
– fixed bug causing some hidden resources not to show up when having the idea for it (ex: pearls)
– removed inventory control of national armies for anyone but the formation owner.
– fixed passive troops (civilian units) still doing pillage when part of an attacker’s formation
– fixed UI issues in nation hierarchy of large nations
– fixed logic problems with combinations of gates + cliff + stairs
– fixed edges display glitches when building while heights display is also disabled
– fixed issues with wall logic connections with cliffs causing incorrect tile edges to get blocked or not.
– fixed issues with tribal rebellion event
– battle deployment: improved choice of region border when an army is deploying from the edge but not coming from any previous tile
– reducing adornments need to 25 for leadership mission

In previous hotfixes:
– investigate unusually low or oddly located ressources in terrain generation since last patch
– fixed issue causing invalid resource placement in terrain generation
– fixed issues with “copper age ” mission
– fixed battlecode error causing infinite battle
– fixed bug of black flags missing their amblem
– randomized order of events when inspecting events to trigger
– fixed solo game server not auto closing
– fixed bug with neutral formations registering as main defender in battles
– added mission for animal husbandry
– reduced max wood collection action to 30
– made collecting action unit number based and not strength based
– made formation collecting actions only possible on empty tiles