Author: Ronchiporc

UDP networking
This update mainly adds the implementation of UDP into the game’s networking, in an effort to circumvent issues with the engine’s poor TCP implementation that’s been causing constant connectivity issues for some players. 
By diverting some things to UDP, i hope to reduce the triggering of this issue and to therefore increase connection stability for players who had problems.
Note that this means servers now need to forward their port in both TCP and UDP.

Economic rebalancing and cargo bugfix
This update also rebalances some economic things.
Notably it fixes a bug in cargo prices that caused cargo to reach abnormal prices and generating huge income for dock workers and therefore in taxes. 
Cargo was also not purchased properly in the trading balance.
The cost of outposts has also been greatly increased to limit the tendency of players to make cities with the outpost status.

Stored wealth
Besides that, resources now have a basic wealth value which is a constant based on the amount of work required to produce them. This change requires to modify the stats of many buildings, and therefore the production of some buildings has been affected.
This resource wealth was added for a new feature: professional storage buildings now contribute to the territory wealth based on the wealth of all resources stored in them and provided they have a worker. 
Storage buildings now have a customizable priority to better manage them.

A new wealth side pannel is now visible in the economic tab of territories, to see how much wealth is originating from production and storages.

Warning for future updates 
In a future update i plan to heavily penalize the practice of building massive wall “grids” in forts. Walls built on inacessible tiles surrounded by other walls will therefore be penalized by maintenance or decay in ways i still have to decide, so i’d like to warn players designing forts around the use of the surfaces of wall tiles in advance.

The UDP update
v0.1.8.x

– implemented UDP into networking
– added territory wealth pannel in the economic tab of the territory menu
– professionnal storages now contribute to the territory’s wealth based on their content
– resources now have a base wealth value constant, used to calculate the wealth of storages (wealth a constant and is independent from market value)
– added customizable storage priorities
– greatly increased maitnenance costs of gates
– greatly increased maintenance costs of outposts
– rebalanced resources workforce uses and production
– restricted storages now have an automatic priority higher than non-restricted ones
– fixed a bug in cargo prices and trades routes where cargo wasnt being paid for in the trade balance and where dock workers were getting abnormal incomes and generating abnormal taxes as a consequence.
– doubled production of trading service in markets
– doubled storage capacity of warehouses
– added LVL1 market building
– fixed bug where vote isnt cancelled when superior to vote for no longer is a superior in hierarchy
– expelling/quitting nation now previews the treaties that will be broken by this action
– fixed expelling characters from nation not triggering treaty breaking closes if relevant
– fixed issue where loyalty wasnt increasing even when target loyalty was higher than current
– fixed problem with treaties and messages failing to send
– fixed networking issues
– fixed units being visually late when moving long distances on the world map
– fixed crashes when armies retreated more than 1 tile away after a battle
– armies now display on multiple lines when too numerous on a worldmap territory

 

This small update modifies once more the score calculation, as i still try to find the right balance.
It aims to simplify the score and victory points system by removing the whole system of a reference ‘par’ score, replacing it with a simpler and more intuitive ‘world score’ that is just a sum of the scores of all active characters in the game.
The score cost per VP is also simplified, as it is now set to be equal to 0.5% of that world score, so that 100VP now cost 50% of the world score.
Therefore in order to win a nation will need to control about 75% of the score and to achieve total diplomatic or military domination (because lower ranks do not contribute 100% of their VPs).
Also victory missions are removed, as the coming bigger update adding a “game ending event” will replace these with a more scenarized single event giving a lot of VPs if completed. 

Besides that I’ve started working on exciting new long term features that all need to come together to work, so they will not be “turned on” until everything is ready for it.

Yet another Score reform
v0.1.7.x

– “ref score” is replaced by a world score that is a sum of all character scores, but ignoring inactives in part.
– removed the “score from subordinates” component is from the calculation of character scores.
– the cost of 1VP is now set as equal to 0.5% of the world score, so that 100VP now cost 50% of the world score.
– lowered difficulty of the olive oil project
– fixed a battle pathfinding issue causing server freeze in some cases.
– improved the french localisation
– fixed critical bug with retreating armies disapearing since a previous patch.
– implemented automatic chronicles (not used yet)
– reorganized formation types to allow for the addition of many new types in the future.
– created the “artefact” formation type (not used yet)
– market purchases now impossible if in debt
– formations that have no possible retreat position after a defeat are auto-destroyed
– fixed bug with the choice of retreat location for defeated armies
– fixed bug of corrupted territory data when settling a new tile
– fixed not being able to start projects costing 0 coins when in debt
– fixed modifying/adding researchers to an ongoing project sometimes causing the project progress to reset to 0.
– fixed some of the random program crashes when closing the game
– optimized minor things on the server
– fixed worldmap city icons disapearing when above 2000 inhabitants.

This small update brings 2 main modifications:

In an effort to increase the amounts of ores traded on markets, the amount of ore necessary to refine metals such as copper, tin or iron have been reduced by 2: it now only takes 1 of ore to make 1 of refined metal. On top of that, the efficiency of the mining shaft annexes have been further increased. This should greatly increase the amount of ore available from mines and give more intensive for players to trade and export it to players with no mines.

The other main change is another modification of score calculations to fix issues preventing games from being won by score even when a nation dominates.
This update should now make victory more possible, hopefully allowing the old “ended” official servers to finally end and be restarted fresh.
To do this, the score inherited from subordinates is increased, resulting in a higher score for the nation leader and therefore more Victory Points. 
And to make the score of a global nation more coherent, it’s now the sum of the scores of all members regardless of their ranks, but excluding the scores inherited from subordinates as it would be redundant.

Besides that, i’m glad to announce that i’ve finally come up with a plan of how to properly end games, which is something i’ve had in the back of my head for a while. Besides the current simple victory by points, the victory missions will be removed and replaced with an “endgame event” that will start with gathering a certain number of artifacts and offer a choice between 2 endings. I don’t want to say more for now! I’ll start working on it soon, but its going to be a big task requiring a fair amount of new features and content to work. This should provide a more satisfying ending to games and something to look forward to when playing.

 

The score & metals update
v0.1.6.x
– metals now only consume 1 of ore instead of 2 to refine
– mine shaft annexes are much more efficient and productive
– the contribution to nation score now excludes score inherited from subordinates, but it also no longer reduced by position in hierarchy.
– the share of inherited score from direct subordinates has been significantly increased
– storage policy gets reset if resource is unused, to avoid stocking lockdown issue
– fixed more issues with CJK fonts display
– added WIP chinese (simplified) translation
– data of all controlled territories now get preloaded during initial game session loading
– reduced tech & resources spawn bonus in early game
– fixed server crash caused by instacrushing resolution of rebellions in cities
– fixed display issue of claims appearing and disapearing
– fixed dispaly issue of large city sprites missing on worldmap >2000hab
– addded failsafes and logs to better diagnose an ongoing issue of account corruption on some servers
– fixed problems with score UI display
– fixed forum in construction already providing community service (and other similar issues)
– lowered influence of arbitrage when world price is below local price
– fixed issue with prices not updating

This update brings major memory optimizations for servers, to fix the “out of memory” errors that started poping up on older servers with a lot of content. This update can reduce up to 60% the RAM used by the servers, and also comes with a small performance improvement.

Besides that, this update also brings misc fixes for bugs and issues. Notably, issues related to modifying the terrain or platforms around water. Water will now update in realtime when digging, and digging tools are now unlocked around bronze age along with wooden platforms and towers.

This update also adds a new “My games” tab in the ” Join game” menu: this tab lists all your currently played characters (on the same pc), and allows to conveniently load them directly, whether its a local game or a multiplayer game.
For multiplayer games it also saves the last known address of the server so that you can connect even when the steam lobbies mess up and that the server doesn’t appear in it, which tends to happen.

Server optimisation update
v0.1.5.x
– major server memory optimisation
– minor server performance optimisation
– server auto-deletes aknowledged old events
– server auto-deletes dead characters data after a certain time
– server auto-deletes old finished treaties
– lowered region decay treshold in realtime/solo games
– fixed display problem when selecting neutral territories on the worldmap not showing their colors.
– renouncing occupied territories now gives it back directly to the occupied player instead of rebels.
– fixed bug with platform destruction tool applied to all tiles event when there’s no platforms.
– water modification now updated and visible in realtime when modifying the terrain.
– fixed logic issues with terrain and water modification.
– fixed stone tower having officials instead of guards.
– fixed some issues with CJK fonts.
– fixed succession votings not working.
– added “my games” into the Join Games menu, allowing to directly save servers and characters being played and to join the directly.
– fixed a display issue on the worldmap causing regions to be visually missing.
– fixed sending treaties and texts to server not timing out when failing, and causing a client crash.
– added crushing defeats on settled territories to prevent spamming exploit.
– unlocked terraforming and wooden walls and towers earlier in bronze age;
– increased demand for truffles
– occupied cities no longer lose claims

I’m back after a month of vacation 🙂
This update brings a bunch of miscellaneous exploit fixes and small rebalances. 

One significant change is that from now on, below -200 of state power, players will directly lose armies and territories as their state collapse, effectively triggering a game over unless the situation is fixed quickly.

Most other fixes are here to counter exploits that have been rampaging through the servers.

Now another issue that most games have is that they reached their “end” but have yet to be won officially.
Therefore they keep going on while players leave, and its creating a rather anti-climatic end.
For this i’ll be reworking the score and endgame until i can get these games to effectively end. This will also allow me to finally restart new fresh games on the official servers.  
As a first step in this direction i’ve made a change to the PAR score calculation, which will result in more Victory Points for the leading nation getting them closer to effective victory.

Bugfixes update
v0.1.4.x
– fixed armies not paying AP for their action when retreating
– fixed exploit when converting militias into armies
– added more infos in persistent games lobby
– fixed cultural integration (dismantling) not reset for vassals of a player joining a nation by treaty/vassalization
– fixed UI problem with owning character of occupied territories on the worldmap
– rebalanced “PAR” score calculation: now based on an average that ignores the score component of score gained from subordinates -> will increase VP of dominant nations.
– fixed issue with battles display for long battles causing them to visually restart/reset.
– added “government collapse” events when below -200 state power, causing direct loss of territories and formations.
– empty cities (0 pop) will decay even if they belong to active characters.
– fixed problems with hardware survey failing from unusual characters in windows username.
– fixed ui problem with the tutorial
– adding new character missions
– distance penalty for cities does now maxed at -95%
– horses and camels +1 nb attack
– adding ideas trigger bonus in solo mode to ensure all techs ideas can be unlocked
– school intelligence bonus lowered from 15 to 10.
– fixed problem with networking socket ids
– fixed problem with server auto-close
– rebel cities not elligible for decay for about a week after rebellion , in persistent speed
– fixed spawn bonus too strong in newly created games when it should remain at 0 in the first days;
– reorganized and debugged issues with tutorial
– converting militias depletes all AP
– fixed national armies controllable even if you’re at war with their owner
– fixed gaia cities giving movement bonus
– server offtime no longer counts towards character inactivity timers
– fixed too many animals on worlmaps