Author: Ronchiporc

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.

This quick update fixes critical gamedesign flaws in the economic simulator post-currency.

Price arbitrage 
A new price factor has been added : price arbitrage. It represents the natural arbitrage that would happen between the prices of cities that are near to one another when there are big local price discrepancies between them.
Price arbitrage calculates a “world area price” for each resource of the city, by  looking at the price of that same resource in all nearby territories the city has trading relations with, weighted by proximity with the city.
That includes other cities of the player, but also all foreign cities they have trading rights or rights of passage with.
Based on the difference between that world price and the current local price, it determines the price arbitrage modificator that is applied to get the final effective price of the resource.

The goal of this feature is to harmonize prices in a region, and to fix the game-design flaw that allowed players to easily manipulate prices by having a territory produce a cheap resource in great amounts, to then sell it in limited amounts in the next town where it would reach luxurious prices and make game-breaking profits that made everything else irrelevant.
With price arbitrage, price differences are now much lower and this easy strategy is no longer possible, improving the game balance.

Trade routes versus manual transfers
Another flaw was the advantages of manually transferring resources between cities via units instead of using trade routes. This resulted in advantaging repetitive tedious actions.
The cause of this was the fact waste would be applied twice in trade routes ( from the exporting city, and another time in the importing city ), while you’d only pay it once when transferring manually ( buying with no waste in the exporting city, and paying waste on state sales profits in the importing one ).
To resolve this, waste is now collected only on trade profits rather than trade raw incomes, which fixes the double waste problem for trade routes.
Additionally, buying up resources by loading them up into units is now subject to a waste penalty, meaning that manual transfer is now the one exposed to double waste.
This makes trade routes now much more profitable than manual transfers for regular exchanges of resources.

 

The price arbitrage update
v0.0.28.x
– lowered authority loss from militias by 50%
– lowered max effect of leader wealth on leader superiority. –> superiority from wealth now maxed at 100 at +∞, with a 1/x shaped curve.
– fixed bug with demand in the price variable of supply/demand
– increased cultural decay speed from low influence
– increased armor of wolf warriors (+2) and manbearpigs (+3)
– fixed bug of technologies costing double what was advertised
– added waste cost when buying resources to load into formations
– added new price arbitrage variable in resource prices based on a world area price, which is a price average calculated from all nearby territories.
– waste now only applies to importations and exportations profits, rather than gross incomes.
– fixed visual issues when selecting neutral nations in the world map.
– fixed resistance not decreasing after uprisings
– disabled sleeping building upkeep for buildings with no workers (ex ground storages)
– fixed an issue with sows, piglets, and olpigs access to services (ex doctors)
– price profit margin now considers the fact that the resource is distributed by merchants and is increased to +2 in that case.
– fixed memory leak in battles, on the server
– fixed tax incomes not being collected in some cases

 

This update adds a long-needed option: the ability to control game speed for solo and realtime games, making the solo or local multiplayer experience much more dynamic. 
The game host now has game speed controls on the top right of the screen, allowing him to speed up the overall game speed up to 4 times. This allows to speed up battles, or moments when you’re waiting for resources to stock or new events.

This update also add a new “solo” game preset, with even faster speed settings  than realtime, to make things even more dynamic for players who want to practice and learn the game in solo.

Another noteworthy change is the addition of all the missing UI details in the territorial menu: culture evolution, population health, life quality and intelligence now all have the proper stat breakdown to understand where these values are coming from and how they are calculated.

Besides that, Outposts have been rebalanced. Territorial status can now be tech locked or require some policies to be active: outposts now require the government tech, and fair exchange to be active. 
They also are more expensive, as every productive building (that has workers) has an upkeep cost of +1.
Sleeping building also now have an upkeep cost of +1.

 

 

The speed update
v0.0.27.x
– added new “solo” game preset, with faster speed than realtime games (especially construction, research, and new ideas rate)
– added game speed controls (x1,x2,x4) for the game host, in solo and realtime game modes.
– added territory culture UI details
– added territory’s population health, life quality, and intelligence UI details.
– added territorial tech and policy prerequisites.
– outposts now require government and fair exchange enabled
– colonies now require leadership enabled
– increased population conflict in outposts +200%
– increased loyalty bonus of outposts from 25 to 35.
– all sleeping building’s upkeep +1
– outpost buildings upkeep +1 (not houses)
– slightly lowered desertion speed of armies
– lowered changing outpost penalty from -50 loyatly to -20
– lowered barbarian activity in solo and realtime
– fixed flickering units on water rafts
– fixed AI pathfinding issues an infite battles caused by water
– fixed broken tax income and added UI details
– fixed bug in state power transfer from treaties
– fixed some critical game exploits
– fixed issues with tile edge display and platforms
– fixed bug of server restarting on wrong port in daily restarts
– fixed bug resulting in incoherent health bonus from food quality
– fixed tabs of the region control pannel resetting to the formation tab all the time in world view.
– fixed bug where actions could be executed without the required AP (battle, invade… )
– fixed bug allowing for faster movement speed on the worldmap when giving successive movement orders.
– lowered density and amount of primitive tribes in solo and realtime games.
– repaired auto-shut down option for servers
– placeholder: disabled free cities

This update adds new tools to show different informations in regions, such as heights, ground fertility, or impassable edges as well as the ability to toggle the display of terrain heights allowing you to see the region on a flat plane.
It replaces the infamous “T” debug placeholder tool.

The display modes are available from a button located near the minimap. 
Another button allows to toggle heights on or off at any time regardless of the currently displayed layer.

Some display layers are also specific to building placement, and are auto-enabled when placing these buildings: a fertility display when placing fields, or walls display when placing palisades.

 

The display layers update
v0.0.26.x
– added new system of region layers display.
– added ability to toggle heights display on/off.
– removed “T” debug tool.
– added fertility, groundwater, heights, and fortifications display layers.
– added auto-enabling of display layers when placing some buildings (farms and walls).
– lowered state power cost of national armies from 5 to 3.
– fixed issue when disbanding a formation containing troops partially manned.
– fixed bug where battles registered as a loss when defending a territory only with allied armies.
– fixed infinite battle bug caused by problem with retreating units.
– fixed infinite battle bug caused by problem with hunting with multiple formations.
– fixed bug allowing to recruit and access resources in occupied territories.
– fixed various issues when moving nation members in the hierarchy.
– fixed issue when subjugating your own superior in a nation: now triggers an automatic rank swap within the nation.
– climate AP modificator is now disabled in cities.
– fixed bug with cancelling treaty offers
– honor commitments in treaties lowered to 50 max.
– fixed neutral armies in battle having their AP depleted as well.
– lowered VP missions reward to 1VP.
– fixed issues with the subjugation action.
– improved choice of region for retreating armies: now prioritizing adjascent controlled territories.
– if a character is dead/powerless, the nation maitnenance costs of its subordinates are now relayed upon its own superior.
– subordinates now pay no taxes/state power if their superior is dead/powerless.
– fixed “join faction” treaty term conflicting with other treaties and not causing them to be broken.

This new update brings changes to war and territorial statuses!

Every time a territory is invaded during a war, it now gets a special new territorial status of “occupied territory”, which costs no state power and no maintenance, but provides no income and no control: the territory is basically in limbo for the duration of the war. It also no longer triggers a resistance penalty: instead, occupied territories generate resistance with time.
If the invader wishes to claim the territory, he can still do so by changing that status to something else, but by doing so the immediate resistance penalty will apply as before.

If a player loses control of all his territories in a war, he can now be automatically vassalized through a new “subjugation” action available to his opponents. 
This will automatically end the war, retrocede all occupied territories to the defeated player, but integrate him to the nation of the winner with a vassality treaty that includes payments of State power and coins.
The point of this new system is to favor faster and non-destructive wars where aggressive players can still express their bloodthirstyness for imperialism and annex weaker players, while leaving these players alive and in control of their cities afterwards, able to keep playing. 
IT also makes the annexation of inactive cities much easier.

This updates also brings a ‘territorial statuses’ overall, changing how they work. Each status now has its own set of properties and permissions, and they are all listed in a new territorial status menu available from the region’s menu.
Colonies now have different properties than before, and behave in a much more similar way as your own cities. Building and managing its resources is now allowed, to make them easier to manage. However it contributes little to your culture, and provides limited income. 
Another status was added: the outpost. It acts like a smaller colony, it’s not a potential player spawn, but unlike the colony it provides 0 income and has all the maintenance costs. Its an expensive status, but useful for small settlements made to exploit strategic resources you can’t get otherwise.

 

 

 

The subjugating update
v0.0.25.x
– territorial statuses overall: now each territorial status has can have its own specific properties and permissions (resour
– overdraft is now forbidden in colonies and outposts
– building and controlling resources of colonies is now allowed
– added ‘outpost’ territorial status: similar to colonies but is not a player spawn and has expenses. good for small settlements to exploit strategic resources.
– added ‘occupied territory’ territorial status: default status or any invaded territory during a war. costs no state power, has no expenses and no incomes. generates no initial resistance, but resistance grows in time.
– changing some territorial status (ex changing status of a colony) is now possible, but can trigger loyalty penalties
– IP & steam ID can now be hidden by changing the config.ini file (for streamers).
– added ‘subjugation’ action, available when at war with a character that no longer controls any territory. this action ends the war, joins the character to the nation of the winner, auto creates a vassality treaty (paying tribues), and also retrocedes all occupied territories to the defeater character.
– fixed some issues and exploits related to treaties
– reworked worldmap display layers when zooming out: now showing state & nation names at max zoom out.
– removed action auto-encampment for some actions (raids, claims…). auto-encampment is now displayed on the action a wheel with a small tent next to the AP cost.
– improved windowed mode: client starts properly maximized and server will auto-minimize when starting.
– improved display resolutions: splitted UI and viewport resolutions, now using a more intuitive % unit.
– improved territory menu, simplifying the top part by removing non essential informations.
– added detailed trade balance at the government level.
– herds can spawn hostil animals (wolves, bears)
– primitive tribes can now respawn if no player is settled nearby
– worldmap spawn points (primitive tribes) are now more dense and concentrated in a single region of the worldmap instead of all over the map.
– improved region generation of lakes to make them more interesting (islands, tiny rivers, more random shape, no longer always in the middle of the region).
– increased amount of rivers in the worldmap, and fixed bug causing “squares” of rivers.
– Annex tool now only displays links of annexes belonging to the same owner as the selected annexes.
– Annex tool now allows to click on owners, which auto selects all the annexes belonging to that owner.
– fixed bug with changing home of formations
– fixed bug with too many herds spawning on the worldmap