The Jewelry update

Adds jewelry production chain and solo/realtime game mode improvements with new game missions to secure early game key techs and improved game speed controls.

 

New missions
This update focuses on improving the experience of solo/realtime games, especially to fix issues caused by the previous update that added the mechanic of hidden natural resources making it much harder to progress alone.
To fix this, new early game missions have been added to better scenarise the discovery of the first critical techs of agriculture, leadership, and metallurgy.
Therefore these techs no longer rely on randomly triggering their ideas, ensuring their discovery and preventing being blocked in solo mode.

Game speed controls
To further improve the rhythm of solo and realtime games, game speed controls have been improved and split in 2 different controls: one for game speed now up to x40 to make sure players are never stuck waiting, and another one affecting only the speed of units and battles still limited to x4.

Jewelry 
Additionally, this update introduces the production chain of Jewelry (luxury need resource) with new natural resources of pears and shells and a new building of jewelry making producing adornments (early stone jewelry) and jewelry (made of gold or silver).

Wood collecting action
To also reduce waiting times and dynamize the early game, this update introduces a first step towards more formation actions with a new woodcutting action that allows a formation to collect some wood on forest tiles in exchange for APs. This should help giving players more options instead of being typically stuck waiting for a few wood units in early game.
Depending how this is received, i’ll keep improving on this system.

Fixes and server improvements
As always this update includes its fair share of bugfixes and server improvements.
Notably, a key algorithm used for building placement as been greatly optimized, allowing the server to be much faster and efficient at placing automatic buildings such as slums or storages. 
I’m not forgetting about the endless fight with exploiters and cheaters, and this update includes an upgrade of the anti-cheating to detect the use of multi-accounts. However it will remain for now in ‘silent’ mode and thus is not in effect yet.
Numerous infamous UI issues with the policies menu have also been fixed.

  

The Jewelry update
v0.2.6.x
– added missing display of resource rewards in projects UI
– added Pearls and Shells natural resources
– added Jewelry and Adornments resources
– added Jewelry maker buildings
– added Jewelry techs and projects
– added new early game missions to direct the discovery of agriculture, leadership, and metallurgy (which no longer rely on random discovery)
– added wood cutting action for formations
– added better game speed controls in solo & realtime games, with game speed now up to x40 and separated from battles speed
– fixed server crash causing loss of time for timed events
– optimized algorithm for free space detection (AI building placement) –> server much faster at auto placing buildings like slums or storages
– anti-cheating upgrade for multi-account detection (silent for now)
– fixed settling action not working on some claimed territories
– fixed problem of some ideas triggering despite lack of natural resource (ex fishing)
– fixed problem of some critical resources sometimes missing from starting region (ex missing meat source)
– fixed issue on server regionmap files
– auto converts nomad form types in a non-NPC owner controls any city
– fixed UI issues with policies in government menu where policy settings would reset to 0
– moved “treasury contribution” parameter into the “privileges” policy
– simplified and cleaned up leader wealth privileges & contribution calculations + added more UI feedback
– fixed problem of troops all deploying around the same camp when 2 formations already in territory start a battle
– fixed building workers income bug from state owned resources
– fixed city ambient sounds from considering inactive buildings as active
– fixed invalid ruins sprite for 4×4 buildings
– improved automatic placement of formation camps
– fixed issue where event-triggered battles would register an attack instead of a defense, depleting AP
– fixed bug of wildlife presence when visiting a region with wildlife after having visited a region where wildlife had left
– networking improvements to fix a case of connection loss during initial worldmap loading for some players