Hello everyone!
We hope you all had a nice and peaceful Christmas and enjoyed the New Year's Eve celebrations.
2021 is here and we wish that it brings you more fun and less worries than 2020. We also took some rest and recharged our batteries, but we’ve been back a couple of days now and we are going full speed again.
As promised, we will be releasing an update every month (roughly) depending on our workload related to the new DLC. These updates will be focused on bug fixing and on improving the game in those aspects that the player community feels most strongly about.
We introduced a regular public poll where you can vote for feature(s) that you would like to see in the next update. The last poll showed clearly that many of you want a clearer, simplified view of the map in 2D. To be honest, Pavel wasn't particularly happy about this, because from the available options this one is the most time consuming from a technical point of view. But we got our teeth into the problem and would not let go until it was done.
So, full 2D view mode will be now available as a standard part of the game. But that's not all! The list of changes is quite long, so check it out.
New features and improvements added:
- 2D View implemented - a feature requested by many players who like to play in top-down view. It allows for a clearer overview of the map and should be also a good solution for those with low-end PCs.
- Happiness modifier called Army Size now indicates if the penalty received is for too big or too small an army.
- The calculation of the Birth Rate Support estimate was reviewed and made more precise.
- Birth Rate Support manipulation was improved - a player can open the Birth Rate Support window also by clicking on city size in the Unit Menu.
- Currently selected city is now highlighted in the Birth Rate Support window and the list of cities is automatically scrolled to it.
- Panels listing damaged and currently busy map items can be now collapsed.
- The Oracle State Decision was tweaked - a player now needs only two Sages to build it.
- The algorithm for selecting the best position for the Lion Statue (State Decision) was improved.
- The costs for paying tribute to Hades (an action of the Gates to Underworld) were added to the tooltip.
- Multiplayer performance was increased (the size of messages has been considerably reduced).
- Trade Overview window now keeps the current scrollbar position (when you get back to the window).
- History Replay window got a new button, which allows the player to see the history either with cameos (leaders' illustrations) or banners.
- Banners in the Political Map now get focus (when one banner is partially hidden behind another and the player hovers over it, the hidden banner will be highlighted).
- "Busy" and "Fortified" 2D icons were changed.
- UI performance was improved.
- Descriptions and titles of the Steam workshop items are now displayed with correct localization (if the creator makes these multilingual).
- Chinese localization got a big update.
- Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Czech localizations were updated.
Bugs fixed:
- Issue with locked technologies not being correctly displayed in the Invention Tree window was fixed (they were "hidden").
- Issue with too many resources given to newly created factions was fixed.
- Issue with a tooltip shadowing a currently hovered UI item was fixed.
- Issues with a missing last line of text in long descriptions was fixed.
- Several rare CTDs fixed.
And now it is time for the next poll! Again, we have four different features for you to choose from:
- Disabling Advisor for particular situations - this would allow you to disable the advisor for particular warnings only, not as a whole (currently the Advisor window pops up in all attention requiring situations or not at all).
- Cameos in Trade windows - we would add leader cameos to the Trade windows so that you can see your opponents.
- Infrastructure connections in Strategic Overview – this would enable the connections between mines and blacksmiths as well as temples and cities in the Strategic Overview window to be shown.
- "Replay the same map" functionality - this would allow you to regenerate the same custom world but with different starting positions and conditions.
Let us know what you think and don't forget to vote in the Poll section on our Discord. The poll will be open for a week 🙂
The best news we saved for the end though. We already started working on our new DLC and the announcement should not be too far off now, so stay tuned!
Yours,
Kube Games team.