New features:
- Music! Ardarium now features 12 tracks from UK ambient musical artist Dennis Huddleston, also known as "36". In my opinion this is the most important addition so far. The main idea of the game is that you are observing a world from an outside perspective. I imagine it would be a wondrous and lonely experience to look down on a planet and witness its natural drama through the ages. This music sets the mood exactly how I want it. I'm very happy to be able to improve the emotional impact of the game in a way that I couldn't achieve on my own.
- You can now specify a world seed on the new game screen. A world seed is a 10-digit number that the game uses as the basis for all randomness. It affects terrain generation, natural disasters, ai decisions, and anything else where chance is involved. If you set the number yourself it's like choosing not only one map but one timeline out of infinite options. Be aware that any player interaction including mouse clicks affects the timeline downstream of that event. This means the only way to see the "true" sequence of events tied to any given world seed is to not interact with the game at all after clicking start.
- There is now a button on the ESC menu called "Add chaos". If pressed there is general mayhem across the map including random weather, earthquakes, and extreme temperature fluctuations.
- You can now control the intensity of solar heat, the speed at which the sun and the moon move across the sky, and the probability of random natural disasters.
- There is now an alternate display option for nation borders that uses fill color and thicker lines.
Minor changes:
- More color contrast dirt, plants, and water (dirt has less green and blue, plants have less red and blue, water has less red and green).
- Darker dark
- Colors update slightly faster with respect to changing light conditions
- Rearranged ESC menu
- Changed default map size from 15x15 to 25x14 to better fit a 16:9 display
- Rebalanced probability of earthquakes, volcanos, and meteors
- Meteors now only come from the right side of the screen aka the eastern sky
- Added more definition to the three stages of human life in the game (child, adult, elder) by increasing the periods of time during which a person is considered to be a child or an elder and by making it so children may no longer start farms, build castles, lead armies, or participate in any fights except in self-defense.
- Lower chance for fights to start
- Higher chance for wars to end
- People can now sleep while sailing without automatically drowning. Sleeping while swimming still causes drowning.
- Fixed an incredibly uncommon crash that would happen if a female and a male are mating and the male becomes a zombie at the exact same time that the female becomes pregnant