Hey everyone!
Happy 2025! It's time once again for a BIG update, and this one adds quite a lot of new and long awaited stuff, some more popular the others. Make sure to check everything! First...
It's Flag Time! 🏳️
For the longest time, people have asked to be able to add and edit flags in their scenarios, well NOW IT IS HERE! 🎌
The game now has a dedicated Flag editor which allows you to draw flags completely freely, using a 36x24 pixel canvas. I figured pixel art flags would best fit this game's aesthetics. Use the grid to more easily make tricolours or otherwise symmetrical designs. There is also a list of preset flags, featuring flags of all current day nations to make painting faster. Happy painting!
Currently new nations don't automatically get flags, but I have a few ideas that might happen in the future.
Flags are entirely optional, but if you are determined to add them to your scenarios, there are also some new stats in Scenario Editor to make sure you are fully covered. You can see how many nations have flags.
Plus, if you are more inclined to edit flags in outside programs like Photoshop, Aseprite or Paint, you can also fill every flag with a random color and fix them later in your preferred program. I will create a proper guide for this soon!
Wars Map Mode! 🗺️
This map mode makes it easier to follow conflicts around the globe. Each color represents one war.
In addition to that, the base map mode also now has a bit more "depth" with a slightly highlighted border even during peacetime. For maps with many super small countries this might not look the best so there is an option to disable this.
New Antarctica Map! 🏔️
This continent needs some love, so here is a hypothetical situation where the ice melted and left this beautiful map in its place! Unrelated to Antarctica but there is now also a separate Tundra terrain!
AI & Revolt Changes 🚩
This update moves away from the per-nation revolt chance, to a per-city revolt progress. Revolt progress increases with war decalarations, passively during wars and whenever the city changes hands. So cities in the centers of conflict are more likely to rebel.
You can follow revolt progresses in the Statistics.
Before this update, events like wars and alliances always happened in random parts of the world, so on more crowded maps it was a bit difficult to keep track of things. Now, events have a high likelyhood of causing more events nearby, so it's more likely to cause so called conflict hot spots, where one part of the world spends more time in different wars, whereas in other places things are more peaceful. Let's hope this is a fun change. Let me know what you think and if something needs to be adjusted!
History Log Saving 📜
A small addition some people might appreciate, you can now save the History Log list into a separate text file, from the bottom of the panel. The format is pretty simple, but for some it may be useful.
Custom Random Names 👑
You can now also make your own name bank for any random nation names. Since this is a bit of a niche feature, it is currently a bit technical. When you launch the game after updating, a new "RandomNameSettings.json" file will be created in your user files, the same place as your save files.
You can edit this file to add as many random names as you want. For more randomized names, you can add a list of first and last names, which will be combined when generating names. If you have more concrete names, add them to the full names list. You can also temporarily disable these custom names, and decide whether the base game names can also appear.
Even if you aren't familiar with editing JSON files, it should be pretty easy to edit without breaking anything. If for some reason you do some mistakes in this file and something breaks within the game because of it, you can just delete the file and the game will recreate it in startup.
If many people use this feature, I might make it more user friendly in future updates.
v4.0.0 Full Changelog
Additions
- Added a Flag Painter. The size of a flag is 36x24 pixels, though you don't have to fill the entire canvas.
- Added a bunch of default flags to make flag making faster for custom scenarios
- Added flags to most premade scenarios
- Added a counter in scenario editor which shows how many nations have flags
- Added a counter in scenario editor which shows the amount of preset revolts/dead nations
- For those who want to edit flags in outside programs, added a button in scenario editor to fill all flags with random colors
- For those who want to edit flags in outside programs, scenarios with flags will also save an additional "flagNames.txt" file, which will help in connecting nations with their flags.
- Added a Wars Map Mode, which shows all the current wars and occupations, colored based on the primary attacker
- Revolt chance is no longer counted per nation. Instead, each city has its own Revolt Progress. Once it goes over 100, it can spawn a revolt once its current owner ends a war
- You can view city revolt progress in the city popup and edit it there
- Added Statistics for City Revolts, which shows revolt progresses
- Added a new terrain, Tundra (#808080)
- Added a new base map, Melted Antarctica
- Added a button to easily remove puppet liege in-game from the puppet's Nation View
- Added a faint border to nations even when they are not in wars. You can turn this off in Display Settings
- Added a button to save the History Log into a separate text file
- Added a way to add your own custom random nation names with the new RandomNameSettings.json file, which is created on game startup
- Occupied status of tiles will now be saved in scenarios and save files
Bugfixes & Improvements
- Changed the way events happen in the game. Previously the game picked a completely random nation every time to do something. Now, when a nation does something, it has a high chance to cause other nearby nations to do something, resulting in hotspots where many conflicts happen in one part of the map in succession. Events do still happen in random places around the world regularly.
- Time, Killer and Origin links in Nation View have been condensed into one text box next to the Flag
- Improved the way terrain and owner data is stored in save files, which will make save/scenario files much smaller from now on
- Occupied tiles will now be shown on Diplomatic Map Mode
- Occupied tiles will now be shown when painting territory
- Fixed a bug where editing terrain could result in land income and gold being turned to NaN
- Fixed a bug where if you clicked outside the game and later returned to the game, selected nation would be cleared while in rename or other screens
- Fixed a bug where removing the last war of a nation in setup didn't clear occupied tiles
- Fixed a bug where on-screen keyboard would appear when running Big Picture Mode on PC
- Fixed a bug where some UI animation speeds were dependant on game speed
- Fixed a bug where tiles didn't lose occupied status on some revolts
- Fixed a bug where the pipette cursor didn't perfectly align with mouse position
- Fixed a bug where tooltip remained on screen if the element that spawned it suddenly disappeared while on top of it
- Increased Maximum gold so that nation can always have enough gold to purchase a new core
- Updated some in-game UI bottom row elements
- Updated multiple default scenarios
- Updated some translations
- Condensed Map Editor buttons
- Small UI fix in main menu
- Fixed some translations
- Updated credits