I've worked on adding quality of life changes to make playing Ascendant Dawn easier and more enjoyable. There are also a load of optimisations as well and more graphics settings.
Additions:
Mounted troops now need livestock of a certain type and those livestock need to be of sufficient strength. This is done via selectively breeding your livestock.
Tribal nobles now generate a new default troop.
New background area, the mountains have been replaced with a landscape
When interacting with an animal resource or livestock changes are shown
The tutorial has been much improved
A popup event teaching about popup events
Added cloud shadows
The sun now doesn't go directly overhead meaning there are always some shadows.
New landscape textures
Added particle effects to the desert
A few new settlement buildings
Fixes:
Improved appearance of settlement walls LODs
Fixed deer sometimes appearing as camels
Camera homing has been fixed
AI Armies now work better
Quality of Life
Sharpened Camera Movement
The camera now goes over mountains
Tutorial widgets now consume clicks
Clicking to move the tribe starts the game moving
More tooltips
Improved controls feeling
There are a few other small changes that should make your experiences better.
Optimisation
For optimisation a lot of people have been complaining about the performance of unreal engine games, which Ascendant Dawn is, so I've ensured that it's well optimised. Before this update the CPU was the bottle neck and there were a load of inefficient functions I optimised. For the graphics I've added billboards for trees, ensured good LODs and worked on graphical effects to minimise their impact. I've also added a few more graphics settings to give players more granular control over their graphics.
This should mean that if you have the recommended hardware then you should get around 120fps.
If you have an older GPU I'd like to hear how well it performs.