Hey everyone,
Circle Empires 2 has been getting a little makeover.
Over the past few weeks, we've been polishing up the menus, improving the user interface, and tackling some particularly troublesome multiplayer issues. We've also made a few changes to how maps and late-game worlds behave!
Every Leader Gets Their Own Menu Background
The menu backgrounds now change depending on which leader you're playing,reflecting the world you're about to enter. Once you've played a game, the menu can also show a foggy version of your last battlefield, giving the whole game a little more of a sense of place.
We've also reworked the Unit Editor visuals, adjusted several menu layouts, added more UI sounds, and made a number of smaller improvements throughout the interface.
Building buttons are now smaller and arranged more neatly, world edges fade when zooming out, and Escape now works as a proper step-back button in several menus. We've also added screenshake to some explosions, which can be adjustedin the visual settings if you'd rather keep things calm.
More Variety on the Map
Resources can now appear either spread throughout a circle or grouped into clusters.
This gives economic layouts a little more variety, so not every circle will present exactly the same resource puzzle. Sometimes everything is conveniently together. Sometimes it really isn't.
A Big Multiplayer Fix
We've also tackled a particularly nasty multiplayer issue that could cause lag and crashes when a player had more than 1,000 objects in their world. This affected a surprisingly large number of late-game systems, including new circles, level-ups, buildings, spawners, and necromancy.
We've also adjusted the physics tick rate in extremely crowded worlds, including multiplayer. As populations get very high, the physical simulation can now run at a lower tick rate while the game and UI retain more of their frame rate. This should make late-game multiplayer feel considerably less sluggish on most systems.
And for anyone planning to level up one unit to extreme heights, the maximum unit level has been practically removed, while the visual scaling of units can now continue far beyond the old limit.
And More…
There are plenty of smaller balance changes, fixes, and quality-of-life improvements included across these updates. We've adjusted level-up health scaling, improved circle discovery, changed zoom-button behaviour, refined resource messages, and fixed several unusual XP and UI issues.
As always, you can find the full patch notes in the Steam Discussions.
Thank you for all the reports and feedback that help us find these strange little problems. Some of them are apparently hiding very deep inside the circles.
See you among the circles!