New features:
You can now open or close your city gate to allow your troops to defend your city, or avoid attackers, respectively.
Closing your gate will allow other players to freely loot any unprotected resources you have without having to win a battle against your troops.
Your troops will always fight to defend your city during conquest battles. Consider launching a conquest against a stubborn rival who only wants to hide behind their gates!
Balance changes:
Population capacity changes:
Active troops no longer count towards the population of your city, meaning you can have theoretically infinite troops in any city.
Troops in training still count and will reduce your "idle population" and can contribute to an overworked factor.
This change has been made to prolong the end game, and also allow players a fighting chance at punching above their weight, as high-level cities that could support a much larger population capacity such as London were extremely difficult, if not impossible, to win wars against from smaller cities
Troop stats:
The maximum range of ballistae has been increased at maximum technology levels to be approximately 90% of that of cannons, where previously it was around 50%. Ballistae are meant to be a cheap, well performing variant of the cannon, but were almost useless relative to their firearms equivalent due to the range disparity.
Bug fixes
A bug with the new battle mechanics where troops would not move forward if the legion in front of them was killed off has been fixed
Next steps
The next planned major update relating to battle mechanics and PVP is reworking scouting, so - if an opponent has their gates open - you must win a battle against their scouts to successfully obtain a report. This allows players the choice to invest heavily in scouts in an attempt to avoid being scouted, allowing them to hide their intentions from nosy neighbours...