Osiris balance patch
Normally I'd say this is the last patch before the new server goes live, but I can't seem to stop tweaking at the minute so let's say it's one of the last.
For those that missed it - a brand new server is coming on Thursday!
Osiris will ship with a new modifier that totally reworks the resource and population gain models. Prepare to lock in because the days of easy gold are over!
However, to ease the pain of starting over for a 4th time, a lot of changes to the early game have been made to streamline it. These are all aimed at achieving a good flow of the early game so you aren't constantly being asked to wait around for 5 or 10 minutes for basic upgrades or army marches to complete.
Balance changes:
Battlefield size increases with military command level are now capped at level 10, after concerns were raised that level 10 cities could not meaningfully compete with the highest level NPC cities
Troop march speeds have been made 3 times faster, so the map traversal speed is roughly in line with other similar games. This may be revisited if the speed buff from mayor combat is deemed too overpowered
The order and per-requisites of many buildings, research and troops has been changed to give a better gameplay flow; for example, scouts are now available as the second troop in a natural progression sequence, as it made little sense to make archers and swordsmen available before you would know what troops you would likely need, which requires a scout report.
Buildings that take 5 minutes or less to complete can be instantly finished, for free, by simply clicking their relevant timer. Note that this only applies to buildings where the total time is less than 5 minutes, rather than longer upgrades that are within 5 minutes of completion.
Many building upgrade times have been tweaked to make them work better with the above 5 minute skip, and also with the speedup items the player receives as part of the early quest progression. For example, many upgrades that usually take 10 minutes have been either decreased to 5 minutes (so they can be skipped for free) or increased to 15 minutes (so it is obvious that a 15 minute speedup item should be used). The idea of the early quest system is to incentivize aggressive investment of the early game quest rewards to achieve rapid and satisfying early game growth, but timers that fell awkwardly in a range where there was no efficient item usage possibilities instead encouraged players to sit around waiting, which made the early game quite tedious.
Bug fixes
Servers on the multiplayer server list should now show the correct number of online and total (human) players
A number of quests that either completed incorrectly or would not complete if the criteria were satisfied before they were unlocked have been fixed.
Aesthetic changes
All of the missing icons and text has now been added to the game. If you see the placeholder Godot icon (other than the command chat button and sandbox items, which intentionally use it) or text that says something like "[MISSING TEXT: SOME_TEXT_KEY]" then please let me know via Discord.
Added the rest of the animations to the city background and buildings. If you see something that looks like it's meant to be animated that isn't (e.g. a lit torch or a waterfall that isn't moving at all) then let me know via Discord
Architectural changes
The server will now perform a remote backup every 4 hours which could lead to a brief drop in performance at these times.