This update focuses on many various gameplay changes to fix balancing issues and exploits.
Elephants
Elephants and Mammoths have been a consistent source of exploiting, used by some players to become pretty much unbeatable and making this unit too central to military gameplay.
A number of new changes have been made to counter these flaws associated with them:
- To counter players storing all their livestock -including hundreds of hoarded elephants and mammoths- in their army's inventories (to avoiding having to maintain labor intensive paddocks), animals may now escape and be lost from the inventory via an event, especially if kept in large numbers relative to the units guarding them. The only way to keep them safely being with proper paddock buildings.
- To counter players keeping hundreds of elephants as resource and only insta-recruiting them for war (avoiding the high upkeep of these units), elephants can now only be stored in a special Elephant pen building (they cannot go into regular cheap paddocks anymore) that costs high maintenance and can only store 1 elephant.
These 2 measure should help avoid that a few players monopolize hundreds of elephants, and to counter exploits allowing to escape the high cost of maintaining a few elephant units, as it should remain an elite and expensive unit.
Inacessible areas
To counter players deploying troops or placing buildings such as defensive towers in inaccessible areas on purpose ( building a staircase to access a hilltop/wall > building there > deleting the staircase afterwards ), any building in an inacessible area will now be auto-abandonned. Troops deployed into inacessible areas will also auto-redeploy to default positions.
Spawn griefing
To counter players using a second account (or their own) to repeatedly spawn as colonies of a target enemey in order to sabotage them from inside, or to spawn in a nearby inactive player as its successor before using all its resources to suicide against that enemy, the spawning rules have been modified.
- The basic cooloff period is now exponential and increases at every new character made in that same game.
- Colonies and successions are now "Precious starts" with their own cooloff period of 15x the default one ( that's 15 days in persistent ) regardless of the player's main cooloff and affecting all the Precious start types as soon as one is used. Therefore a player starting as a colony will not be able to restart in another one for 15 days even if its his first character with a 1 day cooloff.
- To prevent players using the "spawn close to" feature to spawn near their enemies in order to sabotage them by suicide and griefing, all characters now have a unique "invite code" which must be communicated to the new player willing to spawn close, ensuring that this feature can only be used between consenting players.
State power
Many exploits involving the milking of inactive/dead characters to provide high amounts of extra State power to Nations in order to allow them to grow bigger have been countered.
That includes auto-removal of dead characters from nations, limitation of the transferable State power via treaties, and freezing of state power and tax transfers from inactive characters.
Representative money
Representative money proved itself too problematic for the game balance as it trivialized all the other mechanics and difficulties of the economy by being too powerful and easy, making some players infinitely rich.
Until it can be better modeled by the addition of some gameplay mechanics, its effects have been mostly disabled.
As a placeholder solution and to keep Gold and Silver relevant in the meantime, these 2 metals are now a attributable resource that fills the need for Luxury of the population.
The anti-exploits update
v0.0.19.x
- fixed decimals not working for trade route amounts
- fixed 3rd party operators in your trade network not being available in the trade route menu.
- added various extra warnings and 'first time' tutorial messages.
- added 'Invite codes', which are codes specific to every character and now required when trying to spawn near a specific one. This ensures a player may now only use the 'spawn close to' feature with the other player's agreement, as he must have his invite code.
- respawn cooloff is now variable and increases at each respawn
- added a 'precious start' attribute to colony and succession start types. they have a x30 cooloff (so 30 days in persistent) once used, regardless of the player's spawn cooloff.
- fixed animal resource icons
- elephants/mammoths now have their own 'paddock' building that can only store 1 elephant and costs high upkeep. They can't be kept in regular paddocks anymore.
- animals kept in formation's inventories can now escape, especially if kept in large numbers relative to their keepers.
- fixed recycled materials not being state owned
- fixed bug when demolishing fields of recovering wheat instead of the field's food
- fixed the number limit of some annexes (ex: windwheels per mills) not working
- fixed barbarians targetting territorial claims
- fixed building tab displayed in territorial claims
- decreased score cost of victory points.
- subordinates now contribute to the score. players receive a fraction of their subordinate's scores.
- territories now requires <10 of resistance to be made a colony: it is no longer possible to immediately make colonies out of invaded resistant territories
- slowed culture decay of foreign cultures in regions
- some armors now cost additional leather to be crafted
- gold and silver can now be distributed to the population and fill the need for "luxury"
- greatly reduced wealth gained by gold and silver stocks (with the representative money policy)
- increased 'cover' of all battlements
- added more tutorial messages
- fixed a bug where recycling planned constructiosn of platforms gave back materials
- buildings in inacessible areas are now auto-abandonned
- fixed exploits with deploying troops in inacessible areas
- max transfered state power by treaties is now 25%.
- active characters with no territories are now 'powerless'.
- inactive characters with no cities are now auto-abandonned from their owning player, and therefore becoming directly "dead".
- dead characters with no subordinates are auto-expelled from nations
- dead/powerless characters have 0 production of state power.
- dead/powerless do not transfer taxes or state power in nations.
- treaties with dead characters are auto-ended
- transfer of coins or state power in treaties is frozen for non-active characters
- fixed an issue with resistance when liberating your own cities
- added support for decimal material costs
- recycling infrastructures like roads, fences or walls now recovers 50% of its materials
- small fences now cost only 0.5 of wood or stone.
- fixed purchased resources on markets not being state owned.
- WARNING: fixed calculation errors of income from state-owned resources. the error generated extremely high income in some cases, allowing for exploit.
- fixed incomes from state resource sales not being subjected to waste
- added server the option of enabling a daily autorestart at a specific time
- fixed state purchases not counting in supply/demand price factor
- light helmets cost less metal
- increased upkeep of heavy shields, cuirass and heavy helmet
- increased attack skill and damage of battleaxes
- increased armor of armored elephants
- fixed issue with mass bonus in melee charges
- bows cost less materials
- silver is slower to produce
- slightly reduced the city-size malus affecting breeding willingness of porcos
- slightly reduced additionnal health bonus from mutiple foods above 4
- fixed state ownership loss when transfering resources from different warehouses
- fixed recycled resources from demolishing building not being state owned
- you now recover 50% of the previous building's materials when upgrading it