This update introduces custom Army Templates, automated Rally Point deployment, and conventional missile strikes. It also delivers ~11-second faster menu boot times, month-based recruitment timelines, and multiplayer resync state cloning fixes.
🎖️ Custom Army Templates & Rally Points
Custom Army Template Editor: Design and save custom army unit compositions (combining infantry, armor, and artillery regiments) in a dedicated template editor menu.
Automated Rally Point Deployment: Ordering a template deployment automatically distributes unit construction across all eligible provinces. Upon completion, newly trained regiments march across land, fleets sail to adjacent sea zones, or air wings rebase automatically to converge and merge into a single force at your designated rally point.
Per-Province Naval & Air Queues: Converted naval shipyard and air wing construction queues from national bottlenecks to per-province queues.
🚀 Missile Interceptions & Conventional Warheads
Real-Time Missile Interceptions: Overhauled missile defense interception logic. SAM batteries and missile defense networks now engage incoming missiles on their exact arrival tick using salvo interception calculations.
Conventional Warhead Strikes: Added conventional warhead strikes alongside nuclear warheads, allowing strategic bombardment of enemy infrastructure without nuclear escalation.
⏱️ 11-Second Faster Game Boot Time
Accelerated Menu Boot: Reduced game startup time to the main menu by ~11 seconds by implementing a fast save file metadata cache (reading 256KB headers instead of scanning 635MB raw save files per frame).
Deferred HUD Initialization: Deferred non-essential HUD component builds until gameplay entry, eliminating menu loading hitches.
⚙️ Month-Based Recruitment & Tech Gating
Realistic Build Timelines: Rebalanced unit construction timelines to realistic month-based durations rather than days.
Research Tech Gating: Advanced warships, aircraft, and armored vehicles are now tech-gated by research progression.
🌐 Resync State Cloning & Stability Fixes
Faithful State Resyncs: Fixed a resync loop bug where applying snapshots left dangling memory state. Resync state application now performs a 100% faithful clone of the host state.
Mod Persistence & Stability: HybridCLR mod DLLs now survive world re-creations cleanly via assembly caching, backed by world-lifetime guards to prevent desktop crashes.