Update v0.4.1 introduces a major diplomacy expansion featuring the Diplomatic Trust system, physical foreign Embassies, constitutional neutrality, army stack selection on the map, economic trade war blowback, and a total-conversion "Replace Mode" for modding.
🏛️ Diplomatic Trust & Physical Embassies
International Trust System: Introduced dynamic Diplomatic Trust between nations. Trust steadily accrues through honoring treaties, long-term peaceful coexistence, bilateral trade partnerships, and mutual guarantees. High trust serves as a core requirement for military alliances and guarantees, while aggressive wars, broken treaties, or covert sabotage shatter it.
Global Embassy Networks: Nations can now open, maintain, or close physical foreign Embassies subject to national embassy capacity limits. Embassies grant permanent diplomatic mission bonuses, improve diplomatic access, and unlock advanced statecraft options.
Recalls & Expulsions: Strained or hostile relations automatically trigger embassy closures and diplomatic expulsions, and AI nations actively manage embassy networks by closing redundant missions to prioritize emerging regional partners.
Constitutional Neutrality: Officially recognized neutral nations (such as Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Malta, Turkmenistan, and Costa Rica) now strictly adhere to permanent constitutional neutrality, refusing military alliances and collective defense pacts.
Clean Collective Guarantees: Removed redundant bilateral independence guarantees between nations that are already co-members of collective defense alliances (such as NATO or the EU).
Enhanced Diplomacy UI: Overhauled diplomacy tooltips to clearly break down the interplay between raw relations, underlying trust, and active embassy bonuses, alongside dedicated badges for international organization memberships (UN, UNSC, G7, G20).
📈 Economic Warfare & Crisis Restraint
Trade War Exposure Blowback: Initiating a trade war now inflicts direct economic blowback on the initiator proportional to their trade dependence and exposure to the targeted nation.
AI Crisis Restraint: AI countries will now automatically pause foreign financial aid, currency manipulation attacks, trade wars, and predatory debt-trap loans whenever their own economy enters severe recession or fiscal distress.
Currency Attack Cooldowns: Added strict re-launch cooldowns to currency manipulation actions, and getting caught in currency sabotage now destroys diplomatic trust with the victim.
🎖️ Military, Combat & Map Usability
Army Stack Cycling: Clicking on a province containing multiple stacked armies now cleanly cycles through each individual army formation, making troop management effortless in congested battlefronts.
Interrupted Movement Realism: Fixed an issue where armies intercepted in combat mid-march would instantly snap or teleport to their final destination upon victory; armies now realistically resume marching their path.
Coalition War Conclusion: Coalition wars now conclude cleanly when the overarching coalition war outcome has been decided, pooling total side contributions while keeping individual bilateral war scores intact.
🛠️ Modding Expansion — "Replace Mode" & Live Map Previews
"Replace Mode" for Total Conversions: Modders can now choose to either extend base content or operate in "Replace Mode"—starting with blank rosters to build total-conversion mods from scratch.
Custom Icon Replacements: Mods can now replace icons for buildings, military units, raw resources, and national doctrines, as well as selectively hide or expose Knowledge Network branches.
Custom Currencies & GDP Scaling: Added support for custom display-only national currencies and adjustable GDP scaling factors for custom scenarios.
Real-Time Map Previews: The In-Game Mod Builder now renders real-time visual previews of borders, labels, territory removals (which become terra incognita), starting deployments, and fleet/air markers directly on the 3D globe.
⚡ Multiplayer & Performance Optimizations
Multiplayer StateHash Rev 12 & 13: Expanded multi-peer state verification to cover diplomatic inboxes, human player rosters, and active treaties, completely resolving post-resync host freezes.
Pointer & Tooltip Input Optimization: Streamlined UI pointer probes and idle tooltip tracking, cutting frame overhead during rapid camera movement.
Calculation Performance: Optimized recruitment site mapping and AI embassy candidate evaluations to maintain higher, more consistent frame rates.