Major Update v0.5.0 opens multiplayer to everyone with Steam friend invites, fixes doctrine milestone tooltips, overhauls air and naval warfare, hardens missile basing, and updates province demographics using real-world population data across all 221 countries.
🌐 Multiplayer is Now Available to Everyone
Open to All Players: Multiplayer is now completely open to everyone directly from the main menu, featuring an overhauled lobby interface, direct Steam Friend Invites via the Steam Overlay, and interactive map-based country selection.
Lobby & In-Game Chat: Communicate with peers through a dedicated text chat system featuring message timestamps, unread alert badges, and system announcements.
In-Game Players Panel: Press Tab at any time to open the live Players Panel, displaying real-time ping latency, connection stability, and player-country assignments.
Campaign Resumption & Reconnection: Multiplayer campaigns can now be saved and resumed directly from the lobby. Automatic drop detection, reconnect grace windows, and mid-game rejoins keep matches running smoothly.
Country Ownership Safeguards: Enforced country ownership safeguards so players can only issue orders to their assigned nation.
📜 Doctrine UI & Milestone Tooltip Fixes
Milestone Tooltip Visibility: Resolved a tooltip binding issue on the Doctrine screen where milestone details failed to show properly due to parent container hover-reset interference. Milestone cards now reliably display their full stats, requirements, and effects.
Directive Button Tooltips: Allowed individual directive buttons inside milestone panels to register and display their own dedicated action tooltips on hover.
✈️ Air Warfare & Strategic Bombing Overhaul
Dynamic Range Visualization: Air mission range circles now dynamically follow and highlight the targeted province for intuitive planning.
Concentrated Sorties: Aircraft sorties now concentrate damage onto targeted enemy divisions instead of dispersing weakly across entire armies.
Strategic Bombing Suppression: Strategic bombing runs now actively suppress infrastructure recovery in targeted enemy provinces.
Airfield Basing Capacity: Land airfields now enforce realistic basing capacity limits, mirroring naval aircraft carriers and preventing infinite air wing stacking.
Transparent Wing Status: Air wings now explicitly report their active mission status, target locations, and mission completions.
⚓ Naval Combat & Task Force Defense
Transit Engagements & Radius Patrols: Fleets can now intercept and engage opposing naval task forces while in transit, and patrol missions actively sweep a wider territorial radius.
Scaled Fleet Anti-Air Defense: Ship anti-air capabilities have been re-engineered to scale with fleet density and individual warship armaments, providing more effective layered protection against hostile airstrikes.
Automated Rally Point Pooling: Naval and air production templates now automatically pool and merge newly constructed ships and aircraft wings at designated rally ports and airfields (including carrier wings).
Transit Line Cleanup: Resolved visual artifacts where transport fleets drew movement lines back to themselves after completing amphibious landings.
🚀 Missile Basing & Targeting Protections
Controlled Territory Basing: Missile silos and launch batteries can now only be established in fully controlled home provinces, tracking real slot utilization.
Targeting Safeguards: Conventional and nuclear missile strikes now validate launcher silos and target coordinates, and players can freely cancel or exit targeting mode at any time.
🌍 Real-World Demographics & Global Data
221-Country Population Calibration: Every province population across all 221 countries has been updated using real-world population data.
Historical Capital Resolution: Moving capitals now prioritizes historical capital status and province ownership over simple name matches.
Trade Bloc Founding Rules: Trade blocs now require at least two founding members and automatically dissolve if membership drops to a single nation.
🛠️ Expanded Modding Tools
Scenario National Goals: Scenarios can now define custom national goals (nationalGoalsFile) for both the player Agenda panel and the AI decision planner.
Doctrine "Replace Mode": Total conversion mods can now build custom Knowledge Network branches from scratch while cleanly hiding default trees.
Mod Builder Dropdowns: Integrated themed dropdown selectors across the Text and Goals editor tabs.
⚡ Engine & Performance Optimizations
Accelerated Pathfinding: Substantially improved military pathfinding calculations using accelerated passable terrain fills for weighted A* calculations.
Cache Lookups: Streamlined province graph cache queries and province snapshots across air, fleet, and intelligence systems.
Presentation Layer Throttling: Gated military and diplomacy map overlays to eliminate unnecessary redraws during rapid camera panning.
Globe View Clarity: Disabled unit count labels on distant markers and in full globe view to reduce visual clutter and rendering overhead.