Patch Notes

City HUD

• The approved compact TopMidBar is now the live city interface, presenting the active city, population, and city happiness in a cleaner parchment-and-carved-wood layout.
• All 18 base-game cities now display their own transparent coat of arms. Visby's shield and both status values were optically aligned to sit cleanly inside their frames.
• The compact rank-and-gold HUD now retains its intended size when moving from the world map into a city, while rank progress details open directly beneath it.

Renewed Cities

• Riga has been rebuilt as a compact coastal city with a full descending seabed, shoreline-ending defenses, three outward-facing gates, and three main roads meeting at a central civic junction. Dense mixed housing and workplace districts now follow connected side streets, while the two southern gate districts remain intentionally open.
• Visby now features a broader west-coast layout, paved civic center, connected harbor channel, deepening seabed, coast-ending walls, dense road-bounded districts, nine departure berths, and a wider opening camera view.
• Stockholm, Aalborg, Bergen, Edinburgh, London, Malmö, and Oslo have received new centered coastal layouts with fortified and paved centers, three gates, connected streets, 52 stable houses, 12 workplace plots, sea-facing harbors, road-bound pedestrians, and safe offshore ship departure points. London also received its missing functional Town Hall.
• Stockholm's gates and roads are now correctly aligned, ships depart over deeper water, building and road overlaps have been removed, the Town Hall and Architect occupy separate civic spaces, and paving fills the fortified interior. Oslo additionally received a wider northern fjord and a complete shelf-to-deep-basin seabed.

World Map & Interface

• New games now open the world map centered on the player's selected hometown. Loaded saves and later visits retain their existing map position behavior.
• Changing UI Scale now immediately refits the world map, preventing grey gaps while preserving the selected scale for HUDs and panels.
• City names and ship markers no longer become clipped along the lower edge of the top HUD while zooming the world map.
• Bremen's route marker now initializes and highlights consistently, while Riga is recognized as a completed hometown and no longer displays a development marker.

Performance

• Autosave snapshots are now serialized away from the main game thread before the existing safe disk write, reducing save-related frame stalls without changing save contents.
• Sea-route planning, AI destination traffic, fleet tracking, visible ships, construction sites, and harbor departure points now use persistent indexed lookups, reducing repeated world and scene searches as trade networks grow.
• Cities now use persistent road meshes, cached terrain-following pedestrian routes, coordinated camera-facing labels and interaction props, and GPU-instanced materials for heavily repeated walls and buildings.
• Market, Ledger House, Town Hall, rank, Shipyard, stock, cargo, and automatic-trade interfaces now batch relevant updates and reuse their authored rows, reducing unnecessary refresh work without changing prices, cargo, gold, or trade results.