List of changes:

🌍 Colonization (new mechanic)

• New mechanic: settle unclaimed land — deserts, tundra, jungle, arctic islands and other unowned territory on the map
• Tap free land → a price card pops up → press it → paint the exact area you want with a brush right on the map (just like a peace conference) → send the expedition
• Colonies grow organically along the coastline instead of a perfect compass-drawn circle — shape depends on the terrain
• Price rises with distance, but distance is no longer a hard wall — far-off land just costs more, it's never simply forbidden
• Overseas colonization now requires being an actual colonial power (economic and military weight plus a coastline), not just having the biggest landmass on the map — countries like Mexico or Persia used to qualify while France and the Netherlands didn't
• The AI competes for the same land too, with staggered start times so one bot can't snowball into taking half the unclaimed world
• Only available in scenarios from the right era (Victorian Era and similar) — 1936, WWII and the modern world simply have no free land

⚔️ War and combat

• Fixed: wars between two developed countries would literally grind to a halt at 1-4% captured territory even at max game speed — such wars now actually get fought to a conclusion
• Fixed: attacking through mountains, forests, marshes and hills was in places mathematically impossible — troops would "just stand there" on exactly that terrain. Hard terrain is now slow instead of impassable
• Fixed (observer/sandbox mode): divisions never marched at all, drawn attack-plan arrows were ignored, and switching the viewed country wiped out the army you'd built — all three bugs at once
• Putting down a rebellion now has its own declaration screen instead of looking like an ordinary war with a neighbor: rebel flag, a "CRUSH THE REBELLION!" button, and a clear line showing which government the rebels want to install
• The war declaration screen has been reworked: your side is always shown on the left, both countries are labeled by name (not just flags), the reason for war gets its own line, and a power-balance bar has been added
• When justifying a war you can now paint on the map exactly which territory you're claiming, and write your own custom reason for the war — pure flavor for immersion, it doesn't change the cost or balance

🤝 Diplomacy and coalitions

• A coalition against you now behaves like a real temporary alliance — members actually fight alongside each other and share the same seat at the peace table, instead of just quietly making your life harder one at a time
• Coalitions now correctly recruit great powers, not just small neighbors who had no real chance of defending themselves
• New: trade embargoes. High enough infamy turns part of the world against trading with you — worse prices, shown directly in the trade menu
• You're now asked before being drafted into someone else's coalition — it used to be able to declare war on your behalf silently
• Fixed: countries conquered a long time ago (not just via an ultimatum) can now be released again — the game used to simply "forget" they had ever existed
• The "Release Country" menu has been reworked: draw the new country's borders yourself or hand over its entire historical territory, with a running total always visible of what you're giving away and what you keep

🏭 Economy

• Fixed a serious bug: large countries with mediocre land (the USSR, Canada and similar) went into the red from turn one, because upkeep scaled with total territory while income scaled with land quality. This reliably caused an unexplained uprising within seconds of starting a game
• The game now automatically trims spending when you're heading for bankruptcy (science first, then welfare, then the military budget) and restores it once your treasury recovers — previously only the AI could do this for itself
• Fixed: artillery, tanks, aircraft and ships could silently drop to zero production forever, because infantry ate the entire recruit budget — every production line now gets its fair share
• Naval shipbuilding is finally reliable — ships used to almost never actually get built
• Land quality now weighs even more heavily on income and population — the gap between good and mediocre territory has widened

🗺️ World map

• The big scenario maps (Modern World, WWII, Victorian Era) have been redrawn at a much higher resolution — zooming in on PC looks noticeably crisper
• Phones now automatically get a lighter version of those same maps, so the game doesn't run out of video memory or fail to launch on older devices
• Country borders are noticeably smoother now — the "staircase" jaggies along coastlines and frontiers are gone

🛠️ Map editor and mods

• New selection tools: pen (bezier curves), lasso and magic wand, on top of the brush — and now EVERY drawing tool respects the current selection
• New: a historical regions layer — trace a region and assign it to a country in one go, or split a country's territory into regions to start from
• The water lock no longer blocks painting over rivers — it now only guards actual sea/ocean, not water in general
• New: import content from another scenario — map, terrain, growth, cities, diplomacy, flags, pick and choose — without manually copying files
• Scenarios can now be renamed and have their start year changed after creation, not only when they're first created
• Fixed a crash when saving on exit from the map editor
• Fixed cloning and exporting scenarios, which in some cases (especially on phones) produced an empty or broken copy
• The editors hub has been reorganized: map/scenario editors on one side, backgrounds and mods (which aren't tied to any single scenario) in their own column

🎨 Interface

• The save/load screen has been reworked: sessions collapse into groups, there's an AUTO/MANUAL filter, and a details card (difficulty, mode, seed) before you commit to loading
• The settings menu has been unified between the main menu and the in-game pause menu — every option, including display and font size, is now available in both places
• Menu backgrounds no longer restart from a random image every time you switch screens; you can also use your own images or turn the background off entirely
• Epidemics no longer interrupt the game with three popups in a row — the outbreak and the outcome are now quiet notifications, and only the actual "risk infection?" decision still pauses the game
• The loading screen has been reworked: the scenario's map assembles itself country by country while you wait, so progress no longer looks stuck
• The first-launch language and age screens have been redesigned with proper panels, keyboard navigation, and automatic detection of your system language
• Tooltips and button highlights now appear instantly instead of after a delay
• Fixed unreadable text on several panels in dark theme

⚡ Performance

• Fixed a loading freeze of up to ~40 seconds on large maps — the game was building the same internal land-quality map twice
• Fixed micro-stutters during large wars — army position lookups were being recalculated from scratch instead of using a cache
• Fixed a memory leak in single-player games where army-movement data piled up forever and was never cleaned
• General memory pass — noticeably fewer stutter-pauses in long games
• Fixed a multi-second freeze when resizing the window or loading a scenario for the first time