Argosy Patch Notes

New Features

• New Game is three steps. Previously: a persona card that launched the game on click, then a single form that asked name, name culture, name gender, chart, and hometown all over again — five controls with a second copy of themselves one screen back. Now: who you are, where you are from, what the world is like. Nothing about the person on step two; nothing about the world on step one.
• Character creation, with two hundred faces. A 424px portrait in a carved frame fills the left third. A hundred-face gallery with arrows, chips for the frame's shape and finish, then name, gender, descent, and the beginning you start from. The faces are not illustrations drawn for the game: each is a crop from a public-domain European panel painting of roughly 1400–1600, from the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland, and Wikimedia. 67 collections, 124 named hands, provenance recorded per file. Six carved frames (arch, oval, round in walnut or gilt). The chosen face and frame are written to the save and shown wherever the player is shown.
• Pick a home port on the chart, not from a dropdown. The map takes two thirds of the card; every town is a mark you click. The list survives as "or by name," which is the right tool for finding something on a chart with eighty marks. Hovering a town fills a parchment dossier: its quarter of the League, population and what that size is called, what it makes and what it must buy in. River towns are called out, because only river-capable hulls can reach them.
• World settings are graded tiers, not feature switches. "Newspaper: Disabled" tells a player which system they are switching off. "Rumour alone — a close horizon and no paper" tells them what their game will be like. Advancement, Trading conditions, Competition, Disasters, Fortunes, What you know, and Regional relations each run on one scale from gentle to punishing. 16 rows became 10; 4 tabs became one column.
• Starting rank and starting fleet on the form. Rank stops below Councillor — the council seats are offices you are voted into, and granting one at world creation would mean seeding an election result nobody held. Rank also picks the opening hull class (Snaikka → Crayer → Crayer → Cog), so it is a head start in tonnage as well as in title. Capital and fleet track the Trading conditions tier until you pin one.
• Colour-vision settings. The market supply pips fill one to four for weeks of cover and colour them for price. Simulated under deuteranopia, cheap and dear sat 2.5 apart against 42.5 in full colour. Options → Interface now carries three independent settings: a colour-vision palette, a high-contrast modifier, and shape cues. The palettes are measured, not eyeballed, and per-type: deuteranopia and protanopia move the good-bad axis to blue-ochre-wine (2.5 to 28.5 and 8.0 to 32.0); tritanopia keeps the shipped green and red and moves the amber shoulder to mauve (21.5 to 29.6). One shared "colourblind palette" would have handed tritanopes the one axis they cannot read.
• Map Editor — Sculpt Brush (S): Coastlines previously required vertex-by-vertex editing. Sculpt lets you drag to add land (over open sea it becomes a new island, over a coast it grows it) or drag to remove it. Alt inverts the mode for one stroke. One stroke is one Ctrl+Z. Looping around a headland detaches it as its own island; a cut wholly enclosed by land is reported in the panel rather than silently doing nothing.

Balance

• AI routine-think budget removed. A cap of three routine thinkers per tick — from a slower era — gated only the 51 routine behaviours, never the 8 urgent ones, including the idle-ship assigner. At Normal speed, 0.31 routine thinks fall due per tick against a cap of 3, so it barely bound at all. At debug fast-forward it failed unfairly: 24 of 842 players received 100% of routine thinking and 818 received none. Routine thinking is now paced by each player's own jittered clock. Measured over two sim-years: AI commands +32%, AI popularity +30%, AI gold -5% (the dip being AI converting cash into standing and civic assets).
• Apprentice starting capital: 65,000 → 50,000, which is a tier the form can show as a plain choice.
• The tutorial now runs under Disasters "Kind" and Fortunes "Quiet," which is what a scripted chapter wanted anyway.

Performance

• Sculpt brush commit scales with stroke, not map. Two parts were quadratic. A drag across a 4,096-unit map with the smallest brush produced roughly 2,900 polygon operations. The stroke is now the exact swept area between pointer samples — one capsule or hexagon per sample regardless of distance — merged in O(N log N) rather than O(N²).
• Settings changes no longer freeze the game for two seconds. Applying a colour or text-scale setting was deep-copying the full theme, including two FontFiles and twenty textures, dropping all glyph caches in the process. It now captures only the scalars it needs.
• Portrait gallery loads 128px thumbnails at six per frame: roughly 6 MB of VRAM for a hundred faces, rather than roughly 100 MB and a visible stall.
• AI assumed prices for unvisited cities are now computed once per tick for the whole world rather than per AI player on its own interval.

UI and UX

• New Game card sized by what it holds. Previously 760px wide at 14–16pt on a 2560×1440 canvas, smaller than the screen it replaced. The fix overshot to 1440 and read as low resolution (the issue was the card, not the textures: the menu frame's art is finite at 1040px of paper and stretching it 2.7× smears every line). The card now sizes to its widest chip row and measures itself on any width change, with everything clamped to the viewport so settings scroll rather than hang off both ends.
• World screen opens on a summary. A player arriving at step three has just made a character and picked a home port; their beginning already chose a coherent world. Eleven "name — value" lines with a "Change these settings" button replaces the opening wall of toggles. Read-only text rather than greyed chips on purpose: a disabled chip row is still 42 controls to look at.
• Live difficulty readout. Every row is normalised to 0 (kindest) to 1 (cruellest) and averaged, re-read on every chip press. The persona badge went stale the moment you changed anything; this does not.
• One line per setting. All 42 blurbs rewritten to fit one 15pt line. Spacing inverted so a title, its chips, and its line cling together. Panel height: 1,515px → 1,149px against a 1,440 canvas.
• Home port dossier shows real demand. The "MUST BUY IN" line was reading the caravan list, which is empty for 129 of the League chart's 155 towns. Where it was non-empty, it named goods the town gets for free by land — the opposite of what the heading promised. It now shows what citizens want and the town cannot make, ranked by weekly gold. Fish otherwise drops out of the top six of every town on a straight unit count.
• Town marks are now things you click. A town was a 4px ink square. Each is now a paper knockout with an ink centre and a standing ring. Knockouts are laid down for every mark before any mark is drawn, so a crowded coast does not leave earlier marks looking bitten into by their neighbours.
• Menu polish. The face arrows' hover was an 8px bright sliver from a 457px glow bar scaled to a 44px button. Small square buttons get their own style. The Descent dropdown painted two carets and fell back to Godot's grey radio circles on parchment; both fixed. The painter's name caption under the portrait is gone: a museum label under a character the player has just named reads wrong. Provenance remains in each cell's gallery tooltip.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed small towns reporting no demand for goods they visibly eat. Weekly consumption was written from a real number with a plain integer cast, so Riga's 0.14 loads of meat and Torun's 0.98 loads of spices both truncated to zero. Worse, a good with no consumer at all took a floor of 2, so the market showed more appetite for goods nobody wanted than for goods the town ate. On the Baltic chart: 72 of 73 goods reporting zero demand had real demand behind them.
• Fixed the wedding system offering every merchant as a candidate regardless of gender. The player's gender had never been written by anything in the game.
• Fixed every landmass existing twice as two coincident polygons with opposite winding. The Cradle: 42 → 21 coastline polygons, verified as zero differing cells across the land mask. The duplicate winding also meant a caller could no longer tell a lake from an island.
• Fixed five tooltip and tab colours frozen against every colour-vision palette despite the theme values being correct — they were correctly valued but unbound, so the palette swap never reached them.
• Fixed high contrast doing nothing to the neutral text ink, which carries most of the words on screen and sat at 4.56:1. The first fix then closed the colourblind palettes' price bands toward each other; it is a uniform push away from each ink's declared ground now.
• Fixed shape-cue marks reading as smaller rather than different: a diamond covers 64% of a disc's ink and a triangle 54%, and the outline stroke was a raw 1.4px while the marks follow the text-size setting — so at 160% the empty pips thinned out as the interface grew.
• Fixed a Hansa merchant being named Devi Trivedi. The descent roll drew from all thirteen culture pools; "(Anywhere)" now rolls among the seven Hansa-adjacent ones.
• Fixed portrait JPEGs shipping twice in exported builds — a second 15 MB copy from a raw include filter alongside the imported resources.
• Fixed the region-diplomacy world rule arriving after the region relations it was meant to suppress had already been seeded.