Last week we published our latest update, which included a new map, many changes to province administration and a lot of other smaller or bigger changes. We spent the last days to get everything to work smoothly, did some additional balancing and fixed some bugs. We are confident that we were successful doing so and started working on the next release.

This release was a big chunk of new stuff, as you can see in the complete list below. Especially the transition from old games to the new system had some problems which we were able to solve. These include upgrades that were not finished after their build-countdown reached zero seconds and reached levels beyond the possible maximum. Both issues were easy to repair.

We also adapted food consumption, as food proved to be a quite worthless resource in most game rounds. We probably went a bit to far and risked a famine in many games. Fortunately, the American Red Cross was able to help, as can be read in yesterdays issue of the Daily European in games with the new map. For those who did not notice: We added 200 tons of grain for each province and increased the morale of food provinces. The daily food consumption of each province is now 1300 tons.

Improved AI: This update also brought a substantial improvement of the game's AI. Countries which are governed by the computer will now build upgrades in their provinces. A swift AI algorithm determines which upgrades have the highest priority for the country, as they will either improve the economy, morale or military defence capabilities of a province. This means, that AI countries will build fortresses along the border to human players and harbours and railroads in valuable resource provinces.

Outlook: After this big update is released, we are planning to have much more regular improvements to smaller aspects of the game. Releases will take place biweekly. Our next smaller target will be the foreign affairs section, which urgently needs some cleaning up.

Finally, for those interested, here is a complete list of changes of the last week:

0.9.57 (10/09/2008)
- army morale after splitting off from a larger army fixed
- fixed invisible morale check box for strategic map
- newspaper scrolls to top on program startup
- added automatic scrolling when the mouse is close to a map border
- fixed unnecessary embark orders on sea when using 'via'
- improved AI, it now builds province upgrades
- reduced army morale drop in battles

 0.9.58 10/09/2008
- added support for new upgrades
- added recruiting office and barracks upgrades
- upgrade and factory productions are scheduled in real-time
- possible factory productions depend on factory level
- fixed a mechanism that allowed to influence AI trading price on start of game
- improved, tiled map-painter painting
- added support for multiple maps
- fixed problem with attacking spied armies
- fixed problem with showing spied army's command paths when selected
- fixed artillery attack after disembarking
- improved spy reports for factory production
- fixed a bug that led to ships joining armies at land
- resource panel shows tax income and expenses separately
- improved province list and spy report list performance
- newspaper scrolls to top after login

 0.9.59 16/09/2008
- costs for repairing are displayed correctly in ingame help- improved province table sorting
- optimised army map painting with high load
- fixed a bug that could give armies fortress protection outside of fortresses
- lower levels of multi-level upgrades can be repaired now
- changed food consumption to 1300 per province
- fixed auto-completing upgrades and special units