**🔥 Area Abilities Overhauled — Shapes, Free Aim & Friendly Fire**
• AOEs now come in three shapes: **Burst** (circle around where it lands), **Cone** (sprays out from the caster, configurable spread angle), **Line** (a straight beam, configurable width) — set Shape/Spread/Width right on the skill card, and the AI authors shaped skills too
• **Free ground aiming**: every area skill gets a 🎯 button — aim on the battle map, a colored shape follows your mouse (orange = in range, red = too far), click a tile to unleash. No target needed; empty ground just fizzles
• **FRIENDLY FIRE IS REAL**: the shape decides who's caught, sides don't. A harmful blast hits allies standing in it; a heal reaches everyone in it — even an enemy. Position matters, aim carefully
• **Enemies are smart about it**: an intelligent caster holds a blast that would roast its own allies and picks another move — a mindless beast doesn't care (based on your world's mental stat)
• Support skills can finally target friendlies: the target chip now appears on allies too (green) — heal, buff, shield anyone
• Fixed a nasty old bug where area blasts applied their damage once PER victim (a 3-target fireball hit 3× as hard)
**👑 Characters, Courts & Lineage**
• **Realm gates finally work mechanically**: the level cap now reads your whole gate ladder ("unless Nascent Soul then max level 50…") instead of only the base line — high-realm characters can actually BE their level
• **Building a court works**: brand-new characters can be created at their proper level (the XP anti-cheat only guards progression now, never a first build), and the AI must set social class at creation — no more Commoner emperors
• **Courts arrive knowing each other**: creating a group now requires starting relationships between members — no more rosters of strangers
• **Declared Kin**: relate two characters WITHOUT a shared parent entity — half-brothers through a never-created father, sworn or adoptive kin. Add them in the Lineage editor by name with any relation label; shown as gold chips on the family tree, mirrored on both people, and the AI is forbidden from inventing ghost parents
• The family tree shows full names (no more four nodes all reading "Shangguan"), and an org leader's real title displays instead of a hardcoded "Leader"
• Marriage links can't be hijacked anymore: a spouse update used to get silently rerouted into the character's group roster
• The eternal duplicate-species bug is dead (Human/human): the census normalizes on every load, so old saves heal themselves; population edits can't fork case-duplicates again — same fix for duplicate resource pools and stray "FAVORED_STATS" attributes at creation
**🎯 Friend or Foe at a Glance**
• Targets are color-coded everywhere: **red = hostile, green = ally, blue = neutral** — being in the same fight no longer paints your own party red
**👥 One Population Number**
• "Unseen population" is retired — **Total is the one number**. Parents already include their children; refugees, dissolutions, and discharges all move real totals now
• The AI no longer sneaks phantom "unseen" people into your settlements — the doctrine that told it to is gone
**🕵️ Auditor Honesty & Markets**
• The inspector refreshes the moment an AI fix lands, and the diff shows only REAL changes
• Markets attach at creation for any settlement level with the pop/market toggle ON — the Context Hierarchy Matrix is authoritative — **and old worlds heal themselves**: on load, every populated settlement missing its market gets one automatically (matrix-gated, no clicks)
• Population suggestions respect your toggles (whole-word matching, no more "hub" inside "Hubris")
**🎬 New Main Menu**
• Your campaign art shines through a smaller glass pane, edges fade to dark, gold embers drift over everything, menu items glow on hover, community buttons float in the corner, and the beta info lives quietly under Settings
**🗺️ Maps & Worldgen (since v1.17)**
• Sub-map zoom is fast again on huge painted maps, the grid toggle can't lose the grid anymore, and painted art shows the tactical lattice
• Painted areas save exactly where you painted them through EVERY creation route, and the brush paints clean straight bands along map edges
• Worldgen can't silently half-build anymore: truncated AI replies are healed, a failed step STOPS the build and names itself, and AI calls fail fast (8 min) instead of hanging half an hour
• Deleted Global JSON keys STAY deleted — forever, including after full wipes
• Grid map art stopped drawing giant wagons and crowds on your terrain; "no X" art overrides actually win now
**🔧 Fixes**
• Names with apostrophes (Lu'an, Hunter's Lodge) are clickable links again
• The AI core no longer goes blank during long GM turns
• The hostile-overlay crash on older campaigns is fixed
• The in-game AI report button never actually worked — it does now
• Species/Races panel appears in the campaign wizard for new players
• Painting a new zone now hands the AI the zone's exact database id — no more failed lore write-ups when the AI can't find a freshly painted province