Hello everyone, thank you for being so patient with the game updates.
There has been major rework in the infrastructure side to support the extent that we'd like to see the game go.
The goal hasn't changed, we would still like to deliver the military campaign, the religion system, the cultural influence system, and very importantly we want to create vertical integrations across all these systems to improve gameplay.
In the May update, we added the necessary infrastructure behind the military campaign. Specifically, the world is now mapped with locations (points of interests), roads (which connect them), and we moved over anyone that moves such as battalions and caravans to the Traveler system, which makes use of these roads. We have built systems for building up an army and maintaining them, battle sequences between opposing forces, and the concept of faction ownership on locations. Additionally, some locations are tagged as Fortress, Castle, or City and provides additional bonus.
Another feature rolled out behind the scenes is the World Entities system. This translated a number of in-game values to actual entities with common properties. For example, the Granary, Warehouse, and Treasury are now "Resource Containers" in game, this will lead eventually to the concept of splitting up containers for budgeting/planning so that you could for example set up a container specifically for Contracts that automatically takes resources out of the main Stockpile based on certain policies.
A unified approach to developing in game widgets has led to a number of QoL features. The Sell list in the Trading screen can now be sorted to help you decide what needs to be sold. The Warehouse and Granary both have ability to sell goods instead of discarding them directly once you have the Market unlocked. The tagging system enables the warehouse to be sorted into categories so that you can quickly see what you have.
We also heard you loud and clear, the early game can sometimes be dull while you're waiting for buildings to be completed. You can't spare any more builders either, so instead you can help out your builders similar to chopping wood and gathering food.
We also introduced a few features based on feedback from the community. Farm houses and Tree houses now have an added bonus where they improve the efficiency of workers in the Agriculture and Forestry sectors respectively. This works by calculating the number of workers in the relevant Sector, and calculating the percentage of which is living in one of these location-specific homes. Makes sense if you think about it, someone who doesn't have to commute far can do more work with their time. However! Farm houses, like all other buildings in the Plains, is prone to being flooded, and Tree houses like all other buildings in the Forests, is exposed to forest fires.
Finally, we also released the full version of the Consistency Engine. This is a value checker that runs every now and then in game to make sure certain things stay up to synch. As we say in the development world, there's 2 hard problems: naming things, and cache invalidation. For sake of performance we cache a lot of frequently calculated values, and unfortunately the cache can become outdated. Given the scope of the game and the number of interdependencies, it is almost too easy to create accidental inconsistencies. The Consistency Engine is equipped with a set of formulas to ensure things like number of worker slots is consistent with the buildings that are operational, or that the seasonal bonus is appropriately updated for every batch in every job.
Now I understand that this update talked about a lot of infrastructure stuff and not a lot of features. Please be patient as we work towards the June update that will add some more content to the game.
Cheers!
dSolver