Hello all!
This update starts with an apology. If you entered a script into the Arena, changed it and tried to send the better version, the arena kept showing your old one. There was no way to replace it. That has been true for about two months and I only caught it recently, which is not a good look for a feature whose entire point is that you iterate on a script until it wins.
It is fixed. Send an edited script again and it replaces what you had. Nothing was reset as far as the scores go.
With that out of the way, the rest of this update is mostly things you asked for.
Until now every AI country wanted the same things in the same order. The only thing separating two of them was a hidden roll made when the world was built which nobody could see and nobody could set.
Now you can tell a country how to play. There are seven to choose from.
Balanced: the AI as it has always played. Every scenario you already have uses this and nothing about it has changed.
Aggressive: starts wars often, and attacks even when its army is smaller.
Defensive: never attacks first, but builds forts and holds the line hard once someone attacks it.
Pacifist: never attacks first and makes peace as soon as it can. It spends its time building instead.
Opportunist: stays quiet until a neighbour is weak or already fighting someone else then takes the chance.
Isolationist: no wars, and no alliances either. It refuses every pact in both directions.
Maritime: sends its troops across the sea, and prefers land nobody else is fighting over.
You can give a personality to one country, or to an ideology so that every country following it plays the same way. If a country has its own setting, that one wins.
That second part is the interesting one. Give your Fascism a personality and the whole bloc plays like it, without you setting it a hundred times. Then hand one country in that bloc something different and it becomes the odd one out, for a reason you decided.
Set them in the Scenario Editor, from the country panel during a game, or when you found a new nation mid-game. The country panel shows an icon for whichever one a country is using, so you can see how a neighbour intends to behave before it proves it to you.
Two things worth saying plainly. Leaderboard runs and AI Studio runs always use the normal AI, so nobody is scored against a world that plays differently to yours. And a country running a custom script ignores personalities entirely, because your script is already the personality.
Straight from a player: a flag on the front was bigger than a tank, which made the armour look like a decoration next to the infantry.
There is now a size setting for the flags on the front line.
Also from the community, building on the request above: an option to draw each soldier as a circle rather than a rectangle, closer to how the front looked before flags arrived.
It is a toggle and it is off by default. The flag is cropped into the circle rather than squashed into it, so the stripes on it stay straight. It gives you an evener line at the cost of showing less of each flag, which is a trade some of you will want and some of you will not. That is exactly why it is a switch and not a replacement.
Both live in Settings, in the pause menu and in the main menu.
Speeds 1, 2 and 3 are all slower now. Several of you said the slowest setting was still too fast to follow a war properly and after the last round of tuning that was still true.
Speed 1 is half the pace it was. Speed 2 is now what speed 1 used to be, so if you were happy before, move up one button and nothing changes for you.
Speed 4 is untouched. It is the one for skipping ahead rather than watching, and it was the one nobody was complaining about.
Thank you for playing, and all the feedback!