Making a world
• Four ways in, including building a world by hand
• Quick Start tells you when it's done, and the window shows a progress bar, a clock, and each power as it is built
• Your campaign starts in a real town — real buildings, real people, already in place
• Pick Settlement scope and you get a single town, drawn properly
• Each campaign starts from its own settings
Maps
• A town stands in the same place on every map above it, and its sprawl wears its own colours
• A region's coastline matches the continent it belongs to
• Roads end at the coast; a continent is one landmass
• Saved maps keep everything they were drawn with
• The map browser shows the map as it is, not a fresh roll
Towns
• Towns are about five times bigger
• A town has open ground around it — and the smaller and more rural the place, the more of it, with its fields, woods and outlying shacks drawn in
• A town sits beside a mountain rather than curling around it
• Every settlement has lanes and a way out
• Shanty towns belong to a town under strain, not to a town on the day it is founded
How your world looks
• Choose your world's architecture on the map panel and in Quick Start. Auto reads your genre and setting, so a wuxia world doesn't come out medieval
• Any town, faction or building can have its own style — and it shows on the maps above it straight away
• Changing the world's style restamps the maps you've already drawn
Powers
• Every government on your map is fully built — a ruler, officers with real ranks in the organisation window, and a census
• Every power starts with a ruler, five officers, and troops in its garrison to raise its first armies from
• The ruler a plan names keeps the throne
• Turn Politics off and there are no governments at all — nobody owns any territory, so no taxes, census, armies or vassalage
Costs and time
• Buildings, research and projects are priced like real undertakings — a mine takes months, not an afternoon
• Difficulty makes work slower, not bigger
• Research follows a ladder — a basic law costs a fraction of a great working
• A wonder is simply a very large building now, priced by the same rule as everything else
Smaller things
• Status effects land
• A nickname is the same person — no duplicate NPCs
• Tooltips say what a setting does
• A window-resize notice is no longer reported as a crash
• The results box stays clear of the buttons, and can be made bigger