Update v0.2.48 — Interactive Map Selection, Multiplayer & War Score

This update introduces interactive 3D map country selection, political map color palettes, an overhauled signed War Score system, and smarter AI war planning. It also brings nuclear launch safeguards, infrastructure ledgers, save file compression, and multiplayer lockstep determinism hardening.

🗺️ Interactive Map Country Selection & Palettes

• Interactive Map Picking: You can now pick your country directly by clicking on the 3D world map during scenario setup, seamlessly linked with country dropdown pickers.

• Visual Map Palettes: Choose between three distinct political map color palettes: Normal, Vibrant, and Gloomy, with enhanced shader blending under Vibrant mode.

⚔️ Signed War Score Scale & Transparent Peace Deals

• Signed War Score Scale: Overhauled the War Score system to operate on a transparent, signed scale ranging from -100 to +100.

• Dynamic Battle Scoring: Winning a battle now awards war score based on the exact percentage of the enemy force destroyed rather than a flat value.

• Transparent Peace Deals: Unified the Peace Deal UI to quote peace budgets in a single currency at clear precision, and added a preview of exact provinces requested in incoming AI peace offers BEFORE you accept.

• Threat Decay Tuning: Rebalanced Aggressive Expansion (AE) monthly decay rate to 2.0 per month.

🧠 AI War Planning Engine & Nuclear Safeguards

• Consistent War Target Scoring: Upgraded the AI War Ladder so computer nations score potential war targets consistently across planning, selection, and execution phases.

• War Plan Slot Protection: Fixed an issue where major AI nations sat idle due to orphaned war plans; AI now assigns war slots strictly to top targets.

• Realistic Alliance Weighting: AI coalition logic now evaluates alliance partners based on actual military obligations rather than treating loose political pacts as military alliances.

• Strict Nuclear AI Release: AI countries can no longer fire nuclear payloads simply due to war exhaustion; they must be actively losing an existential war in front of them.

• Reliable UI Alert Toasts: Overhauled nuclear alert toasts to eliminate duplicate sirens, false positives, and missed alerts.

🏗️ Infrastructure Ledgers & Economic Hardening

• Infrastructure Ledgers: Added per-building infrastructure ledgers and passive infrastructure caps to prevent unrealistic building stacking in rural provinces.

• Regional Data Calibration: Calibrated South American raw resource weights and curated regional province overrides.

• Occupied GDP Floor: Prevented fully-occupied nations from collapsing to 0.00 GDP, ensuring they retain a 50% floor to fund liberation armies.

• Bounded Economic Warfare: Implemented strict cooldowns, expiration timers, and per-victim caps on Economic Warfare actions to prevent infinite currency sabotage.

🛡️ Siege Mechanics & Performance

• Siege Threshold Cap: Capped siege capture thresholds at 100%, improved siege UI value formatting, and added visual feedback when garrisons stall progress.

• Collapsible Diplomacy Overview: Grouped Diplomacy Overview into 5 clean collapsible sections with national flags and click-to-focus camera shortcuts.

• Save File Compression: Packed fog exploration data into compressed province ID lists (Save Format v18), significantly reducing save file sizes.

🌐 Multiplayer Lockstep & Resync Engine

• Deterministic Unit Buffers: Standardized unit buffer canonicalization (Armies, Fleets, Air Wings) across unit creation, merging, splitting, and disbanding so unit ordering stays 100% identical on all host and client machines.

• Resync Stall Recovery: Re-engineered lockstep tick-gating and resync coordinators. Follower clients no longer get stuck in resync loops or stranded when backing out of a lobby or experiencing network jitter, backed by automatic stall recovery timeouts.

• Expanded State Hashing: Expanded state hash calculations to cover unit HP recovery, combat resolution, fleet evacuations, and AI movement paths to catch desyncs instantly, backed by detailed multiplayer logging.

• Clean Lobby Disconnects: Resolved an issue where backing out of a multiplayer lobby could leave local ECS systems stranded or fail to clean up network peer states.