The first big post-launch update is here. Thank you for all the feedback since release, a lot of what follows comes directly from your reviews and reports. Improved: The AI Plays for Keeps
The AI was our top priority this update. It now expands far more aggressively, running several settling expeditions at once instead of one at a time, and it scales its ambitions with its wealth. At war, it spends its economy much more heavily on building military strength, trains from all of its settlements, and gathers its forces into massed, coordinated offensives instead of trickling small waves at you. Expect a real fight, especially from the mid game on.
New: Settle Across the Sea
Founding is no longer limited to your borders. A new village can now be founded on the shore of any sea or lake your realm touches: sail your soldiers across, and the far coast is yours to settle. Landlocked realms first need to reach the water. Crossing is slow at first and gets much faster with later technologies. The Founding map (T) now shows this at a glance: territories you could settle glow at full brightness, everything else is dimmed. Unexplored shores across the sea light up too, so you can plan your expansion before you ever send a scout.
New: Game Pace
Choose how fast your world moves. A new Game Pace setting in the game lobby offers three speeds:
Normal: the classic experience.
Fast: settlements hold twice as many people and grow twice as fast, training batches are larger, everything costs 20% less and income is 25% higher.
Very Fast: triple population, the biggest training batches, everything costs 40% less and income is 50% higher.
The pace applies to every faction equally (the AI plays by the same rules), is fixed for the whole game, and is saved with your game. Hover over each option in the lobby to see exactly what it changes.
New: Cascade Conquest
Conquest now scales with the ages. As empires develop administration, their settlements bind together, and so does their fate:
After researching Writing (Ancient Age), villages bound to a town can no longer be taken one by one. Capture the town, and its villages follow.
After researching Feudalism (Medieval Age), towns bound to a city, and all their villages, change hands only when the city falls.
Unbound settlements can always be captured directly.
This works both ways: your empire's structure protects you, and taking an enemy capital can now hand you a whole region in one stroke. Watch the settlement map mode: golden connection lines mark protected settlements.
Tutorial
Fixed a step that could not be completed if the key was tapped instead of held. If the tutorial ever felt stuck on "reveal the borders", this was it, and we are sorry. A tap now counts.
Two new lessons: crossing the water (and settling the far shore) and commanding armies (splitting with one key, merging by sending armies to the same place).
Steps that ask you to press something now give you a moment to see the result before moving on, instead of rushing to the next card.
Major Fixes
Victory now actually happens. Defeating every enemy faction properly ends the game with a victory screen, including when you starve out an enemy's final army rather than destroying it in battle. Previously the game could go on forever after your last rival fell.
Invisible armies fixed. Loading a save with 5 or more factions could leave some factions' soldiers permanently invisible while their army counters still showed.
Victory and Defeat screens redesigned in the same style as the era announcements, with proper end-of-game statistics.
Crash reporting now actually reaches us, so launch problems some players reported can finally be found and fixed. Startup diagnostics are improved too.
Balance and Clarity
Technology effects on founding costs and soldier costs are now shown as percentages, so the tooltip stays accurate on every Game Pace. Charged amounts are unchanged, this is a display correction.
All new and changed text is localized in English, Turkish, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
The free demo is updated with all of these improvements within its scope.