Hello all!
This update started with cultures. I wanted a country to contain actual peoples rather than one population number and I wanted those people to matter when borders moved. That sounded like one system. It turned into terrain, food, farms, subjects, a rebuilt God Mode, a new way to read the news, new tools for the Scenario Editor and a fairly serious rewrite of AI Studio.
So this is 0.7.0. It is a large update.
Every populated region can contain different peoples. Polish, Czech and Slovak people can belong to a wider West Slavic group, for example. Members of the same group are culturally close without every relationship needing to be entered by hand.
That matters when countries conquer land. A diverse state has more to hold together. A people that is badly treated can rise up and form a breakaway country of its own, with an appropriate name and a generated flag if the scenario does not provide one.
Countries can tolerate minorities, integrate them, assimilate them or expel them, depending on what their ideology allows. Assimilation takes time now. The old result where a huge conquered population could change identity within a few years is gone. Violent policies also kill or displace the people they target instead of giving the conqueror all of their population for free.
The culture tools are built around groups, peoples and painting. Create a group, add the peoples inside it, choose one and brush it onto the map. You can paint broad areas or edit one region precisely.
Culture databases are separate from scenarios, so the same population map can be reused. The game includes databases for several historical periods as starting points, and you can clone one before changing it for your own scenario.
Culture mode has its own map colours and labels, so you see the peoples you are editing rather than trying to read them through country borders.
Every region now has terrain. Mountains, forests, plains, deserts and other terrain types change attack, defence and food output. A war report shows the terrain on each side of a front and the strength it adds or removes.
Population also grows now, but only when a country can feed it. Every region produces some food naturally. Farms add much more, fertile terrain makes them better, and Development Technology improves their output further.
A short shortage can be covered by reserves. A long one stops growth, damages stability and becomes a famine. Famines can also happen naturally when a country fails to build what it needs, which means a large empire can now collapse from inside even when nobody is strong enough to invade it.
Countries can rule other countries without removing them from the map.
A subject can pay income to its overlord, lose control of parts of its diplomacy and support the overlord's wars. Its troops appear beside the overlord's on shared fronts, so the help is visible rather than hidden inside a number.
This is not always permanent. A subject with low stability can fight for independence. If an overlord loses its own land but still has subjects, the relationship can no longer leave a dead empire ruling from nowhere.
Subjects can be created during a game with God Mode or set before the first turn in the Scenario Editor. This makes colonial and historical scenarios possible without pretending every part of an empire was simply the same country.
God controls used to hide inside a large right-click menu. You had to know they existed, open the correct country and then dig through a list every time you wanted to do something. They were useful, but using them to actively shape a world was slower than simply watching it.
That entire system has been replaced. God Mode now has its own button in the centre of the bottom bar and opens one permanent workspace. Select a country once, move between its tools and act directly on the map.
The live rules page changes the simulation while it is running. You can change the war limit, world tension, declaration cost, minimum war length, truce length, overextension and passive income. You can also switch rebellions, colonisation and instant construction on or off, or make every war continue until conquest or a direct God Mode peace.
The larger controls are global. One button can turn off diplomacy AI for every living country. Wars, peace offers, alliances and other diplomatic decisions stop being made by the AI, leaving the world in your hands. Nuclear AI has the same switch, so every arsenal can be frozen without disabling nuclear weapons themselves.
You can also change those two controls for one country. Stop one nation's diplomacy while the rest of the world continues normally, take control of its nukes before its AI spends them, or hand either system back whenever you are finished.
The direct country controls have not disappeared. Army units, manpower, treasury, Military Technology, Development Technology, warheads, missile silos and manual nuclear targeting have all moved from the old right-click menu into the selected nation's page.
The important change is how they are used. The workspace stays open while you select countries and move between tools, values remain visible beside their controls, and changing one part of a nation no longer means reopening a menu and finding your place again.
The nation page has also grown around the new systems. You can see daily food production, consumption and remaining reserves, add or remove thirty days of food, deliberately cause a famine or end one with relief. You can incite a revolt, open the full country editor, or release a specific minority from the Peoples tab rather than asking the game to choose a breakaway for you.
Declaring war, making peace and forcing an alliance already existed in the old controls. They now work through the map instead of a right-click list and a changed cursor. Select a country, choose the familiar action and a line follows from its capital to the nation under your cursor, making both sides of the decision clear before you click.
Annexation and subjects expand that system. You can absorb another nation, turn it into a puppet or release a subject from its overlord without rebuilding either country.
God Mode can now alter a war where it is actually being fought. Choose a country, arm a front action and click one of its active war lines.
Breakthrough: win a major battle, inflict heavy losses and take up to three regions.
Reinforce: deploy the country's forces to that front and order the line to hold.
Collapse Enemy: shatter the opposing line at greater cost and push as far as six regions.
The selected tool explains itself above the workspace, highlights what you can click and cancels with Escape. Switching to another action clears the old one, so a forgotten breakthrough cannot fire while you are trying to declare a war.
Territory transfer and colonisation now use a real map brush. Select a nation and drag across the world to give it regions. The brush has a visible radius, works for single clicks as well as strokes and follows the same interaction used in the Scenario Editor.
Ideologies and cultures now have their own in-game editors beside God Mode. You can create an ideology while the simulation is running, change its bonuses and decide which cultural policies it permits. The culture atlas shows the world's peoples, their global population and their strengths, then lets you change them without returning to the Scenario Editor.
God Mode is no longer a small collection of cheats. It is a second way to play Observe: let the simulation run, take over only the decisions you care about and put your hands directly on the map when the story needs a push.
The old event display showed one item at a time at the top of the screen. In a busy world it fell behind almost immediately, so it has been replaced.
Rankings and News now share one panel on the right. The news side keeps a continuous feed with the newest event at the bottom. It follows new events while you are watching, but leaves the scroll alone when you move back to read something older. You can filter it to wars, peace, alliances, atrocities, famines, uprisings and other event types.
The country panel has new information for cultures, subjects and food. Right-clicking a region opens a region panel with its terrain, population, farm output and other local information. Death statistics now separate military deaths from civilian deaths, then divide civilian deaths by their cause.
Season 4 uses one fixed United States challenge instead of asking every script to work from five different countries. The game has become complicated enough that writing one AI for five unrelated starting positions was turning the leaderboard into a test of how many special cases you could survive.
Now everyone gets the same superpower and the same world. You can concentrate on making one script as good as possible, and every score is directly comparable.
Season 4 is a full reset. Every Arena match and every leaderboard score will be run again under 0.7.0.
There are two reasons for that. First, cultures, terrain, food, farms, subjects and the new invasion timing all change how a country performs. A score earned under the old simulation cannot be compared fairly with one earned under the new one. Second, the leaderboard itself is changing from five starting countries to one shared United States challenge. Keeping the old tables would mix two different competitions together.
The Arena duel has also been tightened before the rerun. Both sides have continuous territory with no islands that require a naval invasion to finish. Names on the map use the submitted script names, and a match is forced into war instead of spending hundreds of turns waiting for somebody to make the first move. The rerun gives every submitted script the same corrected map and the same rules.
Your scripts are not being deleted. The scores and Season 3 standings are being archived, then the competition starts again on the new version.
Before the reset, congratulations to the people who finished Season 3 at the top.
IceAxe1523 won two leaderboards, the most of anyone this season.
V1king won one leaderboard.
Paşa :) won one leaderboard.
Achorkov01 won one leaderboard.
If you won any Season 3 category, come to the Observe Discord and let me know who you are. You will receive a special leaderboard winner role. This applies to every category winner, including everyone named above.
Breakaway states: new countries receive armies quickly enough to defend the front that created them.
Generated flags: rebellions and released countries without a saved flag receive a random one from the flag designer system.
Fronts: terrain effects appear in war reports, allied and subject support is handled on the front, and intervention tools no longer remain selected after switching actions.
Naval invasions: invasions take time based on their route instead of resolving instantly. Their flags travel from the departure region to the landing, then show whether the attack succeeded or failed.
There are also a few things in this update that are better found than listed. I will only say that members of the community trusted me with pictures of their pets, and I did use them in the game.
Thank you for playing, testing and reporting the things I miss.