07.08.2026 Merchant Dossiers & Living Sea Lanes

Hansa Forever · published 32 days ago

Rebuilt world-map voyages around a single, hand-authored route network. Normal voyages, manual orders, rerouted ships, and test fleets now follow the same connected sea lanes.
Removed the obsolete sea-grid, A* navigation mask, route smoothing, and straight-line fallback systems.
Ships now remain in a single-file line through shared route junctions while retaining their individual vessel speeds.
Vessels no longer stop, queue, yield, or wait for traffic. Ships may overlap or pass through one another without disrupting their voyage.
Improved voyage presentation across x0.1 and x10 speeds, reducing stutter, freezing, sudden jumps, and delayed visual movement.
AI merchants now distribute their fleets across different destinations and favour less-congested ports instead of sending every ship to the same city.
Fixed ships becoming stranded at sea because of stale destinations, missing map markers, delayed scene transitions, or invalid route references.
AI ships now retain their proper regional vessel names and reliably display their current destination.
Broadened rivers and estuaries leading to Bremen, Hamburg, Cologne, and other inland ports. Cologne’s Rhine approach received additional space for clearer voyages.

Improved the size, framing, detail, and readability of Pinnace, Cog, and Frigate map models.
Added safer harbor endpoint spacing so complete ship models remain visible near Bergen, Stockholm, Edinburgh, and other coastal cities.
Improved ship visibility, coastal clearance, route progress, and movement through narrow passages.
Optimized world-map fleets by replacing continuous preview-camera rendering with reusable static ship previews.
God Mode continues to reveal AI fleets without displaying route overlays.

Completely redesigned the ship panel as a parchment-and-bound-leather Merchant Dossier with classical typography, engraved icons, Hanseatic seals, and a detailed ship illustration.
Preserved the Route, Convoy, Cargo, and Captain tabs while removing the overlapping legacy parchment, stretched artwork, duplicate controls, and old coloured icons.
The Route tab now displays the vessel’s current city or “At Sea,” together with a visual node-based itinerary.
Ships without a trade route display one empty route node. Configured routes display their departure, destination, and connected journey line.
Replaced the duplicate route controls with one compass-marked button that automatically changes between “New Trade Route” and “Edit Route.”
Added a functional Activate toggle beneath the route action.
Cargo entries are now centred and display the localized goods name above the stored quantity.
The Captain tab assigns every vessel a stable, culturally appropriate captain name based on the city where the ship was constructed.
Added a note explaining that captain statistics will become important with the Plague of Seas DLC.
All newly introduced dossier text supports both English and Turkish.

Added a new collection of dramatic, historically grounded AI merchant portraits.
Selecting a visible AI vessel now displays its owner inside the lower-left wooden portrait plaque.
Added a black-and-charcoal identity ribbon showing the merchant’s name, level, rank, and hometown.
Improved portrait framing so faces and hairstyles remain comfortably inside the circular wooden wheel.
Replaced the difficult-to-see city ship marker with a larger aged-brass Hanseatic cog badge and a high-contrast ship-count plaque.
Fixed the world-map anchor button so it reliably opens the selected player ship’s dossier, including while the game is paused at x0.
City ship panels now open in the same position as their WorldScene versions.
City bag icons once again open the appropriate city trade panel.

New games now begin on the world map again with the selected hometown and starting fleet already initialized.
Replaced the plain city-loading screen with a cinematic Hanseatic marketplace scene.
Added an embossed-gold Hansa Forever wordmark and ornamental divider.
The rotating Hanseatic navigation wheel now replaces the system cursor and follows mouse movement throughout loading.
Improved loading-screen scaling so the artwork appears at its final size immediately without growing, shrinking, or jumping.

Added a dedicated Test Mode with the same unrestricted access and AI visibility as God Mode.
Test Mode can display the authored sailing routes while keeping God Mode’s regular world-map presentation clean.
Expanded “test 1” into a high-density route-network stress test that suspends the economy, AI decisions, calendar, construction, and elections.
“test 1” defaults to 300 ships and accepts custom fleet sizes, such as “test 1 100.”
Test fleets now spread themselves across the entire connected route network instead of repeatedly travelling along only a few isolated splines.

Fixed repeated RouteGlyph clipping errors in the Merchant Dossier.
Fixed the Canvas route-line component failing Player builds because of an editor-only validation override.
Removed temporary CityLoader, anchor-button, and ship-panel diagnostic messages from the Unity Console.
Verified the completed update with a successful Unity Player build.