Ymir News

This update mainly improves and re-balances things related to subjugation in multiplayer, fixing exploits and abusive behaviors.

Subjugated characters now get assigned a special ranked that cannot be modified by the nation owners, with fixed tax rate. The taxation from the subjugation treaty has also been removed.
This insures a fair taxation of the subjugated player, as before in most cases subjugated players where assigned a rank with max taxes additionally to the subjugation treaty, resulting in 45% tax rate from which made it impossible to keep playing.

Subjugates characters also can’t be placed beneath one another anymore, preventing nation owners to exploit the rank system.
Indeed, when vassalizing a group of players it is no longer possible to circumvent the state power maintenance costs by putting all the vassals under a single ‘buffer’ one -which also meant condemning him to death as well.

For the same reason, it is also no longer possible to use “inactives” as buffers to avoid paying the nation’s state power maintenance costs. Inacitves are now totally ignored and all their own subordinates will act as direct subordinates to the character above them.

“join nation” treaties are also automatically ended when a character is no longer part of the nation, and all national armies are reset when subjugated – as this allowed for exploits too.


Besides these, this update focuses on laying foundations against exploiters: the arrival of piracy in the first week following release was quickly followed by multi-account abuses in the second, and now more recently by the arrival of actual cheaters.
Sadly most of my work since release has been regarding these issues.
So following the anti-piracy patch insuring legit servers remain free of pirated versions, this patch brings the foundations of anti-multiaccount and anti-cheating measures.
Once the system becomes active in next updates, servers will ultimately auto-ban players flagged for cheating.
Also noteworthy that this new version might get falsely flagged by some antiviruses when launching it.


A new branch was created called “previous_version”, allowing to keep playing on the public version previous to the current one, for people who need to for whatever reason, or in the case when a new patch causes too many issues.

The improved subjugation update

v0.1.1.x
– national armies are now reset to normal armies when being subjugated
– subjugated characters cannot be vassals of another subjugated character in a nation
– treaties with a “join nation” term will auto-end legally if the character is no longer in the nation
– subjugated characters get an automatic preset rank that is ‘locked’ and cannot be modified by nation members.
– removed taxation from the automatic subjugation treaty
– when a superior is inactive, state power maintenance cost is relayed upon the superior’s superior as if the character was a direct subordinate
– fixed subjugated characters getting breaking clauses from previous treaties being broken because of the subjugation
– fixed server game names allowing for special characters that would cause issues when saving with the OS file system
– fixed battle problem when multiple characters hunt at the same time
– organized anti-cheat strategy and layed foundation of an auto-ban system
– implemented multiaccount counter-measures
– disabled equipment loot from spawned rebel (exploit)
– fixed problem at server restart of ” failed to load save”
– fixed problem of infinite worldmap loading time
– added UI button in options to hide account infos ( IPs, user ID )
– minor improvement to connection stability
– fixed battlecode error causing server crash
– fixed issue with claims
– fixed UI issue in the worldmap action wheel where available actions would not update correctly

Another patch was applied today, adding new piracy countermeasures that i've been working on this past week.
This is mostly to prevent illegitimate copies of the game to access legitimate servers (as it only took a few days before it started spreading fast).
So... thank pirates for even slower development, as i doubt this will be the end of it!

This should also reduce the usage of multi-accounts, as they're most likely relying on the use of pirated versions as well.
I might start researching on how to limit this in the near future as it threatens the game balance, if it starts spreading on official games as well.

This update also adds bug fixes on the server side, still in an effort to increase server stability.

Most of the next patches will probably keep focusing on bug fixing and server stability/management and networking, so don't expect much new exciting features for now!


v0.1.0.31
- added piracy countermeasures to protect legitimate servers
- increased production of directly exploited metal ore tiles
- increased efficiency of furniture makers, and required workforce to produce furniture -> increase wealth from furniture makers.
- set realtime games character limit to 1.
- fixed invalid preview of generated resistance when claiming an occupied territory
- changed -1 resistance decay to a proportionnal to population decay ( 1 per 100 resistance )
- fixed bug of units deploying on the edge of the map

It’s been a rough week. Never had so many urgent things to deal with at the same time…
For the next weeks, i’ll probably be focusing mostly on server management, stability, and bug fixing, so don’t expect new exciting features for a while.


Here is finally the first patch of fixes following the release, with mostly server related things.
Notably it fixes the 2 infamous issues of the primitive tribe claims, and the carriers engaging enemies.
Barbarians activity in Solo and Realtime was also reduced.
Server can now auto restart on error, which should reduce downtimes greatly as well and increase the quality of life.
Next step is to find a way to do an emergency save when there’s an error, to avoid the weird ‘rollbacks’ that happen on error.


Besides that, I’ve been started renting a professional dedicated server. All official servers will be moved to it shortly, and a new ones will be started (offical 5 or official 1 ).
The previous official 1 is renamed Official test server, and will remain on the Tester branch, running on my own home server.
Official servers will now be located near Dunkirk, in the north of France, which is also near the Atlantic internet cables if that helps! 😀
I should be able to run eventually up to 8+ on that dedicated server, with much better performances than with my laggy home server. I hope it will reduce ping timeouts and connections issues greatly.


It was also discovered that steam lobbies were filtered by region by default, which is now fixed and will allow users to see all servers worldwide , especially the official ones for people outside europe.
That will reduce the issue of server shortage especially for players in the Americas.


And lastly, it didn’t take long for piracy of the game to spread. I thought i’d have more time 🙂
That can never be avoided, however the fact that pirated copies can access legit servers is a big issue, and this one can be fixed.
I’ve been working on it for the past 2 days and a fix for that is coming – although not on this patch yet .
I will increase measures to counter piracy with additional checks.
Eventually every player will probably need to authenticate its game at least once in online mode. Offline mode should of course still be possible.


v0.1.0.19
– errors on client now invisible, and dumped into an error folder in the “cache\logs\client\error” folder.
– errors on server now silent and combined with an immediate auto-restart, improving uptime ( also dumped in “cache\logs\game\error” )
– server list will now show all worldwide servers and not only the regional ones
– lowered realtime respawn timer to a base of 10 min instead of 1hour
– fixed exploit allowing to claim tiles of primitive tribes
– added popup warning when attempting to move primitive tribe when starting
– added configurable autosave frequency in server ini files
– reduced barbarian activity in solo and realtime, less frequent and slower difficulty increase
– fixed issue of own character showing up in diplomacy menu
– fixed pathfinding issue with buildings, in battles
– fixed battlecode error on server
– primitive tribe rebellions: fixed primitives deploying inside defensive zones
– “stand ground” units will switch en “engage” if fired upon by range units in same defensive layer
– fixed infamous bug of carriers being in “engage” mode in battles ( and hunts )
– fixed speed settings icons not combatible with CJK font
– fixed some localisation issues
– fixed multiple server side crashes
– fixed crash on worldmap when worldmap quality at minimum

Last night Steam finally approved my build - the same build they denied yesterday - and i'm finally allowed to release it!

So here it is: Ymir is finally available on Steam, one day late, but better late than never, and at least the week-end is not over!

About servers: I predict the next days will be quite eventful with the influx of new players. Please be patient! It will take some time probably for the community to get more servers going, and depending on the success of the game i'll look to rent proper servers to host more Official servers and accomodate more people.

One of my top priorities is now to work on my own master server to list open ymir servers, replacing the steam lobbies system and to allow for proper steam independent dedicated servers (which is somehow not currently possible to do on the engine i'm using ), which will help having more servers.

Yesterday Steam denied my current build for release, and today i'm therefore unable to release my game as planned, until it gets approved.

The reason given for this denial was that according to them "the game does not appear to currently support online gameplay ", yep, that's right.
Despite the fact that after more than a year in closed testing hundreds of players participated in games (mostly online), in multiplayer, and that as i received this reply the current test server i'm running myself had players online...

Now before i go on I must say that this also happened because i made a really bad mistake. I had so many things to deal with the upcoming release, that i didnt realize in time that i had to send a build for manual review and approval before being allowed to release. I wrongly assumed that releasing was automated (like pretty much everything else) and a formality that wouldnt take long like every other steps i had to pass before, especially as everything was ready. But i was wrong. This was the ONE of the few things that had to be manually approved by actual people.
When i realized it about 3 days ago, it said that it usually took 2 to 3 days to approve (but could take more if there was issues), so I hoped for the best and submitted it only to receive a negative answer yesterday night.
Of this i am totally responsible, I should have realized this before and started this earlier. Considering things now... apparently weeks before the release date!
This is my first game release, so i'm learning here and making mistakes, espcecially as being alone to manage so many different things and where an error in a single one can make everything else fail - as it now did. For this i apologize to everyone.

But i have to say you'd be surprise how even as a dev, we have pretty much zero human contact with anyone from Valve either. Its more of a self running website where all you're left with is some documentation and a forum of other devs trying to figure out things themselves too and sharing experiences. You can't get any help, and the whole steamworks interface is very confusing, sometimes even faulty/buggy, which doesnt help to make things intuitive.
Is there still humans working at Valve ? nobody knows. I personnally suspect Gabe merged with the mainframe "lawnmower man" style years ago, and left us all to despair with this platform.
More seriously, the ONLY way to contact anyone human at Valve is to send... a support ticket. To which you'll eventually get an anonymous response of about 12 words -at best-, after a day or more. When i realized my mistake i did that. Luckily i got a one line answer - as is tradition - saying they'd speed up the process, but only to receive this absurd denial an hour later.
And the denial explanation was the most cryptic part: " we found out that the game is using the public IP instead of the IP4 address which the port is open for. This happen with hosting only a server form the localfolder. "
If anyone understand the meaning of this sentence, please give me a call.
What is this rambling about the 'public IP' when for an online multiplayer game, that's what it should be using to allow others to connect... online, rather than using a local IP only reachable via LAN ?
What is this thing about 'instead of IP4 address' when all IPs ARE in IPv4 format ?
ANd what the hell does " hosting only a server from the localfolder " even means in this context ?
Nobody knows.
Apparently not only did these testers failed where hundreds of testers have never had trouble doing so during over a year of tests (which is to simply join an existing server), but they ignored the visible public server showing online players at that very time, and concluded that surely that must have been an illusion and that online multiplayer did not exist in this game, while giving the most absurd explanation that made zero technical sense to me.

And as it was an anonymous message with no way to reply directly, that means being back at square one, having to resubmit, and wait again 3 to 5 days. I have no way to ask these specific guys what the hell did they mean or tried to do.
Worst of this is that i don't even know what to change , considering their reply made no sense, so i just ended up resubmitring the exact same thing... with one minor change: i removed the "online multiplayer" tag as it's apparently what triggers them, adding insult to injury for a game that is mainly... online... and multiplayer.

So here i am now, on release day, unable to release my game after about 8 years of work.
Big AAA city builders games are about to be released in a week or so. I had the perfect release day planned, and now it's ruined.

But even though it's partly my fault, i can't keep but feeling bitter at the lack of understanding from Valve's side. On one hand because they didnt seem to care that denying me this for some absurd reason ruined such an important day for me, and on the other because i can't help but feel infuriated that somehow my game was under greater scrutiny and had to meet high quality standards( resulting in a denial), when in the meantime the cheapest porn games and asset flippers seem to be released on a daily basis without the slightest oversight on steam. Like...really Steam? MY game gets its release denied but those are fine?

So what now ? Well i'll release as soon as i can. I don't know when that will be now. I can't do anything else right now but wait...

Best case scenario it sill somehow happens today.
If not its probably over until at least Monday as this will be the week end.