Ymir News

UDP networking
This update mainly adds the implementation of UDP into the game’s networking, in an effort to circumvent issues with the engine’s poor TCP implementation that’s been causing constant connectivity issues for some players.
By diverting some things to UDP, i hope to reduce the triggering of this issue and to therefore increase connection stability for players who had problems.
Note that this means servers now need to forward their port in both TCP and UDP.

Economic rebalancing and cargo bugfix
This update also rebalances some economic things.
Notably it fixes a bug in cargo prices that caused cargo to reach abnormal prices and generating huge income for dock workers and therefore in taxes.
Cargo was also not purchased properly in the trading balance.
The cost of outposts has also been greatly increased to limit the tendency of players to make cities with the outpost status.

Stored wealth
Besides that, resources now have a basic wealth value which is a constant based on the amount of work required to produce them. This change requires to modify the stats of many buildings, and therefore the production of some buildings has been affected.
This resource wealth was added for a new feature: professional storage buildings now contribute to the territory wealth based on the wealth of all resources stored in them and provided they have a worker.
Storage buildings now have a customizable priority to better manage them.

A new wealth side pannel is now visible in the economic tab of territories, to see how much wealth is originating from production and storages.

Warning for future updates
In a future update i plan to heavily penalize the practice of building massive wall “grids” in forts. Walls built on inacessible tiles surrounded by other walls will therefore be penalized by maintenance or decay in ways i still have to decide, so i’d like to warn players designing forts around the use of the surfaces of wall tiles in advance.

The UDP update

v0.1.8.x

– implemented UDP into networking
– added territory wealth pannel in the economic tab of the territory menu
– professionnal storages now contribute to the territory’s wealth based on their content
– resources now have a base wealth value constant, used to calculate the wealth of storages (wealth a constant and is independent from market value)
– added customizable storage priorities
– greatly increased maitnenance costs of gates
– greatly increased maintenance costs of outposts
– rebalanced resources workforce uses and production
– restricted storages now have an automatic priority higher than non-restricted ones
– fixed a bug in cargo prices and trades routes where cargo wasnt being paid for in the trade balance and where dock workers were getting abnormal incomes and generating abnormal taxes as a consequence.
– doubled production of trading service in markets
– doubled storage capacity of warehouses
– added LVL1 market building
– fixed bug where vote isnt cancelled when superior to vote for no longer is a superior in hierarchy
– expelling/quitting nation now previews the treaties that will be broken by this action
– fixed expelling characters from nation not triggering treaty breaking closes if relevant
– fixed issue where loyalty wasnt increasing even when target loyalty was higher than current
– fixed problem with treaties and messages failing to send
– fixed networking issues
– fixed units being visually late when moving long distances on the world map
– fixed crashes when armies retreated more than 1 tile away after a battle
– armies now display on multiple lines when too numerous on a worldmap territory

Today i published on a new patch that changes some networking to the UDP protocol, to avoid the broken TCP implementation of the engine that causes constant disconnections for some users and to which i cannot do anything about as the engine is closed source.
It took me a while to realize that the engine itself was faulty and that the slightest lag in connectivity would put the engine's networking in a "corrupt" state that would then cause a disconnection. That is why players from different continents can hardly play together.

In my internal tests the results were pretty good, with less disconnections and failed loading times even with a high connection drop rate.
However a big change like this creates new issues that will take some time to iron out. Some users are experiencing corrupted loaded data such as region menus appearing empty: i'm working on it and trying to figure out what's going wrong in that case.
This change also means server hosts must now make sure their ports are redirected in both UDP and TCP.

With today's minor hotfix, the auto-ban is now in effect.
This means that cheaters caught by the anti-cheat system will now effectively get banned from servers, and that someone cheating on one official server will now be perma-banned from all official servers!

This small update brings 2 main modifications:

In an effort to increase the amounts of ores traded on markets, the amount of ore necessary to refine metals such as copper, tin or iron have been reduced by 2: it now only takes 1 of ore to make 1 of refined metal. On top of that, the efficiency of the mining shaft annexes have been further increased. This should greatly increase the amount of ore available from mines and give more insentive for players to trade and export it to players with no mines.

The other main change is another modification of score calculations to fix issues preventing games from being won by score even when a nation dominates.
This update should now make victory more possible, hopefully allowing the old “ended” official servers to finally end and be restarted fresh.
To do this, the score inherited from subordinates is increased, resulting in a higher score for the nation leader and therefore more Victory Points.
And to make the score of a global nation more coherent, it’s now the sum of the scores of all members regardless of their ranks, but excluding the scores inherited from subordinates as it would be redundant.

Besides that, i’m glad to announce that i’ve finally come up with a plan of how to properly end games, which is something i’ve had in the back of my head for a while. Besides the current simple victory by points, the victory missions will be removed and replaced with an “endgame event” that will start with gathering a certain number of artifacts and offer a choice between 2 endings. I don’t want to say more for now! I’ll start working on it soon, but its going to be a big task requiring a fair amount of new features and content to work. This should provide a more satisfying ending to games and something to look forward to when playing.

The score & metals update

v0.1.6.x
– metals now only consume 1 of ore instead of 2 to refine
– mine shaft annexes are much more efficient and productive
– the contribution to nation score now excludes score inherited from subordinates, but it also no longer reduced by position in hierarchy.
– the share of inherited score from direct subordinates has been significantly increased
– storage policy gets reset if resource is unused, to avoid stocking lockdown issue
– fixed more issues with CJK fonts display
– added WIP chinese (simplified) translation
– data of all controlled territories now get preloaded during initial game session loading
– reduced tech & resources spawn bonus in early game
– fixed server crash caused by instacrushing resolution of rebellions in cities
– fixed display issue of claims appearing and disapearing
– fixed dispaly issue of large city sprites missing on worldmap >2000hab
– addded failsafes and logs to better diagnose an ongoing issue of account corruption on some servers
– fixed problems with score UI display
– fixed forum in construction already providing community service (and other similar issues)
– lowered influence of arbitrage when world price is below local price
– fixed issue with prices not updating

This update brings major memory optimizations for servers, to fix the “out of memory” errors that started poping up on older servers with a lot of content. This update can reduce up to 60% the RAM used by the servers, and also comes with a small performance improvement.

Besides that, this update also brings misc fixes for bugs and issues. Notably, issues related to modifying the terrain or platforms around water. Water will now update in realtime when digging, and digging tools are now unlocked around bronze age along with wooden platforms and towers.

This update also adds a new “My games” tab in the ” Join game” menu: this tab lists all your currently played characters (on the same pc), and allows to conveniently load them directly, whether its a local game or a multiplayer game.
For multiplayer games it also saves the last known address of the server so that you can connect even when the steam lobbies mess up and that the server doesn’t appear in it, which tends to happen.

Server optimisation update

v0.1.5.x
– major server memory optimisation
– minor server performance optimisation
– server auto-deletes aknowledged old events
– server auto-deletes dead characters data after a certain time
– server auto-deletes old finished treaties
– lowered region decay treshold in realtime/solo games
– fixed display problem when selecting neutral territories on the worldmap not showing their colors.
– renouncing occupied territories now gives it back directly to the occupied player instead of rebels.
– fixed bug with platform destruction tool applied to all tiles event when there’s no platforms.
– water modification now updated and visible in realtime when modifying the terrain.
– fixed logic issues with terrain and water modification.
– fixed stone tower having officials instead of guards.
– fixed some issues with CJK fonts.
– fixed succession votings not working.
– added “my games” into the Join Games menu, allowing to directly save servers and characters being played and to join the directly.
– fixed a display issue on the worldmap causing regions to be visually missing.
– fixed sending treaties and texts to server not timing out when failing, and causing a client crash.
– added crushing defeats on settled territories to prevent spamming exploit.
– unlocked terraforming and wooden walls and towers earlier in bronze age;
– increased demand for truffles
– occupied cities no longer lose claims