In dev 10, I'll be concentrating on making the conquest gameplay deeper. The first step to this is to make the map zoomable.

The strategic map code is some of the oldest and least-touched code in the game. I wrote it back when I considered 1024x768 a reasonable screen resolution. And because it's at a fixed pixel scale, if you have a high-resolution screen, the maps now look tiny.

At the same time, it's also shockingly memory-inefficient. Each pixel on the map is its own map tile with information about height and city ownership. This means that larger maps - a very popularly requested feature - would consume far too much RAM.

So over the last ten days, I've rewritten it to be zoomable. Now, instead of each pixel being a tile, the tile grid is actually much more coarse, but thanks to some hopefully clever thing with the map boundary drawing, this is not particularly evident. So the new maps require 256 times less memory while being smoothly zoomable.

This is only the first step towards making the conquest mode deeper and more engaging. Nothing has actually changed about the gameplay, yet, but this will enable these improvements to happen. And if you'd like to try it out, you can switch to the "dev10alpha" branch on Steam. One caveat: this new map format is incompatible with the old one, so you won't be able to load old save games while on the alpha branch.

Have fun, and let me know if you find any bugs or have suggestions on how to further improve the zoomable maps.