Diplomacy and AI

• Empires consisting of a single town can now apply to join an existing larger empire. The joined empire must be at war with anyone the town is at war with.
• When evaluating attack targets, the AI now looks at enemy fleets that could be sent to reinforce the defenses.
• AI no longer sends ship halfway across the map, ignoring supply limits.
• Roughly halved diplomacy value of towns and cities, but introduced a -40 penalty for any trade that is a loss of territory.
• Doubled interval and effect strength from insults and delegations.
• When evaluating peace, AIs now take into account whether their AI allies want peace.

Features and Adjustments

• Tech tier selector for single combats.
• Attacking fleets are now shown with red travel lines on your map.
• Allowed combat camera to zoom out more.
• Option to turn off heroes and incidents by setting their frequency to "None".

Fixes

• Wheeled and tracked landships are now much better at moving up and down slopes.
• Combats (including missions) from before version 1.2 that have a less wide combat area are now supported properly.
• No longer get a research bonus from stealing a fake occult book.
• Mods with long names now have their whole names shown in the mod list.
• Biplane hooks can be coloured and are drawn below decals.
• Weapons that have a clip greater than one and require more than one ammo to reload (such as giant flamethrowers) now show this properly in the tooltip.
• Gargoyles are now lit correctly.
• Fixed a crash caused by mods referencing techs by their old name.
• Empty tiles no longer emit fire particles.
• The appropriate number of repair crew and firefighters are now despatched to a module, rather than the maximum amount.
• The AI now researches cartography.
• Added mast pieces, bowsprits, and figureheads for buildings.
• Fixed the diplomacy AI not remembering across saves that it recently offered some treaty terms.

Balance

• Reduced pirate, pirate king, giant anemone, and cultist nest clear payouts by a third.
• Can no longer endlessly create hero events by re-researching choice techs, rebuilding city upgrades, and failing at attacks without taking any losses.

Minor Modding Fixes

• Leg images are now flipped alongside the ship the legs are attached to.
• MonsterNestType: incomeModifier, incomeModifierPercentage, and unrest are now bonusable, using the bonuses from the empire whose territory they're in.

Hero Modding

You can now set "canDismiss" in HeroTypes to false to make a hero non-dismissable. They can still leave via stat effects if you so choose. With hero stats, you can now set "winOn100" or "loseOn100" to true to make an empire lose the entire game when the stat hits that value. When that happens, the empire's territories are distributed to whatever empire is closest to each territory.

Modding Shots that Spawn Crew!

An entirely new feature, allowing you to create weapons that produce crew on impact. This is available both for ship and troop weapons. Use the following fields in ModuleType and CrewType to add this:

• spawnCrewOnImpact (CrewType) - Setting this to a CrewType will activate crew spawning.
• spawnNumCrewOnImpact (integer, default 1)
• spawnCrewInsideIfArmourPierced (true/false, default true)
• alwaysSpawnCrewInside (true/false, default false) - Note that if the hit tile is not occupable, the crew will still spawn outside the ship even if this is set to true.
• spawnCrewOnMiss (true/false, default false)
• spawnCrewOnKillBiologicalOnly (true/false, default false) - Only available for CrewType. Crew is only spawned if the shot killed an enemy crew with isMachine set to false. The "zombify enemies" flag.

You can use this to make boarding torpedoes, zombies, and aircraft dropping paratroopers. Or, as in the title image, gatling guns that spawn bees.
Do note that of course crew have a performance cost, so if you e.g make something that makes a copy of itself every time it fires, the game might run a bit slowly after a while...