Hi everyone! Friday means its time to give you all a fresh update on Sunflower (1.2 patch) progress! Its starting to come together nicely now, so without further ado, here is what's been happening... GUI improvements Managing a lot of divisions training in parallel can get hard to get an overview of so now it’s possible to compact the entries. As an added help we now color training that is blocked by lack of equipment making it much easier to manage your queue size.
As a minor improvement to support the work on next section naval battle and port strike reports now give a quick summary over damage to survivors as well so you know how much was done in total and naval invasion alerts are more relevant and accurate. Naval Balance There has been a bunch of reports about the submarine game not working so well, so this week we fixed bugs and tweaked submarines and convoy raiding. The big bug was that raiders would attack empty routes (supply convoy routes to places with enough local supply, so that they weren't used), this meant that they would be attacking non-existent convoys in a bunch of places rather than real ones making it appear as if it was impossible to catch anything there. General detection was also too low and has been tweaked up. The way sunk convoys affected efficiency of transport also had problems and have been tweaked for much stronger impact now. Starving out islands with a lot of defenders work a lot better now and raiding convoys can be pretty potent!
The AI’s use of fleets and missions have been improved a lot for Sunflower, but it’s still an area that needs more work to be really competitive with players. It’s something we will put effort into in the future. General balance-wise we have been working on stuff to promote mixed fleets better and discourage light cruiser spam and lowering the impact of evasion in combat, meanwhile torpedoes have also gotten stronger. It’s going to need some more tweaking before the patch is out, but naval balance is now already much better! Script update We feel it is a shame that so many of the Soviet loving players chose to avoid the fiery alternate history path that picks Leon Trotsky. It simply has not made sense from a pure gameplay perspective. We’ve added a focus to address the issue that Trotsky is a much weaker choice than Stalin. After winning the civil war, a Soviet player will be able to pick the focus ‘Permanent Revolution’, which unlocks parts of the same tree that ‘The Great Purge’ does.
Once the focus is completed, Trotsky’s trait will change to ‘Triumphant Revolutionary’. This will remove his Political Power penalty and make it much cheaper to help fuel more righteous worker revolutions across the globe. “The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”- Trotsky
The focus trees have long been a source of many weird, funny and frustrating bugs. The exiled government of Germany would demand Memel from Lithuania, who would then lie down flat and hand over the territory. Countries would welcome their invaders by building infrastructure and factories in the occupied territories. Diplomatic pressure on Turkey would make them a puppet of the exiled Germany. The USA would view a democratic Germany as still being ‘The Fascist Menace’ and jump at the first chance of war with them. Japan would go for war with the USA, despite being pushed back to the islands by the Chinese. These and many other issues with the National Foci have been addressed in the upcoming patch. I’ll mention a few of the general changes here:

• As a general rule foci are blocked when a country has capitulated. We’ve added an option in script to unblock it for when the foci still make sense to complete.
• Adding buildings via focus should now look for control of the state before building.
• Blocked some of the foci leading to war if the nation has the same ideology.