1 .TH Server "Empire4 Changes"
2 .NA Empire4.4 "Changes in Empire 4.4 (2015-present)"
5 This document outlines the various changes to the game and how they
6 will affect you, the player. These were coded as the Wolfpack project.
8 Changes to Empire 4.4.0 - Fri Sep 1 2017
9 * Don't increase negative ship and land unit to zero on trade.
11 - Support fancy line editing and persistent history when compiled
12 with the GNU readline library. Contributed by Martin Haukeli.
13 - Fix misdetection of input EOF in obscure circumstances.
14 - Tighten protection against rogue server abusing redirection and
16 - Improve some error and warning messages.
17 * Fix wire for deities to honor announcement rejection. Broken in
19 * Fix excessively fast contact aging with option LOSE_CONTACT.
21 * The edit command no longer shows contact with option HIDDEN.
22 * Grant security units a military control bonus similar to their
23 shoot and convert mobility bonus.
24 * Embarked land units no longer contribute to military control.
25 * Fix convert and shoot not to put foreign and embarked land units to
26 work. Screwed up when land units were added in Chainsaw.
27 * A security unit's combat strength bonus for fighting guerrilla is
28 now proportional to its efficiency.
29 * The mobility bonus a security unit provides to shooting and
30 converting civilians is now proportional to its efficiency.
31 * Fix a missing newline in the edit command's "teleported" message.
33 * Don't permit boarding of embarked land units.
34 * Guerrilla fighting fixes:
35 - Let rebels liberate old-owned sectors again. Broken in 4.2.6.
36 - Fix overeager destruction of defending land units. Screwed up
37 when land units were added in Chainsaw.
38 - Reduce under-strength land unit damage for consistency with
39 ordinary ground combat.
40 - Land units without military can no longer die fighting che. They
41 can now get captured when the rebels take over the sector, just
42 like in ordinary ground combat.
43 - Fix the way casualties are applied to land units, because it is
44 utterly bonkers. Screwed up when land units were added in
45 Chainsaw, made worse when military became loadable in 4.0.0.
46 - Fix guerrilla shootout body counts. Screwed up when land units
47 were added in Chainsaw.
48 * Fix ground combat not to disclose retreat of defending land by
49 printing newlines. Messed up in Empire 3.
50 * Fix bad grammar in message reporting destruction of an attacking
52 * Fix a missing newline in intelligence reports on land units.
55 - Spies can no longer assault foreign sectors together with non-spy
56 units. This matches attack and board.
57 - Ground attack can no longer detect spies in the target sector.
58 They can still get caught when the attack succeeds.
59 - Spies that get caught when their sector is taken over are now
61 - Change the chance for assaulting spies to "sneak ashore"
62 undetected from 10% regardless of efficiency to 40% at 100%
63 efficiency. The chance drops to 0% at 20% efficiency.
64 - Assaulting spies now use mobility and can hit landmines even when
66 - Plug memory leak in spies sneaking ashore. Screwed up when spy
67 units were added in 4.0.0.
68 * Plug memory leak when missile defense sinks attacking ships. The
69 leak goes back to flawed bug fix in Empire 2.
70 * Fix lost and xdump lost to report more than one lost sector.
71 Broken since lost item tracking was added in 4.0.7.
72 * Merged news reports now saturate "times" at 65535. Before, merging
73 stopped when "times" reached 127.
74 * More detailed version information, looks like this:
75 V Unmodified release V (same as before)
76 V.N-H Modified release built from a clean git tree
77 N is the number of additional commits, and
78 H is the abbreviated commit hash
79 V.N-H-dirty Same, but the working tree is dirty
80 V-dirty Modified release built from a tarball
81 Visible in output of commands version, xdump version, and in
82 program output for option -v.
83 * Update, budget, neweff, production and work improvements:
84 - Delivery screws up when it abandons a sector. Fix by making it
86 - Plague people in sectors only after taxes and feeding, for
87 consistency with ships and land units. Sectors were messed up in
89 - Reorder the update sequence not to prefer countries with lower
90 country numbers when the same sector repairs ships, planes or
91 land units owned by multiple countries. Broken since Chainsaw
92 introduced budget and foreign repairs as options. Either option
93 worked sanely in isolation back then, but not their combination.
94 They both became standard in Empire 2. Restore the pre-budget
96 - Fix budget for ship, plane and land unit repairs in foreign
97 sectors. Also broken since Chainsaw.
98 - Fix the update to use new available work for ship, plane and land
99 unit repairs even when the sector owner has a higher country
100 number. Also broken since Chainsaw.
101 - Pilots are now paid at the same time as other military. Can
102 matter only when the country goes broke during the update.
103 - Make ships produce after eating and building efficiency, like
104 sectors. The starvation command assumed that, and the change
106 - Don't let stopped ships produce.
107 - Fix sector maintenance to charge for stopped sectors and when the
108 owner is broke. Broken in 4.3.23.
109 - Fix plane maintenance to charge for satellites in orbit. Broken
111 - Change TECH_POP to count civilians in ships and land units.
112 - Fix happiness and education to count civilians in ships before
113 plague (same as in sectors), and to count civilians in land
114 units. No such land units exist in the stock game.
115 - Revise sector production to avoid rounding intermediate values.
116 This makes commands production and budget a bit more accurate.
117 - Don't round income and expenses before adding them up. Fixes
118 numerous crazy artifacts, such as military getting paid less when
119 spread over many sectors.
120 - Fix budget for nations going broke or becoming solvent.
121 - Fix military count in budget.
122 - Zap available work when the sector is stopped or its owner is
123 broke. Broken in 4.0.0.
124 - Limit "rollover" of unused available work to about half the
125 work done by people at the update.
126 - Round the people's work randomly rather than down, to reduce
127 micromanagement incentives. This is how things worked until
129 - Make sector and unit building more predictable. The budget
130 command is now a bit more accurate.
131 - Don't let repair of foreign ships, planes and land units use
132 materials and available work destroyed by che or the plague.
133 - Stopped sectors no longer repair foreign ships.
134 - Fix unowned uw to eat, procreate and produce normally.
135 - Fix budget not to predict production when the required level is
137 - Fix use of stale owner after revolt or revert to deity. In
138 particular, a bank now pays interest to the rebels. Research and
139 tech level for plague were also off. Has always been wrong.
140 - neweff and production now simulate the effect of insufficient
141 food, like budget does.
142 - Fix double-rounding of new work that made the update sometimes do
143 less than neweff and production predicted. Broken in Empire 3.
144 - Enforce sector population limit only right after growth. Before,
145 it was also enforced when the sector changed from big city to not
146 big city (since Empire 2 added option BIG_CITY), but not for
147 other changes of the population limit during the update.
148 - Limit work in big cities to the population limit at 0%
149 efficiency, to get rid of ugly special cases in the code.
150 - Code refactoring to undo much of the damage done in Empire 3 to
151 make budget reuse the update's code.
152 * Make plains more like wilderness: efficiency costs no money,
153 but doesn't reduce mobility cost.
154 * Changes to collect:
155 - Tweak value of sectors.
156 - You can no longer collect an active capital.
157 - Don't disclose the value of a sector when it exceeds the amount
159 * Changes to xdumps, breaking compatibility:
160 - Split tables relat, reject, contact off table nat. Saves disk
161 I/O and xdump bandwidth.
162 - Table nat's field "hostname" was deprecated in 4.3.33 and is now
164 - Meta-type numbers now map to meta-type symbols 1:1. Meta-type
165 "c" is gone; the selectors use type "s" instead.
166 - New sect-chr and item field "power". Field "value" is gone.
167 - New sect-chr and infrastructure fields "l_build", "h_build"
168 replace "lcms", "hcms". The replacements track materials for
169 building 100% instead of 1%.
170 - New plane-chr field "m_build" replaces "crew".
171 - New sect-chr, ship-chr, plane-chr, land-chr, nuke-chr and
172 infrastructure fields for arbitrary build materials, named
173 "g_build" for guns, "p_build" for petrol, and so forth. For now,
175 - sect-chr field "cost" is now money to build 100% (was: cost to
176 designate). It replaces field "build" (money to build 1%).
177 - New sect-chr, ship-chr, plane-chr, land-chr and nuke-chr field
178 "bwork" field "bwork" is work to build 100% sector efficiency.
179 Tearing down a sector costs one fourth as much.
180 - New sect-chr field "flags", backed by new table sect-chr-flags.
181 The only flag so far is "deity", which marks sectors mortals
183 - New infrastructure fields "cost" and "bmobil" are money and
184 mobility to build 100%. They replace fields "dcost" and "mcost"
185 (money and mobility to build 1%).
186 - meta-flags "extra" and "const" are gone. They were of no concern
188 * Game customization improvements:
189 - The power value of commodities is now configurable, and "show
190 item" shows it. The collect value of commodities and sectors is
191 no longer independently configurable, but derived from power
193 - More flexible infrastructure material and mobility cost
195 - More flexible sector build material and cost configuration,
196 consistent with unit building.
197 - Work to build sectors, ships, planes, land units and nukes is now
198 independently configurable. Before, it was fixed at 100 for
199 sectors, and a function of build materials for ships, planes,
200 land units and nukes.
201 - The designate command can no longer be made to cost money.
202 * Fix obscure corner cases where we failed to reset work percentage,
203 loyalty or old owner in sectors without civilians. Lingering old
204 owner can prevent airlifting and unloading civilians. The fix
205 partly mitigates the bug where airlifted and unloaded civilians
206 adopt the sector's work percentage and loyalty. It also sets work
207 percentage to 100% for unowned sectors without civilians.
208 * Even planes without crew can now spread the plague.
209 * The transport command now computes plane weight from build material
210 weight rather than making it up. The stock game's planes become a
211 bit easier to transport, except for Zeppelins.
212 * Tweak the "power factor", which determines power chart order:
213 - Nukes now contribute to power just like other units.
214 - Tweak power value of items, sectors ships, planes and land units:
215 construction materials, oil and civilians are worth less, shells,
216 guns, bars and petrol are worth more. Cheap and old (low tech)
217 ships, planes and land units are worth less, expensive and new
218 ones are worth more. Cheap and "small" (low maximum population)
219 sectors are worth less, expensive and big ones are worth more.
220 - Tweak tech's contribution to power so it's less dominant at low
222 - Research no longer contributes to power with option RES_POP.
223 Note that with the old formula, producing and building certain
224 things could be a net loss of "power".
225 * The edit command now lets you edit land unit plague stage and time.
226 * Takeoff and landing in mountains now require capability helo or
227 missile. The flying commands reject fixed-wing planes based in
228 mountains. When flying to a mountain, they select only helicopters
229 and silently ignore the rest, exactly like they select only VTOL
230 planes for flying to a non-airfield. Similarly, missions ignore
231 fixed-wing planes in mountains. Before, any plane could bomb,
232 drop, paradrop and fly missions out of a mountain, but no plane
233 could fly to a mountain one-way, with fly, recon or sweep. Has
234 always been that way.
235 * Add missing newlines to "while it is carrying a nuclear weapon"
236 messages. Screwed up in 4.3.23.
237 * Disallow bombing spy units. Bombers spotting spies makes no sense.
238 Worse, they could bomb spies that weren't spotted. Screwed up when
239 spy units were added in 4.0.0.
240 * Fix march's check for sector abandonment not to ignore land units
241 that evade spy detection or are loaded on ships, but to ignore land
242 units loaded on land units marching out. Broken in 4.3.33.
243 * Fix damage and ammunition use when multiple defenders with the same
244 UID (say a ship and a land unit) return fire to multiple attackers.
246 * Fix march not to wipe out concurrent updates when the player
247 declines to abandon the sector. Broken in 4.3.33.
248 * Make the savecore example script report more nicely when there's no
250 * Enable various compiler options for hardening the programs against
251 certain kinds of attacks when available.
252 * Tell compilers not to rely on strict aliasing and signed overflow
253 rules. These rules are subtle, and compilers can't reliably
255 * Test suite improvements:
256 - Add news to the smoke test.
257 - Enable GNU libc memory allocation error checking.
258 - Cover much of the update. Notable gaps are fallout, delivery,
259 distribution, ALL_BLEED, LOSE_CONTACT, and parts of guerrilla.
260 - Cover version, show and xdump of configuration.
261 - Improve navigate and march coverage.
262 * Plug memory leaks in navigate and march. Broken in 4.3.33.
263 * Fix read beyond buffer in navigate, march and automatic retreat.
264 Could theoretically crash the server. Broken in 4.3.33.
265 * Fix out-of-bounds array read in bomb, drop, fly, paradrop, recon,
266 sweep. Could theoretically crash the server, or be abused to gain
267 plane mobility. Broken in 4.3.27.
268 * Enable more compiler warnings.
269 * Code refactoring and cleanup.
270 * Info page, manual page and documentation fixes and clarifications.