This document outlines the various changes to the game and how they
will affect you, the player. These were coded as the Wolfpack project.
.NF
+Changes to Empire 4.4.1 - Sun Jan 17 2021
+ * Fix land unit casualties in guerrilla fighting. Broken in 4.4.0.
+ * Changes to edit:
+ - You can now edit bars on ships and land units, and missile
+ fortification.
+ - Fix to reject fortification of embarked land units.
+ - Fix to zap land unit and plane fortification on load.
+ - Fix to take satellite off its carrier when moving it to orbit.
+ * Changes to load, unload, lload, lunload, tend, and ltend:
+ - tend land with multiple target ships now tends each land unit
+ just once.
+ - tend land now reports "not on ship" only when the land unit was
+ explicitly selected by UID. Matches unload.
+ - Fix load, unload, lload, lunload to suppress messages and skip
+ foreign ships / land units when the second argument starts with a
+ digit.
+ - load and unload no longer prompt for land units to unload when a
+ carrier can't carry any.
+ - Fix load plane to reject satellites in orbit. The stock game
+ does not have loadable satellites.
+ * Fix launch to take satellites off their carrier when moving to
+ orbit.
+ * Shield embarked planes and land units from sector damage, like
+ their ships.
+ * Rewrite much of fairland to make it more robust and more fair:
+ - Show a more useful map.
+ - Fix error handling, fix and tidy up error and progress messages.
+ - Drop option -a. Deities can find continents with ?dterr<N, where
+ N is the number of continents.
+ - Drop option -o. Deities can unset resources with "edit l * i 0 g
+ 0 f 0 c 0 u 0".
+ - Drop a useless warning about small world. It was downgraded from
+ error in 4.3.25.
+ - Check arguments more thoroughly, and don't silently "correct" bad
+ arguments.
+ - Fix checking of minimal distance arguments. Has always been
+ broken, but 4.3.15 made it worse.
+ - Ensure the continents' first two sectors obey minimal distance.
+ - Correct bias in placement of expansion islands. These were more
+ often placed to the right of existing land. Players could
+ exploit that to guide their search for land.
+ - Fix island growth and correct its bias. Growth could fail even
+ when there was space to grow. Islands tended to curve around
+ obstacles in a counterclockwise direction. Besides fixing that,
+ the new code also gives better results for high spike
+ percentages: it produces shorter spikes extending from a core
+ rather than long snakes that tend to curve into themselves, and
+ is less prone to put capitals on the coast.
+ - Size and place expansion islands fairly: ensure each start island
+ "owns" the exact same set of expansion islands, where "owns"
+ means it's closer than any other start island.
+ - To make that work, fairland now requires the number of expansion
+ islands to be a multiple of the number of continents, and fails
+ when it can't place all the islands the deity asks for. You
+ can't fill the world with islands anymore by asking for
+ impossibly many of them.
+ - Fix silent failure to place place mountains. Fairness issue.
+ - Fix unfair mountain resources. Neglected when Empire 3 made
+ mountains produce gold dust.
+ - Drop undocumented, silent limit of 1000 mountains per island.
+ - Location of resources is more varied, in particular for islands
+ with few mountains, and for sea. Resource remain pretty much the
+ same overall.
+ - Performance improves for large minimal distances, especially for
+ crowded worlds. It can suffer for huge worlds and small minimal
+ distances.
+ - Manual page improvements.
+ - Code refactoring and cleanup.
+ * Test suite improvements:
+ - Fix empdump-test for "make check-accept". Has been broken its
+ addition in 4.3.33.
+ - Improve give and edit coverage.
+ - Cover load and tend. There are known gaps.
+ - Improve fairland coverage.
+ * Game customization improvements:
+ - Configuration tables now have more extra space deities can use
+ for customizing their games: 31 product types, 63 sector types,
+ 127 ship, plane and land unit types, and 63 nuke types.
+ - Work to produce stuff is now independently configurable, and
+ "show product" shows it. Before, it was a function of raw
+ materials and resource use.
+ * New product selector "bwork" is work to build one unit of the
+ product.
+ * Fix build with compilers that require the depcomp wrapper for
+ dependency tracking. Broken in 4.3.31.
+ * Fix LWP signal code. Messed up in 4.3.6, some more in 4.3.10.
+ * Improve POSIX conformance for portability. Observed to fix the
+ build on Solaris 10.
+ * The client's password prompt now behaves the same on all POSIX
+ systems: read from standard input in canonical mode with echo
+ turned off. Before, it commonly read from /dev/tty in noncanonical
+ mode.
+ * The server crashed on systems when bomb, launch and interdiction
+ miss the target. Fix that.
+ * Fix truncated "info Empire4.3" on systems with a losing nroff.
+ * Make client's fancy line editing and persistent history work on
+ more systems.
+ * Fix ground combat not to wipe out commodities supplied to defending
+ land units. Broken in 4.3.33.
+ * Don't permit SAMs on escort missions. They work, apart from a
+ recoverable internal error, but it makes no sense.
+ * Don't permit marine missiles on support missions. They can't
+ actually go.
+ * Drop support for ABM and a-sat missiles consuming shells. The
+ shell use is logistical busy-work, and economically irrelevant.
+ The stock game's abm type didn't consume any, but its asat type
+ did.
+ * Stricter plane configuration validation.
+ * Increase mountain process efficiency from 75% to 100%. Gold
+ resources in mountains are now worth the same as elsewhere, and a
+ third more than before.
+ * Fix crash when a deity runs neweff or production on a sea sector.
+ Broken in 4.4.0.
+ * Don't let embarked engineers work. Screwed up when the command was
+ added in Empire 2.
+ * Fix buy error messages on concurrent lot change.
+ * Code refactoring and cleanup.
+ * Info page, manual page and documentation fixes and clarifications.
+
Changes to Empire 4.4.0 - Sun Sep 3 2017
* Don't increase negative ship and land unit mobility to zero on
trade.
projects / empserver / blobdiff