--- /dev/null
+.TH Server "Empire4 Changes"
+.NA Empire4.4 "Changes in Empire 4.4 (2015-present)"
+.LV Expert
+.s1
+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 4.4.0 - Sat Aug 12 2017
+ * Don't increase negative ship and land unit to zero on trade.
+ * Client improvements
+ - Support fancy line editing and persistent history when compiled
+ with the GNU readline library. Contributed by Martin Haukeli.
+ - Fix misdetection of input EOF in obscure circumstances.
+ - Tighten protection against rogue server abusing redirection and
+ execute.
+ - Improve some error and warning messages.
+ * Fix wire for deities to honor announcement rejection. Broken in
+ Empire 3.
+ * Fix excessively fast contact aging with option LOSE_CONTACT.
+ Broken in 4.3.0.
+ * The edit command no longer shows contact with option HIDDEN.
+ * Grant security units a military control bonus similar to their
+ shoot and convert mobility bonus.
+ * Embarked land units no longer contribute to military control.
+ * Fix convert and shoot not to put foreign and embarked land units to
+ work. Screwed up when land units were added in Chainsaw.
+ * A security unit's combat strength bonus for fighting guerrilla is
+ now proportional to its efficiency.
+ * The mobility bonus a security unit provides to shooting and
+ converting civilians is now proportional to its efficiency.
+ * Fix a missing newline in the edit command's "teleported" message.
+ Messed up in 4.3.32.
+ * Don't permit boarding of embarked land units.
+ * Guerrilla fighting fixes:
+ - Let rebels liberate old-owned sectors again. Broken in 4.2.6.
+ - Fix overeager destruction of defending land units. Screwed up
+ when land units were added in Chainsaw.
+ - Reduce under-strength land unit damage for consistency with
+ ordinary ground combat.
+ - Land units without military can no longer die fighting che. They
+ can now get captured when the rebels take over the sector, just
+ like in ordinary ground combat.
+ - Fix the way casualties are applied to land units, because it is
+ utterly bonkers. Screwed up when land units were added in
+ Chainsaw, made worse when military became loadable in 4.0.0.
+ - Fix guerrilla shootout body counts. Screwed up when land units
+ were added in Chainsaw.
+ * Fix ground combat not to disclose retreat of defending land by
+ printing newlines. Messed up in Empire 3.
+ * Fix bad grammar in message reporting destruction of an attacking
+ land unit.
+ * Fix a missing newline in intelligence reports on land units.
+ Broken in 4.3.33.
+ * Spy unit changes:
+ - Spies can no longer assault foreign sectors together with non-spy
+ units. This matches attack and board.
+ - Ground attack can no longer detect spies in the target sector.
+ They can still get caught when the attack succeeds.
+ - Spies that get caught when their sector is taken over are now
+ summarily executed.
+ - Change the chance for assaulting spies to "sneak ashore"
+ undetected from 10% regardless of efficiency to 40% at 100%
+ efficiency. The chance drops to 0% at 20% efficiency.
+ - Assaulting spies now use mobility and can hit landmines even when
+ they "sneak ashore".
+ - Plug memory leak in spies sneaking ashore. Screwed up when spy
+ units were added in 4.0.0.
+ * Plug memory leak when missile defense sinks attacking ships. The
+ leak goes back to flawed bug fix in Empire 2.
+ * Fix lost and xdump lost to report more than one lost sector.
+ Broken since lost item tracking was added in 4.0.7.
+ * Merged news reports now saturate "times" at 65535. Before, merging
+ stopped when "times" reached 127.
+ * More detailed version information, looks like this:
+ V Unmodified release V (same as before)
+ V.N-H Modified release built from a clean git tree
+ N is the number of additional commits, and
+ H is the abbreviated commit hash
+ V.N-H-dirty Same, but the working tree is dirty
+ V-dirty Modified release built from a tarball
+ Visible in output of commands version, xdump version, and in
+ program output for option -v.
+ * Update, budget, neweff, production and work improvements:
+ - Delivery screws up when it abandons a sector. Fix by making it
+ not abandon sectors.
+ - Plague people in sectors only after taxes and feeding, for
+ consistency with ships and land units. Sectors were messed up in
+ Empire 3.
+ - Reorder the update sequence not to prefer countries with lower
+ country numbers when the same sector repairs ships, planes or
+ land units owned by multiple countries. Broken since Chainsaw
+ introduced budget and foreign repairs as options. Either option
+ worked sanely in isolation back then, but not their combination.
+ They both became standard in Empire 2. Restore the pre-budget
+ order.
+ - Fix budget for ship, plane and land unit repairs in foreign
+ sectors. Also broken since Chainsaw.
+ - Fix the update to use new available work for ship, plane and land
+ unit repairs even when the sector owner has a higher country
+ number. Also broken since Chainsaw.
+ - Pilots are now paid at the same time as other military. Can
+ matter only when the country goes broke during the update.
+ - Make ships produce after eating and building efficiency, like
+ sectors. The starvation command assumed that, and the change
+ "fixes" it.
+ - Don't let stopped ships produce.
+ - Fix sector maintenance to charge for stopped sectors and when the
+ owner is broke. Broken in 4.3.23.
+ - Fix plane maintenance to charge for satellites in orbit. Broken
+ in 4.2.2.
+ - Change TECH_POP to count civilians in ships and land units.
+ - Fix happiness and education to count civilians in ships before
+ plague (same as in sectors), and to count civilians in land
+ units. No such land units exist in the stock game.
+ - Revise sector production to avoid rounding intermediate values.
+ This makes commands production and budget a bit more accurate.
+ - Don't round income and expenses before adding them up. Fixes
+ numerous crazy artifacts, such as military getting paid less when
+ spread over many sectors.
+ - Fix budget for nations going broke or becoming solvent.
+ - Fix military count in budget.
+ - Zap available work when the sector is stopped or its owner is
+ broke. Broken in 4.0.0.
+ - Limit "rollover" of unused available work to about half the
+ work done by people at the update.
+ - Round the people's work randomly rather than down, to reduce
+ micromanagement incentives. This is how things worked until
+ Empire 3.
+ - Make sector and unit building more predictable. The budget
+ command is now a bit more accurate.
+ - Don't let repair of foreign ships, planes and land units use
+ materials and available work destroyed by che or the plague.
+ - Stopped sectors no longer repair foreign ships.
+ - Fix unowned uw to eat, procreate and produce normally.
+ - Fix budget not to predict production when the required level is
+ too low.
+ - Fix use of stale owner after revolt or revert to deity. In
+ particular, a bank now pays interest to the rebels. Research and
+ tech level for plague were also off. Has always been wrong.
+ - neweff and production now simulate the effect of insufficient
+ food, like budget does.
+ - Fix double-rounding of new work that made the update sometimes do
+ less than neweff and production predicted. Broken in Empire 3.
+ - Enforce sector population limit only right after growth. Before,
+ it was also enforced when the sector changed from big city to not
+ big city (since Empire 2 added option BIG_CITY), but not for
+ other changes of the population limit during the update.
+ - Limit work in big cities to the population limit at 0%
+ efficiency, to get rid of ugly special cases in the code.
+ - Code refactoring to undo much of the damage done in Empire 3 to
+ make budget reuse the update's code.
+ * Make plains more like wilderness: efficiency costs no money,
+ but doesn't reduce mobility cost.
+ * Changes to collect:
+ - Tweak value of sectors.
+ - You can no longer collect an active capital.
+ - Don't disclose the value of a sector when it exceeds the amount
+ owed.
+ * Changes to xdumps, breaking compatibility:
+ - Split tables relat, reject, contact off table nat. Saves disk
+ I/O and xdump bandwidth.
+ - Table nat's field "hostname" was deprecated in 4.3.33 and is now
+ gone.
+ - Meta-type numbers now map to meta-type symbols 1:1. Meta-type
+ "c" is gone; the selectors use type "s" instead.
+ - New sect-chr and item field "power". Field "value" is gone.
+ - New sect-chr and infrastructure fields "l_build", "h_build"
+ replace "lcms", "hcms". The replacements track materials for
+ building 100% instead of 1%.
+ - New plane-chr field "m_build" replaces "crew".
+ - New sect-chr, ship-chr, plane-chr, land-chr, nuke-chr and
+ infrastructure fields for arbitrary build materials, named
+ "g_build" for guns, "p_build" for petrol, and so forth. For now,
+ these are all zero.
+ - sect-chr field "cost" is now money to build 100% (was: cost to
+ designate). It replaces field "build" (money to build 1%).
+ - New sect-chr, ship-chr, plane-chr, land-chr and nuke-chr field
+ "bwork" field "bwork" is work to build 100% sector efficiency.
+ Tearing down a sector costs one fourth as much.
+ - New sect-chr field "flags", backed by new table sect-chr-flags.
+ The only flag so far is "deity", which marks sectors mortals
+ can't designate.
+ - New infrastructure fields "cost" and "bmobil" are money and
+ mobility to build 100%. They replace fields "dcost" and "mcost"
+ (money and mobility to build 1%).
+ - meta-flags "extra" and "const" are gone. They were of no concern
+ to clients anyway.
+ * Game customization improvements:
+ - The power value of commodities is now configurable, and "show
+ item" shows it. The collect value of commodities and sectors is
+ no longer independently configurable, but derived from power
+ value.
+ - More flexible infrastructure material and mobility cost
+ configuration.
+ - More flexible sector build material and cost configuration,
+ consistent with unit building.
+ - Work to build sectors, ships, planes, land units and nukes is now
+ independently configurable. Before, it was fixed at 100 for
+ sectors, and a function of build materials for ships, planes,
+ land units and nukes.
+ - The designate command can no longer be made to cost money.
+ * Fix obscure corner cases where we failed to reset work percentage,
+ loyalty or old owner in sectors without civilians. Lingering old
+ owner can prevent airlifting and unloading civilians. The fix
+ partly mitigates the bug where airlifted and unloaded civilians
+ adopt the sector's work percentage and loyalty. It also sets work
+ percentage to 100% for unowned sectors without civilians.
+ * Even planes without crew can now spread the plague.
+ * The transport command now computes plane weight from build material
+ weight rather than making it up. The stock game's planes become a
+ bit easier to transport, except for Zeppelins.
+ * Tweak the "power factor", which determines power chart order:
+ - Nukes now contribute to power just like other units.
+ - Tweak power value of items, sectors ships, planes and land units:
+ construction materials, oil and civilians are worth less, shells,
+ guns, bars and petrol are worth more. Cheap and old (low tech)
+ ships, planes and land units are worth less, expensive and new
+ ones are worth more. Cheap and "small" (low maximum population)
+ sectors are worth less, expensive and big ones are worth more.
+ - Tweak tech's contribution to power so it's less dominant at low
+ tech.
+ - Research no longer contributes to power with option RES_POP.
+ Note that with the old formula, producing and building certain
+ things could be a net loss of "power".
+ * The edit command now lets you edit land unit plague stage and time.
+ * Takeoff and landing in mountains now require capability helo or
+ missile. The flying commands reject fixed-wing planes based in
+ mountains. When flying to a mountain, they select only helicopters
+ and silently ignore the rest, exactly like they select only VTOL
+ planes for flying to a non-airfield. Similarly, missions ignore
+ fixed-wing planes in mountains. Before, any plane could bomb,
+ drop, paradrop and fly missions out of a mountain, but no plane
+ could fly to a mountain one-way, with fly, recon or sweep. Has
+ always been that way.
+ * Add missing newlines to "while it is carrying a nuclear weapon"
+ messages. Screwed up in 4.3.23.
+ * Disallow bombing spy units. Bombers spotting spies makes no sense.
+ Worse, they could bomb spies that weren't spotted. Screwed up when
+ spy units were added in 4.0.0.
+ * Fix march's check for sector abandonment not to ignore land units
+ that evade spy detection or are loaded on ships, but to ignore land
+ units loaded on land units marching out. Broken in 4.3.33.
+ * Fix damage and ammunition use when multiple defenders with the same
+ UID (say a ship and a land unit) return fire to multiple attackers.
+ Broken in 4.3.12.
+ * Fix march not to wipe out concurrent updates when the player
+ declines to abandon the sector. Broken in 4.3.33.
+ * Make the savecore example script report more nicely when there's no
+ core dump.
+ * Enable various compiler options for hardening the programs against
+ certain kinds of attacks when available.
+ * Tell compilers not to rely on strict aliasing and signed overflow
+ rules. These rules are subtle, and compilers can't reliably
+ diagnose violations.
+ * Test suite improvements:
+ - Add news to the smoke test.
+ - Enable GNU libc memory allocation error checking.
+ - Cover much of the update. Notable gaps are fallout, delivery,
+ distribution, ALL_BLEED, LOSE_CONTACT, and parts of guerrilla.
+ - Cover version, show and xdump of configuration.
+ - Improve navigate and march coverage.
+ * Plug memory leaks in navigate and march. Broken in 4.3.33.
+ * Fix read beyond buffer in navigate, march and automatic retreat.
+ Could theoretically crash the server. Broken in 4.3.33.
+ * Fix out-of-bounds array read in bomb, drop, fly, paradrop, recon,
+ sweep. Could theoretically crash the server, or be abused to gain
+ plane mobility. Broken in 4.3.27.
+ * Enable more compiler warnings.
+ * Code refactoring and cleanup.
+ * Info page, manual page and documentation fixes and clarifications.
+
+.FI
+.s1
+.SA "Server"
projects / empserver / commitdiff