This one is small, and it matters at exactly the moment you would least want it to: the end. When a kingdom loses its last hex it is out of the game, but until now its gold was still in the scoring, and everyone still playing was paying for that. Ruleset 40 fixes it. While I am here, I am also giving rulesets 34 and 35 the write-up they never got, because they were the same kind of fix and only ever had a paragraph each inside another post. And your browser now keeps the artwork for a year, which I claimed two weeks ago and had not actually delivered. More on that below.
A world keeps the ruleset it was born with, for life. The Prosperity change is ruleset 40, so it applies to worlds created from today onward. If you are on 39 or earlier, nothing changes under you. Promise. Rulesets 34 and 35 are recapped below and have been live on worlds born since 17 September. The artwork, the end screen and the smaller changes are on every world, old and new, because none of them touch how a world plays out.
What was wrong
Victory points come from four places, forty each. Prosperity is your share of all the wealth in the world: mostly the gold in treasuries and in your people's pockets, with a smaller part for the trade you run past your own borders. It is a share, not a bank. If a rival gets richer, your Prosperity drops a little even though nothing of yours changed. That part is on purpose.
When a kingdom loses its last hex, its people are gone but its treasury is not. It keeps the gold. And until ruleset 40, that gold was still in the pool. So a kingdom that no longer existed on the map was still holding a sliver of Prosperity, between 0.9 and 2.9 points in the test worlds where I watched it happen, and every living kingdom's share was a little smaller than it should have been. In a race to a hundred points that has to be held for twenty days, a point or two is the whole race. (Yes, a kingdom with no land could have been the thing keeping you off the crown. Sorry.)
I found it two weeks ago while fixing the end screen, which used to list fallen kingdoms as if they were still in it. The screen was the easy half: it now shows them as fallen, with no points, on every world. The scoring was the hard half, because changing how a score is worked out changes how every existing world plays out, and I do not do that to a world after it is born. So the scoring waited for a ruleset.
Ruleset 40: no land, no share
From ruleset 40, a kingdom holding no land is out of the Prosperity pool. It scores nothing there, and its treasury no longer counts against anyone else. Its trade routes leave the pool with it. The moment somebody falls, everyone still standing gets their full share back.
Here is one world, scored both ways. Axum has lost every hex it had and kept its gold.
One thing I left alone on purpose. Prestige is not a share, it is a plain count of what you have built and learned, so a fallen kingdom that researched a lot of culture still holds those Prestige points. That takes nothing from anybody, so it stays.
Tribute has to be paid (ruleset 34)
A vassal that pays you tribute is worth eight points of your score on top of the fourteen for the oath itself. The problem was that a completely broke vassal, one that paid you nothing at all, still earned you those eight points forever. The game gives a broke vassal thirty days of grace before it asks again, and the score was reading that grace period as a payment. The "tribute paid" dispatch was fooled the same way.
So from 34 onward a vassal that really pays is worth 22 points and one that cannot is worth 14, which is how it always should have been. It shipped on 17 September inside the ruleset 36 post, which is why it never had its own entry.
A dead kingdom stops selling (ruleset 35)
When a kingdom died or lost a city, everything on that land was wiped, people, goods and prices, except its standing sell orders and export floors. Those stayed on the empty ground, and whoever settled there next inherited them. A respawn tends to land where a kingdom just fell, so a fresh capital could arrive with its starting supplies already listed for sale at a dead ruler's price. From ruleset 35 those orders are cleared the moment the land changes hands, however that happens: conquest, collapse, or somebody new founding on it.
This one also shipped on 17 September and also lives in the ruleset 36 post.
Your browser keeps the art now
In the last post I said that opening the game a second time no longer asked my server about the artwork. That was true on my machine. On the real site it was not: the hosting ignored the rule I had written, and your browser kept asking about all 52 art files on every visit, exactly as before. I only found out because a check I run after each release kept printing a quiet note I had decided was harmless.
It is fixed now, and this time I checked it on the live site rather than my own. Each art file carries a name based on what is in it, so it can never change without its name changing too. That makes it safe to tell your browser to keep it for a year and never ask. A return visit now asks about none of the 52. On a phone on a bad connection, that waiting was most of the load.
What I broke on the way
For about six hours on 18 October the fix went one file too far. The game keeps a small list that says which art file is which, and that list has to stay fresh or your browser would go looking for old names after the next art change. The hosting matched my "keep for a year" rule to that list as well, because its name started the same way as the art folder's. Nobody hit it: no art changed in those hours, and I had the proper fix out the same evening. The game now double-checks that list on every load whatever the hosting says, the list has moved to where the rule cannot reach it, and the after-release check refuses to pass if that file is ever frozen again. Lesson learned about trusting a note that says "harmless".
Smaller changes
You cannot join a paused world any more. The game says so before it asks for your kingdom's name, with a link back to the world list. A join you queued before this reads "paused, placed when it resumes".
The world list shows ENTER on a world you are already in, and a plain label on a paused or full one instead of a link that led nowhere.
The end screen says how the world ended: wins by Hegemony, the Nation of X wins with its vassals and their points, or wins as the last kingdom standing. Fallen kingdoms are listed after the living, marked fallen, with no score. This works on worlds that had already ended too.
Goods are named properly everywhere now: Spices, not spices.
The treaty you picked in the diplomacy panel no longer snaps back to Peace while you are reading the terms.
The selection ring sits under city names now instead of cutting through them.
When a lot of you come back to a world at the same moment, the server is asked to rebuild your views once, not once per player per poll. You will not see this one. The bill does.
What it means for you
| Change | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Fallen rivals | On a ruleset 40 world, the moment a rival loses their last hex, their gold stops counting. Your Prosperity goes up without you lifting a finger. |
| Vassals | A vassal that actually pays is worth 22 points, one that cannot is worth 14. Pick rich friends. |
| Resettling | Land that changes hands comes clean. Nothing a dead kingdom listed for sale follows you onto it. |
| Loading | Nothing to do. Your browser keeps the art now, so a return visit asks about none of the 52 files. |
| Paused worlds | You cannot join one. Pick a running world from the list. |
If you hit something odd, note the game day and what you'd just done. That pair is almost always enough for me to reproduce it.
Peace,
Yadah