April 24th
The final version of the patch has gone into beta community testing, and we're going to test it over the weekend. We had hoped to have it on general release tonight but it was felt there should be longer dedicated to international version testing.
There are over 70 bug fixes in this upgrade, plus a tonne of balance and feature tweaks.
Some of the key game breakers that were fixed include: Fixing the crash caused by AI capturing a ship after naval combat. Fixed the 'port selection' crash when selecting a port in North America as Great Britain, we fixed a crash on building capture notification, we fixed the 'stuttering loading bar' issue and the mid-battle crash related to audio. We fixed the garrison outisde playable area crash during land battles. We also fixed the crash caused by certain factions attempting to assasinate gentlemen inside a school. We also addressed the hang loading into battle problem.
We hope to have this gameplay upgrade out the early part of next week following the weekend's testing, meaning hopefully, you'll all see a marked improvement.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to talk about Naval invasions if I may. The technology behind naval invasions is actually really rather heavy and is still causing some issues. The gameplay upgrade will make naval invasions possible but they will be rare. The AI now has a proper mechanism for the planning involved and can execute that mechanism when required, however increasing its frequency is a balance issue we haven't been able to get fixed in time for this upgrade. So in short, naval invasions are now possible and may occur, but they will not be frequent, which means we have to up that likelihood.
As a ray of hope to those concerned with this issue, I've seen the work we're doing on the AI for the next patch coming on leaps and bounds. There are a large amount of significant performance fixes that we're working on for the upcoming upgrade, this included. The primary purpose of the gameplay upgrade that will be released next week is to fix the AI aggression issues, remove the vast majority of game breaking crashes and tweak the unit behaviour whilst laying groundwork for naval invasions.
Again, many thanks for your patience. Hopefully you'll all be discussing these changes next week.
Kind regards,
Kieran
na endlich
freu mich schon drauf