Patch 1.0.10

another small patch is here. More balancing issues including some of those chunky bits that required more testing... Hopefully this removes all known annoying obstructions to progressing.

Thanks to everyone sharing their saves in relation to shields struggle. As I mentioned in discussions the problems are quite fragmented. While the common issue is that players are hitting unexpected resistance from shields the root-causes vary. Based on the cases I have seen I decided to separate the general experience with shields between Hard an non-hard difficulties - with normal/easy being more tolerant to unit usage diversity (see details below)

As for so called Crises Death Spirals I believe a Horn of Resolve change (mentioned below) will provide a sufficient mechanism to recover from any mistakes player makes in regards to warfare or other risky business. Together with last patch grace card we should have a decent safety net for normal difficulty gameplay.

Still I will be keeping an eye on these in case there are any more corner cases ending in hard to recover state. An adviser system is something I have in mind to assist with situational tips ingame - to complement tutorials in the future...

This patch is relatively invasive (in terms of code changes) so please do not hesitate to report any new defects or weird behaviour.

1.0.10

Bug fixes

• Hot-Fixed Tech tree structure and resulting tech cost calculation in Tier 4 Classical era (it was using an obsolete cost model and was badly connected to the correct model resulting in a mish-mash of both). Besides throwing away the old model I've also reduced Tier 4 research costs overall after Classical to soften the current pace and added a Population lock to help steer the player towards minimum expected population count.

  Note: The resulting state is not perfect and would deserve a full balancing retest, but because the old values were ridiculously wrong I decided to do a quick-fix for this first and fine tune this later. The Full balancing tests of the correct model are by this time invalidated by population/autonomy-affecting changes in prior patches - so the test has to be redone. I now ran two smaller tests through the Classical using very naive build and the timing seems playable (with 'absolutely naive' build they need to fit under 10 mintues per tech). Obviously using midgame features (magnitude, unique heroes, wonders or Idols) and doing a synergic map layout with strategic resources can turn this into under-a-minute matter easily.

• Fixed an issue with older save containing a shield boost crashing the game.

• Fixed an issue causing rare crashes when selecting construction projects

• Fixed Perk and Hero randomness on Civilizations spawned by Flag locks

Balancing adjustments

• On Normal/easy difficulty, Ottomans, Redcoats and Prussians crises will not spawn with cross-resisting Massive/Furious perk. They will always have the perk more advantageous for the player. Other war crises still spawn with random perk. This is done mostly to prevent first encounters with blue and black shield to carry this extra resistance (it can be effectively a 3x-4x powerup for the crisis depending on level). Hard difficulty is unchanged

• On Normal/easy difficulty Black shield absorption maximum is lowered by about 1/3. This enables buffed light units to potentially destroy the shields under normal circumstances up to later stages of the game. Hard difficulty is unchanged

• On Normal/easy difficulty Blue shield absorption is 90% instead of 95%. As above this allows players to use traditional builds (like light unit spam) early on to somehow beat through the initial bosses. Hard difficulty is unchanged

• Unit and ability preferences are