Nova Patria Weekly Update

Ave Patricians!

Another week of steady progress across the Empire. This week’s work focused on world immersion, UI clarity, and continued polish across systems and visuals - with improvements that make Nova Patria feel more cohesive, readable, and responsive moment to moment.

Here’s what the team has been working on:

🎨 Art & Visuals

Continued visual improvements across the game world:

• Animated Spring Tiles:

  • Majority of variations now animated (with only a few remaining and coming soon)

    

• Improved heatmap visuals:

  • Clean masking between network and intersection sprites for better clarity in heatmap mode when they are semitransparent

• UI:

  • Sharpened wealth UI assets

🌍 World & Immersion

We’ve made several improvements to how the world is generated and presented - bringing more cohesion and flavor to your colony:

• Smarter City Naming:

  • City names now better reflect their surroundings (forests, rivers, coasts, etc.)

  • Expanded pool of names for greater variety

• Map Generation Improvements:

  • Prevented forests and drylands from appearing directly adjacent

  • Reduced instances of very small dryland regions

  • Prevented beaches from closing off bays from the ocean

  • Fixed rare elevation issues with mountain tiles

• Tile Naming Update:

  • Coordinates now use 1,1 → 150,150 (previously started at 0,0)

🧠 UI & Readability Improvements

A major focus this week was improving how information is presented to the player:

• Global Resources UI

  • Larger, more visible resource arrows

  • More pronounced arrow angles for clarity

• City Center Information Window Tooltips

  • Added border expansion details to population tooltip

  • Improved layout and alignment for Population, Houses, and Buildings tooltips

  • Fixed issue where Next House Tier could appear blank

Text & Visual Clarity

• Improved Goals & Perks text color for better readability

• Wealth indicator now turns yellow when ≤ 4000 (still red when negative)

• Various text updates, including tutorial typo fixes

⚙ Controls and Input

Several improvements were made to player control and system feedback:

• Added Copy Building hotkey (fully configurable in keybind menu)

• Expanded use of Enter key for confirmation actions

• Broadened the set of valid characters for save names

Save & Profile Systems

• Added Reset Profile option in New Game menu (with confirmation)

• Updated save/load UI to:

  • Visually identify obsolete save files

  • Prevent them from being loaded

• Fixed save/load bugs related to:

  • Demo version conflicts

  • Save file selection behavior after deleting saves

Menu & Input Improvements

• Title screen now blocks input when Save/Load or Options menus are open

• Fixed hotkey visual feedback for Shift key, to match behavior of other hotkeys

• Improved selection behavior in save/load menus

⚖ Gameplay & Simulation

• Roads and rails now remove hill travel speed penalties (Elevation changes still apply their own penalties)

• Improved construction rules:

  • Prevents placing a City Center if expansion would absorb a Fountain that is the sole freshwater source (rule previously only applied to Level 3 Perk Fountains)

  • Tooltip now clearly explains why construction is blocked

🔊 Audio

• Reduced volume of windmill sound effects for better balance

🛠 Bug Fixes

A wide range of fixes were implemented across systems:

• Fixed Resource Range heatmap showing incorrect information for tiles that are potentially reachable with more roads

• Fixed network heatmaps not updating after construction

• Fixed Tier V house sprite alignment issues

• Resolved bridge spawning visual bugs near rivers

• Fixed mipmap compression artifacts on aqueduct animations when zoomed out

🧹 System Cleanup

• Removed outdated backwards compatibility logic from older beta versions

Each week continues to refine Nova Patria - not just in how it looks, but in how clearly it communicates and how naturally it plays. From smarter world generation to improved UI clarity, the Empire is becoming more intuitive and immersive with every update.

To everyone following along and sharing feedback - thank you! Your continued support helps shape Nova Patria.

If you’re interested in becoming a part of our community, whether as a playtester or enthusiast, and follow development more closely, come hang out with us on Discord:

https://discord.gg/jPsPvhMSYv

More soon!

Ad victoriam, – The Nova Patria Team