Patch 3.1 "Tactics"

Patch 3.1. was officially released on 3rd February 2016

Developer's Introduction
We're excited today to officially launch the new 3.1 expansion to Hegemony III. This free update adds dozens of new features including new combat, colonization, scouting and rebellion mechanics as well as new diplomacy objectives, AI enhancements, editor upgrades and more.

Extra thanks to everyone in the community that helped with the beta over the last few months. We wouldn't be able to do this without your feedback and support.

For those who haven't made the upgrade yet, 3.1 will still load older saved games but you may encounter some temporary disruptions to your empire due to the new changes. For compatibility, the 3.0.3b version is still available through the Beta tab in the game's properties window.

While work has already begun on the next major expansion, we will be maintaining 3.1 separately so if you encounter any problems please let us know and we will do our best to get them resolved and the game updated as quickly as possible. As always, problems can be reported here or e-mailed to us directly at rob@longbowgames.com

And finally, a quick update on the editor tutorial series and the new Macedon map: as is usual for us, what started as a small sample mod has quickly grown into a significant project on its own. So far, the new map includes 7 factions and almost 30 cities from the original game, but it's coming along really well and we hope to make it available in the next couple weeks.

Scouts

 * New infantry and cavalry scout units
 * New scout stances: scout, scout stealth, an saboteur
 * Dynamic view range for scouts that grows when stationary and shrinks again when moving.
 * Significant reduction to base view distance for cities and units
 * City view distance now increases with city size
 * Increased view distance bonuses for scout officer, watchtower, walls, etc
 * Update Explore objective to use scouts

Ambushing

 * Removed recon stat, view distance is now used directly for ambush detection
 * Replaced ambush stat with visibility range (distance unit can be spotted by enemies)
 * Fog-of-war now covers all terrain that can possibly hide units, only terrain that is guarenteed free from enemies is clear. Enemies within the fog-of-war may still be detected based on their visibility.
 * New terrain overlays to show view/visiblity ranges when a unit in an ambush stance is selected.

Formation Strength

 * Replaced on/off 'Formation Broken' status with a more incremental formation strength stat
 * Formation strength drops when starving, under missile fire, in blocked terrain, fording rivers
 * When formation strength reaches zero, the formation breaks and the unit loses any applicable stance bonuses. When out of combat, formation strength increases again over time and unit regains bonuses when it reaches 100%.
 * New Field Tactician upgrade boosts formation strength and charge/block stats

Charging

 * Overhauled charge mechanics to make outcomes more reliable
 * New values for all charge strength/block stats
 * Charge related bonuses now use percentage multipliers so a 50% to charge strength equals 50% more charge kills against the same enemy.
 * Successful charges cause a one-time drop in the defenders formation strength

Rebellions & City Morale

 * A city's base faction morale now requires the city to be properly fed
 * Garrison and attacker morale effects are now capped
 * New scripted city rebellion system

Food Penalties

 * More penalties for starving cities and units
 * Starving units now immediately start to lose morale when they come under attack
 * Greater damage penalties for starving ranged units

City Stances

 * Re-balancing and reduction of income, population growth, and recruit production for large cities
 * New city stances to create more of a trade-off between growth, income and recruitment

Assimilation/Colonization

 * New assimilation stat for captured enemy cities (increases automatically over time)
 * Cities can be colonized when assimilation reached the maximum and the faction has the colonization skill
 * New gui element around faction emblem to show assimilation level
 * Reduced cost of colonists, they can now be resettled in enemy cities for one-time assimilation boosts
 * New forum upgrade to boost assimilation (assimilation bonuses on other civilian city upgrades)

Diplomacy

 * Factions now start neutral with the player
 * Improvements to diplomacy gui to clarify truce costs
 * New diplomacy events/objectives to declare war, request truces, renegotiate truces
 * New conquest events/objectives where factions ask for help attacking other factions
 * New warning message when you're attacking neutral targets
 * Difficulty settings control target number of hostile neighbours
 * Intimidation changes take affect immediately now
 * Hostility now increases over time when a faction is paying you tribute

Unit Retraining

 * Units can now be retrained as another unit type supported by the city keeping thier xp and officers
 * New retraining faction skill

Strategy Map

 * Updated texture to highlight accessible terrain
 * New detail texture
 * Increased distance were city dots and names are visible
 * Improved city selection using city dots
 * Improved mouse accuracy for selecting miniatures on the strategy map
 * Fixed graphical bug with trade route flow overlay

Minimap

 * Now defaults to using a dynamic zoom range
 * Now shows cities, visible enemies, objective icons
 * Clearer fog of war

New Notification System

 * New notification icons across the top of the screen for different events
 * Icons can be clicked to cycle through alert objectives
 * Configure auto-pause on new alerts
 * New options page for configuring alerts and notifications

City Population Damage

 * City's will now lose pop growth when out of food
 * City's lose some pop growth when captured

Resource Management

 * Resources are now automatically moved to the closest city with available space rather than just the closest building
 * City food consumption now takes precedence over stockpiling when decided where to send supplies
 * Fixed bug that prevented forts/cities from supplying units from their stockpile

Sieges

 * City hitpoints are now more closely tied to city size
 * Boosted missile damage from garrisons
 * Garrison damage is now displayed in the garrison tooltip
 * AI is less likely to leave walled city when it's weaker than the besieging enemy

Map Editor

 * Fixed bug with grass painting in the editor
 * Increased file limit when importing heighfields in the editor
 * Improved support for strategy map modding on custom maps
 * Adjusted default map size & coordinates in the editor
 * Map editor now dynamically creates a strategy map from the current heighfield
 * Added more tooltips to the editor

Interface

 * Double-clicking portraits inside cities/camps now selects all units of that type in the building and double-clicking ungrouped units on the map now selects all visible units of that type
 * Added button to pause upgrade construction
 * Stop bridge construction button now has a separate image and tooltip

Everything Else

 * New season tooltip
 * New Objectives to Defeat Raider Invasions in the Prelude
 * Talking head text now appears in the message log
 * Right-clicking on an indie city will now default to moving near the city rather than capturing it
 * Fixed multiple bugs where AI group could get stuck trying to execute a command (capture, enter, scavenge, etc)
 * Added numerical percentage to buff tooltips (Morale, Formation Strength, etc)
 * Improved cavalry's ability to break from combat
 * new tutorial for cancelling objectives
 * new tutorial for raiding farms
 * fixed bug saving the order of units in a group
 * fixed bug displaying stance menu when there was more than one page
 * Greek Psiloi now use ranged stances rather than mixed javelineer stances
 * improved error messages when uploading mods
 * more city historical notes
 * added more faction logos to objectives to make it clearer who's offering the objective
 * fixed bug with garrison slinger animations
 * blocked trade routes no longer cost gold
 * improvements to trade tab formatting
 * improvements to how AI disbands units when running low on food/gold
 * fixed bug with units constructing bridges while under missile fire
 * improved reliability of visible enemies and sighted ai events
 * burn farm objective now works on mines and wood mills
 * stances can now be changed from the asset list
 * improvements to population growth tooltip to show growth bonuses and penalties
 * re-balanced AI to prefer unit building upgrades (barracks, stables,etc vs mercenary post)
 * fixed bug that caused raiders to capture cities rather than raid
 * prelude raider events no longer pull other raiders on the map
 * Gallic Naked Skirmishers are now buildable with a Barracks II
 * Prioritized AI building bridges necessary for moving supplies
 * new objective for conquering your ancient rival
 * fixed bugs displaying group miniatures in the fog
 * added strategy map icons for more objectives
 * new dynamic rewards for Defeat Brigades and Burn Farm objectives
 * modding support for custom attributes
 * added gameplay option to always show controlling faction emblem
 * various map fixes: new forts in Ligures territory, fixed incorrect marsh region near Ravenna
 * fixed multiple problems with raider ship landings
 * raid speed is now tied to unit size
 * improvements to how the AI builds units to improve variety
 * fixed occasional script crash when starting a new game after already playing a game
 * water supply lines now cost significantly less per km than land routes
 * Cleaned up some interface issues with blocked bridge construction
 * Fixed problems with the greek military skill tree
 * General reduction of supply line costs
 * Greater combat penalties while fording rivers
 * Increased limits on raider attacks relative to other faction attacks
 * Bug fixes for AI units stuck in unbuilt bridges/camps
 * Fix for script bug that blocked advisor/objective messages
 * Pillage amounts are now tied to city size
 * Fixed bug with corrupted formation outlines when too many units are onscreen
 * Fixed crash displaying player gold resource when running very large deficits
 * Improvements to Mod page tooltips
 * Raiders should no longer try to scavenge from farms
 * Fixed problem with getting invasion warnings for enemy units that are still in cities
 * Added gameplay setting to increase the zoom range
 * Fixed text bug in return city objective
 * Fixed multiple bugs in the pay the prince objective
 * Fixed bug with AI capturing cities outside the playbounds
 * Fixed rare crash in rout AI
 * Fixed AI saved game crash that occurred shortly after loading a game
 * Fixed bug moving ships into cities with both river and open water access
 * Improvements to large group movement in narrow terrain
 * Fixed problems saving city construction progress
 * AI adjustments for cities under siege and reinforcing from other cities
 * Fixed incorrect warning when logging camps are building upgrades
 * Fixed bug with unit formations not reloading properly from saved games
 * Fixed bug that allowed the fog of war to be cleared at a group's target location
 * Improvements to unit pathfinding in narrow terrain
 * New hostage units for each faction (mixed civilians /w guards)
 * New miniature and build button for hostages