00 01/09/2009 18:14
Hi,

I am pleased to confirm that update 1.4 will be out in late September.

First off, some new items that will be going into 1.4:

- 2 new historical battles: Battle of Rossbach and Battle of Fontenoy. Both available in single player and multi player.
- Missile cavalry can now fire and reload whilst on the move.

And previously announced, the update will contain the following fixes and balance changes.

Balance changes:
- Overhaul of naval balancing as talked about in 9th July Update.
- There is now a cap on how many of some units you can take in MP. Examples of such units are Ferguson Rifles, many of the Elite Units of the West, and other unique units such as Royal Ecossais etc.
- Dragoons are available from higher building levels and now have fire by rank to allow them to better fulfil the role of mobile infantry.
- Light Dragoons have gained longer range guns to allow them to skirmish better.
- Reworked cavalry costs to better reflect their value on the battlefield.
- Increase in cost to Windbusche Jaegers and Ferguson Rifles.
- Some improvements to projectile balancing.
- Balance improvements made to Road to Independence Episode 3.

Fixes and improvements:
- Significantly increase the rate of naval invasions. Including those across theatres.
- Increase AI aggression and improve use of armies.
- Increase the creation and retention of strong mixed higher level unit armies by the CAI.
- Fix for texture allocation in sprite cache that was causing a memory crash.
- "Backstabber" and "Dishonouring Treaties" diplomatic factors change so don't apply when joining an ally in war.
- Fix for some towns in regions still giving bonuses to income when damaged for raiding.
- Improvements to siege AI in how it approaches and assaults walls.
- Units with fire by rank now fire correctly when behind walls.
- Bug with fort cannon targeting fixed, making them much more accurate.
- Many fixes to sound bugs improving overall sound across the game.
- Fixed issue with default battle preference not being saved.
- Fix to include protectorate owned regions in explicitly-specified victory condition regions.
- Various crash fixes.
- Fixes to various group formations to improve formations used by player/AI.
- Fix for routing unit cards losing faction colour.
- Fix for auto unlimbering causing the attack order to terminate prematurely resulting in an inability to stop the unit from firing.
- Fix for troops on fort walls not using fort gun range when judging when to fire on enemy troops.
- Fix for fort guns using wrong targeting formula.
- Fixes to fort pathfinding and use of ropes.
- Multiplayer soft lock fixes.
- Fix crash in quotes table.
- Cumulative updates to improve AI invasion behaviour.
- Bug fixes and improvements to AI counter offers.
- Improvements to AI diplomatic valuation of military access and alliances.
- Fix for wind sounds not working in naval battles
- Fixed ship wakes not always working.
- Fixed potential crash disembarking agents from navies.
- Fixed armies not being booted out of regions when losing military access gained by joining an ally in war.
- Improved AI diplomacy valuation of technologies.
- Fixed reinforcements from unreachable positions.
- Balance of power fix for attack of opportunity.
- Fixed bug that was causing issues with embarking an army containing multiple characters.
- Minor tweak to stop some ship sails endlessly play furling sound.
- Fixed path blocked bug (pathing into ZoC).
- Diplomacy counter-offer improvements.
- Fix for fast forward not working as intended on some PCs. Will always speed up if camera is still, if camera moves fast forward will be as fast as possible on each PC.
- Fixed issue where artillery would be told to stop firing but continue.
- Fixed issue with the virtual file system whereby on certain hard drives / raid configurations / partitions which were experiencing a crash with sound enabled.
- Fixed a boundary pathfinding crash.

Thanks

Jack




"Teste alte, perdio! ...Quelle sono pallottole, non merda." (Lepic, colonello dei granatieri a cavallo della Guardia - Eylau 1807)

"Un ussaro che a trent'anni non è ancora morto è un vigliacco!" (Lasalle, generale della cavalleria leggera dell'esercito francese)