GAMEPLAY

Contracts - The new and much needed feature gives the player something to work towards. In both the short term and long term.

On the first of every year 10 new contracts will appear in the contracts menu. A contract requires you to deliver the goods to the specified country, for a specified timeframe, for a specified price.

Any item in the game has the possibility to be used.

All countries have a chance to be chosen. (It's good luck if you get a contract for something mined/farmed that happens to be in the country of it's fertility.)

Contracts can be from 1 to 12 years.

Payout is 5 times the value of that item in that country. (The total delivered)

The "Delivery" process is simple. Just have that item sitting in the warehouse, and the contract will take from the warehouses daily.

Any contract, active or available, will lock that item in that country from being traded on the market. (Managers can still sell, but the player can't just buy items in the contracted country.)

Because of this, it is generally good to reject contracts you don't intend on accepting, just so you can free that item up in the market.

Accepting a contract means that starting on January 1st of the following year, you are expected to fulfill your contract daily until the term ends. Once you accept, if you should change your mind, you will have to pay a cancelation fee.

The cancelation fee is much cheaper if you cancel before the contract starts. After it begins, the price will be substantially larger.

Failure to fulfill your contract will incur daily penalties that will have to be settled when the contract completes.

The penalties can pile on to a maximum price of the entire value of the contract. If this happens, the contract will turn red, and those penalties -instead of hitting the contract- will be fined from your bank account directly. So not only is your contract payout ZERO, but you are getting fined daily from it.

When a contract is complete, you can collect the agreed price (minus penalties).

If you are wanting more contracts, you can spend Influence to clear the available contracts, and generate 10 more. Price starts at 1 influence, and multiplies by 10 every time. This number resets on the first of every year.

On the left of every contract will be a letter rating, giving you an idea of the general difficulty and/or payout. Starting at D going through C, B, A, S, S+, S++, and the elusive S+++.

Lower rated contracts are going to be more plentiful, but many might not seem worth it. And some of the higher difficulty might seem impossible. Without substantial work before hand, some might actually be. Like a contract for 1000 tons of emeralds per day? Mines can only mine 0.001 tons of emerald per day so unless you have a stash before hand, that would likely be impossible.

FEATURES

Removed neighbor bonus from all tile types. This is for a couple of reasons:

The first of which is that the neighbor bonus is the cause of quite a lot of calculations. Every time you place a tile it needs to figure out if there are neighbors or not. You will notice in earlier versions of the game, if you have many many different types of items being generated in a country, and you exit and enter that country it takes a bit of time. It should be much more snappy now.

More importantly, it doesn't make any sense if you consider how a business would work in real life. Why would there be an efficiency bonus to two factories producing the same product next to each other? Perhaps they could consolidate ordering and deliveries, and maybe employees, but that would be it. If I was to re-implement a neighbor bonus it would only make sense if it were for buildings that feed into another. Like putting a refinery that makes copper ingots next to a factory that makes copper rods. That would make some sense since there would be no delivery time irl.

A side effect of this is I had to adjust the building levels of the buildings you start with so that you are still making a profit.

Buildings now have adjustable efficiency. If you click on a production building, the slider to control the number of employees in a building is adjustable. More employees will increase efficiency with diminishing returns. Reducing employees will have a sharp reduction in efficiency. This was mostly done as a solution to when you are only off by a ton or two, and you need to sneak in just a bit more production out of buildings without having to build another one.

Added a manager instruction. Before this update, all managers were able to do was sell resources that wouldn't fit into the warehouses. Basically making them useless until your inventory filled up. Now there is another setting the manager can be set to, and that is "Empty". When a manager is set to empty, they will keep your warehouse clear of that item, selling it as soon as it is made. This allows for the player to passively earn money on resources that have no hope of filling a warehouse. (Like emeralds for example.)

To change a manager from "Full" to "Empty" simply visit the manager menu, and with the correct country selected, click on a manager that is green and labled "Full", it will automatically turn the text orange and say "Empty". Done! Click the manager's button again to fire them.

Note: if you need to take a manager from "Full" to fired, and don't want to empty your warehouse, you have a couple of options.
-Double click really fast and hope for the best! (Not recommended)

-Set the play speed to 0 and make the changes

-Visit the country and click on a tile that is making the resource you want to manage. You can fire the manager from here. (Or even switch from either manager state.)

Another Note: Since resource generation, and resource usage take place in the same tick, you don't need to worry about your manager accidently selling resources you need in other recipes. They sell after the items are used.

QUALITY OF LIFE

Zooming and Panning on the country tilemaps. - Now, when you have a country open, you can zoom and pan around the tilemap so you can get a better view. Both so you can have the smaller countries fill up more of the screen if you like, or if you want to get a better view of some of the bigger countries. They can be tough to see.

Panning Default: [W], [A], [S], [D] or hold down the middle mouse button and move your curser.

Zoom Default: Scroll middle mouse button forward to zoom in, scroll backwards to zoom out.

Favorite Country Quick Switching - If you have a country you would like to be able to return to quickly, you can swap to it by adding it to one of 10 hotkeys. By default, the way to assign a hotkey is: While in the country hold the left [CTRL] key, and press any number on the keypad (0-9). Then, by simply pressing that key anywhere in the globe, you will open that country. Both the assigning, and triggering keys can be changed in the options menu. "Favorite Countries" will be part of your save file and not user options.

Quick Search - Want to look up an item in the library, or quickly switch to a country you haven't saved to your favorites? Press [TAB] to pull up a search bar, and type at least 3 letters into it so search all items and countries. Click on items to open up that item's Library entry, and click on a country name and flag to switch to that country.

Research From The Library - Now, while in a library entry you will be able to see if you have the correct technology unlocked to produce that item. If so, it will be green.

If not, it will be red with a button next to it. If all pre-requisites are met, it will show you how much unlocking the research costs. If you have enough Research Points, you can click this button to unlock it. Doing it this way means you skip seeing what other items that research unlocks.

UI

Moved and simplified some menus in the game. Far from pretty, but a bit more readable, and less distracting. When entering a country, the build_menu will automatically open, but the storage sidebar will be hidden.

BUG FIX

-Fixed game crashing when turning on "Loan Interest Payments" in the news feed.

-Fixed issue with upgrading buildings tooltip not updating after applying upgrade.

-Fixed issue with researches carrying over from previous save if you start a "New Game"

-Fixed issue with management screen. Sometimes clicking on one item would activate a different one.

FUTURE:

-Balancing

-New unit types

-Research Tree rework