NEWS-2.5.0-RC1

__NOTOC__
= WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 2.5.0-beta2 =
As well as the usual bugfixes, the civ2civ3 ruleset has had a number of rule changes to balance gameplay. The online help for civ2civ3 has been completely rewritten; it's worth a read even if you've already read through it, as some important rules were not documented. This release also fixes several serious crashes in the Windows packages.
== Server / General ==
=== Changes affecting players (supplied rulesets) ===
* Changes to the civ2civ3 rules:
** The Tribal government no longer gives a bonus to movement (this was too powerful, and confused the AI). Instead it increases the chances of gaining veterancy from combat, and martial law that pacifies 2 citizen per unit. 
** Sun Tzu's War Academy no longer increases the chance of veterancy from combat. 
** Changes to terrain-related rules: 
*** Forest can be mined to Grassland; transformation now yields Hills.
*** Irrigation time for Swamp reduced.
*** Deep Oceans now produce 1 food rather than none.
*** Harbors and Offshore Platforms can now be built adjacent to Lake and Deep Ocean tiles, as well as Ocean.
** Transports can no longer gain veterancy by cleaning pollution. Engineers' chances of veterancy from work are reduced. 
** Cities now get their extra defense bonus at size 9 rather than 8, thus requiring an Aqueduct. The risk of fire starts at size 9 also. City map icons updated to match. 
** Explorers and Partisans see an extra tile; Partisans are now granted based on citizen nationality rather than city's original owner. 
** Crusaders no longer cause military unhappiness (to match Fanatics). 
** A.Smith's Trading Co. now has no effect during a Communist government; previously in this situation, buildings with upkeep 2 were free of upkeep. 
** Simplify production waste rules: the unlikely case of a Communist or Federation government without knowledge of Trade no longer leads to extra waste. 
* Changes to bombarder units (such as bombers and helicopters in civ2civ3):
** Rule change: neither attacker nor defender can gain veterancy from bombardment. 
** Bug fix: attempting to move into an empty city with a bombarder now moves, rather than bombarding. 
* Changes to the experimental rules:
** Caravan is no longer obsoleted by Freight; while slower, it can travel on more terrain than Freight. 
** Copy trade route rules from the classic ruleset (maximum trade routes varies depending on technology). 
* Fix trouble receiving future tech from Darwin's Voyage in the multiplayer ruleset. 
* Cosmetic: the multiplayer ruleset (which doesn't support trade routes) no longer displays cities as having "0/4" trade routes. 
* In the civ2 ruleset, Fanatics are now free of upkeep under a Fundamentalist government; the free shield upkeep under that government has been reduced from 10 to 8. 
* Barbarian nations are no longer granted partisans from city capture in any supplied ruleset. 
* Changes to supplied scenario maps:
** Various changes to small and large Earth maps, including more starting positions, increased player limits, and removal of non-default settings. 
** Reduce default number of players in France and North America scenarios so that nations matching the scenario start positions will be used with the core nationset. 
** Fix a terrain glitch in the France scenario. 
* With the new 'fair island' map generator, generated terrain resources were ineffective. Saving and reloading the game fixed this. 
* In rulesets where the maximum number of trade routes can vary, a city with more trade routes than the current maximum could not change them. Now, a single new trade route that would yield more than several of the current ones and bring the number of routes within the new maximum can be established. 
* Prevent team-mates from withdrawing shared vision from each other. 
* Fix some bugs with visibility of unit movement: 
** If one of your nuclear units exploded over an enemy city, you could be left with an apparent immovable 'ghost' missile over the city.
** Players witnessing paradrops through shared vision could fail to see the unit.
* When a technology or similar effect increased city vision radius (such as Electricity in civ2civ3), the benefit was not immediately applied to existing cities. 
* When an enemy pillages a vision-granting base such as a buoy, the base is now removed from the victim's view of the map. 
* When a disaster causes loss of production progress in a city, close some loopholes that allowed recovery in some circumstances. 
=== Changes affecting other rulesets / modders ===
* script.lua is now evaluated before default.lua, so that rulesets can pre-empt signal handlers set by by default.lua (currently "hut_enter" and "city_lost"). 
* Previously, only completion of a mine would cause units on adjacent tiles to check whether they could complete their activity (because it could prevent new irrigation in supplied rulesets). This check has been extended to all terrain-altering activities. 
* Logic that picks a good defender unit for a city now looks at the ruleset's BadCityDefender flag, rather than assuming that sea units have that flag and others do not. 
* If a ruleset triggered an effect off the "disaster" Lua signal, the game engine would still emit the message "We survived the disaster without serious damages", which could be inappropriate. This message has now been removed. 
* Fix a few cases where a negative value for a boolean effect would erroneously enable it: 'Fanatics' (), 'Unit_No_Lose_Pop' (), and 'Tile_Workable' ().
* Fix possible AI confusion in rulesets with sea units with native bases. 
* More robustness against invalid rulesets. 
* Apply patch 3 to the included Lua 5.2.3. 
=== Changes affecting server operators ===
* The --identity option now affects LAN announcements as well as metaserver announcements. 
* The /mapimg delete all command did not always delete every definition. 
* Server tab completion for save file names did not allow .xz compressed savegames. 
* Log any failure to save a game. 
* Fix a possible server crash on quit. 
=== General ===
* Change the networking code on Windows to hopefully resolve "bind failed" errors when starting the server. 
* Fix a bug that could cause incorrect interpretation of non-ASCII characters in descriptions of nations in the extended set (nationset=all). This is believed to be the root cause of client crashes on Windows in certain non-English locales with the extended nations. 
* Some optimization for speed, particularly on the server, some as a result of profiling analysis. 
* Memory leak fixes. 
* Various internal changes which should only affect developers. 
=== AI ===
* The AI now treats players it has never met as potentially hostile; this should make it harder for human players to sneak forces into place before first diplomatic contact. 
* The city the AI has nominated to build wonders is now permitted to build defensive units instead if necessary. 
* The AI could continue trying to build worker units in inappropriate situations, such as where the population cost would cause a city to disband. 
* AI players could be prevented from ever making any new treaties by failing to remove clauses from an existing failed treaty. This particularly affected diplomacy between AI players. 
* The AI now better understands worker/settler units that cost more than 1 city population to build (as in the civ2civ3 ruleset). 
* Fix possible AI crashes in rulesets with ocean cities. 
* Changes to the 'Cheating' AI level:
** It now costs 20% more to incite cities belonging to the 'Cheating' AI level to revolt. 
** The civ2civ3 ruleset was missing some of the standard bonuses for the 'Cheating' AI. 
* In servers with the threaded AI built in but not in use, a message queue would silt up causing unbounded memory and CPU use. 
* With the threaded AI, terrain improvement tasks assigned by cities were never dealt with. 
* For AI developers: a new configure option --with-ai-lib forces the default AI code to be built in for use by a custom AI, even if none of the supplied AIs are being built. 
== Clients ==
* New features and bugfixes in the Qt client:
** Added on-line help. 
** Add bulk selection criteria to the city report. 
** Added 'Save' and 'Leave game' options. 
** Ask for confirmation to exit. 
** Can now change government by clicking on the main map government icon. 
** Menu option for unit to help build wonder. 
** Bug fix: city names with non-ASCII characters were displayed incorrectly. 
** Bug fix: city dialog claimed city was celebrating when it was not. 
** Bug fix: changing tileset did not fully refresh the science dialog. 
** Replaced some icons to fix a licensing issue. 
** Other minor cosmetic tweaks. 
** The Windows installer included some unneeded cruft and is now smaller. 
* The client could crash if the tileset was changed with the science dialog open. 
* Area selection mode for cities (right-click-and-drag) now works in games with national borders disabled. 
* Some speedups to map drawing. 
* Improve diagnostics for unknown client-specific command-line options. 
* (Gtk2) On Windows, the Gtk2 client could crash whenever windows were moved or resized. 
* (Gtk3) Fix a consistent crash on some systems whenever a city dialog is opened (for instance, when founding the first city). 
* (Gtk3) The Turn Done button now blinks if you are the last player to finish a turn in a multiplayer game. (This functionality has theoretically been present in all clients, but has been more or less broken forever. It now takes into account disconnected players. )
* (Gtk3) Make opening page work better on small screens. 
* (Gtk3) Clicking "Show All Cities" in the Goto/Airlift dialog could cause all cities to be focused in turn. 
* (Gtk) Minor visual tweaks. 
* (SDL) It was not possible to withdraw shared vision from someone you were at war with. 
* (SDL) Correct shortcut key label for transform (to 'O' instead of 'M'). 
* (SDL) Fix a possible crash if font loading fails. 
* The Xaw client is now considered unmaintained. 
== Tools ==
* Fix several serious bugs in the Qt modpack installer that made it largely unusable, especially on Windows. 
* Fix error messages and possible crashes from modpack installers on Windows. 
* Fix possible bugs when closing the modpack installer. 
* Accept GUI-specific command-line arguments. 
== Tilesets / Art ==
* Better support for the civ2civ3 ruleset:
** Tilesets can now provide distinct graphics for Tribal and Federation governments and the Internet wonder. 
** All supplied tilesets now have graphics for all civ2civ3 elements except the Internet. 
* Extra graphics and fixes in the Cimpletoon and Amplio2 tilesets:
** Icons for unit upkeep above 2, to support rulesets where that's possible. Notably, this makes more obvious the longstanding behaviour that the multiplayer ruleset's Fundamentalism government has food upkeep 3. 
** Distinct icons for all unit activities. 
** "Outpost" and "airstrip" graphics for use by third-party rulesets (intended for Fortress and Airbase precursors). 
** Minor glitch fixes. 
* The Trident tileset now has graphics for Maglev. 
* The Cimpletoon and Trident tilesets now have Inaccessible terrain graphics. 
* The editor 'road' tool now has a proper icon. 
== Help / Documentation ==
* The help for the civ2civ3 ruleset has been substantially reworked and expanded. 
* Unit help is now more specific about which terrain improvement actions units can do. 
* Miscellaneous improvements to in-game text and user documentation. 
* Miscellaneous changes to developer/ruleset docs. 
* Invisible changes to assist localization. 
== Translations ==
* Updated translations:
** Complete translations: French, Russian, British English.
** Incomplete translations: Polish (97.7% core, 100% nations), Catalan (96.3% core, 100% nations), Finnish (93% core, 87% nations), Japanese (84% core, 92% nations).
== Build/portability ==
* Fix failure to build twice in a row due to missing mkinstalldirs. 
* Improve diagnostic if configure fails to find pkg-config (previously it was erroneously warning about libcurl). 
* The shipped Windows installer Makefile is now compatible with the environment that is used to build the Windows installers. 
See NEWS for older lists of changes.
Category:NEWS