NEWS-2.0.0

Category:NEWS
WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 1.14.2
Rules changes:
* (Beta2) Research cost has doubled, effects of science buildings doubled. SETI now improves Research Labs instead of giving free Research Labs to every city. Isaac Newton's College now improves all the player's universities.
* New units: AWACS and Workers.
* New option: national borders. Units inside your borders do not cause unhappiness under Republic and Democracy.
* It is no longer possible for one player to be in alliance with a player who is at war with another player you are allied with.
* The Civ2 ruleset now has waste. Default ruleset does not.
* Incite costs changed, now cities closer to capital, with units and with buildings have much higher incite cost.
* Killing a defending diplomat now costs you 1 movement point.
* Units now have multiple, configurable veteran levels.
* Team mates now pool their research. You may opt out and research individually by cancelling the 'Team' treaty.
* Server has voting on commands and options. You need over 50% of votes.
* When moving a unit from a transport on an ocean tile to a land tile, you lose all movement points.
* You can specify a list of players that you would like to share victory with, using the 'endgame' command.
* Nations added: Swiss, Afghanistan, Ethiopian, Assyrian, Columbian, Elvish, Galician, Hobbits, Indonesian, Kampuchean, Malaysian, Martian, Nigerian, Quebecois, Sumerian, Taiwanese, Austrian, Belgian, Phoenician and Mexican.
* New wonder: The Eiffel Tower. Makes AIs love you and improves reputation.
* The building requirements of several buildings have been changed.
* The whale special is reduced to 2 food, 1 shield and 2 trade.
* Settlers / Workers / Engineers can never get veterancy.
* Trireme's high sea loss now considers veterancy level (green 50%, veteran 25%, hardened 5%, elite 0%) before being divided by 2 if you have Seafaring or 4 when you reach Navigation (previously only fixed at 50% before being divided).
* Glacier terrain is now unsafe for land units (15% chance per turn of being lost). Also doesn't count as coastline for Trireme safety or Fish and Whale generation. Roads/railroads can be built but all units (worker too) get 15% chance per turn of being lost any way!
* King Richard's Crusade now made obsolete by Robotics (previously Industrialization).
* Fixed tech costs based on the number of prerequisites of the tech in the tech tree.
* Nations have preferred nations to fork off when civil war occurs.
Gameplay changes:
* AI is much improved, and does not use 'double-move' any more.
* AI now conducts diplomacy with you (and against you).
* New difficulty level: Novice. It severely handicaps the AI players.
* Smarter autoexplorer and autosettler code.
* Modpack options vastly improved: You can customize buildings, add buildings as requirements to units, restrict technologies to certain nations, have split technology trees, gold upkeep for units, new units and terrain flags and lots of other options. (This is still done by editing configuration files with a text editor.)
* Fewer popups (eg choose the new government from the menu directly)
* Alternative map topologies, e.g. real support for isometric and hexagonal maps, "donut" map wrapping.
* Incomplete support for drawing civ3 graphics. See the civ3gfx tileset.
* Global observer can observe the entire game.
* New method of settings map dimensions: Just use 'size'.
* Modified map generators.
* Initial units can be selected with a server option.
* 'Home' key centers on your capital.
* Drag and drop goto.
Backend changes:
* Player authentication with optional passwords.
* You can start the server and set server options from the client.
* You can meet with other players for 20 turns after your units have last met, and you can exchange embassies when meeting.
* You can bind the server to a given IP on multihomed hosts.
* New client dialog which uses multicast to find servers on your LAN.
* Compress network traffic and send only a delta (diff) of the data.
* GTK2 client can now run in fullscreen mode.
* GTK2 is now the default client (the code base also features fully functional GTK1, Xaw and native Win32 clients).
* Convert charsets as they are sent between client and server. All data files are now in UTF-8.
* New (and incompatible) metaserver.
* New ALSA sound plugin.
* The s(entry) command no longer doubles as a means to put units on boats - use the new l(oad) command instead. 
* Many more (smaller) changes, and massive changes under the hood.