NEWS-2.5.5

__NOTOC__
= WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 2.5.4 =
2.5.5 is a bugfix release.
== Server / General ==
=== Changes affecting players (supplied rulesets) ===
* A city containing a Leader unit will now never defect in a civil war. Previously this could cause the rebels to end up with both Leaders. 
* Units without a home city are no longer forced to acquire a home city when transferred to another player. 
* Barbarians no longer spawn in Lake terrain in all rulesets which have it. 
* Bug fix: it was impossible to change production in a city after disbanding a unit there the same turn the city was built. 
* The win chance of a boat in a city defending against attack was erroneously displayed as 0%. (A new client connecting to an old server running a custom ruleset may still display an incorrect defense value, this time too optimistic.)
* The client's display of city population could be out of date after international migration. 
* The 'Plague' random disaster in the classic ruleset has been renamed to 'Pestilence' to avoid confusion with the unrelated game concept of plague. Other text changed to mitigate this confusion. 
* Bug fixes and improvements to Latvian, African, and Texan nations. 
* Correct descriptions of server options 'techlost_recv' and 'techlost_donor' to make clear that they apply to technology theft as well as trading. 
* Bug fix: a non-zero 'techlevel' setting (or a ruleset which grants initial techs) along with certain 'plrcolormode' settings could give a (harmless) assertion failure at game start. 
* Bug fix: a player observer can no longer cause the game to start on behalf of a player. 
=== Changes affecting other rulesets / modders ===
* Adding a base in the editor was not taking care of side-effects, such as removing conflicting bases on the same tile, granting vision and borders, etc. 
* In the editor, the "Nation Start Positions" property could be disabled when changing other values on the Game tab of the property editor. 
=== Changes affecting server operators ===
* New 'persistent' metaserver connection mode, where one failure to talk to the metaserver does not prevent future attempts. Enabled with the '--keep' server option or the '/metaconnection persistent' server command. 
=== General ===
* Minor memory leak fixes. 
* Some optimizations for speed. 
* Various internal changes which should only affect developers. 
=== AI ===
* AI players could occasionally be subject to the penalty for changing production type. They are supposed to always be immune to this penalty. 
== Clients ==
* It's now possible to create an all-AI game from the client, by becoming an observer and starting the game. (You also need to set 'minplayers' to 0 and set a turn timeout.) 
* Fix drawing artifacts with oriented tilesets such as Cimpletoon:
** A unit could be drawn with two superimposed random orientations. This showed up in the Gtk unit select dialog and the Qt help. 
** Unit orientation in these circumstances could change randomly on redraws. 
* Fixes to disconnecting from servers and cleaning up spawned servers. In particular, the Gtk and Qt clients now disconnect cleanly from the server when you quit the client. 
* For global observers, fixed display of city map outline and grid coloring. 
* Fixed a potential buffer overflow in some clients in the presence of extremely long tileset or soundset names. 
* (Gtk) Make Prev/Next City buttons insensitive for global observers, since they do nothing. 
* (Gtk3) On very small screens, the balance between happiness and nationality areas in the city dialog has been improved. 
* (Gtk3) Silence Gtk warnings on console by default with newer Gtk3 versions; this is necessary as it's not possible to construct a theme which works across the full range of Gtk3 versions we support without warnings. They can be re-enabled with freeciv-gtk3 -- --gtk-warnings.
* (Qt) Simplified the network page, so that local and Internet servers are on the same page. Scans for local servers are now stopped once a connection is chosen. 
* (Qt) There's now a button to lock the messages and chat window geometry, so that a mis-click doesn't accidentally disarrange them. 
* (Qt) The '5' key on the numeric keypad now selects the previous unit, as in the Gtk clients. 
* (Qt) Allied chat (chat messages are sent only to allies, not all players) is now the default. 
* (Qt) The default leader name defaults to the player name (often the system user name) rather than a leader name from a selected nation. 
* (Qt) Added an option to change the theme. 
* (Qt) The '<', '>', and '&' characters are now handled correctly in chat; they are no longer interpreted as HTML. 
* (Qt) When there's a problem loading a tileset, an error message explaining it is now displayed. 
* (SDL) The display of shields in the city dialog immediately after changing production could be overly pessimistic. 
== Tools ==
* Minor fix to freeciv-manual tool's output. 
* Minor fix to modpack installer's error reporting. 
== Help / Documentation ==
* The 'Chatline' help is now more comprehensive. 
* The tutorial scenario now has a message for when you build your first military unit. 
* Miscellaneous other improvements to in-game text and user documentation. 
* Miscellaneous changes to developer/ruleset docs. 
* Invisible changes to assist localization. 
== Translations ==
* Updated translations:
** Complete translations: Catalan, French, British English, Spanish, Russian.
** Incomplete translations: Finnish (100% core, 92% nations), Japanese (94% core, 95.4% nations).
* When localized into Finnish, the last character was stripped or corrupted in all messages. 
== Build/portability ==
* Package builders can now override the version label used with FREECIV_LABEL_FORCE. 
* 'nonnull-compare' warnings from GCC 6 are now silenced. 
* The included Lua now uses fseeko() instead of fseek() where available. This is unlikely to make a difference in practice. 
* Update some of the libraries shipped with the Windows packages. 
See NEWS for older lists of changes.
Category:NEWS