NEWS-2.4.0-RC1

__NOTOC__
===WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 2.4.0-beta2===
====Server / General====
=====Gameplay=====
* City centre tiles now lose their automatic irrigation bonus if a mine is built on them, since mines and irrigation cannot coexist on a tile. 
** Similarly, in the supplied rulesets, cities on a tile with a mine can no longer get a farmland bonus.
* Fix a pathfinding bug where aerial units would stop to refuel at any city or airbase they passed through, regardless of need. 
* Cities were erroneously enjoying martial law benefits from unlimited numbers of units, even under governments with a Martial_Law_Max specified (such as Monarchy and Communism in the default ruleset). 
* Auto-settler units would revert to manual control when moving between adjacent landmasses through a transport. 
* When a city chose food-consuming units to disband due to starvation, it could choose units not actually consuming food currently, for instance due to government-type related free upkeep. For instance this could lead to cities disbanding all their units in the 'civ2civ3' ruleset. 
* Unit transport related fixes:
** Fix assertion failures and similar problems associated with loaded transports of allied players (with whom you don't have shared vision) going out of sight. 
** Prevent units in nested transports (which can't disembark) from being chosen to attempt to defend a tile. 
* Fixes for undisbandable units in destroyed transports:
** If such a unit was teleported to safety and immediately died (for instance due to auto-attack), the server could crash. 
** Such cargo on non-boat-like transports are now saved in more circumstances (this does not affect the supplied rulesets). (part of )
* If a city becomes landlocked due to terrain change, its ocean-requiring buildings should now correctly be sold. 
* When 'tinyisles' was disabled, the map generator was overenthusiastic about removing 1x1 islands from the map; it could also remove peninsulas from continents in some circumstances. 
=====Clerical=====
* Do not prohibit loading a savegame where the number of surviving players has fallen below the server's 'minplayers' setting. 
* When loading a savegame with automatic 'mapimg' image saving enabled, do not overwrite an image created previously at the start of a turn with a new one. 
* The Windows packages now include support for saving map images in formats other than PPM (such as PNG and JPEG). 
* When a unit is created in the editor, assign it a homecity appropriate for its type more often. (part of )
* Fix a possible infinite loop when logging character encoding conversion errors. 
* Fix a possible crash when sending server details to the metaserver. (part of )
* Fix a minor memory leak. 
* Various internal changes which should only affect developers. 
====Clients====
* Speed up movement drawing of city-building units (the client was redrawing more than necessary). 
* Fix a possible crash that could occur in circumstances such as viewing the terrain activity popup. (part of )
* Fix a minor memory leak. 
* (Gtk3) Fix an assertion failure / crash when closing the unit selection dialog. 
* (Gtk3) Refactoring which should have no visible effect. 
* (SDL) In tilesets with unit orientation (such as Cimpletoon), do not use randomly-oriented unit sprites in the unit orders or production display. 
====Tilesets / Art====
* Use correct small flag for Liberia. 
====Gameplay / Rules Changes====
=====Supplied rulesets=====
* Remove technology root_reqs from the experimental ruleset for now, due to bugs hindering their use. 
* In the civ1 and civ2 rulesets, the Oracle bonus was too generous in the rare case where the player gained the Oracle by conquering without knowing Mysticism; it should (and now does) double the effect of Temples, which in this case means +1 content citizen rather than +2. 
=====Other rulesets=====
* Prevent units being spawned to terrain to which they are not native:
** Partisans 
** Settlers and mercenaries from huts 
* Ruleset sanity checking could erroneously emit warnings about valid effects combinations if negated requirements were used (such as a base that could not be built on either mountains or hills). In addition, warnings are now emitted if a requirement and its exact negative are simultaneously specified, as this is probably a mistake in the ruleset. 
* The Lua definitions const.TRUE and const.FALSE (new in 2.4.0-beta1) have been removed; the const module remains. 
====AI====
* When assessing the threat from enemy units near cities, fear any unit that can take over a city (such as helicopters), rather than just land units. 
* Reduced the weighting of the AI's assessment of defence strength, so that it defends its own cities more convincingly, and is less fearful of its enemy's defenders when attacking their cities. 
* The AI now tends to keep a unit constantly defending each of its cities even in the absence of an obvious threat, rather than relying on being able to acquire one when a threat appears. 
* Remove some assumptions about units' ability to attack from/to non-native terrain. Most likely to make a difference with unusual rulesets. 
* Military land units with nothing to do were seeking coastal cities to defend rather than just the nearest, for no good reason. (part of )
* The AI no longer hardcodes a food_cost of 2 when assessing potential city sites. This makes no difference to its behaviour with the supplied rulesets. 
* Fix a possible crash when starting the (experimental) threaded AI. (part of 
====Help / Documentation====
* Remove some redundant information from online help for ocean-going units. (part of )
* Miscellaneous improvements to developer/ruleset docs. 
====Translations====
* Updated translations:
** Complete translations: Catalan, French, Polish, British English.
** Incomplete translations: Scottish Gaelic (95%), German (91%), Finnish (84%).
====Build/portability====
* Fix a pthread-related build failure observed on MinGW. 
* Windows builds using the Crosser framework will no longer use pthread even if it appears to be present. 
* Fix a build failure on OpenBSD due to failure to find intptr_t. 
* Fix a build warning (which could prevent building with --enable-debug due to -Werror). 
* Fix a build warning in non-debug builds. 
See NEWS for older lists of changes.
Category:NEWS