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I understand if you need a break from Bronze Age; sometimes I had to take a break from a project as well.

May you enjoy working on Xenosea!

Milestone 1: complete! *releases confetti*

Ah, searching endlessly for a single bug; I've done that too many times. But you're almost there, so don't worry!

I didn't realize that -- but then again, I'm also fairly new (I only showed up shortly after Bronze Age reached 3.0).

I'm a bit surprised the Masklings showed up before the Shontu. That said, I'm glad to see progress.

Ah, distractions! Don't worry, everyone gets distracted -- some [such as myself] more often than others.

Productive weeks are good weeks!

Progress is always good; I have some projects of my own I need to work on.

Have you thought about tribe-specific luxuries? I can see pops happier from having both a Humitte luxury and a Shontu luxury to having two Humitte luxuries -- but that's just a suggestion (and likely for future updates when all the basics are done).

And if I make too many suggestions, just let me know; I don't want to delay Bronze Age Tribe with feature creep.

Ah, coding glitches! At one point, while working on a roguelike, I forgot to restrict equipment to certain materials -- which promptly led to a leather sword appearing. Not surprisingly, it did a base of 1d0 damage!

I'm glad to hear you're feeling inspired again; all too often I wanted to work on a project, but just wasn't up for it.

I've always thought about how Bronze Age had trouble supporting an army of culture X in a province populated by culture Y; cultural assimilation certainly makes sense.

I should add that Wikipedia has the list of historically largest cities; the recordholder was consistently in the tens of thousands (and was pretty consistently a capital, much like Rome was in the iron age), so later on you may wish to consider a simple multiplier for the capital region. Then again, you may have already planned for that! ;)

Indeed; it may just be a map model, but we'll be here when the next version comes out.

All good things come to an end sooner or later. I enjoyed playing Bronze Age and snuck in a world conquest one day before the post mortem; now it's time to head over to Bronze Age: Tribes and work on the next world conquest. ;)

Thank you again for giving us a game we like.

Victory! King Nas the Magnificent -- who looks surprisingly young for an 83-year-old -- is the ruler of the entire world.

As I suspected earlier, Tedndyou (the green/brown in the previous post) was the last survivor, although they don't get credit.  After decades of no border changed, the blue/gray maskling force managed to take the last empty province shortly before I conquered their original provinces. They managed to build thorns just below the one usable crossing to Tedndyou, so I had to wait for them to be cleared.

As for Wittoall (red/white), they had two major issues. The first was being totally unable to handle the roving ravensworn; although you see three such units in the upper-right, that's actually five units. I kept rebuilding farms and roads so they'd wander around instead of causing problems. 

Wittoall's other problem:

Yes, that's a maximum population of 682 people (and 24 nobles). There's absolutely no way of handling that (a 7/7/7 family member would be the highest-stats officer ever, yet could only handle 630 people), so I removed extra houses ASAP and (since there was a Hungry Maw infestation, I used the Purge ability). Trying to abandon it would cost 154.1 legitimacy (which would be ruinous!), so if this wasn't the very end of the game I'd bring in plenty of soldiers and gradually Purge it down to acceptable populations as my soldiers fought off raiders.

As for the retrospective, the problems from the first post describe it well: Ravensworn/Hungry Maw everywhere, plus a severe province limit. I fully respect your choice to be on break from Bronze Age, but when you return to working on it (whether it's three days from now, three weeks from now, three months from now, or three years from now), I recommend two changes:

(1) Cut back on Ravensworn/Hungry Maw outbreaks. If I was the coder, I'd add a check of (1000/sqrt(territories owned)) out of 1000; that way, instead of someone with X territories having X times as many outbreaks as someone with one territory, they'd only have sqrt(X) times as many.

(2) If you have twenty territories, surely that gives more prestige than having only one! So I'd add a small bonus to monthly legitimacy (say, territories*0.05).

EDIT: Here's the final save. Next game I think I'll play as Shontu or Masklings (or Twelpers!).

It's been nearly a month since the last update, so let's have another!

As you can see, I'm most of the way there.  King Nas the Magnificent is still in charge at the age of 76; sdadly, he likely will not lvie long enough to see the last bit of the map (thirteen visible provinces) get conquered.

Isatthe (white/orange) was dumb enough to try and demand one of my settlements (roughly the area between his lower spot and the ocean); I laughed at him, built about 30 civilian units, and prepared for a war. And then the war ended early when I snuck in, grabbed an undefended settlement, and used that to peace out.

But he had a target on his face thanks to his absurd demand. When he went to war with Wittoall (red/white), I lined up troops on the border, declared war, and invaded five of his territories. I only took two before battles became a mess, but hey, two new territories. I just had a third war with him (it ended five in-game seconds before the screenshot), and took two more territories (and took a third in the peace treaty. He's down to two widely separated territories, so he's no longer a threat.

Meanwhile, my battle with the Bloodcrusher Clan (red/yellow, on-screen) had an absolutely  humiliating win. Althoguh I only took two of the three territories, it caused so many problems that four of the ruler's six children revolted and formed new clans (a fifth was already dead at the time, and a sixth would eventually rebel as well). Meanwhile, the Guttaker Kindred (blue/gray, on-screen) is down to a 39-year-old ruler and a 39-year-old wife, both old for Masklings.

It's safe to say that rival forces are neutered; the only remaining issue is playing whack-a-mole with Ravensworn and Hungry Maw (who are an even bigger issue at 61 territories).

The save, if you're interested.

If you need a break, take a break; we'll be here when you return. Burnout is no fun.

UPDATE: I win! See the third post.

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...and I'm about halfway there (all blue/blue is mine).

I have two issues to deal with, neither of them enemy forces.

(1) I have 39 settlements, so that means 39 places where ravensworn/hungry maw can pop up. Since I'm basically playing a lot of whack-a-mole with them, sometimes I have to go nuclear on them (abandon the settlement, then rebuild it). Right now they're in four different provinces, so my poor high priest and high judge are swamped with work.

(2) If I want reasonable legitimacy, I'm limited to three provinces (remember, each province is -1 legitimacy growth).  I technically have four provinces at the moment, but one is a maskling province I just conquered. The rest are unaffiliated settlements, so they desperately depend on the judge's +30 authority (meaning they have 34 authority each instead of 4 authority). Obviously, sticking with a high-stat high judge is vital.

Hopefully there'll be no major issues.

Since today is the day for bug reporting:

• In the zoomed-out view, the brown coast is also four pixels too high; it's less apparent, but you can see it in the fog mismatch pic above.
• The subwindows List Armies and List Settlements (of the upper-left window) both have overlap issues, both with the upper-left and lower-left window. This is more apparent while hovering over the button that opens them.
• The subwindow Economy (of the upper-left window) lets you scroll to the right until all the provinces are scrolled off. Fortunately, all it does is look odd (and suggest there are more provinces when there aren't).

Also, I noticed some AI issues. This is not an outright bug, but while observing the AI play itself (Preview map) the AI made four errors: two minor, one major, and one catastrophic.

• It assumed a two unit army should attack a unit enemy army.... even if the one unit is 100% health and the two units are 5% and 15% HP.
  
• It kept moving an army that was starving and low HP, causing a couple units to die. This was post-battle, mind you, so the army was simply moving back to its capital (and therefore lost a couple units for nothing).
• It failed to deal with cults, so three out of four cults managed to overthrow the province (I think the fourth was actually prevented..... by bandits overthrowing the province, seeing as it was a new force but the ghul cult vanished, aside form a ghul unit wandering around).
• It failed to deal with whatever splits apart forces (running out of heirs, maybe?). The strongest force (~15 territories) spectacularly imploded into five different forces.

EDIT: There's one more graphical bug (which is probably easily fixable): when scrolling downwards, it takes too long for the next row of tiles to be drawn; as a result, there's a black bar on the bottom before they show up, whether zoomed in, zoomed out, or city view. The only exception is buildings in city view (including roads and under-construction buildings); they show up fine.

EDIT 2: I found another bug; after viewing the AI play itself, if you try loading a previous game, the cult viewing mode will not show any cult data. Oddly enough, the other viewing modes (standard, diplomacy, and happiness) are fine.

Speaking of bug reports, I found a rare one.

See the eight-province red-yellow maskling tribe? The correct answer is "no", as that's actually two tribes with the same culture, same primary color, and same secondary color. They even have similar names (three-province Bloodcrusher Clan in the east, five-province Bloodcutter Folk in the west).

Yes, the odds of a match like this are very low, but obviously it can happen! ;)

If you need to take a break, take a break; we don't want a talented developer to burn out, especially when they're 100% of the staff!

I've actually thought of modding Bronze Age, but I'd have to juggle it with the other projects I work on.

So the guy you least want to hear from finally got out to testing out 3.2 and, well, the graphics are still not 100%; when fully zoomed out, the visible part is shifted up by four pixels. Sorry. :(

I fear I'm running out of graphics-issue-related flavor text (but hopefully we'll finally squash that last graphical issue!).

Aha! Just as I rival the two maskling empires (5-6 areas, and this is on the smallest map) in size, I get to download this and start a new game. XD

But seriously, good job; I'll certainly give this a try (although I may wait until I conquer one or both maskling forces)

I second this; logistics were always a vital part of military campaigns (sure, they could forage nearby areas, but there's a limit to that, especially with larger armies and less-fertile areas).

Bad news: Optimized Tile Drawing isn't fully bugfree.

EDIT: Also, if you have a large info panel (in my case it's very obvious on the nobles' Manor House, although it's barely visible on the above image), the map appears over the info panel's background but beneath everything on the info panel.

It shouldn't be hard to display squares around all units (and to be able to toggle them on and off).

Yes, but other countries exist, so it's clearly not big enough. :Þ

Take as long as you need; I enjoy playing Bronze Age and I don't want you to feel rushed, especially after what happened with Cyberpunk 2077.

Minor bug report: I tend to give every city a small guard (blame the Civilization series), so my army count quickly gets bigger than expected. Unfortunately, the general list flows out of the box.

Fortunately, simply expanding the box will fix that.

Once you build a mine on limestone,  you should be able to build a masonry.

So I got tired of watching the lighting on coal being wrong (coal had the dark side on the left while all other ores had the dark side on the right). Therefore, I created a small mod to fix it.

The mod is here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/3ubjrg132dg6utu/Coal+Graphics+Fix.zip/file

Surely I'm not the only one who's playing Bronze Age; I have 21 settlements at the moment, but I'm sure there are people here who can beat that. In the meantime, here's my map, along with known blue-and-blue lands (scaled to 50% with ms paint) and the minimap:

Sadly, scaling ate all internal borders, but for convenience I added in borders between my five provinces (and my five yet-to-be-province settlements). Once I have more nobles, I can make more provinces: the two eastern forest settlements, the two settlements east of the southern river, and the southernmost settlement.

Shawn, when it's feasible I recommend adding another level of zoom-out for mapmaking purposes (or simply a map screenshot button).

EDIT: You probably guessed this right away (especially if you checked the minimap), but the eastmost navy blue settlement is not mine; it belongs to a one-settlement AI.

If I went for more compact land, it'd probably look less weird to me. Unfortunately, trying to be optimal (getting limestone, blocking rivals, avoiding being blocked, and now maximizing province size) tends to make my land look like a gerrymandering victim (see the eastmost area in the above pic), especially with river/mountain gaps.

For the curious, the next three areas I took in the above game were north of the eastmost province, north of that (both to block the northeasterners), and south of the southmost province (to prevent me form being blocked). I finally started filling in gaps afterwards.

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I see two more potential issues:

(6) Since you can't own a big river, you can't build a bridge over it (which may or may not be your intention, given how long bridging some major rivers took; the first permanent bridge over the lower half of the Yangtze wasn't finished until 1957!).
(7) Since you're not officially adjacent to the other side of a big river, that may probably interfere with religion crossing the river, despite it being only a short ride away.

I apologize for my lack of posting; I've been sidetracked by other things.  I'm glad the governor shortage is finally over, but I've noticed five things that may or may not be bugs:

(1) Because big rivers are not considered part of a usable area, it's not possible to have a province cross them.  Historically, that wasn't an issue; for example, ancient egyptian nomes  were usually on both sides of the Nile. 
(2) If there are mountains next to a river, they're placed in the same area as the river, even though a mountain probably doesn't count as a river. ;)
(3) Every single chunk of mountains gets its own name, even if it's diagonal to another mountain or an individual mountain inside a flat area (Mightybronze Plain and Tallwall Fields are both mountains surrounded by the same area, Widebronze Fields).
(4) Because it's not possible to control individual mountains or big rivers, the minimap gives you a sliced-up swiss cheese look. If you've played the recent paradox games, you've noticed that if a country has a majority of the areas next to an unusable area, that area is colored with the player's color; I recommend doing something similar on the minimap (and, if needed, dividing big rivers into Upper Sneaky Stream, Middle Sneaky Stream, and Lower Sneaky Stream).
(5) If you have no tribes on the Known Tribes window (I found two, but both are separated by a big river, so technically not adjacent), all the words are crammed into the upper-left corner.

Here's an image with (most of) the issues.

I've noticed that only my levies reliably got maintenance; as a result, I decided on having standing armies of levies and, when needed, mass-recruiting stronger armies. They'd fill their purpose (defeating ghuls or crushing enemy armies) before they died to attrition, and times of peace generally last long enough for more recruitable units to appear.

UPDATE: It looks as if building a warehouse lets spearmen get the gold they need (if they camp on the city and, of course, I have enough goods); presumably that'd work for other units as well.

On a late note I'd like to confirm that yes, after playing long enough, 3.1.0 slows down for me. In my case it's mid-summer 1257, and multiple forces are expanding (the AI apparently like scattershot expansion). For reference, here's the minimap:

If you want the savegame (Hinome The Lands Of Choppin07.bwa), let me know.

EDIT: Somehow I missed the latest news (which recognized the slowdown) until just after this post. Still, the offer stands if you want to see the save game.

I have experience with small graphics, so I should have no problem creating an armored ghoul mod, but it's Shawn's decision whether he wants to do that or to take another direction.

I thought about that last night, actually; my idea is splitting ghouls into two types:

* Ghouls use the current graphics, but weak stats (say, on par with levies). They'd form Ghoul Lord leaders who have lower stats (maybe half the current Ghoul King stats).
* Armored Ghouls would be ghouls in run-down armor (broken leather, green copper/bronze,). They'd have the stats and leaders that current ghouls have, but would not show up until a certain amount of time passes in the game.

Fortunately, since they work the same, 90% of the coding is already there.

Bug report 1: The AI thinks building a trade yard is a high priority, even over removing ruins. Furthermore, building trade yards seems to be a higher priority in 3.1.0 than in 3.0.0. As a result, the AI can wind up being ruins collectors:

Bug report 2: The AI is poor at waging war. In the above screenshot's game, even as a ghoul unit was creating ruins, the white-outline force sent a single levy unit to try and defeat their northernmost province's lion nest. They're also more than willing to send  a clearly insufficient force to attack a ghoul unit (levy only, equal or inferior numbers).

EDIT: Just after that image I took the empty land northeast of white-outline (carpe diem!) and exchanged maps with the blue-purple just northwest of white outline... who has four more ghoul units causing problems. Therefore...

Bug report 3: As of 3.1.0, the AI cannot handle ghouls.

LATE EDIT: I've seen that the AI obsessions vary. Sometimes they really want trade posts, sometimes they really want farms, but on multiple occasions I've seen an AI build the same building over and over in the same territory.

I've noticed in the previous version that the game slows down if the following three things are true:

(1) A city gets too large (in my case, 356 people)
(2) Optimized Tile Drawing is disabled.
(3) You mouse over a business in the big city.

I have not seen as problem with general empire growth (my current game has 683 people over 10 settlements; then again, AI incompetence means three ghoul armies are giving the AI trouble).

Have you tried a game on the 50x50 map? A small map with fewer AIs may help.

With ghouls, you want to hit them early and hit them hard. If needed, swarm them with multiple armies.

Remember, if even a single ghoul gets away, they can eventually become a full unit.