July 1, 2026 — Dev Log — Cities and States

The last stretch had two headline stories. The first: the game can now play itself. An automated agent — driven by an LLM — joins a game, reads a compact digest of the state, and takes real turns, which turns out to be the fastest way we have to shake out bugs and imbalances. The second: we tore down the trade system we'd just built. The Ethereal Banker and the roaming Merchant looked good on paper but played badly, so trade was rebuilt from scratch around abstract, point-to-point trade routes. Along the way: passable mountains, the first proper wonders, a mini-map, a map-lens framework, and a clearer read on where a city's yields actually come from.

An automated player

205 An honest HTTP client for the agent — it talks to the running server over the same API a human client uses, no back doors.
206 A state digest plus a legal-action enumerator: the agent gets a compact summary of what it can see and an explicit list of the moves actually available to it this turn.
207 A baseline scripted policy and a turn loop — the skeleton that takes a turn, ends it, waits for resolution, and goes again.
208 The agent joins an existing game by id as an ordinary participant; it never creates or hosts, so you stay in control of the match.
209 Fix: the harness was racing through turns because it treated a bump in the state-revision counter as "the turn resolved." It now waits on the actual turn number to advance.
210 The LLM-driven policy — the agent's decisions are made by a language model (Haiku, over the raw Messages API) rather than a fixed script.
211 Production choices are annotated with turns-to-complete and whether an item grants more production, so the agent can reason about build order.
212 A strategy document wired into the model's context, encoding production-priority build rules — the tuning surface for how the bot plays.
213 The agent can now target specific tiles for tile-improvement build orders, not just pick what to build but where.

Mountains you can actually use

214 Mountains become passable terrain with a procedural Mountain improvement — they're no longer just impassable wall tiles.
215 The Mountain Pass — a cheap, player-buildable crossing that makes a mountain range a route you can invest in opening.
216 Movement smarts: units route around mountain tiles they can't afford to cross, and mountains are valid move targets rather than silently rejected clicks.

Wonders & build limits

217 One-per-city and one-per-state build limits for tile improvements — some things you can have everywhere, some only once per city, some only once in your whole nation.
218 The first true wonders: the Colossus and the Pyramids — one-per-state, built as same-tile upgrades, and payable with a new gold_cost cost type.
219 A cross-city scan when you enqueue a one-per-state improvement, so the limit is enforced across your whole empire, not just the current city's queue.
220 Per-improvement display scale — wonders now render larger on the map, so they read as the landmarks they're meant to be.

Laurels grow a wealth track

221 The Ethereal Banker's UI is shelved — the button is hidden while the backend stays parked. The market-maker we shipped last month didn't earn its complexity in play; more on that below.
222 Wealth Laurels — a new prestige category you buy directly with gold, via a dedicated Buy-Laurel screen. A concrete way to spend a treasury on standing.
230 The Buy-Laurel "Buy" button restyled to match the rest of the UI.
247 Wonders read as a Laurel in the production preview pane, labelled and marked with the laurel-wreath icon, tying the two systems together visually.

Trade, take two: from merchants to routes

We first built trade around a Merchant unit that physically walked a route and an Ethereal Banker that market-made exchange rates. In play it was fiddly and hard to read, so the second half of this arc replaces the walking-merchant model with abstract trade routes: you commit capacity, the route runs itself, and the map just shows you the flow. The early tickets below are the first version; from 232 on is the rebuild.

223 The Merchant — a civilian unit, gated on owning a Market, costing gold and production. superseded
224 First trade-route data model and a "Create Trade Route" establishment flow. reworked
225 Patrol-movement and the gold economy for a walking route, run in the resolution engine. reworked
226 Map visualization: the route line, its earnings, and in-transit transparency.
227 The Trade modal's "Trade with other players" path — a routes list and deal-screen chrome.
228 A green/red valid-target highlight when you're in "Create Trade Route" targeting mode.
229 Replaced the browser alert() on route creation with proper in-app success feedback.
231 Trade-route gold folded into the HUD gold rate, with a tooltip splitting city income from route income.
232 The rebuild begins — a new schema with a capacity counter and an abstract route lifecycle, no unit on the board.
233 Building a trade unit now adds to a city's route capacity instead of spawning a merchant to shepherd around.
234 A menu-based create/cancel API with a discovery-gated candidate list — you can only route to places you've actually found.
235 The resolution engine gains dynamic path recompute, route dormancy, and expiry — routes react when the map between their endpoints changes.
236 An interim earnings rebalance that caps the distance gradient, so very long routes stop paying out absurdly.
237 The Trade Routes screen rebuilt around the new model: a capacity bucket, a candidate picker, and your active routes.
238 Docs reconciled and the superseded trade tickets swept, so the record matches what actually shipped.
239 Purged the orphaned board-merchant references left over from the redesign.
240 Fix: the route discovery gate now honors fog-off games, where the "places you've found" memory is intentionally empty.
241 Fix: dormant (blockaded) routes correctly read 0 in gold-per-turn displays instead of showing phantom income.

Seeing the whole board

242 A mini-map in the top-right corner — a strategic overview of the whole map at a glance.
243 A lens-system foundation: a toggle framework for overlaying different kinds of information on the map.
244 The trade-route lens — the first consumer of that framework, lighting up your routes on demand.
245 Map-size presets as a lobby setting, so hosts can pick the scale of the match.
246 Continent-structure tuning for the non-Standard map sizes — in progress, so the new presets generate good-looking land at every scale.