Tickets 250–345: a cylindrical world, planning into the fog, perks & identity, and a hostile new neighbor

The world became a cylinder

The map used to have hard east and west edges. This arc turned it into a seamless east-west cylinder — the biggest single change to how the board works in a while. Most of the numbered work below is invisible plumbing (movement, fog, combat range, spawns, rendering, and the camera all had to learn that the edges are joined); the payoff is the last two.

• 255 Consolidated the game's scattered hex-distance and neighbor math into one shared module with wrap-capable primitives — the foundation everything below builds on.
• 256–258 Taught the movement core, then fog, combat range, city spacing, AI, trade distance, and spawn placement to treat the map as a cylinder — all still switched off behind a flag.
• 259–260 Reworked the renderer, camera, interaction, overlays, and minimap to draw and scroll a wrapping world, with tiles appearing on both sides of the seam.
• 261 Flipped the switch: new games now wrap east-to-west by default, so you can circumnavigate the world.
• 262 Killed the visible seam — terrain is regenerated with periodic noise so continents flow continuously across the wrap instead of stopping at a wall.
• 272 Fixed tile-selection highlights (buy-tile, improvement placement, attack reticle) so they render correctly across the seam.
• 278–279 Made trade-route lines both draw and path correctly across the seam, so a route around the back of the world is found and priced by its true shortest way.

Better places to begin

• 253 Overhauled starting placement into a scored algorithm that favors resource-rich, near-coast tiles and spreads players apart, instead of dropping them in map corners.
• 254 In larger games, players are now distributed across multiple continents — adding a naval exploration phase to the early game.
• 251–252 Under the hood: resources now place before spawns, and the terrain debugger gained a spawn-simulation mode to measure placement quality across many seeds.

Planning into the fog

You can now give a unit an order to somewhere you haven't actually seen yet — and the game plans a sensible best-guess route without cheating by revealing hidden terrain.

• 263–264 A fog-aware pathfinder that plans over what you've explored, treating the unknown as passable, and shows you a best-guess route into unexplored territory.
• 265–266 Units ordered into the fog now actually travel toward the target each turn, revealing terrain and re-routing around obstacles they couldn't have foreseen — and the client distinguishes a guessed route from a known one.
• 268 Fixed auto-garrison so a unit only stops in a friendly city when that city is its final destination, not when it's merely passing through.
• 269–271 The game now remembers foreign cities and their borders after they leave your sight, drawn dimmed on both the main map and the minimap to read as "last seen here," not "gone."

Seeing the battlefield

• 299 Forests now conceal the units standing in them and give woods-style vision behavior.
• 300 Units holding a Mountain tile gain a high-ground vision bonus that lasts until they leave.
• 301 Mountains now block line of sight — the game's first true LOS system, occluding your view of whatever sits behind a peak.
• 297–298 Added the Canal: a buildable improvement that, chained across a land isthmus, becomes a naval channel your fleets can traverse.

Perks: tech, government, and something special

A whole new axis of progression. You spend science and culture on state-wide perks, and a third "Special" class of perks is granted rather than bought — the seed for identity and reward systems further down.

• 288 Two new buildings: the Library (science) and the Palace, a one-per-state capital building (culture).
• 289–290 The perk-system foundation, then live yields: Tech and Government perks now take effect, recomputed each turn so they retroactively boost every qualifying city.
• 292 The interactive Tech and Government modals, where you spend science and culture to buy those perks.
• 291 The "trade mules" perk lets your trade routes path straight through mountains.
• 294, 296 The HUD rate and its tooltip now fold in perk bonuses, so income stops under-reporting.
• 307–310 Added the Special perk class — nine to start — including three yield perks and two that grant your land or naval units +1 movement.
• 314, 317–318 Special perks are now legible: the modal lists what you own, and city yield and growth views attribute their effects instead of showing only the base numbers.

Name your State

• 311–312 A start-of-game modal where each player names their State, picks a color, and chooses a starting Special perk — required before you can ready up.
• 313 Your chosen State name is now your identity across the whole UI, falling back to your username where it isn't set.
• 315 The Players window shows both account and State: "[username] - [State name]".
• 316 Color choices reserve live, so the moment someone picks a color everyone else sees it as taken.

Villages, heroes, and neutral wanderers

New things to find on the map, not just build. Tribal villages hand out perks; Vaults spawn one-of-a-kind Hero units that stand neutral until a player draws close enough to claim them.

• 319–321 Tribal Villages ("goodie huts"): map-spawned tiles you collect by ending a move on them, each offering a pick-one-of-three Special perk reward via a stackable modal.
• 329 The Vault — a rare map-spawned tile that acts as a fixed spawn point for Heroes.
• 330, 333 A neutral-ownership mechanic: white-bannered units owned by no one, inert and invulnerable, that convert to your State when your unit comes within two tiles (a tie between players leaves them neutral).
• 331–332 Three uncraftable Hero unit types that spawn on Vaults as neutrals on a randomized schedule.
• 334–335 Garrisoning certain Heroes in a city grants yields — Tim Alien gives science and production, the Golden Goose gives gold — and those bonuses now show in the city yield breakdown.
• 336–337 Units read by their proper display name (e.g. "Mr. Zippy") everywhere, and Heroes can now be loaded into transports like the Trireme.
• 326–328 The Sacrificial Altar unlocks a Sacrifice project — paid in a new spendable culture production cost — that grants the same pick-one-of-three perk reward.

Pillage, and a hostile new neighbor

Improvements can now be burned — and someone out there wants to burn yours. The Raider is the game's first properly aggressive computer opponent.

• 338 Pillaging: attacking a tile's built improvement damages it, and at zero HP it becomes pillaged — its yields switch off and the attacker collects a gold bounty.
• 339 Pillage attacks are issuable and legible in the client, with proper targeting and combat feedback on defender-less improvement tiles.
• 340 A Repair production item that restores a pillaged improvement and re-applies its yields.
• 341 Pillaged improvements render as damaged — dimmed, with a "pillaged" overlay.
• 342 The Raider: a hostile, dark-red computer player whose Heroes spawn on Vaults and can't be claimed like ordinary neutrals.
• 343 Raider AI — its units now hunt and pillage, pathing toward your improvements and attacking them each turn.
• 344 Fix: Raiders were deadlocking by sitting on top of a target; they now pillage from an adjacent tile instead of trying to attack their own square.
• 345 Hover any enemy unit to get a tooltip with its owner and combat stats (HP, Movement, Attack) — scouting a threat no longer means engaging it blind.

Economy, score & production

• 276–277 Units now cost per-turn upkeep (Archers eat wood, Spearmen eat gold), and the HUD's rate subtracts that upkeep to show your true net change.
• 281–282 "Laurels" became "Score" everywhere it's visible, and gained two new categories — Population and Military — tracked as peak-ever high-watermarks.
• 283–284 Settlers now cost escalating population per city (1, 2, 3, …) to stop one city endlessly pumping them out — and that cost recalculates correctly when you reorder the queue.
• 285 The Trade modal opens straight to routes, and buying Wealth Score moved into the Score modal as a single button.
• 280 A reusable stacking alert system, first used to announce when a Merchant finishes building.
• 324–325 A new "Projects" build class — work a city does that yields neither a unit nor an improvement — with the Merchant reclassified into it and a Projects tab restoring it to players.
• 250 The Golden Platypus, a third one-per-state Wonder built by upgrading a city's Monument in place.

Under the hood

A run of internal work with no direct in-game face, but it kept the codebase legible as all of the above landed: a shared state-revision helper (302), splits of the oversized worldgen, overlay, and targeting modules (303–304, 274–275), a unified client API result helper across 19 call sites (305), engineering-model and perk/trade documentation reconciliations (273, 293, 306), and an admin password-reset CLI for the self-hosted server (267).