《Open Doctrines》1.3.1b 更新：手机端可运行、引入战争迷雾与新地图

Hello strategists!

Two things in this one. The browser build plays on a phone, which a lot of you asked for by trying it and watching the tab die. And a world can be made where nobody sees the whole map — including the AI.

You can play it on a phone

The world map is one image, 8,192 by 4,096 pixels, and a phone browser ran out of memory holding it next to everything drawn from it. Two smaller problems rode along: black maps, and an interface zoomed in too far to use.

Those two are fixed outright. For the memory there is a new switch — Settings → Experimental → Risky RAM — holding the map in a compact form a quarter of the size, and an iPhone then loads the full world, all 1,642 provinces. Only the GIF timelapse and turn rewind still want the full image, and the switch says so. It is called “Risky” on purpose: it is new, and we would rather you knew that than found out.

Fog of war

Settings → Experimental → Fog of War worlds, then tick it on a map’s info (“i”) popup.

You see your own provinces and a ring around them, wherever your armies stand, the sea off your coasts, what your ships can see, and what your allies lend you — one hop; an ally’s ally lends you nothing. Everything else is remembered as it was when last seen. A province taken behind the front stays the old colour until somebody goes and looks.

A ninth research tab opens: coastwatchers, radar, reconnaissance, codebreakers, counter-intelligence. From a foreign profile you can plant a spy network, which shows you every province they hold for six turns, or steal their dossier, which opens their books. Both cost money and can fail, and a failure is noticed — far enough into counter-intelligence and the target is told whose spies they were. The diplomats remember that about you.

Two things before you start one. History, the timelapse and turn rewind are off in a fog world: all three replay the truth, which is the entire thing the fog hides. And the AI plays a little weaker there — it is held to the same fog, but the model that ships with this was trained on worlds where it could see everything. Retraining it is the next job.

In multiplayer the host holds the truth and each seat is sent only its own world. Nothing is broadcast, and spectators cannot join a fog world at all.

A new scenario: The Last Summer

August 1990. The Wall is down, the Warsaw Pact is a signature on a dead treaty, and the Soviet Union still covers a sixth of the land. East Germany has six weeks left. The Baltics have declared an independence Moscow has not granted. Iraq is in Kuwait. Three fuses lit at once and none of them gone off.

The fixes

Forts always cost full price. Somebody asked here why Cost Efficiency did not make forts cheaper. It did — everywhere except the button they were using — and Fortress Doctrine was making them 14% dearer. Forts are not industry.
Wars stop grinding into a stalemate the map never showed. A wide front was scored like an opening blow. Switzerland no longer eats France.
A research group you drop keeps your current pick.
Letters cross the network, so a server answers mail and an advisor on the far end can reply.
The mod directory lists newer mods again.
Campaigns act for their whole run, not one turn in fourteen. (GitHub #16.)

One bug worth the whole section

A player failing to join saw the server did not complete the handshake in time. The server was fine. There were two handshake timeouts, in two files, under the same name: the client waited twenty seconds for a reply, the server dropped anything unfinished after ten. The client’s second ten seconds could never help, and it blamed the peer for a deadline the peer had enforced.

When both ends of a protocol keep their own copy of the same limit, the error message will tell you about the wrong one.

For modders, and the launcher

Gearbox 1.4: sixty-two new imports, nothing renamed, a 1.3 mod runs unchanged. Fog is in it for mods and map scripts alike, and on a map without fog it answers as though the world were visible, so there is no special case to write. Monuments, the goods economy, sector taxes and nationalisation too.

Unifico 0.1.1 notices achievements within seconds instead of when you next open the page, and stops burning a frame rate when nobody is looking. Still optional.

What is not finished

The AI does not build monuments, and plays weaker in fog until retrained. The fort change is not benchmarked — eight doctrines’ AIs now pay more for forts and nine pay less, so which way it moves them is unmeasured. Steam is still not published; that waits on account verification, not on the game.