CBP Alpha 11 Patch Notes

This is a medium-to-large sized patch, though the majority of its gameplay changes are individually not that significant.

This patch is especially unique in that a large portion of its gameplay changes rely on hardcoded changes – earlier in the year I had a stretch of a week-and-change where I could tunnel vision on hardcoded work without interruption, which is exactly the environment needed to figure out how complex stuff works and how to change it.

Patch contents

• Balance changes: medium
• Bugfixes: medium for multiplayer-only; high if including CtW fixes
• Enhancements: medium

TECHNICAL CHANGES

Most of these were already shipped out early in the post-Alpha-10 tech updates so aren’t strictly new, but are noted here nonetheless.

CBP Setup / CBP Setup GUI / CBP Launcher

• Updated dependencies and migrated from .NET Framework 4.7.2 to .NET Framework 4.8 (should slightly improve performance).¹
  • Windows users playing CBP should have support for this version without needing to download anything new (can’t speak for Linux/other users).

CBP Setup

• Basically the same as CBP Setup GUI, but with the UI completely stripped out.
• CBP Setup now replaces CBP Setup GUI as the updater for CBP Launcher.
  • Not having to load a GUI for this step makes it complete faster.
  • In case of any issues, a basic debugging log is saved to /Rise of Nations/CBP/CBPSetup_log.txt if that path can be accessed, otherwise to the location where CBP Setup is being run from in situations where that path can’t be accessed. Note that this is only a simple logging process, and so the logging itself may fail in cases of catastrophic errors.²

CBP Setup GUI / CBP Setup

• Changed default consent settings to automatically complete most steps without explicitly asking the user for confirmation (user can still override this setting to require manual approval to make any changes).
• Replaced the statically staggered delays when checking for CBP Launcher with a dynamic loop (reduces user waiting times).
• Now includes a warning for Linux users about not being officially supported (though it still generally works).

CBP Launcher

• Completed long-time work on converting a lot of stuff to run asynchronously, with most loading deferred until after the launcher has already started up.³ This significantly improves startup times and makes the launcher feel more responsive because common loading operations no longer cause the UI to freeze up.
  • Added a rad loading spinner while the bulk of the loading is occurring.
  • The mouse cursor now also switches to a spinner while stuff is loading.
• Overhauled the way that the RoN path is found, including no longer blindly trusting the registry entry (it’s often wrong in the case of reinstalls etc) – it should now be very rare for the path to not be found.
  • If you’re one of a handful of users that have been stuck manually inputting the path each time (sorry!), the bug where the manually-input path wasn’t being saved should be fixed.
• Replaced the fixed staggered delays when checking for RoN startup with a dynamic loop (reduces user waiting times).
• When no internet connection can be established, the warning about not having the latest version downloaded is now automatically skipped.
• Added checksum for RoN exes modified to be LAA using the NTCore “4GB Patch” utility.⁴
• Added explicit font fallbacks, which should have no effect on Windows users but should un-fuck most of the janky font rendering for most Linux users.
• Added a second Workshop button on the “Other..” tab which opens the same link in Steam directly rather than in the default web browser (I was surprised to find out how many people aren’t logged into Steam in their browsers).
• Fixed visual mismatch of selected tab when switching skins.
• Attempted to fix a migration from a very old previously-used CBP installation.⁵
• Disabled plugin security warning (since plugins are deprecated anyway).
  • I then went back and hid the plugins tab entirely 🫠.
• Raising the white flag to insane users, removed the ability to bypass the lockout on running CBP Launcher from the Steam Workshop folder by typing “I agree” after being given a clear and unambiguous warning that this was not what normal users should be doing.
• Added additional logging to provide more information in the log file when troubleshooting problems with users.
• Added a user notification when the default launcher is changed to CBP Launcher.
• Added a proper pressed-down sprite to the “primary” buttons in the launcher, replacing the previous simple cyan tint when pressed down.
• Fixed an issue where a voluntary setting reset (upon triggering reinstall detection) wasn’t closing CBP Launcher despite saying it did.
• Improved some messages to be more user-friendly (less dev/debug focused).
• Changed the color of the link to the full patch notes on the “Classic Plus” (dark) skin.
• Changed the patch notes link from the latest patch notes to a page with all published patch notes.
• Removed a fuckton (technical term) of unused legacy code.
• Other misc minor bugfixes, refactorings, and other changes to improve performance and/or improve maintainability and/or improve UX etc.

GAMEPLAY CHANGES

• [H] denotes changes relying on hardcoded changes to function.
• [h] denotes changes that look like they would be just softcoded, but actually also rely on hardcoded changes to function properly.⁶

Decaying line of sight bonus at start of nomad games

• [H] In games with “Nomad” as the “Start With” game setting, units at game start now receive a temporary line of sight bonus that decays over time:⁷
  • +4 LoS for 5 seconds, decaying to..
  • +3 LoS for 10 seconds, decaying to..
  • +2 LoS for 15 seconds, decaying to..
  • +1 LoS for 20 seconds.

Nomad games are highly vulnerable to bad starting locations leading to unbalanced games, but this is complicated by the fact that spending too long scouting for a good location — and building late as a consequence — also puts players very behind. The sweatiest min-maxed meta seems to be to scout minimally (to build quickly) and then resign if your starting location is unviably weak because your chance of winning without e.g., usable wood is too low. In other words: too much RNG.

The best way I’ve been able to think of to address the situation is to give starting Citizens in nomad games (and only nomad games) a decaying line of sight bonus at the start of the game, allowing players to find viable starting locations more quickly but encouraging them to not take too long to do so (hence the decay). This doesn’t solve bad RNG on your starting location, but should dampen its effects significantly.

Game time	Active LoS bonus	Duration of bonus
0:00	+4	5s
0:05	+3	10s
0:15	+2	15s
0:30	+1	20s
0:50	0	–

Note that the visible LoS difference for linear values does not seem to be linear.⁸ For example, on Citizens the +1 LoS bonus seems pretty negligible, but the difference between +1 and +2 is comparatively massive.⁹

By focusing the main bonus in the first 30 seconds, players should be strongly encouraged to not delay their first city too much, but the extra LoS will also usually allow them to find a good city spot within that time that would’ve previously taken a full minute or more to find.

The visuals of the higher LoS take a second or two to kick in at game start because implementation-wise it was significantly easier to adjust the LoS at game start (after loading screen) rather than during game setup.

• The first city in Nomad games is built in 200% of normal time -> 225% of normal time.

A decaying line of sight bonus accidentally pressures the player to Ruin-scout a little while the bonus is active instead of building their city with all Citizens. This pressure has been lessened somewhat by making the bonus decay non-linearly. This is then being further offset by slowing down the first city build time from 200% to 225% of the base build time value, which increases the opportunity cost of prematurely scouting, thus adding counter-pressure to avoid spending extra time scouting instead of building.¹⁰

While players playing and watching(!) CBP Pre-Release 4 games (where an earlier version of this change was tested) have liked the decaying LoS bonus, there was basically no feedback on the balance tuning, so the implementation in Alpha 11 is my current best guess at juggling between the various factors involved and — as always — is subject to change based on better insights and player feedback.

Rares

• [H] Copper increases HP of Factory and Dock units by +20% -> reduces cost of Dock units by 8%, military buildings by 12%.

Copper is being reworked. As it stands its only real value on pure land maps is as a potential source of metal, yet it’s potentially so valuable on sea maps that its bonus HP value had to be balanced around having slightly tankier ships. However, even at low values, the HP bonus felt frustrating to play against because it causes most mirrored naval fights to be won-by-default by the player with Copper (e.g., in a 1v1 between two heavy ships, the player with Copper just wins). This left it in a bad spot on both land maps (too weak) and sea maps (feels bad to play against unless nerfed into the ground), with no good path to resolve either issue, let alone both issues.

Reworking the bonus while simultaneously splitting its values (a bit like Marble) lets it provide a meaningful bonus even on purely land maps, while still maintaining some of its “good on sea maps” heritage but avoiding the mirror-matchup issue. Unfortunately I just don’t see a good way to balance Copper that doesn’t involve a rework of its bonus, so this is one of the few times where CBP has to implement a change that deviates more significantly from the original gameplay in order to achieve good gameplay.¹¹

• [h] Marble reduces cost of Wonders by 12%, other non-military buildings by 6% -> 8%.

Marble is getting a small followup to Alpha 10’s implementation, reverting it to the “original” value that was implemented in the Pre-Releases prior to Alpha 10’s release. My reason for originally dialing it back in Alpha 10 is still valid, but I think it’s more important to prioritize typical games than a hardcore boom-fest edge case where Marble gives disproportionate discounts. During the most important part of most games, the “expensive” economic buildings like Granaries are only being built in small numbers (per building type), keeping ramping costs down, and therefore keeping the resource savings from Marble’s discount down.

So to make Marble more competitive during this more important part of most games, it gets its 8% back, and we’ll just live with the fact that if you fill out eco buildings in late game it provides higher economic impact than most other rares.

Governments / Patriots

These changes are focused primarily on Age IV governments / patriots.

• [H] RoN/T&P bugfix: Forage / Logistics / Supply increase the craft of Supply Wagons (and red Patriots) by 1000 / 2000 / 3000 -> don’t affect Supply Wagon craft.
• Patriot base craft 1000 -> 1000 / 1500 / 2000 (for Age II / IV / VI Patriots).

Patriots’ craft had an undocumented “feature” of being boosted by supply/forage techs, but it turns out this was probably a bug leftover from when Supply Wagons actually used craft¹² as a resource earlier in the game’s development. However, having Patriots gain craft over the course of the game is also not necessarily bad gameplay-wise, so the mechanic is being adapted rather than completely removed. This adaptation also helps to make the green Patriots in IV and VI feel a bit better to use compared to their craft-spamming red Patriot brethren.

• [H] new: Monarchy increases Patriot craft by 50% (regardless of current government).
• Partial revert: Monarchy reduces cost and increases production speed of Stable / Auto Plant units by 15% -> 20%.

Monarchy gains some intentional symmetry with Democracy. While the latter boosts the craft of Generals,¹³ Monarchy now focuses that extra craft on just the Patriot. This bonus is coming from the government tech, not the Patriot units, so this will still apply to The CEO / The Comrade even once you switch to Capitalism or Socialism in VI.

I’ve known for a long time that with unit damage working as intended (and especially with Age IV HI no longer being completely shafted in their base cost), Monarchy was over-nerfed in early versions of CBP. The issue was that Democracy was always too weak on land maps to support Monarchy getting power back, and Monarchy awkwardly out-scaled Democracy due to tank-spam being a key part of late-Age combat.

With Democracy buffed a little and tanks being weakened slightly due to both late-game LI no longer dealing (effectively) zero-to-negative damage to them and late-game HI being buffed, Monarchy can get some of its lost power back. The goal is for both Democracy + The President and Monarchy + The Monarch to be generally viable. Whether we’re there or not is hard to say, but this is probably the closest we’ve ever been.

• [H] Experimental: Democracy now provides +3 border push (in addition to existing bonuses).¹⁴

Democracy gets a little bit of immediate power focused on land maps without making it even stronger than it already was on sea maps — and in a way that keeps its defensive/booming identity (+border isn’t that useful for an offensive military focus). +3 isn’t hugely impactful, but it is at least a visible difference in IV. Due to how borders get calculated a small flat bonus doesn’t scale particularly well into late game, but Democracy might be overall strong enough now to leave it alone and move onto other balance issues.

As with the border bonuses from Gems / Colosseum / Eiffel Tower, Democracy’s border push is halved(ish) for Russians.

Heavy Infantry (esp. Age IV)

• Heavy Infantry in Age IV base cost 50/40 -> 50/30.
  • Spanish Tercios (IV) base cost 50/50 -> 50/40¹⁵
  • New World CtW-only Portugese Bandeirantes base cost 60/30 -> 60/20.
• Revert: Arquebusiers (IV) temporary damage modifier vs Heavy Infantry -4% -> 0%.

Heavy Infantry in IV are the victims of a BHG design decision that all units in Age IV should cost more regardless of whether their stats drastically improve (like Arquebusiers) or not (like Elite Pikemen). For cases like the latter, this introduces confusion over whether upgrading to the more expensive unit is better than just continuing to build cheaper units and can require some mid-game spreadsheet calculations to make the optimal decision.

In early CBP releases, a halfway point was taken for Elite Pikemen while evaluating whether to fully revert their “arbitrary” cost increase. That decision has now been made, so their cost is coming down and the minor temporary damage change is being removed.

• Arquebusiers (IV) bonus damage vs Heavy Infantry 0% -> 10%.¹⁶

So it turns out that having cheap, spammable high stat units that have good matchups against both buildings and most units causes some balance issues. Musketeers (V) already receive a +20% bonus against Heavy Infantry for balance reasons, so Arquebusiers (IV) are getting half of the existing bonus one age early to help prevent HI from being overly dominant in IV.

Age IV is uniquely advantageous for HI because their main counter (Foot Archers) is phasing out, and the next best thing (Gunpowder Infantry) are far more expensive. Military units (mostly) cap at a fully ramped cost that’s 225% their base case, causing 180-cost HI to face off against 292-cost GI. At the same time the units which HI counter — melee cavalry — are (often) more powerful thanks to Monarchy/Monarch, making HI more valuable on both ends of their matchups. On top of this their high base armor benefits disproportionately from getting +4 armor from Operations.

Players who tend to just lazily attack-move their entire army may find that HI are now very cost-efficient in Age IV. Players who know how to not treat their ranged units like melee units can educate them on why HI spam still doesn’t beat a more balanced army composition.

• Age II-IV Heavy Infantry HP growth per age 25 -> 22.

This is related to the above changes but is also being done partly independently. Basically HI are slightly too effective when they’re massed in II-IV for basically the same reasons mentioned above. Reducing HP for a melee unit is a generic nerf which I think is what’s needed here – they’re not just too strong in one specific matchup.

In Age I this isn’t such a problem because Foot Archers are more powerful in I (due to official anti-rush buffs), HI are less effective against buildings (due to official anti-rush nerfs), HI are more expensive (due to no Metal), there are no melee cavalry to lethally threaten enemy Foot Archers (Slingers only have low-lethality pressure), and nobody has the resources to fully ramp unit costs (making their slightly cheaper base cost less impactful).

Age	Unit	HP (CBP Alpha 11)
Age I	Hoplites	120 (unchanged)
Age II	Phalanx	142 (-3)
Age III	Pikemen	164 (-6)
Age IV	Elite Pikemen	186 (-9)
Age V	Fusiliers	200 (unchanged)

Age II unit upgrades (esp. LI)

• Experimental: Unit upgrades in Age II cost 200% of base unit cost -> 150% of base unit cost.

In standard, it’s usually a trap to upgrade units in Age II and upgrades are almost universally skipped until Age III. When you have very few units it’s far better to add more units than to make existing units moderately more powerful and then have to pay to upgrade them again in a few minutes anyway. In nomad (very expensive and slow tech) it can be a bit of a tossup whether it’s worth upgrading or not.

This cost reduction isn’t significant enough to fundamentally change either of these two situations most of the time, but should increase the proportion of times when upgrading is not a trap by making it more clear that if you’re able to fight you should consider upgrading.

• Light Infantry upgrade cost 150% of base unit cost (112% in Age II) -> 100% of base unit cost (75% in Age II).

Following up from the Light Infantry upgrade cost changes already in Alpha 10, their upgrade cost is being dialed down even further to make them more attractive without directly increasing the power of the units (which helps to prevent them from being strong as a massed unit).

German / Roman / Spanish General / Patriot bugs

• RoN / T&P bugfix: German / Roman / Spanish Generals and Patriots don’t have hotkeys for their special abilities -> have the same hotkeys as other nations.¹⁷
• RoN bugfix?: German / Roman / Spanish Generals are no longer missing the “b” flag which other Generals have.¹⁸
• T&P bugfix: German / Roman / Spanish Patriots when garrisoned inside a building don’t give +1 range and +1 attack strength -> do give +1 range and +1 attack strength.
• [H] “CBP” bugfix: German / Roman / Spanish Generals aren’t affected by Democracy’s craft increase -> are affected by Democracy’s craft increase.
• CBP tooltip bugs as a tradeoff:
  • Nations other than the above three now say that their Generals upgrade to Generals in their tooltips (but they don’t).
  • Auto-filled numerical values (like armor bonuses) in the tooltip for Generals don’t work correctly anymore; in the English localization I’ve hardcoded the values instead of auto-filling them but other localization will be missing numerical values.

Generals are a generic unit available to all nations without any inherent gameplay differences between them, but for flavor reasons these three nations have their own identical-stats version with a different appearance. The specific way that this (and the related game logic) has been implemented causes several issues for both them and these nations’ Patriots.

Due to development bandwidth constraints it makes more sense to prefer softcoded solutions instead of having to understand, modify, handwrite, and test hardcoded changes in assembly, but in this case doing so comes with negative cosmetic/text tradeoffs. Gameplay bugs are more important than cosmetic/text bugs so I consider this an acceptable tradeoff to make to save hours of developer time that can be spent on more important things, but in a perfect world we would just use a hardcoded fix.

See note for bug details:¹⁹

Spies

Fun fact: Spy nerfs were one of the highest priority changes in early versions of Alpha 10 circa late 2023. I backed off on them partly because nobody else — judging by in-game decisions — agreed that they were too strong, and so Alpha 10 ended up not touching them (beyond the cosmetic change that Jatin asked for).

While treating CBP Pre-Release 4 like CBP Alpha 10.5, players have finally started to abuse spies with some consistency, particularly in defensive play where the enemy melee units have to run into the Spies moreso than the reverse.²⁰

• Spy base cost 50/50 -> 60/60.
• Spy HP 15/45/90/150 -> 20/40/80/140.
• Spy production time 225 frames (15s) -> 240 frames (16s).
• [H] Tactics reduces production time of Generals and Spies by 50% (100% faster) -> 33% (50% faster).²¹
• Strategy reduces cost of Generals and Spies by 50% -> 33%.²²

Much of the situation with Spies can be explained pretty quickly by visualizing their cost against common high-value Bribe targets (these two units being representative of Heavy Cavalry and Tanks more generally).

Given even a 50% Bribe success rate, Spies are currently an extremely cost-effective augmentation to an army. Each successful bribe is effectively a slow ranged attack that one-shots an enemy unit of your choice and then also creates a unit of yours of the same type. This makes each successful Bribe a net +2 unit swing: they lose one, you gain one. Despite this, they’re often meaningfully cheaper than the units they’re most interested in bribing, making it cost-efficient not just to build them, but to spam them.

Until you get Fusiliers in V, to counter enemy melee cavalry you normally have to use melee units of your own, but Spies can do this from Age III using what’s effectively a ranged attack. Yet unlike other ranged attacks which will be subject to enemy armor and the focus-fire penalty reducing their damage, Bribe continues to scale perfectly linearly, ignoring both of these mechanics.

When they start out at 15 HP, Spies die in a single volley from Crossbowmen, which seems a bit excessive and makes them borderline unusable without Tactics. Giving them another +5 lets them survive the first volley and die in the second instead.

Because of the generous HP scaling (+30 / +45 / +60) which they have, combined with armor scaling and the focus-fire penalty, it’s often difficult to use ordinary troops to focus down enemy Spies in time to prevent Bribes from going off, and this problem gets harder the more Spies are being deployed simultaneously. Nudging the HP scaling down (+20 / +40 / +60) will make it slightly easier to kill each individual Spy, and since they’re already more expensive there’ll hopefully be less of them (allowing damage to be focused on fewer targets earlier). A specialist support unit shouldn’t be so successful when positioned like a frontline combat unit.

Unlike almost every other unit type which gets more expensive over time as capabilities improve (guns are more expensive than bows, etc), Spies become better units through upgrades and then researching Strategy makes them cheaper, making them even more cost-favorable to spam in the late game against the more capable but more expensive late game units.²³ Even with both the base cost increase and nerf of Strategy’s cost reduction, the cost of adding several Spies to your army still looks very favorable.

On top of this, Tactics makes them quick to produce, making producing your entire spy corps from a single Fort often a non-issue. Even with a small nerf to both base production time and the reduction from Tactics, Spies are still faster to produce than most other units once you have that researched.

Unit	Base production time in frames (seconds)
Spy (<a11)	225 (15s)
Spy (a11)	240 (16s) (+15 (+1s))
Spy (with <a11 Tactics)	113 (7.5s)
Spy (with a11 Tactics)	160 (10.7s) (+47 (+3.2s))
Hoplites (I)	188 (12.5s)
Slingers (I)	150 (10s)
Crossbowmen (III)	169 (11.3s)
Arquebusiers (IV)	169 (11.3s)
Light Horse (II)	175 (11.7s)
Cataphract (II)	245 (16.3s)

Now, the intuitive answer to all of this is that Scouts can kill Spies and are cheaper (40/40 base cost, with the same 10/10 ramping cost). Both of these things is factually true, but this perspective misses a couple of important contextual points.

First is that Spies can choose their targets, and this can also be done as a group to significantly cut down on the micro required to pull it off (whereas a group of Scouts would have to be individually spread around to protect an entire army). The defending player can of course guess where Spies are most likely to come from, but they don’t actually know. Say it’s Age III and you have an army of 20 combat units of mixed composition, guarded by 3 Scouts (optionally, Explorers). A fight breaks out – your ranged units are starting to fire on incoming enemy melee units, and your melee units are moving in to engage them. Where do you place your Scouts to reliably block >50% of enemy Bribes?

If you distribute your Scouts to one each out of front/left/right, then having a group of Spies coming from one of these sides will overwhelm your single Scout, and there’s a good chance the Spies will be able to pull off a >=50% bribe rate. But if you group up your Scouts at any of the three sides, then the majority (2/3) of the sides is now open to a hit from Spies – and unlike your Scouts which your opponent will be able to see moving into position, Spies can be held back outside of reveal range before sending them where they’ll be most effective.

That was the tactical/micro lens, but the problem is mirrored when looking through the strategic/macro lens. The player building Scouts doesn’t know how many to build, because unless you’re camping all of your opponents forts with active detector surveillance (or you manage to Informer a Fort), the number of enemy Spies is unknown. If you don’t build enough Scouts to bring the Bribe rate to a low level, then the Spies “win”. If you build too many Scouts and the opponent doesn’t actually use many Spies, then they actually also “win”, because they’ve made you spend more resources countering them than they themselves used. You have to somehow do a perfect Goldilocks roleplay and get the number just right, but blindly.

Both of these basically boil down to “initiative”, where the Spy-using player has a major advantage over the player on the receiving end.

I actually personally think there’s a good chance Spies are still too strong after these changes (in the context of players both using and countering them reasonably effectively – which admittedly is not what I usually see played out in real games), but we’ll start here and see what actually ends up happening in-game.²⁴

• Spy Bribe time is halved by Strategy -> World Government.

When Bribe times are halved, it’s almost a given that Bribes will complete on enemy units even if Spies are both being revealed and focus-fired by anything except machine guns. This breaks late-game balance and makes it virtually impossible to participate in large-scale land combat without bringing The CEO along to block the Bribes (which in turn breaks Age VI government / patriot balance).

Pushing this perk to a future tech (where things are “allowed” to be crazy powerful and kind of game-breaking) lets the mechanic stay in the game instead of being removed, and also provides World Government with some additional value beyond basically existing just for cheese strats.

• Spy Informer range 10/13/16/19 -> 10/12/14/16.

Informer’s range is something that I very rarely see abused, but with its upgraded range it’s possible to use Informer even on units that are actively guarded by detectors and still not be seen.

There’s an undocumented quirk of Informer where the range for it is huge, but then halved when used against buildings instead of units. Against buildings is how most players use it (netting them probably-9 range when fully upgraded), but using a 19-range Informer to risklessly scout your opponent’s forces from afar was seriously being slept on because most players seem to undervalue information-gathering.

• General base cost 80/80 -> 90/90.

Generals are mostly just catching a stray here – this is primarily a change for neatness (so that their Strategy-reduced cost becomes 60/60 post-nerf) rather than balance. Since Generals are rarely rushed (players have Patriots for that already) and aren’t built en masse, the balance implications are very minor, but it better follows conventions around unit costs attempting to be round numbers.

The original cost of Generals was decided before Patriots existed, so a 10/10 higher base cost is actually still discounted compared to the full 20/20 ramping cost that you would normally have to pay if the Patriot counted as a General.

This is also a minor nerf to melee unit spam since melee-centric comps are more reliant on chained Forced Marches to be effective – though at only an extra 10/10 cost, very minor.

Misc unit changes

Unrelated changes that didn’t fit neatly into any of the other groups.

• Revert: War Elephant (II) base cost 110/70 -> 120/70

Because fixed masks make early elephants overall weaker, Alpha 7 included a small base cost reduction to War Elephants (II) and a small ramping cost reduction to all elephants. While it’s still true that early elephants are generally weaker in CBP than EE, they’ve proven to still be viably strong in CBP.

The Alpha 7 changes focused a lot on their 1v1 potential. However, War Elephants are reasonably powerful in a formation with other units because RoN’s focus fire penalty makes it impossible to take them out quickly even with counter units, and in the meantime it’s able to waddle up to any enemy unit and fight it. Contrast this against other early cavalry units which have to be very wary of both HI (because of unit counters) and random potshots from ranged units (because of their low armor and HP pools).

They also compare situationally favorably to Foot Archers because they allow for high lethality against enemy HI, but without the extreme vulnerability to enemy LC. Of course, they don’t have range, but power can substitute range for fight control if said power is high enough – and for War Elephants it very well can be.

For now the elephant line as a whole will keep its ramping cost reduction buff, but the War-Elephant-exclusive base cost change is being rolled back since they don’t seem to uniquely require it.

• V2 (VII) Rocket splash damage 25% -> 33%.

V2 Rockets (VII) are just a bit weak in general (high cost, unremarkable damage and accuracy), so they’re getting a small, simple, low-risk buff. At least now if you don’t get a direct hit (which you often won’t, given their somewhat low accuracy), you’ll get a little bit more damage on whatever you actually wanted to hit.

Unit (Age)	Splash radius	Splash damage
V2 Rocket (VII)	1	33% (+8%)
Cruise Missile (VIII)	2	50%

Chinese

• [H] RoN / T&P bugfix: on assimilation, captured Cities always become Large Cities -> become Large Cities only for Small Cities (this also fixes the Forbidden City being eliminated from the game due to Chinese assimilation).

Chinese nation powers get a straightforward bugfix (though one not straightforward to implement 🫠).

Greeks

• RoN “bugfix”: Companion (II) deals bonus damage to units and buildings +0% -> +5%.

Greek HC UUs, like a handful of units that were presumably added early into the game’s development, have some specially hardcoded damage bonuses outside of the game’s normal systems for unit stats. In this case, +5% damage against units and buildings. However, this bonus only applies starting with the Royal Companion (III), skipping Companions (II). While this is not definitely a bug, based on everything I know about RoN and how BHG does things, I think it’s more likely than not a bug — one which we can remedy with a small softcoded damage modifier that replicates the original hardcoded modifier.

This shouldn’t have a huge impact on Greeks balance-wise and is more of a consistency thing, but a buff is a buff I guess.

Indians

• [H] T&P “bugfix”: Economic radius bonus only applies once certain undocumented triggers are activated, causing it to be bugged in nomad games for a while -> is special-cased to be active in nomad from game start so long as the player has Indians nation powers.²⁵

Another nation powers bugfix. If you’ve ever played Indians in nomad, you may have noticed that in your first city the visual radius of your economic zone doesn’t match the actual buildable radius – at least until you’ve hit certain triggers like researching Civic. This seems to just be a bug with the triggers for recalculating the economic radius stat not being properly activated when the city gets completed.. or something like that – I didn’t manage to identify where the underlying discrepancy was coming from so this is just informed speculation.

Although properly activating the trigger is the most obvious solution, another approach is to just special-case the power to be active in nomad games even before a city is placed, which has the added benefit of showing players the “true” radius when they’re placing their first city in nomad games before nation powers are normally active. As far as I can tell, this approach has no practical downsides in normal gameplay, and it’s not harder to implement on my end either.

Lakota

• [H] Cities produce +10/+10 -> +10/+5.

Lakota nation powers are the high water mark which all other nation powers have to contend with because it’s really fucking hard to balance theirs, holding back the entire field because stronger nerfs to other powerful nations would create 2 tiers of “good” nations: Lakota vs everyone else.

Generating Food from Citizens (which cost Food) is a diabolical positive feedback loop which abuses their low Timber costs from having no Farms to slurp up every Ruin on the map to get even more Food, to get even more Citizens, to get even more Food and repeat ad infinitum.

Using Nomadium 3 games as my data source for Ruins timing, I created an early eco simulation for RoN to see what theoretical changes could be made to reduce Lakota’s early game dominance without stunting them later on (which e.g., moving to +3 Food would do). The two most promising things I came up with in these eco simulations are:

1. Reduced Timber income from Cities, forcing slightly earlier investment into Woodcutter’s Camps – a small nerf.
2. Splitting the bonus given by Ruins to the two lowest resources instead of just the usual one, which reduces their early game Food spike without hurting their rest-of-game Food income in general, then offset somewhat by making Cities give +15/5 – a meatier nerf.

The latter is more complex for players, a lot more complex to implement, and honestly still a bit inelegant (though given how hard Lakota are to balance, some degree of inelegance is likely a necessary sacrifice). So we’ll start with the simpler change and see if that feels “good enough” when done alongside buffs for weaker nations (bringing up the average strength of competing nations). If not, I can try taking a stab at implementing the much harder change or just try to find another balancing approach.

Note: I couldn’t figure out how to get the dynamic value on the city tooltip to update after an hour or two (like it does for Germans), so I just gave up. This isn’t unique to Lakota as Roman cities also don’t mention their Wealth income, but it’s still a “bug” of sorts.

Maya

• Revert: Recoilless Gun (VII), Dragon AT Missile (VIII) damage vs Vehicles 125% -> 135%.

My apologies to Maya HI UUs. As stated many times now, early testing for CBP unit balance was heavily 1v1 focused. Most of the time this generalizes fine to army-vs-army combat, but in a few cases it doesn’t. Like, if say, a ranged unit with a damage bonus has to fire at a unit being shot at by a unit that does almost no damage to it. If I had known the focus fire penalty was this bad when combined with damage modifiers and armor scaling, the nerf wouldn’t have been implemented in the first place. Short of having a time machine to fix the mistake, the next best thing is reverting it now that I know how bad it is. Foolish, foolish!

Mongols

• [H] Receive +1 Food for every 1% of territory controlled -> +1 Food for every 1.25% of territory controlled.

With nation powers providing a lot of their power, Mongols are another nation that was hard to balance around until I learnt how to edit XML document the game’s code directly. Their Food bonus is typically very powerful during the early game, but the XML controlling the power is an on/off switch, rather than a numerical value that can be fine-tuned.

Through the power of edit XML document, this is no longer a roadblock, so Mongols can be re-tuned to be more than “I made 100 more Food than you in the first 5 minutes so you lose”, where free resources are a relatively boring and uninteractive nation power. However, I haven’t had a chance to sit down and give them a thorough look yet, so Alpha 11’s adjustment is more of a placeholder nerf until I’m able to revisit them properly – something that’s been a long time in the making.²⁶

Persians

• Start with 50% bonus Food -> 25% bonus Food.

Persian nation powers are strong enough that in EE they’re rated as a tier 1 nation in standard but a mediocre tier 3 nation in nomad despite having access to elephants that are stronger in the early game than in T&P/CBP.

“I have more resources than you and there’s nothing you can do about it” is one of the more boring bonuses a nation can have. To make room for power coming from other changes — while keeping them power-neutral or slightly weaker in standard — it’s being slimmed down.

• T&P bugfix: Caravans switching between land and sea forms sometimes causes additional free Caravans to be created beyond the intended limit -> are counted as normal.
• [H] The check for free Caravans occurs every 1s -> every 5s.

For reasons that I wasn’t able to understand even after looking at the relevant game code and running tests, now and then Caravans that are switching between their sea form and their land form are incorrectly counted, causing Persian free Caravan nation powers to spawn additional free Caravans – even exceeding the Caravan limit.

Thankfully a fix was seemingly simple – grafting the sea form Caravans onto the land form Caravans fixes the count and has had no observed downsides during testing.²⁷ Thanks to aFewBitsShort for documenting this bug in 2015 so that I could eventually investigate it.

Because free Persian Caravans spawn rapidly, it’s possible to kill a Persian Caravan and then spawncamp the Market where the Caravans are spawning for I N F I N I T E - W E A L T H - H A C K.²⁸ Reducing the spawn check frequency from every 1s to every 5s should significantly cut down on the power of I N F I N I T E - W E A L T H - H A C K while having minimal negative effect on the Persians player’s own wealth income.

• [H] T&P bugfix?: Persians’ double-capital power is ignored by World Government outside of Sudden Death Capital -> is never ignored by World Government.

The Persian double-capital nation power is — for reasons that I don’t understand — ignored by World Government outside of games with an Elimination setting of Sudden Death Capital, allowing World Government to cause the instant elimination of Persians if either one of their capitals is captured. This seems.. unintuitive and probably unintended? The code explicitly special-cases a check if the elimination setting is Sudden Death Capital so it’s not like BHG never thought about the interaction at all. I don’t really know what’s gone wrong here – maybe there was a bug in the source code which I can’t see in the compiled game code, or maybe BHG just hates you personally if you play Persians.

I’ve added in a new check that should lead to the intuitive result – you now need to capture both Persian capitals to knock them out even with World Government, regardless of the Elimination setting.

• [H] New: Conventional missiles are created 20% cheaper and faster.

A few nations kind of run out of nation powers and UUs in late game and even independent of balance considerations it kind of just.. feels bad? So while I was working on all of this other stuff for Persians I’ve thrown them a small bonus that isn’t particularly powerful but feels nice to have and is easy to implement.²⁹ The timing with real-life events is coincidental and not the reason for the change.

• Persian HI UUs base cost 50/30, 50/40, 50/40, 50/40 (in Age I-IV) -> 50/30, 50/30, 50/30, 50/40 (in Age I-IV)

Persian HI UUs were originally released costing 60/50 before BHG realized this made them so weak that they were just worse than the units they replaced and lowered the cost to be 50/30, 50/40, 60/40 in Age I-III in T&P patch 2 (“0800”) (with unchanged cost in Age IV). CBP then lowered this slightly more to 50/40, 50/50 in Age III-IV (keeping the same cost in Age I-II).

The BHG and CBP changes were enough to offset the units’ lower base stats but missed something pretty important that still afflicts them that nobody seems to have noticed: melee units are not subject to reduced damage from focus-fire penalties but ranged units are.

In a 1v1 this doesn’t matter, and in a small-scale skirmish the range advantage probably outweighs it, but once you have several HI in a fight this starts being quite significant, and is a major factor in why Persian HI UUs can perform relatively poorly in large-scale fights in II/III. For everyone else, Foot Archers tag enemy cavalry as they’re running in, and then the defender’s melee HI still deal full damage. For Persians this doesn’t happen and their HI can struggle to kill tagged cavalry because they now deal 1/3 damage to them. Even in cases where no other unit types are tagging them, if several HI attack the same cavalry they’ll apply the fire penalty to each other in a way that normal melee HI don’t have to worry about.³⁰

• T&P “bugfix”: Arquebus Immortals (IV) 32 attack recharge (but 44 frame attack animation) -> 44 attack animation (with unchanged animation).
• T&P “bugfix”: Arquebus Immortals (IV) universal damage bonus vs units and buildings 0% -> 30%.

Arquebus Immortals, like Dutch ships, have their DPS affected by an animation timing mismatch that causes them to attack more slowly than intended, significantly reducing their DPS. Despite having an attack recharge of 32, they effectively have an attack recharge of 44 because they can’t perform a new attack until their previous attack has finished.³¹ Like many of the obvious damage bugs before it, it’s a little embarrassing that none of us noticed this earlier – it’s relatively straightforward to notice with basic QA testing on the individual unit.

Re-timing the animation of organic entities can cause them to exhibit an unnatural speed that looks weird (it causes a bit of an uncanny valley effect), and I don’t want to learn more than basic 3D animation just to fix occasional RoN bugs. So instead of making a new proper-looking animation or stealing a correctly-timed-but-visually-mismatched animation from another unit, they’re being “fixed” by getting the same +30% damage bonus against units and buildings with the similarly-slow-firing Spanish Tercios get. This does make the Arquebus Immortals slightly less unique than they would’ve been if their animation was just re-timed, but I can live with the tradeoff and they were already basically Tercios-but-much-worse because of the existing bug. Now they’re just bascially Tercios-but-somewhat-worse.

Romans and Spanish

• Partial revert: Roman HI UUs bonus damage vs HI +86% -> 90%.
• Revert: Spanish HI UUs bonus damage vs melee cavalry +67% -> +80%.

These two Age IV HI UUs received “training wheels” in earlier versions of CBP to reduce whiplash of people coming over from EE and getting unexpectedly curb-stomped by units with working damage bonuses and non-arbitrary base costs.

You’ve all had six years to learn to ride your gosh darned bicycle and Spanish is still generally considered playable-but-low-tier so we’re ripping off the training wheels (and acknowledging that although debilitating strong in 1v1s and skirmishes, Tercios (IV) and Royal Tercios (V) are ranged units and so are subject to focus fire penalties that make them moderately less lethal when fighting alongside other ranged troops).

Romans don’t get the full-revert treatment because they’re (1) still high tier and (2) not subject to having their bonus damage watered down by the focus fire penalty in later ages. Plus I’m scared of Italians. Having a UU be iconically powerful isn’t necessarily an issue, and we should be able to balance around nations having high-power UUs if needed.

Russians

• [H] Attrition is 100% stronger, with a minimum of +2 (even without techs) -> 50% stronger, with a minimum of +2 (even without techs).
• [H] RoN bugfix: attrition recalculation is delayed in nomad because initial attrition calculation doesn’t work in nomad -> is now also triggered by city completion and will work immediately even in nomad.³²
• [H] New: Military units are 10% cheaper.
• Spies are 50% cheaper -> 33% cheaper.³³
• Revert: Rusiny Lancer (III) armor 3 -> 2; Cossack (IV), Don Cossack (V) armor 4 -> 3.

Another nation that was hard to balance in just XML, Russians are getting a partial rework of their attrition in the hope that they become less feast-or-famine, while ensuring that their early game attrition is just as strong as before but now properly active from game start in nomad.

The idea with this set of changes is that a lot of their existing bonuses are too situational, making Russians strong in a narrow set of situations when they can play to the strengths of their nation powers, but struggling in too many others to be broadly viable against stronger nations and better players. They’re swapping some of their situational power to gain a bit more generic power so that if they’re utilizing both their generic and situational power at the same time they should be about as powerful overall as they were before, but now they’ll be able to hold up a little better even when their situational power isn’t applicable to the current context of the game.

To help them in a wide variety of conditions, they’re now getting a blanket discount on military units (which is defined by not being a Civilian unit as per object masks). This gives them a modest increase in reliable power that works on both land and sea maps while intentionally retaining their signature weakness of not having (direct) economic bonuses; they’re still not a great choice for pure booming. As with almost all cost reductions in the game, this only affects base costs, so the discount for fully ramped units³⁴ ends up being <=5% – enough to be meaningful given that it affects so many unit types, but not earth-shatteringly powerful. This bonus also helps them to participate more in team games even if they’re not an edge player (where their attrition/border push is more relevant). Note: just like other unit base cost discounts, this also affects base upgrade costs (but not ramping upgrade costs) – in this case it’s mostly an undesired side effect, though it shouldn’t make too much difference during normal gameplay as the extra savings are unlikely to make that much of a difference.³⁵³⁶

Attrition is in a bit of a weird spot. Its DPS growth vastly outpaces the HP growth of units (meaning as both are upgraded, units begin to die increasingly quickly to attrition), but it’s both completely negated by active supply, and kneecapped by anti-attrition upgrades. This means that when it works, it works well, but when it doesn’t work, there isn’t much left for the Russians to rely on. This makes playing as or against Russians overly binary depending on successful supply or successful destruction of supply, and whether the opponent has anti-attrition techs researched or not. Reducing the bonus attrition (while special-casing the early game values) makes it less feast-or-famine while freeing up some power budget.

During game setup, RoN calculates the attrition that each player has. With standard game settings this works fine and Russians get their attrition powers immediately, but because nation powers aren’t active in nomad until players build a city — and there’s no existing trigger for attrition re-calculation for cities being built — Russians miss out on their attrition powers in nomad games until some other in-game action (like researching a tech) triggers attrition recalculation. Setting that recalculation to also trigger upon city completion resolves this, which helps Russians slightly in nomad games by virtue of making their territory harder to scout during the early game with Citizens.

Spy spam is another overly binary situation where you either tend to get most of your Bribes off (which usually makes the fight wildly successful), or most of your Spies get killed before the Bribes complete because your opponent was preempted your Spy spam (and you lose the fight). With more consistent bonuses now available to rely on, Spies don’t need to be as important a part of Russian armies. This is also an intentional nerf to Russians’ ability to freeze out attacking melee cavalry with Spy spam. Overly cheap Spies in a defensive fight basically break unit counters by allowing Russians to bypass an entire category of units in rock-paper-scissors unit counters.

Lastly, because we’re no longer handcuffed to balancing in just XML, Russians no longer need the small (but not particularly impactful!) UU buffs that were otherwise one of the only levers to buff them with in the old days.

Turks

• RoN “bugfix”: Royal Janissaries (V) 40 attack recharge (but 44 frame attack animation) -> 44 attack recharge (with unchanged animation).
• RoN “bugfix”: Royal Janissaries (V) bonus damage to units and buildings 0% -> 5%.

Royal Jannisaries (V) get stuck with the same bad attack animations that Arquebusiers (IV) and Janissaries (IV) have even though Musketeers (V) get nice animations on their upgrade. This alone isn’t great (and is enough to basically negate Royal Jannissaries’ +1 attack strength – such is the power of good attack animations), but not having their own animations also means that their lower attack recharge of 40 (vs the normal 44 which Arquebusiers / Musketeers have) is completely negated by having to wait for their attack animations to complete, just like with Persian Arquebus Immortals.

Slapping a simple 5% damage on there is enough to make them outperform Musketeers pretty reliably. It’s not as strong as having an attack recharge of 40 plus good attack animations, but I’m happy to leave it as “good enough” as this is only a minor balance issue. I can take another look at the unit if I ever do more work on Turks balance or get player feedback about the change.

Thanks to dPope for originally bringing up the issue for me to investigate.

CTW CHANGES

Changes here are again a little lighter than I expected in this patch as a couple of significant CtW bugs took 20-30 hours to iron out but only came up while I was already doing final QA for Alpha 11, leaving little time to test other CtW fixes without delaying the patch further.

All campaigns

• CBP bugfix: A variety of supporting scripting (stuff that wouldn’t prevent the scenarios from being completed) wasn’t loading properly in the CBP mirrors of CtW campaigns (thanks FireFly for reporting this issue).
  • The fix for this is pretty big and has required manual edits of over a hundred CtW files. I’ve double-checked the changes and done spot-check verifications of several scripts in-game, but yell if anything doesn’t seem to work right; the risk of human error here is relatively high.
  • I’ve tried to implement the fix in a way that’s compatible with official localization, but we’re conspicuously missing a localization team and I also don’t know how modded third party localization will handle it. Players relying on localization should consider playing the non-CBP version of campaigns (with or without CBP loaded) to ensure good localization support.
• The description of each campaign now includes a note about the longer first-time load for the CBP mirrors of campaigns (i.e., describing what the situation already was as of Alpha 10) so that when your game freezes while generating map textures you hopefully won’t freak out.

Napoleon

• T&P bugfix: The Ruins of Montenotte scenario: fixed missing Imperial Guard spawns due to being incorrectly called “Royal Guards” in the setup script.³⁷
• T&P bugfix: The Ruins of Montenotte scenario: the initial spawn of Commandos that occurs after your discussion with Commander Schwarzenberg no longer includes a Schwarzenberg clone.
• T&P bugfix: The Ruins of Montenotte scenario: to fix inconsistent behavior, Austrian units attempt to cast Sabotage at >=50% craft -> >=56% craft.

Thanks to motter28218 for pointing out the Ruins of Montenotte bugs.³⁸

COSMETIC CHANGES

• RoN bugfix: Merchant Fleets (II) and Modern Merchant Fleets (VI) no longer use the icons for Merchants despite actually being Caravans.³⁹
• RoN bugfix: Merchant Fleets (II) no longer use the selection and move-acknowledgement sounds of modern ships.
• RoN bugfix: Modern Merchant Fleets (VI) are no longer missing a selection and move-acknowledgement sound.
• RoN bugfix: Fixed at least one situation where the visual line for borders wouldn’t appear on the map until an explicit recalculation was triggered by an in-game event (e.g., a player researching a tech).⁴⁰
• T&P bugfix: Anusiya (II) no longer sometimes use their ranged attack animation when attacking in melee range.
• T&P bugfix: Anusiya (II) no longer sometimes use their melee attack animation when attacking at range.
• T&P bugfix: Anusiya (II) are no longer missing attack sounds when using animations for ranged attacks.
• T&P bugfix: Anusiya (II) no longer use the ranged attack sound when using animations for melee attacks.
• T&P bugfix: Forbidden City is no longer missing attack sounds in all ages.
• T&P bugfix: Red Fort is no longer missing attack sounds in all ages.
• [h] T&P bugfix: Red Fort now uses the same projectiles as Age IV Forts (regardless of age) instead of default projectiles.⁴¹

TOOLTIP / TEXT CHANGES

As usual, these changes only apply to English tooltips until other people step up on localization.⁴²

• RoN bugfix: The pop limit tooltip no longer incorrectly says that cavalry cost 2 population.⁴³
• RoN bugfix: Spanish scouts’ faster ability usage in their nation power tooltip now specifies that only Sniper and Sabotage are affected, instead of incorrectly implying that all abilities are cast faster.
• RoN bugfix: Informer’s tooltip no longer incorrectly states that it provides any special benefits when used on Markets.⁴⁴
• RoN bugfix: French nation powers tooltip now specifies that Generals (but not Patriots) regenerate craft at double speed (previously undocumented).
• RoN “bugfix”: French nation powers tooltip now includes exact values for all bonuses.
• RoN bugfix: Cotton now correctly states that it increases production speed of units rather than reducing the time it takes to create them.⁴⁵
• RoN bugfix: Cotton’s “popup” text now says “ships” instead of “sail”.
• RoN bugfix: Sulphur now specifies that it affects all Siege Factory / Factory units (not just siege/artillery units).
• RoN bugfix: General’s tooltip no longer incorrectly says “attack rating” when meaning “attack strength”.
• RoN bugfix: Chinese nation powers tooltip now specifies that captured Small Cities also become Large Cities, not just ones they build themselves.
• RoN “bugfix”: Inca LI UU tooltips now only describe themselves as “somewhat” effect against mounted units (more accurate to their in-game performance in the matchup).
• RoN “bugfix”: Tip 50 now specifies that nearby Generals increase troops’ armor rather than generically saying “combat power”.
• RoN / T&P bugfix: Several units with perfect accuracy⁴⁶ no longer incorrectly refer to their accuracy as “high” or “low” in their tooltips.
• T&P bugfix: Persians nation powers tooltip now specifies that their free Caravans require a Market.
• T&P “bugfix”: Persians’ Arquebus Immortal now specifies that it’s a gunpowder unit.
• Light Infantry tooltips in Age II and Age III now include a cautionary warning that they’re ineffective if massed.
• Russian nation power tooltip slightly reworded with regard to how their attrition works.

MISC CHANGES

• In future, the current pre-release -> main release pipeline is probably going to be retired or at least drastically changed.

Over the past 2 years, testers of CBP pre-release patches have demonstrated extremely poor precision and recall, failing to identify the majority of bugs present (which I’ve later found myself while doing QA) while also causing me to go on a wild goose hunt for multiple issues that magically resolved without me ever updating CBP. Priority feedback balance changes in each pre-release have also received very little balance feedback despite hundreds of games being played with them.

Thus, outsourcing early testing and feedback using pre-releases has generally proven to be a net-drain on my development resources, as I still end up doing the vast majority of the testing work I would’ve done without releasing the PRs, but then have the extra overhead of false positives and handling pre-release distribution. The current process also delays the release of patches more than I’d like — this would be fine if bugs were found and priority balance feedback provided, but since this is largely not the case it’s a delay with minimal benefit.

I’ll either swap to just doing all the testing myself (with additional 8P bot-only games for brute-force testing of any crashes induced by hardcoded gameplay changes), or go with a much shorter window for pre-release testing and ignore unsubstantiated bug reports.

One of the prior justifications for the long pre-release testing phase up until now was uncertainty regarding the efficacy and stability of hardcoded changes, but those seem to have overwhelmingly gone smoothly and so no longer justify the same level of extra testing as before.

KNOWN PROBLEMS

• As with all CBP versions starting with Alpha 10, Windows 11 users with Smart App Control enabled may temporarily struggle to use the sequence of CBP Setup -> CBP Launcher -> Rise of Nations due to security precautions by Windows. If you have this problem you should be able to work around it by launching CBPLauncher.exe or riseofnations_CBP.exe directly as needed (shortcuts should work fine). As the updated program(s) gain(s) more trust it/they may be considered “trustworthy” and no longer be blocked. Smart App Control does not support whitelisting individual programs, but if you’re desperate you can evaluate whether turning it off temporarily makes sense for your needs.

UPCOMING PATCHES

Here’s the current plan for the next while:

• Alpha 12: focused mostly on non-balance changes like localization, launcher improvements, and more CtW fixes and tooltip fixes, intended to be a bastion for players who don’t want what’s coming after. They’ll also be a handful of standard-focused balance changes since that’s been a bit neglected in “modern” CBP due to the higher popularity of nomad.
• Patching after that: if it happens at all, experimental nation balance changes (first distributed and tested by players before being shipped to “live”) to bring the remaining difficult outliers (e.g., Koreans) into line. I’ve left these nations for last because I think they’ll require deviating from their current identities a bit to achieve acceptable balance and I know that drifts away from the “keep everything the same where feasible” that CBP tries to weigh up against balance considerations.

Though everything in life is subject to change, once those outliers are fixed up I currently intend to go back into retirement/hiatus in terms of CBP development. Despite having a vastly better ability to tweak game balance than before thanks to finally utilizing hardcoded patching, most of the problems that previously caused me to give up on CBP’s original balance ambitions still hold true and life is too short 💔.

 

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1. 4.7.2 is still technically supported, but there’s no specific reason to continue using it. The reason it was previously chosen back when CBP Launcher was first being developed was to maintain support with a UI controls pack which CBP Launcher doesn’t currently use.
2. I can make it slightly more robust in future.
3. I think I started working on this in 2021 – I actually got very close to finishing it, but couldn’t figure out a couple of critical things so I never got it completed.
4. Unlike other ways to modify the LAA flag, 4GB Patch silently updates an internal checksum, and so generates an exe with a different checksum despite applying the same LAA flag as everything else.
5. The OP never followed up, so I don’t know if the fix worked.
6. This distinction is for the benefit of those working on/with CBP such as advanced modders or someone taking over CBP development in the future.
7. These values are different to (a bit weaker than) what was present in Pre-Release 4).
8. DON’T ASK ME WHY, I DIDN’T MAKE THIS SYSTEM AHHHH
9. Maybe it has something to do with odd vs even unit LoS values? Not sure.
10. The original value for this is 300%, so the new value of 225% is still a bit faster than non-CBP, juggling both unnecessary dead game time and Citizen spawns that are far apart being more punishing the slower the build times are.
11. Citrus is on the to-do list, though it might be fine with just implementation tweaks instead of a rework.
12. Or more likely a variant thereof, the way planes use “fuel” which is still basically just craft with a new name.
13. As of Alpha 10.
14. Buffing Democracy this way was not actually what I originally wanted to do in Alpha 11. I previously got a different, more interesting buff rubber stamped by the HnZ committee (only HnZ is on this particular committee, because he is a ruthless dictator) to make Generals gain additional effects, probably based on current government choice (red vs green). The idea passed shallow balance checks, but then once I started digging more into it while working on the hardcoded implementation, I realized it was rather a mess and I didn’t think the idea was worth salvaging and agonizingly balancing. So we now have +border.
15. Persian Arquebus Immortals were already 50/40 and so haven’t changed.
16. Note that unlike all other GI UUs, this doesn’t apply to Fire Lances (III) because I’m sinophobic because Crossbowmen (a stronger counter to HI) already exist in III, Fire Lances are cheap, and the issue isn’t much of a thing in III.
17. The Senator still has no Bribe hotkey for all nations – I wasn’t able to find the underlying cause while doing Alpha 11 work.
18. I don’t know what this actually does and saw no obvious gameplay or cosmetic difference in testing with it on/off, but I imagine it should be consistent between “identical” units in case there’s any actual effect.
19. Based on the game logic, I’m pretty sure both the General/Patriot hotkeys and Patriot garrison bug are because the patriots derive from unit type 0x36 (the non-German General) instead of 0x39 (the German General) even for Germans / Romans / Spanish. Instead of checking “oh, these guys can’t build General (type 0x36), let’s check if they can build the graft of that unit (type 0x39)”, the check just fails.
    
    Garrisoned Generals work fine because the logic handling that check does a 0x36-or-graft check, which correctly finds the type 0x39 graft.
20. I was actually planning to ship Alpha 11 without any Spy nerfs, but with players now abusing them somewhat, I’ve fished a few things out of my “possible changes” pool and slapped them in with a final round of Alpha 11 changes. The only reason I waited an extra while with Alpha 11’s release is because originally players weren’t testing PR4, and then they complained about stability issues which ultimately seemed to evaporate as simply being misattributed networking or other out-of-scope issues.
21. With this and the base production time change, the Tactics-reduced time is going from 113 frames (7.5s) to 160 frames (10.67s).
22. With the base cost increase, the absolute value changes from -25/25 to -20/20.
23. There is a point here about how they have to now contend against higher-craft Scouts and all ranged units rather than a mix of melee and ranged units, but god damn, they get an order of magnitude tankier and become cheaper!?
24. If balancing for just me, I’d consider increasing their ramping cost from 10/10 to 15/15, possibly entirely removing some of their buffs (like cheaper cost from Strategy – or maybe move some of that to some other tech like what was done with World Gov already) and even consider making casting Bribe blow their cloak entirely. I would actually also be happy to explore adding a resource cost (like 25 Wealth) to Bribe itself, but that and blowing cloak on-cast would both be pretty extreme changes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
25. I’m using quotes on “bugfix” because this is more of a targeted workaround than a true fix, plus I’ve effectively also added a QoL feature to the initial city placement for Indians in nomad games.
26. The current changes should leave their power level fine (because early bonuses are so strong and early free units are a much higher early resource saving than unit discounts), but it does leave their nation powers looking a little thin. If I get around to intensively examining them I’ll try to tune them a little to feel a bit more satisfying without reverting them to S tier.
27. Though it wouldn’t shock me if there is one and it just hasn’t been found.
28. Please imagine this being said with a slow, booming voice with some reverb applied. Thank you!
29. Aside: I did work on the inconsistency with whether they’re allowed to build a new Senate or not depending on which of their two capitals they currently own, but tl;dr it doesn’t have a neat solution (at least within my capabilities without spending an exorbitant amount of additional time) so I’ve left it alone.
30. This may also be why Gun Heavy Infantry have such obscene bonus damage to enemy cavalry – high damage partially offsets the damage lost from the focus fire penalty.
31. Seemingly, even with animation cancelling.
32. Not technically a Russians-specific change, but it only really directly affects them and nobody else, so I’ve put it here.
33. With the increase to Spy base cost, the absolute cost reduction is only changing from -25/25 to -20/20.
34. Fully ramped costs being 2.25x of base cost for most units.
35. If it were easy to remove, I would, but I don’t think it’s problematic enough to be worth the effort.
36. The value of the discount was originally pegged at 5% but that seems dangerously close to nothing at all (the math on total resource savings does not look good) so we’ll see how they land with double that.
37. I’ve also changed the Cuirassier spawns to Horse Guard Grenadier (i.e., French HC UU) spawns in the setup script, but it doesn’t really matter since the game already spawns in the UUs anyway – just noting the extra change here for the sake of completeness.
38. Note that I’ve taken a different approach to some of their suggested fixes and have intentionally not followed their suggestion for changing team colors: https://ron.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=1802
39. Maybe including the word “Merchant” in their name was a mistake – or maybe it used to include both Merchants and Caravans?
40. There might be other situations where this happens that I haven’t fixed – I’m not sure.
41. Technically this fix includes adding explicit projectile types for all Wonders, it’s just that Red Fort is the only one that needs a non-default projectile so it’s the only Wonder where being changed in this way actually matters.
42. I’m looking at doing some basic work here for Alpha 12, but most of the translation work will still have to be community supplied unless somebody wants to pay someone else to do it.
43. Presumably that’s a legacy value from an older version of the pop system.
44. I checked the EE game code and looked at the in-game effects for 7 different versions of RoN – in no version did it do anything extra, so I’m reasonably confident in saying that it’s probably just legacy stuff / cut gameplay.
45. Producing 100% faster is only a 50% reduction, so the difference is not purely semantic.
46. (Most units in RoN have perfect accuracy)