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
After slightly too much work and slightly too many whiplash-inducing pivots about what the patch’s contents would be, what formally started in 2023 as a small bugfix patch but which slowly evolved into a gargantuan patch has now been split up slightly so that a cut-down implementation of Alpha 10 can be released and players can consolidate on one version instead of splitting across Alpha 9 and Pre-Release versions. The changes that were pulled for the sake of timeliness have been pushed to later versions which will release as time and inclination allow.
Even this “lite” version — with many of its planned changes pulled — is substantial, probably the largest single update CBP has ever had, and is the result of a lot of unpaid modding / balancing / software development / testing / etc work which I hope a few people will still appreciate.
Early versions of CBP were more nerf-focused,1 sanding down a lot of elevated nation powers and unit stats and requiring nations and units to sort of “re-justify” why they might need the higher values in a modern meta that has evolved since the last official (intentional) balance changes from over 20 years ago. Now, finally, we’re getting more buff-focused changes, with a variety of targeted changes to help bring up some of the weakest rares / nations / units etc.
This update also includes important technical changes to how CBP works, including moving to a new mod format which better supports utilizing new “hardcoded” changes in the game’s code.
Patch contents
Balance changes: high (very high quantity, but mostly modest changes)
Bugfixes: high (very high quantity, but mostly small fixes)
This is a small bugfix patch, basically “Alpha 8c”. However, because these changes are not multiplayer-compatible with Alpha 8, they’re being released as Alpha 9.
To try to better communicate the reason behind changes, I’m trying out a slightly more fleshed-out set of patch notes to accompany the summary published on the mod’s Workshop page.
Each balance change will include a few lines providing context as to why the change was made, something that was often difficult to do within a single cell on a spreadsheet.
All the minor bugfixes etc which don’t affect gameplay are also listed in their entirety.
