[E-Announce] Coming soon: Eressea update to version 3.4

Over the past couple of months, many changes have been made to the code of Eressea. Thanks to everybody who helped out! # Effective February 21, 2015: * Silver is no longer weightless; this was a bug. 100 silver weigh 1 weight unit. Watch out for any ships or units that are currently over capacity! # Effective February 7, 2015: ## Major Changes * PROMOTE has been shifted to another position in the sequence of orders. It is now just after RECRUIT, but before PAY NOT and before paying building maintenance. * Region owners (in E3 and Deveron, not E2) now pay maintenance for lighthouses, markets, and harbors if those buildings are empty. In this case, they also get the benefits of those buildings. The region owner may stop paying for a specific building with PAY NOT <building-id>, or for all buildings in the region with PAY NOT (without parameter). This is, as usual, a short command that must be issued each week. * DESTROY is now a long order. * RESERVE now only takes items from other units if those items are not already reserved by those units. For example, if unit a has 5 silver and unit b has 12 Silver, and both have RESERVE 10 silver, then unit a ends up with 7 silver and unit b ends up with 10 silver. In the past, the result would have been based on the order of the units in the region. * E3 and Deveron have an "auto-teacher" function. It will provide double study speed as long as all skills of a unit together have fewer learning weeks than turn/2. For example, if the turn is 300, a unit with melee 13 and endurance 10 (worth 13 * 14 / 2 + 10 * 11 / 2 = 146 weeks) will reach melee 14 after learning for 7 weeks on average. A unit with melee 15, endurance 10, on the other hand, needs the usual 16 weeks on average. * A ship sailing into a harbor requires HELP GUARD from the harbor's owner to the captain of the ship. * German orders should use the imperative forms, that is ARBEITE, BEFÖRDERE, VERGISS. Some orders (still) have no imperative form: ALLIANZ, BANNER, BOTSCHAFT, DEFAULT, EMAIL, GRUPPE, KAMPFZAUBER, NACH, NUMMER, OPTION, PASSWORT, PIRATERIE, PRÄFIX, ROUTE, URSPRUNG. The old versions (ARBEITEN, BEFÖRDERUNG, VERGESSEN) still work, but this might change in future versions. * The English COMBAT order is now recognized correctly (and is different from COMBATSPELL and HELP COMBAT). FIGHT is recognized as an alternative for COMBAT, but it might not be supported in future versions. * Monsters may attack again, but will never attack units in buildings. This is to accommodate E3, where there is no stealth skill. Dragons may behave differently. * When a unit travels through a region that is guarded by an unfriendly faction, the chance that it is stopped depends on a number of factors: it is increased by the number of non-allied (no HELP GUARD) persons guarding the region, the terrain type (increased for swamps, glaciers, mountains and volcanoes), the unfriendly factions' perception skill (if applicable), amulets of true seeing, and the size of the castle of the region owner, if the owner is also unfriendly to the traveler. The chance is decreased by the number of allied persons guarding the region, the travelers' stealth skill, and rings of invisibility. * Monsters in E3 and Deveron will use LOOT instead of TAX. LOOT is a monster-only command, and will gather silver for the monster, but also destroy silver and morale in the region. Dragons fly, so they can do this even in guarded regions (if there are no flying guardians). ## Minor Changes * Messages for the duration of magic paths have been corrected (https://bugs.eressea.de/view.php?id=2066). * Monsters no longer have cryptic names (https://bugs.eressea.de/view.php?id=2057). * Enemies revived by post-combat spells keep their equipment (https://bugs.eressea.de/view.php?id=1962). * Volcano outbreaks are reported correctly in neighboring regions. * There will be a region message for empty buildings whose maintenance has not been paid. * The unit limit is reported in the NR and CR (https://bugs.eressea.de/view.php?id=2055). * A flying unit can only be stopped from moving or taxation/looting by another flying unit. * Natural armor bonus is now applied correctly. * Hunger reduces sailing skill only by 1 point, not by a factor of 1/2, like other skills. * A few peasants (or player units) are allowed to work even in regions completely covered by trees (hunting and gathering). * Regions with no peasants but otherwise good conditions will slowly attract new settlers. * Many, many minor bug fixes, code improvements, and tests. # Older Changes Not every change in recent times may have been widely announced, so to recap, here are some of the ones that may have been missed: * ORIGIN is disabled because it sometimes causes a crash. * RESERVE ALL works. * FOLLOW SHIP is a short(-ish) order now, just like FOLLOW UNIT. * change unit order for VERLASSE/GIB KOMMANDO. * fix astral space vortex. * monsters may attack again. * CRs now include a tag with the exact build number of the server. * lighthouse reduces drift chance to 0. * Demons no longer suddenly turn into goblins (https://bugs.eressea.de/view.php?id=1981). * fixed PIRACY. * fixed resist magic spell ("Schutzzauber"). * fix fleeing units getting control of castles. * fix iron and stone golems. * fix guards stopping enemies. A summary of all this with more links to the actual code changes can also be found at https://github.com/eressea/server/wiki/Roadmap As always, updating the code can cause new bugs and crashes to surface, and cause delays or re-runs of turns. The chance of this is greatly reduced by our volunteers who receive test reports with the new code and report differences to their original report. If you would like to volunteer for this program, please send me a message with your faction id and the game you are in. Enno. -- Eressea Fantasy Strategy PBEM Game, Twitter: @eresseadev http://www.eressea.de/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eresseapbem Become a Patron: http://www.patreon.com/enno Flattr your GM: https://flattr.com/thing/681354/Eressea