System(s) Changes:

• General Map Overhaul (The map was changed to reflect historical 1910 borders).

• Added Countries: Ottoman Empire, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino.

• AI Frontline System Overhaul: The AI can now attack-from/reinforce allied/vassal/union borders, which previously was not possible.

• Trenches & Consolidation: These two properties apply to tiles. Units build trenches in tiles that neighbor hostile tiles. These trenches decay over time, and they also take attrition during combat. Hostile units can take over friendly-built trenches and use them to defend their newly-gained tile. Tiles that are newly captured have zero consolidation and must be consolidated; tiles with low consolidation apply a debuff to the new occupier when defending their new tile.

• Combat Overhaul: Combat now last days or even weeks; defenders have major advantages. They consist of three stages (Skirmish, Assault, and Breach). The Skirmish stage is a low intensity stage with minimal casualties on both sides and wear on the defending side's trenches. The Assault stage is a medium intensity stage. The Breach stage is a high intensity stage where attacking units have breached defender trenches and are now locked in the battle. Both attackers and defenders can also get exhausted (reducing stats). Attackers also abort attacks when they are either exhausted or lose too much. The three stages of combat are represented by three different animated sprites.

• Pinning Mechanic: Units that are defending a tile are pinned and unable to move. Units that are attacking a tile can retreat before the Breach stage of combat. Upon reaching the Breach stage, attackers are pinned as well. (Pinning, as a feature, is necessary to prevent units from passing through one another.)

• Tile Density Significantly Increased: In this iteration of the map, Spain and Portugal have manually-created tiles following national, state, and river lines, while the rest of the map consists of procedural tiles only following national lines. Each tile spans roughly 200 square miles. The map has around 42,000 tiles in total.

• Unit Movement Improved: Units no longer teleport and their movement generally look and handle cleaner.

• Unit Queued Orders Indicators: Thin lines are now rendered to indicate queued orders of selected units.

• To Limit Lag (and for realism): Static Unit Caps have been added for Russia, Germany, France, and other countries. These unit caps will be replaced by real constraints on military size (economy, supply, etc.) later on. Unit caps only affect the total soldiers a country can have fielded at a time, so eligible manpower still plays a major role.

Backend Updates:

• Tile Selection now supports very small tiles (which were previously unselectable).

• Procedural Tile Adjacency algorithm has been fixed, which allows faster development of map updates.

• Pathfinding now uses multi-threading, which allows for much higher performance and speed.