Changelog v3 40s - Heliomance/Uncharted-Horizons GitHub Wiki

_{Changelog · Design document — Changelog}

Breakthrough IDs link to the breakthrough that holds the ID today. A few early entries predate a renumbering or a merge, so an ID there may since have passed to another breakthrough.

Summary: Great Alchemist, Athanor and Alchemist removed (one new mechanic per elemental world); Hall 6 and Stone 6 matter a turn; matter budget recorded.

• The Great Alchemist, the Athanor and the Alchemist specialist are removed. Each elemental world now has one new mechanic: Substance a new resource (Prima Materia), Process a new Great Person (the Great Sage and its Turnings). The Alchemist's slots become ordinary ones — Scientist in the Hall, Merchant in the Vats, one of each in the Philosopher's Stone (which gives Great Merchant points).
• Matter sources reset to absorb the loss of the Athanors (which were the largest late-game source): the Hall provides 6 a turn (was 4), and the Philosopher's Stone provides a flat 6 a turn — replacing its "half of every Market's gold", which the converter reads as half of the Market's own 2 Gold, i.e. one matter a turn. A whole game's matter is now ~2,800 for an eight-city empire (~3,700 with the Stone), with a three-city tall civilisation within a few per cent: the Vats lean wide, Dispersal in the Hall's city leans tall.
• With no gold → matter route left, Bullion's exchange is one-way and pump-safe by construction.

Summary: Turnings: +3 tile, one-to-one feeding via min(), stacking phase effects per fed Turning; The Great Wheel doubles feeding capacity and keeps +5% per complete wheel.

• Turnings rebalanced for the counts players reach. At five to eight Great Sages a game, "+1 per feeder and +3% empire-wide" was an ordinary Great Improvement with an invisible percentage, and the cycle itself was almost inert. Each Turning is now +3 of its stat on its tile, and each fed Turning grants one stacking, policy-sized effect of its phase: Wood +15% growth, Fire +15% Production on buildings, Earth −20% culture cost of border growth, Metal +10% Strength for military units, Water +15% Great Person generation.
• Feeding is one-to-one, counted as min(beneficiaries, feeders): one Water no longer feeds every Wood, so piling one element behind a single feeder earns nothing, and progress beyond the first wheel is incremental — each extra Turning placed behind an extra of its feeder adds one effect.
• The Great Wheel changes the rule rather than adding a percentage: each Turning feeds two. Folded into the same counts as (1 + [⁠[The Great Wheel] Buildings]), so no second set of uniques is needed; its value scales with the Great Sage investment it rewards. It keeps +5% of every yield per complete wheel as a baseline for one-wheel civilisations.

Summary: Turning of Water permitted on coastal land (OR via De Morgan).

• The Turning of Water may now stand on coastal land as well as beside fresh water. Unciv filters offer AND ({A} {B}) and NOT (non-[X]) but no OR, and several placement uniques are combined with AND (TileImprovementFunctions, line 125), so the rule is written non-[{non-[Fresh Water]} {non-[Coastal]}] — legal under the parameter docs' nesting rule (no AND inside an AND).

Summary: Qi removed; the Five Turnings become terrain-bound Great Sage improvements that feed one another along the generative cycle, counted natively; The Great Wheel rewards complete wheels via min(); Fresh Water filter corrected.

• Qi cut as a resource. Its only sinks were the Five Turnings and the Wandering Sage; it was not earning its place. The Cycle Forge, Cycle Garden, Wandering Sage and every Qi cost and source are gone; the Forge is now +4 Production with a Sage slot and Great Sage points.
• The Five Turnings are Great Improvements, each built by consuming a Great Sage and each only on its element's land (Wood: Forest/Jungle; Fire: Desert/Plains/Volcanic; Earth: Grassland/Flood plains; Metal: Hill/Tundra/Snow; Water: land beside fresh water — and, from v3.47, the coast). Each yields +2 of its stat on its tile, +1 more for every owned Turning of the element that feeds it (Water→Wood→Fire→Earth→Metal→Water), and +3% of its stat empire-wide. All of it is counted natively — Owned [tileFilter] Tiles with <for every [countable]>, verified in Tile.kt, UniqueMap.kt and TileStatFunctions.kt — with no marker resource. Terrain is enforced by Unciv's own instant-construction check. Pillaging a Turning removes it from every count.
• The Great Wheel now pays +5% of every yield per complete wheel, counted with the countable language's min(); the Great Sage may alternatively be gifted to a City-State for 40 Influence (the gifting code pays before it destroys a Great Person).
• Latent bug fixed: Irrigation and Nitrogen Fixation used Fresh water (river-adjacent only) where the canonical ruleset uses Fresh Water (next to any fresh water, lakes included) in compound tile filters.

Summary: Turning the Wheel removed (the flow cannot be forced); Process wheels pace at ~75 turns per city on passive Qi; quantitative loss/gain audit recorded in §7.0.

• Turning the Wheel removed. A process that pours production into Qi contradicts Model II's sixth axiom — only a pattern opened to the Great Cycle draws on it — and it was the main reason the Process gains outran the atomic losses. Qi now comes only from opened patterns (Forge 4/turn, Cycle Garden 2/turn, Great Sage 150, The Great Wheel 150), so a city's wheel takes ~75 turns passively and the +15 yields arrive as a Modern-era ramp. Substance keeps Dispersal (matter can be forced from work, at a loss); Caloric keeps Banking Heat (work into heat is Joule's own experiment). The fork's process extension now serves two stockpiles, not three.
• Quantitative audit recorded in §7.0: what elemental worlds genuinely lose (~+30 Science, +16–56 Production, +25% spaceship production, one missile tier, mostly late) against what Process gains (+120 yields across eight cities, paced), with the Turnings' yield and cost named as the next levers.

Summary: Multipliers are situational: the meaningless ×1.5 on the world-exclusive gateways removed; their difficulty is a threshold, not a factor.

• The ×1.5 on Transmutation Practice and Five-Phase Theory is removed: both exist only in their own worlds, so there is no baseline cost for a multiplier to act on — their difficulty belongs in their thresholds, set when thresholds are assigned. §1.2 now states the rule: a multiplier expresses how much harder the same breakthrough is in a given world; world-exclusive breakthroughs are priced directly. Miniaturisation's ×2.5 stands — it is the same breakthrough in both worlds.

Summary: World-Truth-conditional cost multipliers formalised (§1.2); Miniaturisation possible in Elemental worlds at ×2.5; Miniaturisation possible in Elemental worlds at ×2.5.

• New rule in §1.2: a breakthrough's Insight threshold may carry multipliers keyed to World-Truth values. Impossible physics removes a breakthrough; difficult engineering multiplies its cost. Several existing effects were already this lever informally (the Antikythera/Clockwork halving of Babbage, the +50% Insight toward Quantum Tunnelling from Loop Quantum Gravity and Bio-Quantum Coherence, Phlogiston Theory's Chemistry bonus) and are now named as such.
• Miniaturisation restored to Elemental worlds at ×2.5 — Model I says resonance computing is slower to miniaturise, not unable — so pocket electronics and Powered Armour arrive late rather than never. Photonics and Quantum Computing remain removed: no photons to count, no discreteness to compute with.
• The elemental gateways cost ×1.5 (Transmutation Practice, Five-Phase Theory) — the gentler alternative to moving them an era later, and now first in the list of levers in §7.0.

Summary: Fissile Material withdrawn; the familiar world set as baseline. Elemental worlds lose the silicon age (Miniaturisation, Photonics, a shrinking Fab, Powered Armour) as their physics implies; the Transmutation Hall becomes a national wonder and the Cycle Forge yields 4 Qi.

• Fissile Material withdrawn. The atomic world should feel like base Civ V, not acquire a new — and almost wholly military — stockpile economy. The Nuclear focus is re-grounded on familiar objects: Uranium-gated units and reactors, the Breeder and Advanced Fuel Cycles as Uranium resource-production bonuses (the Arabian-Oil pattern), Thorium and Micro-Reactors as plant-less power.
• What the physics says elemental worlds lack — taken seriously instead of mirrored. Model I calls resonance computing "slower to miniaturise than silicon" and forbids photon-counting; so Miniaturisation (EN10) and Photonics (EN08) now require the Transistor, the elemental face of Substrate Mastery is a Resonant Crystal Works that does not shrink (+2 Gold, no Moore's law), Powered Armour follows Miniaturisation into the atomic world, and the Compact Athanor is reached through Robotics rather than Miniaturisation. An elemental world builds computers; it never gets the silicon age that base Civ V hands every player.
• Elemental engines brought down: the Transmutation Hall is a national wonder — one per civilisation, so matter scales with land and people through the Vats, Athanors and Dispersal, never with city count — and the Cycle Forge yields 4 Qi rather than 6 (a passive wheel in seventy-five turns, faster only by spending production).
• §7.0's parity paragraph rewritten around the principle: the familiar world is the baseline; elemental worlds are brought to it, never the reverse; the remaining levers are named.

Summary: Process parity (Sage, Great Sage, Cycle Garden, Wandering Sage, The Great Wheel); the atomic Fissile Material economy grounded across the Nuclear focus; world-type parity recorded.

• Process brought level with Substance along Unciv's own depth vectors, in its idiom: the Sage specialist (+1 Food, +1 Culture; Great Sage points), the Great Sage (150 Qi, or plants a Cycle Garden — a Great Improvement providing 2 Qi with food and culture), the Wandering Sage (bought with 40 Qi; 30 Culture on consumption, or 6 Influence gifted to a City-State), and Great Harmony grounded as The Great Wheel — a world wonder whose reward is completed wheels: every city that has turned all five Turnings works a tenth harder in every yield, and each luxury type gives a point of happiness. Balance, made a payoff.
• The atomic world given its own exclusive economy. The audit of what elemental worlds lack found only late theory and second-tier energy — nothing to weigh against alchemy. The ontology supplies the answer: discreteness alone makes fuel countable. Fissile Material is a stockpile enriched from Uranium (Enrichment Facility; the Enrichment process at 4 → 1), bred and extended by the fuel-cycle chain that was unmirrored theory (Breeder +3, Thorium +2 with no Uranium, Advanced Fuel Cycles +50%), and spent on the Atomic Bomb (60), Nuclear Missile (100), Nuclear Plant (40), nuclear hulls (30), Micro-Reactor (20), Cascade Reactor (60) and Giant Death Robot (80). No Bullion: fissile wealth buys power and nothing else. The Nuclear Physics focus is grounded in the process; NP08's nonexistent Thorium resource is dropped in favour of the breakthrough as gate.
• World-type parity stated in §7.0, with the one remaining asymmetry named — the elemental engines open three eras earlier — and the lever to pull if that snowballs.

Summary: Tall-civilisation matter: Alchemist specialist, Great Alchemist, Athanor improvement, mine-head Reserve Vats — matter that scales with people and land, not city count.

• One Hall per city meant matter scaled with city count while its uses (strategic resources, luxuries) are civilisation-wide — a one-city Venice could never compete. Three native sources now scale with population and land instead: the Alchemist specialist (new Specialists.json entry: +1 Science, +1 Gold, Great Alchemist points 3; slots in the Hall, Reserve Vats and Philosopher's Stone); the Great Alchemist (a new Great Person by the standard recipe) who yields 120 Prima Materia or builds an Athanor, a Great Improvement providing 3 Prima Materia a turn from a tile with no upkeep; and the Reserve Vats' mine-head dispersal (50% of the city's worked-mine production, summed before truncation). With Dispersal scaling on production, a tall civilisation has four matter levers that scale with what it has most of. Qi and Caloric need no such fix: their sinks (Turnings, Heat Exchanges) are per-city, so their demand scales with cities as their supply does.