NEWS-2.6.1

See the full ChangeLog in the source for a comprehensive list of all changes.

Download links for the latest release can be found on the download page.

WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 2.6.0

2.6.1 is mostly a bugfix release.

Server / General

Changes affecting players (supplied rulesets)

• Vision-providing bases, such as buoys, could in some circumstances remove visibility from tiles, perhaps preventing the owner's cities from working them, in the presence of autosettlers. HRM#797698 HRM#781551
• Various automatic processes in cities at turn change, such as rearranging workers when a settler is built, no longer interrupt rapture growth before the player can intervene. HRM#771536
• A warning is now displayed every turn when units are at risk of being disbanded due to an armistice turning into a peace treaty. HRM#764959
• All players are now warned the turn before a game is due to end due to a spaceship arriving, or due to the endturn server setting. HRM#764421 HRM#764956
• Stop displaying "wonder will be finished next turn" messages for obsolete wonders. HRM#764965
• If a city starts to build an improvement from the worklist whose requirements are not yet met (for instance, its technology is not yet known), it will now be left on the worklist, rather than purged. The city will accumulate production points until the requirements are met or the player intervenes. (This is a longstanding feature, but has been broken for a long time.) HRM#846514
• If a player used /away to set up caretaker AI, any worker tasks the player had set (by right-clicking on the city map) would be forgotten. HRM#685283
• Cities produced pollution slightly too often. HRM#763881
• When your attempt to steal technology fails, you're now told if it is because you already stole from that city. HRM#801810
• The dispersion server setting on hex maps now uses a hexagonal distribution, rather than a square one. HRM#767131
• Historians failed to take angry citizens into account when reporting on the "HAPPIEST Civilizations". HRM#763884
• Fix a possible network protocol warning when units are starving. HRM#661865
• Increased the amount of culture points required for cultural victory in rulesets where that is possible: civ2civ3 (disabled by default), experimental, and sandbox (disabled by default). HRM#766716
• Being the first to gain an achievement no longer gives you double the usual culture bonus for that achievement. (Affects civ2civ3 and sandbox rulesets.) HRM#763885
• Fix unconfirmed server trouble in rulesets with a "Land Ahoy" achievement (civ2civ3, experimental, sandbox). HRM#823174
• Improvements to civ1 ruleset fidelity:
  • Remove all restrictions on tax rates. HRM#827329
  • Only Artillery and Bombers should ignore City Walls, not other aircraft. HRM#822926
  • The Great Wall did not prevent population loss in cities it protected. HRM#822929
  • Railroads can no longer be built on city centre tiles (and do not appear there automatically), for behaviour closer to the original. HRM#803249
  • Forests can no longer be planted on river tiles. HRM#825239
  • Online help claimed that land units could be airlifted; they can't. HRM#850673

Changes affecting other rulesets / modders

• In rulesets which allow capturing units, it's no longer allowed to capture a transport which is carrying units. (Previously this was allowed, but left the game in a broken state.) HRM#772516
• In rulesets with nation-specific starting units, care is now taken to place them on tiles they can exist on, and clear any huts from their tile. HRM#767129
• A unit entering a tile containing multiple hut-like extras is now handled more correctly. HRM#824708
• If a unit entered a tile containing an extra with cause 'Hut', then any other extras on the tile with category "Bonus" would also be treated as more huts, even if they didn't have cause 'Hut'. (For example, this would affect Ruins in supplied rulesets, except that it's not possible for Hut and Ruins to end up on the same tile by the operation of standard game rules.) HRM#782719
• The game editor didn't allow changing research bulbs if the player was researching Future Tech at the time. HRM#765089
• Copying and pasting tiles in the game editor would accidentally paste the same units three times. HRM#850947
• Rulesets which defined a unit type without any tech_req could crash the server, rather than giving an error message. HRM#816374
• Fix inability to use default/nationlist.ruleset in a custom ruleset lacking standard plural-named terrains such as 'Hills'. HRM#827555
• Calling the Lua API function (City):inspire_partisans from the client could crash it, due to incomplete game knowledge. Now this function returns false if determining the answer requires knowledge that is not available in the caller's context. HRM#797679
• Coding style clean up to supplied default.lua script. HRM#822189
• The included Lua engine has been upgraded from 5.3.4 to 5.3.5. HRM#765936

Changes affecting server operators

• If control of a player was delegated over a game load/save cycle, ending the delegation would not restore control to the original owner. HRM#772657
• If a fixed random seed (gameseed) was set, second and subsequent games started on a single server would not honour it. HRM#761219
• Included Luasql has been upgraded from 2.3.5 to 2.4.0. HRM#801775

General

• Various changes to pathfinding, affecting how goto paths are drawn in the client as well as the actual paths chosen by units. Notably, the "Turns to target" shown for goto paths now indicates how many turns before the unit can act again, as it did in 2.5. Other changes affect fueled units, including a fix for a possible infinite loop. HRM#763893 HRM#657396 HRM#824278 HRM#824099 HRM#824100 HRM#824102 HRM#765079
• Saving a map image could cause a crash with a high number of players on a crowded map. HRM#707912
• Tweaked the categorisation of the event cache settings. HRM#778665
• Slightly improved diagnostics for missing sound files. HRM#799291
• Various internal changes which should only affect developers. HRM#735284 HRM#656441 HRM#656443 HRM#735289 HRM#767074 HRM#768652 HRM#755356 HRM#776786 HRM#778025 HRM#780526 HRM#780300 HRM#800781 HRM#800852 HRM#801661 HRM#801777 HRM#819537 HRM#821112 HRM#821128 HRM#821847 HRM#824076 HRM#828263 HRM#846809 HRM#847090 HRM#848027 HRM#823695 HRM#820981 HRM#851193

AI

• The AI is now more likely to build sea attacker units. HRM#825073
• The AI now attaches some (small) value to gaining culture points. HRM#767726
• The AI now values getting an embassy from diplomacy, in rulesets like civ2civ3 where that reduces research costs. HRM#767838
• Fix possible regression in AI's ability to build defending units when under threat. (Also, a server crash when started with --debug 4.) HRM#764974
• AI is now more likely to build attacker units that will make a difference to the goal of conquering a specific city. HRM#825074
• Speed-up for threaded AI. HRM#804448
• Fix some failures to fully initialise AI state on loading a savegame. Could possibly affect ferries. HRM#804394 HRM#804440

Clients

• When setting up single-player games, the client's AI level control no longer gets out of sync with the server state. HRM#765061
• A forced tileset specified like freeciv-gtk3 --tiles amplio2 could be ignored when starting a scenario game. HRM#765923
• Try to make the city outline display for city-founding units more accurate for some custom rulesets. HRM#746187
• Fix possible trouble when ordering a unit to take an action on its current tile, such as building a city. HRM#827156
• (Gtk3/3.22) If you pressed Escape when prompted for the name of a new city, the relevant unit could subsequently not respond to the (B)uild City command at all. Hitting Escape when renaming a city could also lead to trouble. HRM#689225
• (Gtk3/3.22) Happiness tooltips from the city dialog could appear in the wrong place. HRM#768105
• (Gtk3/3.22) The client no longer permanently consumes a lot of CPU after witnessing a nuclear explosion. HRM#850672
• (Gtk3.22) Various keyboard shortcuts (such as Ctrl+S for save) were missing or wrong. Now they are consistent with other Gtk clients and the help. HRM#850291 HRM#850292 HRM#850293
• (Gtk3.22) Menus and other UI elements now support keyboard navigation with Alt+key combinations, as in the other Gtk clients. HRM#850295 HRM#850297
• (Gtk3.22) Fix a possible crash at startup. HRM#769012
• (SDL) It was not possible to start a revolution with some rulesets, such as civ2civ3 with its default settings. HRM#794114
• (SDL) Fix a possible crash on closing the client. HRM#824593
• (SDL2) Fix a client crash. HRM#824589
• (SDL2) The SDL2 client now treats touch events similarly to pressing the left mouse button. HRM#831742
• (Qt) Many improvements to the Qt client:
  • If the ruleset allows building multiple road or base types in the current situation, the Qt client now allows choosing which, like other clients. HRM#684336
  • Zoom changes:
    • The map zoom level no longer affects the city dialog, the resolution of units in the current list, etc. HRM#769214 HRM#769212
    • Option to control whether text size is scaled with the map view. HRM#769204
  • Speed up startup and zooming. HRM#768847
  • On the Nations report, show "Science: (Unknown)" rather than "Science: 0%" if the information isn't known (due to lack of an embassy, etc). HRM#769585 HRM#825218
  • Fix various choices made on first run:
    • Huge fonts could be chosen on small displays. HRM#766497
    • Better default city dialog layout. HRM#767092
  • Virtual cities used for trade planning are now always shown, even if trade route drawing is disabled. HRM#767094
  • Adding a city to trade planning no longer has the side effect of opening its dialog. HRM#767095
  • Prevent observers attempting to rename cities or change their governor. HRM#769796
  • Look for themes in all data directories on the path, not just the first. HRM#782349 HRM#850290
  • With iso-hex tilesets, units were drawn too big. HRM#770253
  • Show technology icons in more places. HRM#771722
  • Tweak city dialog layout. HRM#770355
  • Clicking 'Load' with selecting a savegame to load caused a hang. HRM#778016
  • Fix an assertion failure in the city dialog. HRM#847688
  • Fix a warning when leaving a game with a meeting dialog open. HRM#769764
  • Other minor fixes. HRM#771721 HRM#767837
• Fix various various client memory leaks. HRM#767983

Tools

• Fixes to the experimental ruleset editor:
  • When saving a ruleset using root_reqs for techs, techs which implicitly inherited root_reqs from others were saved with explicit root_reqs. HRM#758958
  • When saving a ruleset while the system language was not English, the resulting ruleset could fail to load due to its OutputType requirements erroneously being translated. HRM#848260
• Changes to the freeciv-manual tool:
  • Now includes minimal documentation of unit types. HRM#840873
  • Fix assertion failure. HRM#763694

Tilesets / Art

• The Hexemplio city graphics for Asian, Babylonian, and Tropical city styles were wrong. HRM#774184

Help / Documentation

• Miscellaneous improvements to in-game text and user documentation. HRM#763957 HRM#804379 HRM#734377 HRM#821646 HRM#825210 HRM#824129 HRM#829168 HRM#851510 HRM#852070
• Miscellaneous changes to developer/install/ruleset docs. HRM#765121 HRM#767203 HRM#767841 HRM#692480 HRM#769401 HRM#785520 HRM#785647 HRM#802774 HRM#769391 HRM#817952 HRM#741552 HRM#819966 HRM#820664 HRM#821817 HRM#821798 HRM#821848 HRM#824117 HRM#834328 HRM#850289
• Invisible changes to assist localization. HRM#765598 HRM#851518

Translations

• Updated translations:
  • Complete translations: Polish, Russian.
  • Incomplete translations: French (99.9% core, 100% nations, 100% ruledit), Catalan (99.7% core, 99.9% nations, 100% ruledit), Finnish (99.5% core, 91% nations, 98.2% ruledit), Spanish (94% core, 99.9% nations, 18% ruledit), British English (95.3% core, 100% nations, 100% ruledit).

Build/portability

• Fix failure to find glibtoolize on Mac OS. HRM#714899
• Fix deprecation warnings when building Gtk3 clients with Gtk+ 3.24 and later. HRM#771103
• Fix some compiler warnings with GCC 8/9/10. HRM#765910 HRM#801655 HRM#825241 HRM#830116 HRM#851727 HRM#851728 HRM#851873
• Fix widespread function pointer casting abuse that prevented building with Emscripten. HRM#775057
• Fix a warning with the wasm toolchain. HRM#829535
• Fix building SDL client with Freetype ≥ 2.9.1. (SDL2 client was not affected.) HRM#754206
• The SDL2 client build could fail to complain gracefully about too-old Freetype2. HRM#765927
• Fix possible configure failure to disable building of SDL2 client when SDL2 development files not present (upstream bz 4544). HRM#850938
• Fix Qt build issue on Cygwin. HRM#820604
• In Windows Gtk3.22 installers built with msys2, the modpack installer could not be launched. HRM#781746
• Fix possible modpack installer build failure on some platforms. HRM#767468
• Make the Gtk2 client's appdata XML format less out-of-date. HRM#767187
• Some developer scripts now require a binary called python3; however, this is not required just to build from the distribution tarball. (The underlying scripts would still run in Python 2 or 3 for now, but their #! line refers to python3.) HRM#842994

See NEWS for older lists of changes.