Envoy Levels, New Art and Delving Lore

Cultural Influence and envoy levels

Levels 1 to 30 are untouched. From 31 the curve becomes exponential in five level bands, each costing about 2.6 times the one before, so the endgame cannot be walked through by any faucet that scales linearly with the number of actions you take. Two such faucets are closed here as well.

• reduced
  Levels 31 to 50 cost far more Cultural Influence

  WasLevel 40 at 21,485 lifetime Cultural Influence and level 50 at 41,620, each level costing a few hundred more than the last

  NowLevel 40 at 32,650 and level 50 at 190,834

  Level 31 is very slightly cheaper than it was, at 10,105 rather than 10,175. Everything above it is dearer, and the gap widens with height: the step into level 50 alone is 32,294, which is more than the old curve charged for all fifty levels put together. This curve is provisional and under measurement.

• reduced
  Every envoy above level 30 was relevelled against the new curve

  WasEnvoy levels stood where the old thresholds had put them

  NowEach envoy sits at the level its lifetime Cultural Influence buys on the new curve

  No envoy drops below the level its already spent skill points require, so nothing you have spent points on is ever taken back or left owing. An envoy that spent every point it had keeps its level outright; the floor only bites where points were banked. Every prior level was recorded before the change so the whole recalculation can be reversed while the curve is being measured.

• reduced
  Trade CaravanCommerce · Tier 4 · 3 ranks

  When your envoy arrives at another city linked to its home city by a completed trade route, it delivers goods to that city. The delivery is a share of that city's hourly production of the resource it is weakest at producing. Your envoy earns Cultural Influence based on the amount delivered. Rank 1: 25%. Rank 2: 50%. Rank 3: 100%.

  WasEvery arrival at a route linked city paid out, with no cooldown, no cap and no throttle

  NowOne delivery per envoy, per destination city, per day

  A caravan arrival was paying 250 to 290 Cultural Influence against 2 to 4 for the arrival itself, which is why two earlier rounds of arrival cuts did not slow levelling at all. Shuttling an envoy back and forth between two linked cities is no longer the fastest way to level in the game. The skill is untouched for a trader who moves between different cities.

• reduced
  Grand TourDiplomacy · Tier 3

  Your envoy visits 5 different players' cities without going home, then earns bonus Cultural Influence equal to everything those arrivals paid. The count starts again after it pays out, and resets if your envoy goes home first.

  WasEvery arrival added to the banked total while only a new owner advanced the count of 5, so revisiting the same owner accumulated without limit and paid out in one uncapped award

  NowOnly an arrival at an owner the tour has not counted yet adds to the total

  Every in flight tour was reset to zero with this change, for every envoy, at whatever point it had reached. Every banked figure was produced by the old rule and none of them can be told apart from an honest one row by row, and the history needed to recompute them was never recorded. Resetting everyone evenly was the only correction that did not single out particular accounts.

Art for the envoy rework

The envoy skill and investment rework shipped with 26 icons borrowed from unrelated features, so a real feature was indistinguishable from a different real feature on screen. Those 26 land here along with 6 additions.

• improved
  32 icons land, and 26 of them replace art borrowed from other features

  WasPathmaker's road, Send a Runner and the Invest action all drew the trade route icon, and both festival tiers drew the same celebration icon

  NowEach has its own art, and the six surfaces that carried none at all now have some

  Citizen Management's Apply button also gains the citizen at work icon at the same 53px the Collect Resources button uses, and that button row stacks on narrow screens where a 53px icon and its label no longer fit a half width button.

• improved
  A Grand Festival draws its own marker on the map

  WasEvery festival marker on the world map drew the ordinary pavilion, because the two festival tiers named the same placeholder file

  NowA Grand Festival is distinct from an ordinary one at a glance
• improved
  An investment card shows what the investment is

  WasThe Invest screen showed the funded building and nothing else, so Hotel Patron and a Hotel were one picture, and the four paths that fund no building had no art at all

  NowThe card leads with the path's own icon and keeps the level badged building thumbnail beside it

  The two answer different questions. The building art says what is at this city and how good it is; the path icon says what this investment is.

The Invest screen and the skill trees

Two screens a player reaches constantly, neither of which said what it was.

• improved
  The Invest screen leads with where you are investing

  WasNo title at all, so a player arriving from a map popover met a bare city name, an identity strip and an unrelated list of statistics

  Now"Invest at <city>", with the city's banner, name, owner nameplate and score read as one object
• improved
  The envoy funding the stake gets its own bar

  WasThe envoy appeared as three stacked lines and a fourth paragraph repeating the city named directly above it

  NowA 56px portrait with the name, home city and level on two lines

  The old fourth paragraph was the outlook row "Paid from" moved out of the host city's statistics, where it read as if the host paid. The envoy's own line answers it, and the full explanation of which city pays stays on the tier selector directly above the prices, where the question actually arises.

• improved
  "Owner last active" reads in days

  WasThe server's raw calendar date, leaving you to do the arithmetic while deciding whether to commit resources

  Now"Yesterday" or "3 days ago", coloured by recency, with the exact date still on the cell
• improved
  Back names where it goes

  WasA bare "Back" on its own row above the title

  Now"Back to <destination>", sharing the title's row

  The Invest screen has four entry points and three of them are city pages, so the label follows the one you came from. Arriving by deep link, bookmark or refresh names the host city and goes there, rather than falling back to an unlabelled button.

• improved
  Due DiligencePatronage · Tier 3

  UNLOCKS: On the Invest screen your envoy shows an exact projected return worked out from that city's own history instead of a range, and every Hotel, School, Market or Town Hall investment it makes costs 10% less.

  WasNamed as plain text on the Invest screen

  NowA skill reference carrying its tree, tier and exact effect, like every other named skill
• improved
  The skill tree header names its way out

  WasA bare arrow glyph in the header, roughly 18 by 18 pixels of hit area against a 44 pixel touch minimum, naming no destination

  NowA full width row reading "Back to all skill trees", with the tree emblem doubled from 28px to 56px

Lore fragments from delving

Delving has rolled lore fragments since encounters shipped, recorded them into the run's haul, and then never materialised them when the haul was banked at home. Fixing that one chokepoint covers all three sources at once: an ordinary delve, a Runner's delivery, and the fragment Manuscript Preservation salvages from an injury.

• improved
  A delve gives you the lore fragments it finds

  WasEvery fragment a delve rolled was recorded on the floor it was found on and then discarded when the haul was deposited at home

  NowThe fragments a delve rolls arrive in your journal with the rest of the haul

  Fragments authored against a minimum ruin depth are also awardable now, which is most of the library's deep material. Before this, the pool a depth 10 delve could draw from held one legendary and two epics.

• ◆new
  NEW: Epic lore fragments drop from delves

  Epic was missing from every depth's tier weighting, so a delve could not produce one at any depth. It enters at depth 7 and rises with depth: 7% at depth 7, 12% at depth 8, 18% at depth 9 and 30% at depth 10. The Possible Haul distribution bar carries the sixth slice to match.

• improved
  Lore is a number of fragments, not a capped chance

  WasA flat 20% plus 10% per depth chance of one fragment, capped at 100%, so depth 8 and deeper were certain to find exactly one and a lore bonus on top bought nothing

  NowAn expected count of 0.2 plus 0.1 per depth with no cap, so depth 10 expects 1.2 fragments

  The whole number is fragments the floor certainly yields and the fraction is the chance of one more. Depth 10 is one fragment for certain plus a 20% chance of a second. A +50% lore choice at depth 9 used to buy exactly zero, and at depth 7 bought a third of what its label said.

• improved
  The Possible Haul box says how many fragments, not just their tier

  WasThe lore box named the six tier slices and implied a flat one fragment at depths 9 and 10

  NowIt reads "1 for certain, plus 20% of another" beside the same tier slices

  The tier slices were always right. The disagreement lived entirely in the quantity, which the old shape had no room to state. Nothing is stated when nothing is guaranteed, because the bar's own None slice already covers that.

• improved
  Three terminal encounter choices stop being traps

  Was"Break the seal", "Open it, and make this floor your last" and "Open it, and spend what is left of the day inside" each forfeited every resource in the run and ended the delve for a doubled lore chance that the cap had already spent

  NowEach pays 2.75 times the expected fragments and shifts the tier pool toward better fragments

  All three are still terminal and still cost the whole run's resources. Two of the three previously had no tier shift at all.

• ⇄reworked
  A lore choice shifts the tier pool rather than upgrading the fragment

  Was"one tier higher", which described a guarantee

  NowWeight moved toward the better tiers, described as better odds

  The engine has redistributed weight rather than upgrading a rolled tier since this rebalance. The old wording promised something it no longer does, and "+50% lore discovery chance" promised something the game could not keep at depths 7 and 9 either.

• improved
  An encounter choice with several consequences reads as a list

  WasFour consequences stacked under one heading and ran together as a paragraph

  NowThey bullet, per heading. A lone consequence still reads bare.

Preparing for a delve

Preparation is offered at depths 6, 8 and 10 and costs a share of the resources and Cultural Influence the run has banked so far. Lore fragments are never spent on it. The safe outcome bonus each tier buys is unchanged at 5, 12 and 20 percentage points.

• reduced
  Preparation costs ten times what it did

  WasLight 3%, Medium 7% and Full 12% of the run's banked haul

  NowLight 30%, Medium 60% and Full 90%

  An envoy standing at depth 10 holding 400 wood, 200 clay and 30 Cultural Influence pays 360 wood, 180 clay and 27 Cultural Influence for Full, where it used to pay 48, 24 and 3. At the old prices preparing was free value and there was no reason not to. Full stops at 90% rather than 100% because at 100% the stake being protected is zero the moment you buy, and a severe injury would then threaten nothing. All figures are before Insured Cargo.

• improved
  The preparation panel says what deep preparation costs

  Was"Spend part of the resources and Cultural Influence gathered so far to improve your odds on the next floor."

  NowThe same line, followed by "Preparing deep costs most of what you are carrying."
• ⇄reworked
  Insured CargoCommerce · Tier 3

  Your envoy prepares a delve for half the usual price. Every tier costs half what it would without this, so preparing deep stops meaning spending almost everything you are carrying.

  WasLight 2%, Medium 5% and Full 9% instead of 3%, 7% and 12%, a saving of one to three percentage points

  NowHalf of every tier: Light 15%, Medium 30%, Full 45%

  Stated as a ratio rather than a table of percentages, so it cannot go stale the next time the tiers move. At the new prices this is worth 45% of a run's banked haul at Full, where before it was worth 3%.

• ⇄reworked
  Thorough PreparationExploration · Tier 3 · 2 ranks

  Preparing before a delve raises your envoy's chance of a safe outcome. Each rank adds to that: +5% at rank 1, +10% at rank 2, on top of whatever the preparation itself buys.

  WasMultiplied the tier's own safe bonus by 1.5x at rank 1 and 2x at rank 2

  NowAdds a flat 5 or 10 percentage points to it

  Depth 6 carries only 20 points of injury risk in total, so Full already consumed the whole pool there and multiplying it bought the skill nothing. Surplus bonus now buys down the dead end outcome instead of evaporating, but only once every injury outcome is already at zero: preparation never trades away the friendly result while a real one is still on the table. At Light this is a straight gain (10% or 15% against 7.5% or 10%); at Full it is smaller than the old multiplier (25% or 30% against 30% or 40%) and lands where the old one could not.

Fixes

• "Deep Reading" draws an icon instead of a broken image.

  Both the button on the wonder panel and the survey it opens pointed at a file that does not exist, so the icon slot rendered as a broken image everywhere the skill appeared.

• The Great Library states what studying a fragment is worth.

  The deposit modal worked the Thesis reward out as 20 Cultural Influence per rarity tier against an actual award of 100, understating it fivefold and hiding the deposit versus study decision entirely. The skill card has always said 100 for a Common up to 500 for a Legendary, which is what the game pays.

• The city name on the Invest screen goes to that city.

  It linked to a route the router redirects to your OWN empire page, so every player clicking the name of the city they were funding was sent to their own empire holding a land id they do not own. An investment target is by definition somebody else's city.

• "Foreign Markets" says make and accept.

  The card described creating offers only, which was the whole feature until buying through another player's Market shipped. It now names reachable offers alongside eligible buyers, since the host's routes answer both directions.

• "Silent Partner" says make and accept.

  A Market investment grants the same right by another route, so its card and its outlook line move in step with Foreign Markets.