New Skills: Long Road & School Ties

Your envoy gains 1 range every level until level 12 / 25 / 50. Envoys normally gain 1 range every second level.

Every range figure in the game counts it, and when a destination is out of reach the travel screen offers the next rank when it would bring the destination closer.

UNLOCKS: Open a trade route with a city by learning at its School. When your envoy learns skills or attends a lecture at another city's School, a trade route with that city starts establishing at the same time. It is ready 30 minutes after it starts, or when the lesson or lecture ends if that is later.

The School offers the route when you enrol or attend a lecture. Swift Establishment shortens it as it does any route.

Your envoy establishes a new trade route in 22.5 minutes instead of 30.

UNLOCKS: Your envoy studies a lore fragment from your journal for Cultural Influence based on its rarity, from 100 for a Common up to 500 for a Legendary. Studying does not use up the fragment, and each fragment can be studied once.

Study is on each found Fragment's Thesis card in the Journal, and is no longer in the Great Library's deposit window. With one envoy who can write it, the card offers Study; with several, you pick who earns the Cultural Influence; with none, it says where Thesis is taught.

It applies only while that plot is your only land and its Town Hall is at level 0. You keep your account and choose a starting spot again, as a new player would, and the first page of the starting booklet says why. Plots you claimed or bought are never affected. The Terms of Use say so in section 18.

The skill step says to open a School in any city and choose Learn Skills, and to look through all five trees first. The trade route step names both ways to open one: Trade Routes in Commerce, or School Ties in Scholarship.

Rename your display name on the Profile page, a city in City Settings, and an envoy with the new Rename Envoy button in their row. Naming something for the first time is free, and so is choosing a new name after a moderator has reset one. Clearing a name is free, but the name you choose after clearing it costs a rename. Each city and each envoy counts its own renames. The fee is shown before you confirm, and if it changed in the meantime (another tab renamed first) nothing is charged and the new fee is shown instead. Changing only a city's banner or your nameplate stays free.

Create Envoy, the Naming Ceremony, City Settings for an unnamed city and the Profile page for a player with no display name each end their intro with the price of the first rename. Create Envoy no longer says you can rename your envoy later for free.

Paste a link into Discord, a chat app or a social post and it unfolds into a card: a player's nameplate with their cities, envoys, empire score and culture; a city's banner with its score, culture, Hotel and School; an envoy's portrait with their level, range and title. A leaderboard link shows its own description.

Opening Nearby centres the envoy in the part of the map the drawer leaves visible.

The card names the envoy, the ground, the debuff and its time left, and Begin Travel stays held back. Tapping such a tile on the map opens that screen. The envoy picker lists a barred envoy under CANNOT GO with the reason.

Every city has one address, for its owner and for visitors alike, and a visitor sees the owner's name and their Cities and Envoys tabs above it. Every envoy has one page too: its owner gets the full controls, and everyone else gets Show on map, which opens the map on the envoy with other players' envoys switched on.

The options menu below the book exports your Journal as readable text (.md) for notes, or as structured JSON. It holds every Fragment you have found, and never corrupted text or anything you have not found yet.

"Discovered by", "Named by", or "Discovered and named by" when one player did both, in the ruin drawer, the delve screens and the wilderness header.

Folded, it still shows the band's Cultural Influence total and how many envoys reached a new level.

The City Score card shows each term with its sign. A Specialist city's badge carries a small mark of its resource and reads, for example, "Specialised in Wood" and "+25% wood collection amount"; Resonance names it too.

They used to show the streak so far, which looked as if it disagreed with the Shop's claim card.

An envoy with Frostbitten, Heatstroke or Swamp Fever, or a tab still running an older version of the game, could send a route that cost more than the cheapest one, and the server took it for a Navigator route. Frostbitten and Heatstroke only stop an envoy ending a journey on their ground, so routes now pass through it, and without Navigator the server simply sends your envoy by the cheapest route they may take.

Such a tile is now refused as a destination or a stop, and the tap shows its hover card, which a phone otherwise never sees.

Check In, Learn, Trade Route and Travel now fit, with two-word labels wrapping under their art.

They now stand clear of the nameplate and are drawn sharp on high-resolution screens, and Show on map switches the other players' envoys layer on.

"The Corrupted" on the Discovery Panel stayed sealed even for fragments decoded to the end. Decoding the last layer now records the find, and fragments already decoded have been credited.

A walkthrough step no longer scrolls a target that is already in view, and a tap on the dimmed area reaches the page instead of ending the walkthrough. Leaving the page still ends it.

First Welcome, Open Gates and The Welcomer now say that an invited player counts once they reach Town Hall level 8 in a city.