V0.7: Core gameplay loop

Hi everyone! This update focuses on shaping the three gameplay phases more clearly, fixing a bunch of bugs that crept in over the past weeks, and improving performance across the board.

Please don't hesitate to give me feedback and suggestions, I know the core gameplay can be "boring" because there isn't much to do, but this is intentional for now, I want to define the core loop very well before buildings more feature on top (but many are planned!).

Three Phases of Civilization

When you start a game, your journey through the world follows a natural progression and the tools you use shift at each stage.

Early Game: Exploration and Settlement

You begin with a single city and a world to discover. Your first real tool is the Explore order, which sends out explorers to map adjacent territory and reveal what lies underground, ores, gems, coal, salt.

Use the Expansion order to direct where your city grows as population increases, claiming tiles toward the resources you need. 

The city panel let you adjust worker allocation across farms, mines and workshops, so this phase is mostly about learning what your land offers and making sure food stays stable while the first production chains come online.

Mid Game: Optimization and Branching Paths

Once your city is self-sufficient, you face a real choice. You can pour effort into food production and send out Expansion orders aggressively to grow your footprint fast, positioning you for early colonization. Or you can diversify production across different goods categories, because the technologies your state discovers are influenced by what your cities produce. Want metalworking? Make sure your smiths are busy. 

 Diplomacy begins here too, first contact with neighboring states will define your strategy while you quietly stockpile the military resources you will eventually need.

Late Game: Empire and Internal Crises

Expansion orders, military settings and population management all converge once you are running multiple cities. You coordinate colonization alongside war, managing loyalty crises that emerge from rapid growth or difficult conquests. A city far from your capital with a hostile population is a liability, and the loyalty system reflects that. This phase is less about optimizing a single city and more about holding an empire together while pushing its borders outward.

Patch Notes

Performance

• FXAA replaces MSAA for better performance and comparable visual quality.
• Terrain noise baked via GPU compute shader with LOD for distant tiles.
• Deferred deletion system prevents frame stalls from large Vulkan allocations.
• Organic borders and biome blending disabled.

Settings and Console

• Added console commands for runtime control and diagnostics.
  
• Runtime log level controllable via -log flag or debug console.

Save System

• Fixed crash on load from tile data being moved instead of copied for the sim thread.
• Fixed crash in season system from unresized crisis arrays on initial snapshot.
• State selection popup now reappears correctly when loading a save with no player state.
• Fixed AI thread start order to prevent race condition on load.

Fixes

• Fixed Tin resource enum collision corrupting data for other resource types.
• Removed dead AI profile settings fields causing stale trade resources to accumulate.
• Fixed Vulkan synchronization for MAILBOX present mode.
• Fixed descriptor set validation errors from sets updated while in use.
• Fixed GPU timestamp pool reading wrong frame index.