V0.8: Diplomacy & Exploration

Hi everyone! This release adds the two systems that turn Orbis from something you watch into something you steer: you can now run diplomacy against rival states and send scouts out to map the world. There's also a much bigger tutorial and a lot of polish along the way.

Diplomacy

Every state holds a relationship score with every other state. It drifts on its own and shifts with your actions, and that score is what gates everything else.

You also see diplomatic postures both ways: a much stronger neighbor views you as prey, equals stay neutral, mutual friends warm up. Some deeper verbs (peace offers, influence campaigns, tribute) currently run AI to AI only, with player-side controls landing next.

Exploration

Your cities periodically propose expeditions. A popup gives you a heading, an expedition type, and the provision cost up front. Accept it and a scout sets out; provisions come out of the city stockpile, and if the city can't afford it yet the expedition waits until it can.

As scouts move they uncover foreign civilizations and underground deposits (ores, gems, precious metals), each surfacing a contextual report: who you just met and what they value, or what's buried and where. That feeds straight into your decisions about who to befriend and which direction to grow. You can paint Explore orders to pull scouts toward a frontier, or leave them to chase the best discovery-per-cost on their own.

Also in this release

The tutorial roughly doubled, now 22 missions across 7 tracks that unlock from in-game events rather than a fixed line, so meeting a rival opens the diplomacy track on its own. Configurable crisis alerts warn you when food, trade demand, or population turn bad. Rivers now visibly swell and shrink with the seasons, the game-over screen breaks down how each rival finished, and keyword tooltips across the HUD are now clickable links into the Encyclopedia.

Next up

The next release will finish diplomacy's remaining verbs with proper player-side controls and rework the tutorial into a coherent chain. Colonization moves from an AI-only behavior to something you direct, founding distant settlements without needing contiguous land.