Changes to the game data

- Rebalanced attack ranges across all ranged units and defensive buildings. Firearm infantry now clearly outranges bows in its era (hand cannoneer 16, arquebusier 18, musketeer 20, line infantry 22, trench rifleman 24, assault rifleman 25 vs. stone-age bow 12, composite bow 15, longbow 18), siege and artillery gained real standoff distance (catapult 23, trebuchet 28, bombards 30/33, artillery pieces 38/42, field guns 20/24/30), and warship ranges were re-tiered from the archer ship (12) up through ship of the line (30), dreadnought (36) and battleship (42). Towers (10–20), fortresses (12–24), town centers, coastal defenses (14–30) and flak positions (16/20) scale up accordingly, so fortifications keep pace but siege weapons of the same era can always outrange them. The cannon tower now fires light firearms instead of a direct-fire cannon. All other ranged units moved up in proportion: mortars now reach 20/26/32, machine guns 18/22/25, the panzerfaust 25, snipers 28/32, tanks 16–26 depending on class, crossbows 15/17, rocket artillery up to 38, and mounted skirmishers (horse archer, conquistador, dragoon and the special cavalry lines) gained reach while staying deliberately short-ranged. Warship lines were re-tiered to fit between the new anchor ships, torpedo craft and submarines included; flamethrowers, fire ships and aircraft are unchanged.
- Added the Fortress, a new defensive building line (800 stone, 400 wood, 250 gold, town-center-sized footprint) with four tiers: an Antiquity fortification with keep, walls and corner towers (triple archer volley plus a scorpion bolt thrower), a Late Medieval castle (triple crossbow volley plus scorpion), a Colonial bastion fort (triple musket volley plus a direct-fire cannon) and a massive Modern concrete fortress (three heavy machine guns plus a direct-fire gun turret). Every architecture style — western, far-east, orient and nordic — gets its own execution of all four models. Default build hotkey: V.
- The Conquest victory condition now counts fortresses alongside town centers: a player is only eliminated once all of their town centers AND fortresses are destroyed, so a standing fortress keeps you in the game after your last town center falls. The setup-screen tooltips for both standard victory conditions now also spell out the wonder rule — losing a single completed wonder is instant defeat under Conquest and Total Annihilation alike.
- AI players on every difficulty now actively build fortresses: from Antiquity on, an AI without one treats its first fortress as a top-priority project — deliberately saving up the stone for it instead of spending every pile on cheaper towers — and Hard/Very Hard AIs (plus larger empires with colonies) add further fortresses over time. Previously the AI never built a single fortress, which under the new Conquest rule would have left every AI dying with its last town center.
- Added repeat training to production buildings: a new circular-arrows toggle in the training row clears the rest of the queue (refunding it) and keeps producing the current unit automatically for as long as resources and population allow. Switch it off and the unit in production simply finishes. The loop follows line upgrades, survives saving and loading, and waits patiently through empty coffers instead of cancelling itself.
- Reworked the Hero Mode HUD into a proper first-person-shooter layout: the old RTS-style panels are gone. Your hero's HP bar now sits bottom right, hero abilities in a row at the bottom centre, and the unit's identity and combat stats — weapon types with their icons (up to two), unit class with icon, damage breakdown, armor, range and speed — are drawn frameless at the bottom left, directly over the scene. The minimap is now also visible in Hero Mode, rotating with your view direction, with your controlled unit marked as a diamond.
- Fixed unit shadows stuttering behind their units on Medium/High shadow quality: the sun shadow map only re-rendered when the camera or sun moved, so the real cast shadows of walking units stayed frozen in place for a moment and then snapped forward while the units themselves glided smoothly. The shadow pass now also re-renders whenever a shadow-casting unit near the camera has moved.
- Fixed workers permanently freezing a few tiles short of their resource — most visible as AI players starving on wood and stuck in the Stone Age on generated maps, since roughly every tenth tree-chopping trip ended with the worker standing idle in front of the tree forever. The same freeze could hit any gather trip (yours included); workers now always recover and finish the approach.
- Generated maps now guarantee four small groves (about 14 trees) plus two extra berry bushes around every starting position instead of four lone trees, so early wood income no longer depends on how close the nearest natural forest happens to be.
- Fixed AI worker rebalancing being effectively dead on generated maps: workers standing inside their dug-out mines counted as "can reach nothing", trees counted as "unreachable" because their own trunk tile is solid, and the whole pass gave up whenever the single neediest resource had no free spot — so AI economies piled up thousands of stone and gold with dozens of workers mining them while the food and wood needed to advance an age starved. AI players now shift workers off hoarded resources onto what actually blocks their progress.
- Fixed AI worker assignment repeatedly sending mine workers straight back to already-overflowing gold and stone veins: the same "standing in a mine pit means nothing is reachable" error dropped those workers into a fallback that ignores stockpiles and just picks the nearest node — the vein they were standing next to. Combined with the rebalancing fix above, AI civilizations that used to sit age-locked on 10,000+ hoarded stone and gold now staff wood and food properly and keep advancing (worst case in testing went from stuck-in-Bronze to reaching the Renaissance in the same 30 minutes).
- AI players saving up for an age advance no longer spend the exact resource they are saving faster than it comes in: exempted construction (defensive towers during constant raids, military and research buildings) is now rationed to one such build per 90 seconds while saving, instead of consuming every stick of wood the moment it arrived.