This weekend I continued the work on 0.3.3.1 by fixing some UI issues and improving some overlays and behaviors. Here's a short summary:

• Fixed: “Set initial population” dialog appearing on loaded worlds that are already in progress.
• Fixed: Polity Focus and Faction Guidance UI components would not appear for focused polities and guided factions in loaded worlds.
• Fixed: Duplicate key crash when attempting to set initial population in a new world after aborting a previous attempt to set the initial population.
• Fixed: Players could change game speed through hotkeys when the game is paused when they shouldn’t.

Regarding other improvements, I made some tweaks to the Population Density overlay which, after the changes in 0.3.3 became more or less useless because it was very difficult to visualize very low density populations in most parts of the world when there are a few extremely populated areas. The improved overlay works by assigning color intensity using a logarithmic scale. So, for example, the difference in color intensity between 100 people and 1000 is the same as between 1000 and 10000, and so forth. Here's a screenshot of the tweaked overlay:

As you can see, low population areas are more visible now than they used to be. On the other hand, the world's population still appears very concentrated along coasts and river banks than anywhere else, which is not necessarily inaccurate, but the difference is way too great and it is mostly due to the 'fishing' activity being too OP (it needs some serious readjusting).

Regarding shipbuilding, I ended up decreasing the relationship between the shipbuilding knowledge level and the distance that could effectively be traveled by one quarter of what it was before. This seemed to be adequate enough since less than that made it impossible for populations to travel even the shortest distances between landmasses even with the shipbuilding knowledge maxed out. 

In addition to that, I also tweaked the travel route overlay to be able to display not just the travel routes but also how strong those routes are. So now weaker routes, those that have very little chance of being successful, are shown with high transparency and are barely visible. Strong routes, on the other hand, appear on more solid colors (still they don't mean they'll be successful routes). The strength of a route is calculated as a function of the shipbuilding knowledge (more is better) and the navigation skill (high is better), and the distance to be travelled (shorter is better), plus other factors. Here's an example screenshot:

The transparency level is also logarithmically scaled just like with the density overlay. So very weak routes are still visible compared with very strong routes. Though, I'm not satisfied with how routes are calculated and displayed yet. But further, more in-depth, changes will have to wait for a future version of the game. For now this will do, I hope.

Finally, I started working on an oft-requested feature: To be able to start the simulation paused or at different speeds other than maximum speed. I'm going a little bit deeper with that change than the others, so I will need to keep working on that for another weekend. Nevertheless, I hope to complete that that new mini feature by then.

That is for now. I still expect to be able to release 0.3.3.1 by the end of December, but I'll let you know if I encounter any complications or delays.