This weekend I continued working on fixing issues and doing minor tweaks in preparation for release 0.3.3.1. A few of those things I can't talk about yet. But not everything is a "secret". Here's a very short list of things I can mention:

• Fixed a very old issue where hotkeys would not work after loading a running world.
• Tweaked fishing to make it much less productive than it was before, and bringing more balance between all three food producing activities (farming, foraging, and fishing)
• Added founding dates to all polities and factions, which now are displayed in the top left hand info box when relevant overlays are active (General and Polity overlays)

Aside from those minor things I added an often requested minor feature: Now it is possible to set the speed with which the simulation will start after generating a new world, within the "Add initial population" dialog.

The new option, which appears at the bottom right of the dialog, works similar to the option displayed on decision dialogs. Each press of the button toggles the speed toward the next faster option until cycling back to the first option, which is to start the simulation paused. The game will remember which speed option was last taken, and the next time a new world is generated the default option show will be that last one used. Even across game sessions.

For loaded worlds where the simulation has already started, things are going to be a little different. Every loaded world will start paused by default. But upon unpausing, the world will resume at the speed it was when it was previously saved. This is I feel what would make the most sense since I think anyone would like a chance to see the state of a loaded world before resuming the game.

Next weekend is the last one I'll work on 0.3.3.1. My goal is to add a bunch of extra fixes and do some extra testing. With the hope that I'll be able to publicly release this version after the last weekend of December. I'll probably won't be able to add all the things I wanted to add for this fix-up release. Nevertheless I think I handled most of the issues and requests that I could easily get done in the span of a month. After that release is done I'll move ahead and start working on 0.3.4.