The game world now encompasses 6,850,000,000 people which might be slightly above the real value, but its still a large number anyway. About large numbers, BYOND doesn't do too well with them once you hit the thousand million mark, and then it gets really silly after 2 thousand million. I've had to adjust the regions to take this into account as Asia has simply gotten too big, so I've split the Indian subcontinent off as well, making a 7th region. I debated splitting off North and South America forming and 8th but decided against it as there is only easy data for "Northern America" which is a very boring US + Canada + the odd European Island. I might consider splitting it off in future, but at the moment as its under 1 thousand million anyway there is little need.
Splitting off India has also meant I had to tidy up the Asia region, because otherwise its just a mess. I produced an image (included) with the rough boundaries of each region. Russia is included in Europe for ease, but its not "connected" to China/Asia regions (I make 'em go through Middle East), the Middle East region includes the 'stans of Western Asia, and now the Asia region only includes the South East + Koreas and Japan. This makes Japan and the Koreas a little odd as they are the other side of China but if they were tied to the Chinese Region then China would be unnecessarily large while Asia would be unnecessarily small.
Adding to that, I've edited some of the current years populations to be a bit more accurate, and to compensate for the new region. I've also to the best of my googling knowledge and research produced data for many more eras, including every 50 years from 1850 to 1700, every 100 years from 1700 to 1000 and then every 200 years from 1000 to 0. A lot of these estimates are from very crude % estimations of world regions from estimations from total population but it still serves the purpose.
Which finally gets me to the main juicy bit. Weapons. I held back in the last version from including the built in year-checker to see if you are actually in an age where the weapons you find (or start with) were produced. This is largely because I simply didn't have enough weapons in the game to make it worthwhile, it would be a hard slog if I did set it at the time. Including so many years (there is now 20 different time settings) I can't possibly allow that to continue (Getting a Desert Eagle in 0AD? Now that would have got rid of the Roman Occupation of Judea :p) so naturally I've devised a new system to take this into account. You will now only start and find weapons that were produced during or before the year you start in. Expect to have Crossbows in 0 AD, the Arquebus in 1400 AD, Brown Bess in 1750 AD and the Spencer Repeating Rifle in 1900 AD.
On top of that, originally the ammo for each weapon were separated even if they technically used the same cartridges. Expect all Muskets or 9mm Pistols or Crossbows to share the same ammunition supply as other guns of their type for easier and more reliable scavenging and use. Of course, not every gun or weapon was found everywhere in the world, don't expect to find that good ole 7 round clip Spencer Repeating Rifle in Africa, but if your lucky you might find it while your in the Asia region (yay for 19th century American involvement in Japan!).
I don't know whether this will be available for download this month, as I'm going to have to stop soon in order to work on Joshtan, but you might get lucky we'll see.
Also note that someone seems to be hosting Exploder for the last couple of days, take advantage, play some games and get on the leaderboard!
http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/Exploder?tab=live
