This is one of the largest updates that we've added to the game so far. There are new buildings, units, a handful of general improvements and balance changes, and new strategies to explore. We've finally added walls and siege units to the game, and we can't wait to see  what kind of strategies people come up with!

Walls and gates
The addition of walls and gates means you can wall off and protect any areas of interest. Enemy armies will no longer be able to just waltz in and take out your farms and village center. Walls can provide you with extra time to execute a counter-measure, and it can add choke points that you can use to your advantage as soon as the walls are breached. Maybe you want to surround the enemy and trap them inside your base?

We've taken great care to make sure walls don't disrupt the existing game mechanics in any way. For example, if you close your gate and a villager needs to get through it to deliver a resource, as soon as you open the gate, the villager will continue with its task.

Connect walls and gates to watchtowers
Usage of space is important when walling off your settlement. You can of course place watchtower inside your walled off settlement to give an extra barricade between your enemy and the watchtower, but if you need that space for something else, you can always connect the watchtower to the walls instead. It also means enemy ranged units won't be able to attack your walls without your garrisoned units being able to respond. Lastly, it makes your settlement look good!

Siege units
We've introduced two siege units to tackle walls, gates and increased building hit points (increased buildings hit points was actually introduced in an earlier version, so buildings have been too strong until now).

The Sapper is a melee unit that digs to undermine buildings. Historically these have been mentioned numerous times in sources from the Bronze Age. Their fighting capabilities aren't that great, but they are useful to breach through enemy walls or take out buildings quickly in the midst of battle. It has extra protection against ranged units and can be upgraded with copper helmet and bronze shield.

The Battering Ram is also frequently mentioned in Bronze Age sources. It takes a while to produce and its movement speed is slow, but it deals massive damage to buildings. It even deals double damage to gates! Furthermore, rolling over enemy farms will damage them. Get a few of these within enemy farmlands and you can wreak havoc to their food production!

You need to construct a Workshop to train both of these new siege units. Both units require organised warfare researched, while battering ram requires wheel researched as well. to be produced.

Increased vision range for all units
All units have had their vision range buffed. We found several game flow improvements after testing this. Villagers will search for new resources in a larger area before idling, and military units will look for new units to chase in a larger area.

Early game is more pleasant
Since all units have increased vision range it means you can see more of your starting environments straight away. This again means you can make a good decision on where to place your village center quicker. Lastly, the increased vision range and slight movement buff for the scout also makes scouting more pleasant.

The increased vision range for all units makes it much easier to make a formal decision about where to place your settlement right away.

Rally point improvements
Since watchtowers can be connected to walls and gates, it's important that you can control which side units exit them. So we added the ability to set a rally point from watchtower, and we also made sure that units actually spawn towards the direction they will take, whether they exit a watchtower or are newly trained from a barracks.

Culling non-military units from selection box
One situation that often arises is that you have a bunch of villagers and military units spread out over your farm lands. In this situation it can be quite tricky to only select your military units. Especially during battles, when you need quick reaction times, this can be annoying, and you often end up selecting and ordering a bunch of famers to attack your enemy as well, even if that's not what you really intended to.

To solve this, whenever you create a selection box, if there's military units within it, then all scout and villager units will be culled from selection. This makes it much easier to only select military units during stressful situations like described above.

Tribe, scout and villagers will be grouped together like before, to make sure that it's still easy to select these units as one group to explore your surroundings and settle somewhere else in the beginning of the game.

Also, this culling only happens when creating a selection box. You can still hold shift and double click on a bowman and then double click on a villager to select all nearby villagers and bowmen in a group.

Advanced woodworking is now +50%
Clearing trees is even more important now, since single trees often block your planned wall constructions. To make up for this, advanced woodcutting increases woodcutting speed by 50% (up from 25%). We often saw that techs like organised warfare, composite bow and plough were preferred starting technologies for rushing food surplus or advanced units. Advanced woodcutting is now a more viable starting tech since it allows you to more rapidly clear land for farms and walls.

Bowman changes
Based on our data, bowman has been so widely used to the point that it severely hurt the fun factor of the game. We have received reports of online gamers "banning" bowman from being used, and that this led to more unit variation and fun. Our internal tests indicate that bowman is actually not that strong, but it becomes too strong in large numbers due to its long range and ability to focus fire and one-shot units, as well as its ability to garrison watchtowers most efficient in the game. As a counter measure we've therefore nerfed its attack range slightly, and we've increased the cost of training to match tier 2 melee units. Bowman being more expensive and thus less spammable should make the cheaper Javelin Thrower, with its more powerful short-range attack, a more viable option.

Light Axeman damage buff
This buff means you aren't as forced to research advanced warfare right away at the expense of other early-game options. We hope to see more early-game strategies with this change.

Change log 0.6.4.0

New
- Added new building Workshop where you can train new siege units
- Added new unit Sapper that has high siege damage and armour against ranged attacks
- Added new unit Battering Ram that excels against buildings and deals bonus damage to gates
- Added new building Wall that can be connected to Watchtower and Gate
- Added new building Gate that can be connected to Watchtower and Wall

Unit behavior
- Unit ignores units and buildings in other zones when looking for a new nearby target (unless ranged)
- Unit will not chase a unit that hit it with a projectile if the unit firing did it from another zone
- If you wall off so that villagers can't get to their delivery point or back to the resource they were harvesting, they will wait for an opening, and as soon as there is one, they will continue what they did (this will be the general behavior for most actions)
- Villagers will look for resources and delivery points in the same zone, unless strictly ordered otherwise, and if a delivery points gets blocked off, villager will wait for an opening unless villager finds another delivery point in the same zone
- Implemented general behavior for other cases as well when zones become inaccessible, for example if a target enemy suddenly is in another zone, or a group of units are split between multiple zones

General improvements
- Watchtower can now be connected to Wall and Gate
- When creating selection box all villagers will be culled from selection if a military unit is selected amongst them
- When a unit spawns from a production building (eg. Barracks) or exits a watchtower, the unit will now find an empty node on the side that is closest to leading to the target rally point position (instead of always below the building like in previous versions)
- Asking all garrisoned units to exit watchtower now automatically selects units that exited
- Tribe unit no longer looks for nearby enemy units to chase while idling
- Scout no longer looks for nearby enemies to chase and attack
- Adjusted all AI waves difficulty levels 
- Updated village center icon in how to play pages
- No longer playing harvesting sounds like chop, mine etc. after match has ended
- Buildings are no longer transparent when placing them (looked bad with multiple parts)

Balance changes
- Bowman costs 35 food and 15 wood to train (from 25 food and 15 wood)
- Bowman attack range reduced to 14/22 (from 16/24)
- Advanced woodcutting increases woodcutting speed by 50% (up from 25%)
- Bronze spear costs 75 metal and 50 wood (down from 100 metal and 50 wood)
- Bronze axe costs 75 metal and 50 wood (down from 100 metal and 50 wood)
- Bronze arrowhead costs 75 metal and 50 wood (down from 100 metal and 50 wood)
- Light Axeman has 5 melee attack damage (up from 4)
- Increased vision range of all units (the increase is 8 in average)
- Scout has 10 movement speed (up from 9)

Bug fixes
- Constructing and selecting Watchtower plays correct sound
- Fixed wrong behavior when villager was ordered to attack enemy farm and reached farm
- Ranged unit that attacks while garrisoning tower plays attack sound effects
- Units are visible based on actual position and not next target node
- Correct sprite for garrisoned unit (leave) button
- Fixed hotkeys for crafting equipment in furnace
- Fixed wrong color on copper weapon upgrades showing on units and in UI