Ember Reach - what's new
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0.5  (1 November 2026)
  - Fog of war for the computer houses: they now choose what to attack
    and where to settle only from what their worlds and fleets have seen,
    as a player does. Attacks need a sighting from the last turn; an older
    sighting only tells them whether a system was unclaimed then. Their
    scouts revisit the systems seen longest ago, and they keep three.

0.4  (1 November 2026)
  - New settings PeaceDays (10) and Difficulty (Easy/Normal/Hard) for the
    computer houses: they leave a new player alone for PeaceDays days,
    and play more or less boldly. See "Computer houses" in README.TXT.
  - Computer houses now build troops and land on worlds they blockade,
    instead of blockading for ever.
  - Fleets that had arrived were treated as still moving: blockades never
    cut production and arriving patrols didn't join the guard fleet.
  - Settler fleets stopped at a guarded system now look for another world.
  - Research moves on to another track when one is finished, instead of
    wasting the points; the header shows "Research all done" at the end.
  - ermaint status keeps big numbers apart.
  - Ember Reach is now under the GNU General Public License version 2
    or later (COPYING); the source is released as REACHS04.ZIP.

0.3  (1 November 2026)
  - Saving a game is now safe against a crash or power cut at any point:
    REACH.DAT is put back from REACH.NEW or REACH.OLD if it goes missing,
    and the nightly run no longer takes a missing REACH.DAT for "no game"
    and starts a new one.
  - Houses on autopilot (players away for a while) now get orders from the
    computer each night, instead of standing still. They still leave the
    game after DissolveAfter days.
  - The game lock records when it was taken and how long it may be held.
    A lock is only broken once it is older than that, so a working
    program's lock is never broken by mistake. A MAINT.RUN left by a
    crashed maintenance run no longer keeps players out for two nights.
  - Splitting a fleet can no longer leave troops behind without enough
    Haulers to carry them.

0.2  (31 October 2026)
  - First test release: the door, nightly maintenance, reachcfg, news and
    the Hall of Fame.