Hello all!

This update brings Weekly Challenges, a long list of Lead Mode changes based on your feedback, and a round of fixes.

Every week there is a new scenario and one country to play, made by our wonderful community, if you upload a scenario to the Workshop, it might become a weekly challenge. Everyone starts from the same place. Play as many times as you like until the week ends: your best result goes on that week's Steam leaderboard.

• Find it on the right side of the main menu. It shows the goal, the time left, your best result and the top players.

• Each new week opens with a card: a picture of the map, who you play as, and a few tips to get started.

• While you play, a board shows the top five and the players just above and below you, so you always know who to catch.

• Weekly runs play on Easy, with no saves, no God Mode and no console, so every score is made the same way.

The scenarios come from the community. If you made one you would like to see as a weekly, send it to us on Discord.

Difficulty. Lead Mode now has Easy, Normal and Hard. Your first Lead game asks you once, and you can change it anytime in Options or the pause menu.

Political capital and war.

• Being attacked no longer costs you political capital. Joining a war to defend an ally is free.

• Only wars you start drain political capital, and declaring war costs much less on Easy and Normal.

• Allies no longer drag you into wars they started. They send you an invitation, and you can stay out.

Alliances.

• A country that likes you enough always accepts your alliance. The Propose button shows how much is needed.

• If an alliance is not possible, the panel tells you why: the pact is full, there is no shared border, or they are already in another alliance.

• New allies stay for at least a year, and you are told when an ally leaves.

Coring. This was the biggest chore in Lead Mode, so it got the biggest change.

• Land you hold in peace now becomes homeland by itself over time. It is faster next to your homeland and with a Political Office.

• Coring by hand costs much less, never more than your political capital cap, and gets cheaper as the land comes closer to becoming homeland.

• The Government panel lists your conquered land by the country it came from, with its flag. Core it all at once, or turn on Auto core and let it happen every month.

People. A new People panel shows who lives in your country. For each large minority you choose a policy: Tolerate, Integrate, Assimilate or Expel. Your ideology decides which ones are allowed. The game asks you when a new minority appears, and until you decide, they are left alone.

Naval invasions now use an army group. Your landing ships decide how many soldiers can go, and if the group is too big, you are offered to split off a landing force.

• Large countries no longer leave alliances just because they are large. This old rule was made before custom maps existed.

• The war list now groups wars by side, so two alliances fighting each other show as one war.

• The AI leaderboards are now in AI Studio

• Events, ideologies, AI behaviors, buildings, ships and sea zones are now picked from lists instead of typed by hand.

• "Set ideology" and "ideology is" now work in scenarios that use the default ideologies.

• The text cursor is now visible in text boxes.

• The paint tool and other region tools work again with Legacy map graphics on custom maps.

• The nuke aiming arrow no longer stays on in other map tools.

• Some text showed as raw keys, fixed.

Thank you for playing, and see you on this week's leaderboard!

Also if you would like to support Observe further, you could do so by getting the Soundtrack for the WWI campaign:

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/91809/Observe_Supporter_Edition/