- Introduce difficulty-based combat multipliers and veteran promotion chances (Chieftain/Warlord eased, Prince+ neutral)
- Randomize leader selection on setup screen and add dynamic portrait with pick speech
- Replace inline hover text with a centralized Tooltip component for tech tree, foreign cities, and buildings
- Add descriptive flavor text for governments and terrain improvements
- Add building completion notifications with a "VIEW CITY" action button
- Expand deferred city attack cinematics to cover explored rival cities
- Improve Tempest flipper AI to scale lane-flipping chance/cooldown with level and enable climbing flips
- Add verification tests for difficulty combat modifiers and veteran rates