TrackMania² Pursuit - title update 1.4 "4 Years of Pursuing" is out!
Gotta admit, it's been a ridiculously long time without any updates for the Pursuit pack. But hey, there's no better time for some new content than a 4 years anniversary!
TODAY MARKS EXACTLY 4 YEARS SINCE THE VERY FIRST RELEASE OF THE MODE. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, PURSUIT!
(proof)
Besides celebrating 4th birthday of my precious IP, with
florenzius we're bringing you a whole bunch of new gameplay mechanics and various quality-of-life tweaks.
CAPTURE ASSISTS 
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I don't need to ask you "how many times did you
just had them caught?", as the answer is obviously very high. With today's update I'm happy to introduce you to
capture assists! It's honestly the most important part of this update, therefore it deserves to be listed first. But how does it work?
In short: game will try to detect who else contributed in catching a thief, besides the person who did it. Whenever you do one of the things listed below, you will be considered as an assistant in the capture, if someone else happens to capture the thief:
- Chasing a thief for long enough will result in game detecting a chase sequence.
- Making a thief start moving will detect you as the person who provoked the thief to escape. It will count the nearest policeman within a fixed distance for an assistant.
- Making a thief drop down of ledges, cliffs and other spots (or drive downhill) will make you an assistant. Similarly to the above, the nearest policeman to the drop will be marked for an assistant.
Assisting in a capture gives you 1 point. But that's not everything yet!
Causing a thief to die through any other means will count as YOUR catch if you're marked for an assistant.
Your assistance status is kept for 15 seconds after performing anything listed above. After that time - no points for you.
TRACKMANIA FOREVER VEHICLES 
Following the trend of TrackMania Forever cars getting everywhere in ManiaPlanet, thanks to the 4.1 update, Pursuit is now providing you access to all 6 "new" vehicles without any Planet paywalls! (Ridiculous!) With some help from
Purification and
TM ONE crew, were bringing you upgraded Island Car, Desert Car and Snow Car models as well!
Notice: TrackMania 2 cars are unavailable for the first week, letting players experience them in their full glory.
GOAL HUNT PURSUIT 
Pursuit and Goal Hunt are joining their forces to bring you a brand new gameplay variant - the Goal Hunt Pursuit. In this variation, thieves don't get any points for survival when someone else is captured. Instead,
thieves play Goal Hunt in order to score their points. Every thief has their own individual goal to score 2 points upon reaching. When reached, next one is picked randomly. Once caught, the only way to score points is (classically) to catch thieves as a policeman.
Goal Hunt Pursuit is available directly with the standard Survival Pursuit mode on a single server - just add Goal Hunt maps and it's ready!
SPEEDBOMB 
Running away from the law was never so hardcore as with the Speedbomb ticking in your trunk. From now on, maps can enable the Speedbomb - a new mechanic, which "equips" your car with a bomb ignited by driving at slow speed. Forget about camping, this one will make you sure to stay fast, or an explosion triggered after 5 seconds of turtling around will make you lose your precious thief (or policeman!) status in a BANG!
3 BRAND NEW ZONES 
Prepare for a trouble and make it double - with 3 brand new Zones, mappers now get twice as many options they used to have. Every zone serves unique purpose in the arena.
THIEF ZONE 🦹â€
Similarly to the Police Zone, it can be accessed only by the thieves. But wait - if police can't get inside, then doesn't it make it a perfect spot for thieves to remain during the entire game? Well, no. As a policeman you in fact cannot enter this Zone, it will respawn you immediately. However, thieves can stay inside this Zone for 2 seconds only, leaving it as a way to create small shortcuts, which can save some seconds while escaping. Moreover, the time you got remaining in this Zone doesn't reset when you leave - it regenerates at a very slow rate, thus preventing people from camping in here.
SPEEDBOMB ZONE
Like the name suggests, it enables the speedbomb for any player inside this Zone. Minimal speed requirements are twice as big as with the Speedbomb enabled on the map entirely (200 km/h). Limits can be customized in the map properties.
POLICE DANGER ZONE âš
COMBO! This Zone doesn't physically exist in the editor, however one can make it by placing both the Danger and Police Zone in the same area, resulting in a single Zone, which combines both of the effects.
FUEL & CHARGING STATIONS 
Imagine peacefully driving through the world, while your car suddenly runs out of gas. This may happen in Pursuit now, as maps can feature Charging Stations. With some stations placed, the map will enable Fuel mechanics, which "equip" your car with a gas tank, which slowly dries out as you play. By default, you can drive for 3 minutes or stand still for 12 minutes on one full tank, before your car controls being cut off. Visit Charging Stations spread around the map to refill your tank in order to continue the journey. You don't need to wait for the recharge, it happens almost immediately upon entering a station.
Note: When fuel is enabled, policeman are obligated to wait 15 seconds for respawn, similarly to thieves, to avoid big lack of balance between both teams.
RACE OBJECTIVES
Let's be real - how many times did you play on a ridiculously tall, climbing-based map to only stand here on top, without any reward (except delaying noobish policemen, which can't even reach quarter the distance to you). Race Objectives come here to help you! When a round starts, every Race Objective on a map is loaded with
up to 10 (depending on the number of players) points, which just wait for someone to take them. Once reaching these spots, the player is awarded the points, regardless of the team. The next player to reach a Race Objective will receive one point less than the previous one, this repeating until the Objective doesn't award points anymore.
UI OPTIMIZATION 
Pursuit is now under ongoing
user interface rewrite, which aims to separate client UI updates from the server updates. Whenever there's a bug spotted on the UI, server update will be no longer required, as all the user interfaces are being loaded, composed and handled fully client-side. It also means the translations can be updated as well!
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES
Besides these major additions to the game, 4 Years Anniversary update is also improving your way of playing by many tweaks:
- THIEVES BUFFED!
As it became a bit more difficult to score points as a thief since policemen get capture combos, thieves will now get up to 4 survival points instead of just 1, depending on how many of them remain. Once half of the thieves are gone, survival points are doubled. When a quarter remains, 3 points are awarded. Finally, when the last 1/8th of the thieves is alive, they can grab 4 survival points.
- LAGOON CAR POINTS!
Capturing a Lagoon Car thief while driving any car other than a Lagoon Car, captures (and assists) award the policeman one additional point.
- MORE LAGOON CAR TIME!
Not only the Lagoon Car purchase will give you 2 hours (instead of just 30 minutes), but the timer is ticking down only when you're spawned with the car (and the map doesn't force Lagoon Car to be available for everyone).
- NO MORE SPAWN MULTI-KILLS!
Any players remaining AFK on the spawn will turn into policemen when the round starts.
- SPAWN DELAY!
It happens really often, the round starts, but the game hangs for some yet unknown reasons and you're 3 seconds behind in the match. To prevent this to some degree, first spawn in the round won't be instant, but have a classic 1.5 second delay.
A NOTICE FOR MAPPERS
To get Charging Stations and Race Objectives working on your map, you first need to edit the anchor data od these items. They both are recognized as checkpoints by the game, therefore you have to set their tags to GasStation and RaceObjective accordingly.
ULTRA SUPER IMPORTANT: Both of these items
cannot be rotated in any axis, they must be placed level horizontally, aligned to cardinal directions. They can however be placed off-grid at any arbitrary X/Y/Z coordinates.
Stay tuned!
Watch out for the exciting stuff coming to the Pursuit pack really soon! Join our Discord to stay up to date with every little bit of information:
TODAY MARKS EXACTLY 4 YEARS SINCE THE VERY FIRST RELEASE OF THE MODE. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, PURSUIT! 
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