Military and Criminality update has arrived to Lords & Villeins!

Behold, Lords and Ladies,

The Military and Criminality update is here! Watch the trailer below to find out what's new!

Lords & Villeins will also be a part of Steam Summer Sale that starts June 23 (7PM CEST). You are now able to get the game at 20% off! The sale ends on July 7.

Important notice

Due to major refactoring of data structures, that aims to decrease the save file size and optimize loading times, we were unable to secure a backwards compatibility. As a result, your save files from previous versions will fail to load. We do our best to avoid this scenario as much as we can, but in this case we would simply not be able to continue our efforts in optimizations without it. We apologize for this complication and thank you all for your support and understanding!

We have also added a support for Steam cloud saves and relocated save files to a unique folder generated for each active Steam account. If there is more than one account playing on your machine, please be mindful that the first account that launches the game, will "claim" all existing save files and they will be automatically moved to their respective folder. When different steam users log on the same computer, they will not see the save files of the other account. Sharing is still possible by manually placing the save file in a different folder. Save files can be located at: C:\Users[USER]\AppData\LocalLow\Honestly Games\Lords and Villeins\SaveData[/u].

How to access older version to be able to play your old save file

To give you an opportunity to continue playing your older save files and switch to the new version at your own pace, we have created a beta branch, where you can continue to access the pre-launch build. Due to the changes for Steam cloud, your save files will be copied to a new location once you launch the game after the update and the older version of the game will not be able to see them. In order to access them, these are the steps you can follow:

• Right-click on Lords and Villeins in your Steam library and select Properties - Beta Version
• Select the "oldversion" Beta branch
• Navigate to save date folder C:\Users[USER]\AppData\LocalLow\Honestly Games\Lords and Villeins\SaveData\
• If any of your save files were copied to a subfolder within the SaveData folder (usually a folder with series of numbers), make sure you copy these save files back to the root of the SaveData folder.
• Wait for the game to update and enjoy the game!

Changelog

The changelog does not list smaller bugfixes and UI improvements (we had to cut it somewhere! 😅) so be prepared for some delightful discoveries! Jump in the game right now and find out all that has changed!

With this update, we are slowly approaching the end of early access. We have only one major update ahead of us, before we start focusing on the final polish, bugfixes, localization and optimizations for the final release, so stick around for more news of what is next! Thank you for your support, big thanks to our numerous beta testers who contributed tremendously with their feedback and last but not least our players, who continue to enjoy our game and share their delight with the community!

And as always, you are welcome to join us on our Discord, and share your feedback in many of the places we follow - here in the comments, on Steam forums or on Reddit! For some occasional teasers and small news, make sure to follow us on Twitter too!

New Organization Type: Demesne

• Demesne consists of the ruling family, the servant groups and military regiments.
• Players can manage military regiments in the demesne tab of the villager book.
• New regiments can be created or removed. Regiment types support the daily guard, night guards nad soldiers.
• Ruling family can now own animals and seize, grant, sell or buy them on market.
• New animal Horse added, as well as Stables zone managed by servants, where they can be prioritized together with other player-owned animals.
• Villagers can now ride horses. Nobles ride them for fun, and soldiers to train for war.
• New horse-riding skill added.

New Designation: Servant

• Player can enlist peasants to join demesne as servants. They can be assigned to different work groups and perform duties for the player ruling family.
• Servants will perform different tasks based on their assignment. Cooks can cook for the military and ruling family, stablehands take care of animals (mainly horses), laborers haul resources and deal with basic construction tasks.
• New Servant Zones: Cottage, Stables and Kitchen utilized by servants to provide housing, cooking facilities and space for animal husbandry.

New Designation: Military

• Special regiments in the Demesne tab determine duties of all assigned villagers.
• New Barracks zone added. Soldiers sleep there and use Training dummies to train combat skills.
• Guards occupy the guard posts and chase and capture any criminals.
• Soldiers train with their equipment and prepare themselves for war.
• Soldiers reside in the barracks and eat food from the warehouse. They receive soldier pay once a season, that the player can manage in the villager book.
• Soldiers can be promoted to generals. This improves survival chances for soldiers in war.
• New weapon-mastery skills added

New Royal Tax Type: Regiments

• Soldier regiments can be sent to war. Some of the soldiers may return alive after the war ends.
• Player can manage equipment preferences for military regiments. Members of the regiment will seek to equip this equipment if available in the warehouse.
• Royalty demands soldier regiments as part of the yearly targets. First year does not demand any soldiers. System is slowly ramping up through the first five years, when it reaches maximum (but still randomized) demands.
• Regiments requested by the king in the current year generate an equipment template. Players can set this template when managing equipment, to make sure that the regiment meets the royal requirements.
• Regiments have a soldier pay, which must be maintained to keep high morale. Soldiers donate portion of this money to their original family.
• Soldiers can receive war veteran status if they survive the war. This improves their chances to survive another war and make them more valuable as generals.
• New clergy zone Shrine allows regiments, that are marked to be blessed, to participate in the blessing ceremony. Blessing costs holy water and it improves their chance of survival in battle.

New Construction System: Builder Professions and Builder Tiers

• Each structure is marked with a tier - default tier can be built by anyone without restrictions. Other structures needs either a carpenter family or architect family.
• New professions of Carpenters and Architects and a new Carpentry and Builder's Guild zone. These families take care of construction of advanced structures.
• They also produce basic and advanced repair kits, which villagers must purchase to perform repairs.
• Added optimization of hauling resources for multiple blueprints at once.

Health and Happiness Update

• Villagers can now develop health conditions. These include injuries, fractures and sicknesses. Injuries and fractures can happen as a result of labor or combat. Sicknesses develop randomly over time. When villager is freezing, the likelihood is increased. Sicknesses also spread through proximity to other villagers.
• Added new hospital zone and a tending station structure where people can heal their injuries and isolate with sickness. Clergy can assign nurses that will feed the sick and treat them with salve, bandages and cure.

Extended Tutorial

• The tutorial has been redesigned and significantly extended to include new chapters that guide players through all features of the game:
• Regular construction tasks are replaced with quests introducing the builder professions and enlisting servants to perform work previously done by ruling family.
• After the inn is built, the tutorial continues with quests about establishing clergy, building churches, tavern, welcoming first noble family and donations with clergy. It also introduces new content by guiding the player through military content, creating regiments, recruiting soldiers, changing their equipment and preparing barracks, jail and execution.
• We strongly recommend playing through the new tutorial before engaging with the new content, as it can clear out a lot of confusion about the game mechanics.

New Activity: Criminal Acts

• Villagers can now commit criminal acts of vandalism, theft and murder.
• Villagers can lockpick doors when attempting criminal acts. Any door can be lockpicked, but it slows them down.
• Villager committing a crime has a chance to be spotted by nearby guards. Chance is higher if they are closer to the guard and they will also pick a path that does not get too close to guard posts.
• Added ability to imprison criminals and manage their sentence length, including execution order.
• Changing sentence lengths can improve or damage reputation with impacted family.
• New Executioner special role added. Soldiers can be assigned to it and the selected executioner will perform executions.
• New Jail zone with Jail bench and Jail chair structures for captured prisoners.
• New Execution Site zone with execution display and public stage structures to perform scheduled executions. Executions apply settlement debuff that reduces criminality chance, but hurt relationship with affected families.

Minor Features

• Added support for Steam cloud saves and unique Steam ID accounts.
• Villagers and animals have the ability to flee from combat and be chased by the agressor.
• Villagers now go to sleep at semi-random times, to prevent behaviour of everyone getting up to sleep at the same time.
• New arrow indicators on access points to help identify direction of usage.
• New UI for ground storage restriction.
• When selecting a wild animal, players can mark the animal to be either leashed away or killed. This will trigger guards to leash the animal outside of the zone boundaries, or killed pre-emptively. Hunters can still collect the corpses but only if they are within the hunters area (this may be addressed later).
• All zoned corpses are now automatically claimed by the ruling family and stored in the knackery by servants. This should help clearing them out so they don't block construction.
• Time during night speeds up earlier and it is significantly faster to reduce waiting times during night. It will automatically slow down if a nightly special event occurs (i.e. theft attempt).
• Both mood and happiness is now displayed in the population book.
• Expanded description in the detail of villagers to give more information, including progress of studies for novices in clergy.
• Added terms of service page in menu.
• Added an option to opt out of analytics in the settings and secured general compliance with GDPR.
• Added settings to manage monitor in fullscreen.
• Walking speed is now impacted by injuries and weight of equipment.
• Added indicators of pregnancy to the population book.
• Walls, roofs and structure now indicate durability and insulation qualities.
• Villagers now have underwear when they have no clothes.
• Added several types of pies as a recipe for bakers. They consume flour and fruits.
• When resources are granted, the purchase list is immediately updated. This results into immediate update of the tooltip for what family needs.

Balancing Changes

• Need system has been rebalanced. Happiness and mood is calculated more accurately and it now also takes into account player reputation.
• Added rope as a cost requirement to several structures.
• Updated starting resources both in tutorial and standard game.
• Updated balancing of combat strength and defense.
• Significantly increased amount of gold for nobles, as well as their passive yearly income.
• Removed secondary bonus/penalty on relationships with families when granting or seizing. Now only relationship with target family is impacted. This was causing undesired effects and was especially troubling with nobles, and made them leave settlement.
• Balanced insulation and durability qualities of walls, roofs and structures to reflect quality of used material better.
• Redesigned system of joining combat to protect kin. Animals and villagers now have a chance to join combat or flee from danger.
• Animals will not fight back during tutorial mode active.
• New structure Blast Furnace added and replaced Oven in selected zones, to split the amount of recipes put on one structure type.
• General improvements around economy stability, pricing, nobles satisfaction, clergy demands and taxation.
• Regular game now begins with default servants and guards enlisted.
• Increased yields of crops by 15-20%
• Optimized resource prioritization for animals - first they consume acorns, then grain, then straw and then everything else. Purchasing behavior of these ingredients is still driven by cheapest price per weight.

Bug Fixes

• Significant performance optimization around memory usage and loading times.
• Roofs can now be built over a bar that is occupied.
• Caravans will now store gold in their storage to allow sharing it for purchasing.
• Fixed issues with families leaving with their animals.
• Warehouse book was slightly redesigned and optimized to reduce stuttering when switching between pages.
• Several fixes regarding AI crashes, leading to Doing Nothing behavior.
• Fixed a minor bug with flailing spot.
• Fixed visual error with statues in ground storages.
• Fixed sorting issues with graves and plants.
• Fixed issue with smelters harvesting clay in their households,
• Nobles will now properly reduce their interest to stay if the tavern is not able to serve them excellent meals.
• Fixed a bug with nobles causing them to spawn with low amount of money.
• Fixed issue with scrolling the map at the edge of the screen with mouse cursor.
• Fixed issue with incorrectly initializing lights and weather effect after loading.
• Fixed issue with roofs sometimes incorrectly masking off weather effects.
• Head of the ruling family starts with reading and writing learned.
• Improved generation of structures in the starting area.
• Fixed issue with chickens not laying eggs.
• Several issues and crashes present in the previous version identified and fixed.