We are approaching the release of the new Military and Criminality update, so it is time to take a look at another major part of the awesome new features - your demesne!
A lot goes into governing a feudal land. Not only does your ruling family need a place to stay and infrastructure to manage resources they exploit, they need to make sure everyone follows the rules, fulfill their duty and develop economies of great craftsmanship and care. All of this is a lot of labor, quite too much to rest on the shoulders of a few noble aristocrats.
To solve this problem, we are introducing servants. You will be able to recruit peasants in their ranks and assign them various duties that are all necessary to keep your manor clean and functional.
Hard Work For Lay Folk
Once you recruit a servant, they will leave their families and join your demesne. They still maintain relationships and contact with their loved ones, but their daily lives are governed entirely by you and the kind of responsibility you assign to them.
Labourers are in charge of any heavy labor. They will handle basic construction, manage and store resources, relocate animals and corpses, tune the temperature in your manor and other public areas and perform regular repairs of your equipment.
Cooks are the masters of good taste. They will occupy your personal kitchen, a new zone with cooking facilities dedicated specifically to your servants. They will use resources from your warehouse and cook for your whole demesne. Not only for you, but for the entire serfdom, your soldiers, guards and other employees.
Stablehands are the animal caretakers of your herd and they are in charge of stables, a new zone dedicated to animals that you personally own, including the newly added horses. They make sure the feeders are full, your horses are groomed and ready for a ride, they milk your cows, shear your sheep and collect the eggs from your chicken. They will also purchase animals from the market with your money, much like farmers would for their own family, or attempt to tame them from the wilderness.
Take Charge of Your Animals
With servants introduced to the game, we have now been able to support the ability to own and care for any kind of animal by the ruling family as well. Not only will your servants extract the benefits of animal husbandry solely for your benefit, you now have access to animals in the warehouse book, and you can freely buy, sell, grant or seize animals from others!
Construction Professions and Tiers
Another major change coming with the new update, is streamlining the construction and outsourcing it to dedicated families of builders. We are introducing two new zones and professions - Carpenters and their Carpentry, and Architects and their Builder’s Guild.
Without them, your villagers will be able to build only a basic set of objects. Hay wall, some simple beds, a fireplace, storages and basic necessities needed to survive under any circumstances. To upgrade yours and theirs lifestyle, you will need to deploy specialized families on your land.
While there are some exceptions, generally any wood-based construction is handled by the carpenters, while anything made from stone or steel is handed to the architects. Each structure will now indicate who can build it, and the blueprints will have a different color - white tint remains for the basic structures, while blue represents carpenters and orange represents architects.
Everything else is streamlined! Once you put down a blueprint, the responsible family will walk to a storefront of a nearby builder and place an order. These builders now have a contract for construction. They will purchase any resources needed and furnish the construction at once. And if the responsible family has a surplus of the needed materials (that is they would otherwise try to sell them), builders will use them and reduce the price for their services by their cost. Once the construction is finished, the family will make the payment for the cost of the material and some extra margin to pay for their labor.
This applies not only for regular families, but also for you, so make sure you have some gold prepared, so that you can motivate them to work for you. These builders are also using their Builder’s Desk to produce Repair Kits, a new resource allowing villagers to perform repairs on a deteriorated structure.
With this change more than ever before we have seen the need to optimize the resource management during construction, so in the next update you will also see villagers pickup resources for several constructions at once, significantly speeding up any construction.
So, what do you think? Are you excited to enlist servants in your demesne? Do you like the new tier system? While it may introduce some obstacles in your constructions, we believe these types of challenges are a lot of fun and make the game a lot more immersive and interesting. Let us know what you think!
As always, you are most welcome to join our Discord server and become a part of our community. We will be really happy to see you there!