As announced recently, soon we are getting to the release of the 1.0! Many of you have been asking what content can you look forward to, and if this means the end of the development for Lords and Villeins. Let's start by addressing that first.
The short answer is: no! We will continue to support this game after the release, fix any missing bugs and release balancing updates for as long as we can, to ensure that our players have a smooth and enjoyable experience with the content we will have on release.
What about additional content? Right now, we are not ready to set any expectations. Since Lords and Villeins is our first game, any future plans to grow it beyond what we've promised in the beginning, are mainly going to depend on the success of the full release.
Official mod support, Steamworks integration, shipyards, trade deals with neighboring towns, and mercenary quests are just some of the current ideas that really speak to us and we are very enthusiastic about the potential to work on them. Rather than promise something we can't deliver on, we stay reserved in setting expectations about the future. If you like our game, and you want to make sure this kind of content will be possible, the best way to do it is to tell about our game to your friends and help us reach as big of an audience as we can! Our community has always been a huge influence to get us where we are today and we are tremendously grateful for it. Thanks to you we have the opportunity to do what we love!
Now, before we get ahead of ourselves too much, let's focus on what is next. The 1.0 version has three main focal points: high council with public hearings, UI with quality of life features, and bugfixes with balancing overhaul. Let's have a look at the first pillar today!
Assemble The Council And Rule!
When the new patch goes live, you will be able to find a new page in the demesne section of your population book - The High Council.
With it, you can recruit your personal advisors and officers to guide you in your effort to rule the land. Each position is designated with unique responsibilities and unlocks abilities to manage your demesne. Many of them you've already had access to from previous updates but by connecting them to the council we want to give them more narrative weight to support you in creating interesting stories.
- Master Of Affairs - also known as the right hand of the ruler. They preside with the head of the ruling family during public hearings and recruit the intelligence officer to gather vital information and perform some secret activities.
- Master Of Law - with a lawmaker in place, you can hire an executioner and perform public executions.
- Marshal - having a marshal is the first step to start training your soldiers and sending them to the war. This position can only be assigned from the ranks of your soldiers, and the more experienced the marshal is, the faster will be training of everyone else!
- Master Of Coin - having someone in charge of your treasury grants you the ability to perform tax evasion. Royalty requested something you want to keep? Take the risk and with some clever bookkeeping, nobody will think there was anything wrong.
- Bishop and Minister - previously these positions were assigned automatically, but with the high council you now get the option to curate which of the monks will get the honor.
High Council is not just a storytelling flavor. It becomes especially valuable when you want to boost relationships with noble families. Offering them a position at the high council will ensure they remain in your favor and are going to support you in the future. That being said, this decision is not to be taken lightly as removing them from the council has an even more devastating effect on your relationship.
To make ruling even more impactful, people in most of these positions will spend their time walking to the villagers they oversee and motivate them, which can have either positive or negative impact on their mood.
Majestic Town Hall For Public Hearings
Alongside the high council, we have crafted 20+ unique events, that each family and villager are sensitive to and will bring them up to your attention if they become pressing enough. Once you build a Town Hall - a new zone required for the ability to establish your high council - the head of the ruling family together with the Master of Affairs will hold public hearings once a week, the day before the Sunday Service.
During this event, many villagers will gather in the town hall in the audience, and few of them will approach you with a personal request. Naturally, accepting or refusing will have an impact on the relationship with their family.
Information Is Power
Your intelligence officer can be recruited from the ranks of your soldiers, and they are your personal informant and hitman in one. They can perform two main tasks: gather intelligence, and assassinate targets.
In our next post, we will talk about the various improvements to the UI, including the new status monitor HUD, which reveals more information about the causes of bad mood and happiness of your villagers. This is the first way you will be getting more clarity in the situation. To add a little bit of authenticity. we chose for certain things to remain hidden, and Intelligence reports will be your main way to reveal this information.
Pick a family that you want to learn about, and order your intelligence officer to investigate them. For few days, they will follow the family around and finally, prepare a report for you.
In it, you can learn about needs that are serious issue for someone in the family, romantic relationships that may eventually lead to marriages, if there are any families they have a lasting conflict with, wealth status, standing with the clergy, or even their involvement in the revolutionary groups!
Rule Responsibly Or Face The Consequences
An uprising is a new epic event, which can be triggered if your ruling is far too exploitative, villagers are seriously unhappy and all of your efforts to cull the revolution failed. Let's have a look at how this system works!
- Whenever villagers are unhappy, they have a chance to become inclined to join an opposition. First villager to do so will become its founder, and every other villager will join it, if they interact with existing members after they became inclined.
- This means the opposition grows organically, within families and to people they interact with, but it also takes some time to grow.
- With increased members will grow the hierarchical structure within the organization, adding new levels of leadership each time a certain amount of villagers join.
- Your goal is to discover the founder and deal with them swiftly, to dismantle the opposition and prevent it from growing further. Though oppositions are like a snake. Cut down its head and new one will soon take its place. As long as the root cause is true, opposition will remain a challenge.
This system is playing out both on the side of peasants, but also nobles - each having their own organization with their own hierarchy. Once a certain percentage of your villagers become part of the opposition, the final event can be triggered.
For peasants, this takes the form of violent uprising. All villagers will gather and march toward the ruling family. If you've been paying your guards well, they will protect you, or join the villagers in their hunt. If you manage to kill enough villagers, the uprising will fail and you may continue your rule, though at a very high cost of losing many innocent lives.
Nobles are far more cunning with their resolution. Beware if a large number of noblemen are suddenly joining your town hall. This can only mean one thing - a unique encounter, in which you are simply given a choice - step down peacefully and go to exile, or fight for your life, person to person with other nobles in the room.
So how do you discover the founder? This is where your intelligence officer comes in handy. The intelligence report will contain information on any involvement in the uprising and give you a lead to another implicated family, higher in the hierarchy. As you continue investigating, you are bound to discover the founding family. Then the only mystery left is the specific person in it. Use your observation skills to get the right answer and then act fast. Throw them in prison, execute them, exile them, or do as you wish!
Disposing of the wrong person may bring you even more trouble, as every execution and exile increases the chances of villagers joining the opposition. So perhaps, you would like to resort to a secretive assassination. This will be performed by your intelligence officer and if successful, your target will be disposed without anyone having the slightest suspicion of your involvement.
You can also prevent the outcome of the revolution by improving the relationships and happiness of everyone who has already joined. When the time to act comes, they may have a change of heart and the uprising event will be over before it fully begins, with its morale seriously hindered and their memberships dwindling.
It should be emphasized, that our goal is to balance this system so that it takes serious efforts and a decent amount of time before any such event occurs, given it's devastating consequences! We have also included notifications that warn players about growing rumors, so they can react and have a chance to turn the situation around.
Word On Customization
We have learned from the feedback in previous updates, that having the ability to customize your game is very important to our players. You may be wondering with these new features, if the game you've signed up for in the past, is still going to be the same you fell in love with. That is not the case! Oppositions will be completely optional, and you can turn them off at the start of a new game, together with many other systems introduced in the previous updates. We will share more about this in our next post, where we will have a look at an overhauled trading experience, zone templates, underground mining, dynamic terrain, new fonts, other customizability features and a significant update to the UI, so stay tuned for more, including the release date announcement!
If you would like to participate in a closed beta and try these features early, please join our Discord for a chance to be invited! We apologize for not extending this option to players outside of the Discord, as we are not set for an efficient way of gathering feedback and bug reports outside of the server, but don't worry, the new update will be soon in your hands either way!