Behold, Lords and Ladies!
We are ready to serve you a brand new patch and it's not a small one! You already had a chance to check out many of the changes in the public beta, you can read more details about it here - we are now publishing that update to everyone with an extra dose of fixes to it. You can find the full change log at the end of this article.
Lords and Villeins is a complex system driven game with endless potential for interactions and situations that are very difficult to detect during our internal testing. We failed to do better and many of you had a troubling experience with the game after the release of our new DLC. These issues were not discovered even during our lengthy closed beta that was running prior to its release and we regret that we did not stop them from getting into the live release.
We are sorry to anyone we let down by the technical state of the game. This patch should address a lot of the issues reported and we will continue to work on improving the game and fixing any other issues that escaped our attention in the coming weeks.
Where To Share Your Feedback
All of the improvements come from the feedback you provided, which we are immeasurably grateful for. We humbly ask you to continue letting us know what features you think we should add, change or remove from the game. And, of course, if you encounter any bugs waiting to be squished, let us know and include as many details as possible (attaching a screenshot helps immensely).
If you would like to take the extra step to make our job easier, we have a system for reporting bugs also on our Discord, where you have the ability to upload your save files and player logs, which can truly go a long way for us to identify the cause and be able to fix it.
For this reason, we tend to be more active on Discord, but Discord is absolutely not the only way to receive support. You can also mail us to [email protected], post issues on the forums or in the comments of our articles. We read them all, but we struggle to find the space to respond to everyone. We hope you can understand our lack of activity and rest assured your reports on forums are definitely seen.
A lot of you have recently posted a negative review here on Steam expressing your disappointment. This is a very legitimate way of sharing your experience with the game to others and we take every review seriously. We use them to learn about our mistakes and how to do better in the future.
Negative reviews can also create a warning for new players discovering our game from giving it a chance and they can have a serious impact on the growth of our community. So we only ask you to consider those negative impacts when deciding if our game is truly worthy of a negative review. If your intention is to only share an issue with us in the hopes of addressing it, forums and articles are a much more effective place to do so, and unlike reviews they allow us to follow up with you to clear up how the game is supposed to work or in case we need more details to fix it.
We care about our game and seeing the outcome of a release that we have worked so hard on is a moment for reflection. We only hope that delivering updates addressing your criticism will change your mind in the future.
If on the other hand, you are enjoying the game and want to support its further development, the best way to do that is posting a positive review, and if you have not done so already, purchase our DLC - it really helps us significantly!
What is Next?
For the near future, we will shift our focus from releasing new content, to improving the technical state of the game. Fixing bugs is something we could do in a matter of weeks, but improving the performance requires a complete rework of the AI system. The foundation for it has been laid five years ago in the early stages of the game, when it has not been very clear if it would be a good fit for our vision for the game. It had some great potential for an easy access to modding of the game, but In the end it has proven to be very limiting for performance, and we will take some time to rework it. Please be patient with us, this may take some time because it is a big change and Lords and Villeins has been a solo-dev project ever since we released 1.0 version in the November of 2022.
Finally, I want to personally extend my gratitude towards everyone who was forgiving with us and stayed around, especially our closed beta testers who spend hours testing and reporting bug and sharing their feedback. Lords and Villeins is my first commercial game as an indie developer, and I learned many difficult lessons from it that unfortunately also had a negative impact on you. But I love making games and I would love nothing more than to be able to keep creating them and players like you are what makes it possible.
So thank you for being here and staying around for more!
Michal
Honestly Games
Patch v1.6.12 Change Log:
- Added a drag camera input action - holding a middle mouse button allows the camera to move around with the mouse
- Fixed a few instances of incorrectly imported localization
- Updated color palette of the beauty overlay to more easily distinguish best from worst (red is now worst and green is best)
- Salary related debuffs are now automatically removed if NPC is removed from the demesne organization
- When tropical climate is selected, plants are no longer out of season during winter if they are plantable in spring as well.
- Fixed bug with a forward arrow in a new game dialogue being deactivated incorrectly
- Fixed villagers being dead upon starting a tutorial mission
- Fixed a UI clock that would not switch off the night speed if it was clicked twice during the night
- Fixed broken Chinese characters
- Villagers will no longer build structures using taxed resources.
- Fixed issue with animals sometimes not releasing the reservations on objects when they die
- Guards will now automatically defend villagers from animal attacks
- Fixed a crash when a family is erased (i.e. all villagers die) when playing on a map without the overworld (deactivated module or not owned DLC)
- Fixed an issue with a family not removing itself from an overworld cell data when it is erased
- Addressed a number of detected crash logs, these could lead to issues with families being removed
Change Log of the Open Beta changes that now launch into the base game:
Main Game:
- Localization assets are now exposed in the StreamingAssets folder, allowing anyone to develop localization mods with ease
- Warehouse book now takes into account contracted amount (red numbers next to the item) to restrict the ability to grant resources over the available amount
- Save file name is no longer restricting special characters
- Accounting Report now updates the total amount if tenures are changed while the UI is opened
- Animals that belong to the caravan will no longer required to be fed until they are purchased
- Fixed broken How To sequence for updating storage settings, setting soldier pay, creating new soldier regiment, building heat source and changing equipment
- Fixed an issue with fishermen not generating enough demand for yarn to repair fishing nets
- Reduced time it takes to process animal corpse by the butchers
- Fixed an issue that corrupted HP value of animals which could lead to animals never being butchered
- Fixed an issue with clergy not being recognized in data logging as a family business which led to incorrect statistical logs
- Removed a zoom button next to "All zones" option in the Statistics Report UI as there is no function related to it
- Notification indicating completed royal delivery no longer displays text about favor, as it is only awarded during custom deliveries.
- Fixed scaling on the loading screen
- Added further code preventing chests and shelves being targeted for vandalism.
- Fixed bug causing fees to the clergy not being attributed for payment
- Fixed a localization issue in Simplified Chinese in the "Settling" tutorial mission
- Fixed tutorial maps losing their status of a tutorial map when they are saved on their last (bonus) chapter.
- Fixed excessive demand for some resources in certain zones (Royal Forest)
- Terrain change event no longer trigger recalculation of the pathfinding grid to improve performance boost as they tend to be very frequent. As a downside, villagers will sometimes ignore dirt path in their pathing until the path gets recalculated later
- The fast-forward button in Statistics UI now correctly resumes to current season
- Fixed number of crashes when the user did not own the DLC, impacting for example the ability to pay taxes
- Fixed UI crash with a delayed encounter
- Fixed a number of crashes related to ActiveNPC data not being properly uninitialized
- Fixed a number of crashes related to AI behavior that can result into NPC being stuck and starving to death
- Fixed seasonal and yearly supply and demand data of individual families for animals not being logged
- Fixed a game crashing bug that happens any time an NPC dies
- Fixed a serialization issue of the config files as it relates to storing starting family professions
- Fixed incorrectly initialized starting value of animal HP leading to their quick deaths
- Raised the limit for a zone template size to 100 tiles
- Fixed an incorrect formula that was preventing from demand for production material to scale up properly
- Fixed incorrectUI logic when setting 0 money clergy fee on fee-farm zones
- Overworld map overlay and resource sum now correctly updates when a family grows their size
- Fixed issue with work groups being deleted accidentally when their members are reassigned. This could also cause the clergy to break down and stop collecting taxes.
- Added condition in demolishing structures activity, to ignore objects that were recently detected as inaccessible and thus not block the rest of the objects in the queue.
- Updated the LZ4 library as it was triggering a native crash in certain scenarios
DLC Content:
- Fixed water and mountain tiles indicating "Possible production" title when nothing can be produced there
- When a house is demolished on a tile with a terrain feature, the original terrain feature is restored
And just in case you missed it, there is a bundle waiting just for you to buy it! This bundle called The Great Houses Edition includes the main game along with the fresh DLC The Great Houses. There is a 10% bundle discount, so it's a heck of a deal!
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/42643/Lords_and_Villeins_The_Great_Houses_Edition/