Settlement Events
New system with lots of custom Events happening in Settlements. These events can greatly impact the Settlement or Players.
You will find Farmer's Markets, Beggars, Executions, Music Festivals, Village Marriages, Thieves, Lords using Prima Nocta, Witch burnings, Full Revolts, Ongoing Plagues, Ambushes and much more! Many leading to intricate quests.
But be wary before you get entangled in the complicated politics. The outcome may not always become what you intended. But who doesn't want to become the Village Champion when you finally get the chance ?
Combat Strafe/Dodge and Stamina
You can now double-tap movement keys (left/right/back) to make a quick dodge. This uses Stamina that generate over time. Coming patches Armor will impact this further with -% movement speed. But for now all Armor are equal.
Rank Icons
Previously in Battles Lords had a Gold Star icon and Followers a Silver Star. While these two symbols are still the same, the system is reworked and more ranks has been added with more to come. Giving more indications of difficulties and other important information.
A Hill Troll might have 1 Star difficulty, a Minotaur 2 Star and Armored Trolls 3 Star as examples.
New Creatures and Spawn Tables
Many new Creatures that will be faced in Dungeons and the new Spawn Table system is in place that will make it easy for creators to make Spawn distribution for Enemies and Bosses.
With this we added many new Creatures in a first wave. And much more diverse effects comes with this new system where mixes can also happen such as Bandits having Wolves, or Trolls taking over Dungeons becoming Bosses.
Scorpions
- Sand Scorpions - Common and not dangerous but be cautious of the tail stings poison since it stacks
- Red Scorpions - Has much stronger Poison and tail stings should be Blocked with a shield or perfect Parry
- Black Scorpions - Very deadly due to armor piercing claws and movement slowing poison that quickly captures a Armored target
Mummies
- Normal Mummies - Common with Undeads and very slow. Good target practice.
- Burned Mummies - Tougher and can take a beating. Has secret effects.
- Blood Mummies - Remnants from sacrifices. Slow but sometimes very dangerous with secret effects.
Ghouls
Comes in many shapes and forms on Graveyards and Old Ruins. Usually chopping practice for seasoned Adventurers. But be cautious of being cornered by many of them together.
Minotaurs
New Boss creature that hit very hard and usually swings large 2 handed weapons. Don't think you can ram it with the Horse. These creatures are fearsome if not able to Swarm them or Dodging very well.
Can be found in higher level Dungeons and sometimes in the World looting
More Trolls and new Troll Armors
- Hill Trolls - Common around hills and mountains. Easy when prepared but any mistake can be deadly.
- Cave Trolls - Uncommon but can be found around Bridges sometimes. Usually stack more loot because they tend to live longer.
- Armored Trolls - Usually found in formed Warparties from Caves that grew strong. Can be extremely dangerous even for a full Cavalry.
New Wolves
Changed the old Wolves to much better asset with fur, tons of animations and different variations all from Puppies up to Dire Wolves.
Wolves can now also be members in other parties. Excellent to distract ranged soldiers quickly and shut them down.
New World Followers
Deverda Barlow A mysterious Astrologer travelling the World. Some say she's a Witch others that she can see the future.
Keith Hammon A talented locksmith that claims to be able to open any lock in the Kingdom. And maybe even make locks himself that are unbreakable.
Changes to Character Panel / Inventory
Many smaller changes have been made to improve speed and effectiveness when working with your Army and Followers. New way has been added to level up Characters without selecting them etc.
While reforming these changes we found some bugs we believe is the root to some reported weird behaviours around this.
More reforms to GUI will be made where needed. And thanks for all feedback that helps making it better! :)
Audio Settings
Finally you can adjust Volume for different layers such as Master, VFX and Music. We plan on adding more connected Layers that Player requests and a configurable sub-mastering system too for fine tuning.
Summer Time and Multiplayer
The Summer is here and so is vacations. But we will work on next Patch (Families, Marriage & Birthright) the coming 4 weeks. After that is released half the team will go on a 4 week holiday.
The other half is going to focus on Dedicated Server Multiplayer and hence create a 4 week gap without any Patch release before we are back to normal.
However since we are way ahead of estimations for dedicated server, we only have a few things left before releasing it as Experimental and testing. And chances are we are done with all the basics to go Experimental branch.
Basically what we got left in the bigger picture is Steam integration (for unique persistent Player ID and Lobby discovery of servers), add Websockets to make coordination of game instances event driven and the last step of After Battles to correctly hand the Players over back to World Map instance.
Otherwise World Map is working overall already in testing. And starting Battles/Skirmishes/Dungeons work good with all features even Dismemberment.
When a Player starts a Battle/Skirmish/Dungeon a new symbol is placed on the World Map that others (even AI) can use it to join that ongoing battle, or rob a Player that just looted the Dungeon.
This step will open some beta testing but still we need another important feature (Building), that is planned later, to get many of the needed tools for Multiplayer. Such as building your hidden Camp to store things early game. And investing in Saw Mills/Mines/Farms on the World Map to improve material generation while also targets for Pillaging by others.