Hello everyone!

Today's upgrades push melee fighting on foot during battles. This is the first step in a series of combat focused updates coming this year.

At the heart of this update is the brand new Perfect Block system. Time your guard within a 0.4 second window and you will unleash an automatic shield bash that knocks down your attacker and opens them up for an instant finisher. In contrast, kicking enemies is no longer a guaranteed knockdown unless they are low on health. Enemies will now also push you away if you hover around in their face for too long, prevent too close engagements.

Combat flow has been upgraded to feel more responsive. Input buffering makes attacks and combos chain smoothly. Stamina interactions are redone, blocking enemy attacks drains you and blocking also prevents stamina regen, balancing pressure in long engagements and preventing the game from fighting itself. Finishers have been expanded across swords, axes, shields and blunt weapons, giving you more ways to end a fight.

The soft lock system has been improved, making you properly attack your current enemy during battles and making sure your hits connect.

Formations feel more alive with dust effects in dry weather and cavalry charge behavior has been tuned. A batch of animation improvements and bug fixes also bring more polish and consistency to the entire system and fix a couple of critical issues.

This is a big step toward the combat experience. Stay tuned for more updates on this as my main focus is going to be upgrading the game's combat for the coming updates.

Thank you for all the support so far!

If you have suggestions, bugs or just general ideas for the next update, feel free to join the discord or drop by in the discussions. Always happy to hear your input.

https://discord.com/invite/cTgXXfTmhc

Full changelog

• Add dust effects to formations in dry summer weather
• Add dry climate property for custom campaigns
• Add more default sword types
• Add holsters for all weapons
• Add perfect block system that staggers the opponent when timed correctly
• Add finishers for blunt weapons
• Add more ground finishers
• Add shield specific finishers
• Add more finishers for axe and sword
• Add performance option to show all unit holsters
• Add check to knockdowns so only low health units are knocked down from kicks
• Add mid 13th century helmet to Guy Dampierre based on his rider seal
• Add markers for castles on tactical map
• Add mitre without helmet
• Add push away mechanic when standing too close to a units face
• Add subtle footstep soundlayer for holstered weapon
• Add stamina slowdown effect on animations
• Add input buffering to melee on foot
• Add stamina drain when blocking a hit or parrying an attack
• Tweak cavalry charge behavior
• Improve some control and rotation mechanics
• Increase strength of on foot combat soft lock
• Improve draw holster sounds
• Improve way ground finishers work
• Improve stamina stun animation
• Slightly lower general waterlevel during summer to simulate drought
• Make sure militia officer message appears even when the player is dead
• Increase chance player is knocked off horse
• Remove hiding signal instruments of units in combat
• Block stamina regeneration when blocking
• Lower player combat stance reset time
• Remove nasal helmet from default sergeant unit body loadout
• Polish work on various animations
• Fix range marker not erasing when mounting or dismounting horse
• Fix unarmed player animation
• Fix left hand placement when not holding shield in player animation
• Fix potential crash with invalid custom unit data
• Fix animation glitch when equipping or unequipping shield
• Fix way uploaded items are queried on the Steam Workshop
• Fix potential crash related to siege defense locations
• Fix potential crash related to player animation
• Fix default bastard sword handle length
• Fix sword loadout icons
• Fix mirrored old weapon thumbnails
• Fix sound level of two handed weapon swirl
• Fix fleeing player horse
• Fix animation jank when equipping shield or equipping bastard sword
• Fix vassalage for faction with global heraldry enabled
• Fix footstep sounds sometimes being off for player
• Fix missing tournament parry sound