Hello everyone!
Big day today. This update brings what is probably the most requested feature of all time: army movement on the campaign map.
Up until now the campaign was built on a garrison vs garrison model. Every settlement held its own garrison and wars were fought by attacking neighbouring settlements with them. It got the campaign a long way, but the design was running into its limits. So I decided to strip the campaign back to its foundation and rebuild it around armies that actually move across the map. Next to that I decided to completely redo most of the campaign UI.
Armies on the campaign map
Army hosts. You can now muster your troops into a host and move it across the campaign map. Invade enemy territory, lay siege to castles or take undefended land. Each host can march once per turn, so where you place your armies really matters now.
Castles and garrisons. Castles kept their garrisons and are now strategically important as they are the only thing preventing someone from conquering your land if there are no armies present.
Army management. Hosts in the same province can transfer units between each other with a single click. You can split units off into a new army, garrison them in a castle or have a host fall in behind another leader to march together as one large army.
Smarter campaign systems. Going into battle and managing sieges is now a lot easier as the game simply checks what battles need to be fought at the end of the turn. The same is added for sieges at the end of every turn you will get a dialog for both sieging and getting sieged that allows you to manage all relevant things.
Bigger battles and reinforcements
With armies able to grow much larger, the reinforcement system has been reworked. Every unit in the hosts that takes part is now a full participant in the battle. Units that don't fit on the field at the start wait as a reserve and come in to replace fallen formations. They arrive automatically, but you can open the reserves panel at any time to pick who comes in next. During deployment you can also swap units with units waiting in reserve to create the ideal start lineup.
Campaign AI
The campaign AI has been rewritten to work with the new army system. AI factions now raise their own hosts and give each of them a role. Some patrol the border and strike at weak enemy holdings, some hunt down enemy armies and others bring fresh troops to hosts that need them. Large factions gather a grand host before marching to war, led by a senior lord.
New campaign interface
Most of the campaign interface has been rebuilt from scratch, including a new campaign sidebar, the settlement screen, army panels, unit cards, the production queue, tooltips and dialogs. There is also a new campaign tutorial and most panels now have a help button that explains what everything on the screen does. The skirmish and tournament setup screens have been completely rebuilt as well.
There are now also a lot of notification dialogs keeping you up to date with everything happening in the game world. It's not possible anymore to miss a castle being sieged.
A large part of this update was replacing old systems rather than building on top of them. A lot of legacy campaign code is now gone completely, which makes it a lot easier to keep expanding the campaign from here.
It is possible you are missing a feature or something is a bit less polished than before because everything is written from scratch, if something annoys you, always feel free to let me know and I will be right on it!
THIS UPDATE IS NOT SAVEGAME COMPATIBLE
Unfortunately there was no proper way to make this complete overhual compatible with previous updates properly. The changed nature of the campaign makes this very hard to balance. It is compatible with all previous customization content ofcourse and in a short while the campaign editor will be adjusted to take advantage of the new systems.
Thank you all for the continued support and patience while this update was in the making!
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.