Castles Of War Demo Update 
We’re excited to share the first major update to the Castles of War demo! A huge thank you to everyone who’s played, tested, and shared feedback.
New Unit: The Mage!
Magic has arrived on the battlefield! The Mage is a powerful ranged unit that unleashes devastating area-of-effect Lightning attacks. Though expensive to recruit, just one or two can turn the tide of battle.
This update also introduces new Magic Damage, Magic Armor, and Magic Vulnerability stats. Physical armor does not protect against magical strikes. This change opens the door for new units and strategies in future updates.
New Ground Tiles
We’ve expanded the world’s terrain with three new ground tile sets: Forest, Meadow, and Rocky. While currently visual-only, these additions bring more depth and atmosphere to each map and help us tell richer stories through level design.
Balance, Polish & Bug Fixes
We’ve done a complete combat and economy rebalance to account for the Mage’s arrival and community feedback. Expect smoother pacing, fairer fights, and more rewarding strategies.
You’ll also notice visual polish throughout the game such as refined UI panels, improved lighting, fog effects, and other visual tweaks that enhance the overall feel.
Share Your Thoughts
Thank you for supporting Castles of War!
This update marks an exciting step forward, and we’d love to hear your feedback on the new changes. Drop your thoughts, suggestions, and bug reports in the community discussions!
Join us on Discord and Follow Us on Bluesky
Patch Notes 1.0.35
Gameplay
New unit: The Mage
New damage type Magic along with Magic Armor and Magic Vulnerability
Units now capture outposts from the far-side of the outpost
3 new campaign missions
Improved handling of simulation speed: the game will now perform better on higher speeds as the load is now better distributed across frames.
Collision hitboxes refresh more frequently
Units now use a greedy algorithm to choose attack targets, which yields huge performance improvements when many units are stacked close together and distributes damage across enemies in a more realistic way
Improvements to builder AI
Projectile simulation optimized
Balance
Spearmen have more health but have less armor
Swordsmen do more damage but have less armor
Visual
Added skin tone variations to units
Added three new ground tile sets: meadow, forest, rocky
Stars are no longer tinted by the sky color
Small gold icon now used for gold popups
Improved fog rendering so distant objects are more obscured than nearer ones
Gold icon sprites have been added to the font atlas, allowing more consistency and flexibility in their use throughout the UI
Unit gold costs are now listed inside of their hover-card, not on top of their icons
Bugs
Fixed bug where range was half of what it should be
“Spawn Unit” objectives now retroactively count units that were spawned before the objective appeared
Audio
New sfx for Advance, Formation, and Retreat
New sfx for when units enter/exit garrisons
New sfx for when units enter and exit water
Other
Added links for Steam, Website, and Discord to main menu and settings menu
Settings added to disable lightning and choose command sound
Fixed bug where hitting “escape” while the settings menu was open would unpause the game without closing the window