Hey everyone,
Big one this. A whole new card game in the tavern, difficulty options for new runs, a load of new story events, and the download is now about 90% smaller. Full notes below.
The Tavern (new)
There's a new door on your sidebar called The Tavern. Inside, a stranger is waiting with a deck of cards.
It's a full card game. 3x3 board, five cards each, you capture his cards by beating their numbers.
Every card is a real fighter from your world. The four numbers on each card come from their actual stats, so a fighter with 94 striking carries a 9 up top. Power is on the right, defense on the bottom, grappling on the left.
First visit, he gives you five cards of your own fighters to get you started.
Stakes are real. Win and you take one of his cards, fighters from rival houses and the Badlands. Lose and he takes one of yours, and he will absolutely play it against you next time.
You can play him once a week.
Fighter cards sometimes turn up with your Blood Chalice rewards, and if you ever drop below five cards you're guaranteed drops until you can play again, so you can't get locked out.
Drag your cards onto the board, or click if you prefer.
Choose Your Reign (new)
Starting a new game now asks how you want to rule:
The Gilded Path: 40,000 starting gold, fewer deaths, richer purses, milder injuries.
The Iron Road: the game as it's always been.
Blood & Ash: 15,000 starting gold, deadlier bouts, leaner purses, brutal injuries.
Your choice is saved with the campaign. Existing saves carry on as normal on The Iron Road.
Tale of the Tape (new)
Every filled bout in The Arena now has a Tale of the Tape button. Both fighters side by side: records, styles, age, overall, all ten stats as facing bars with the better number highlighted, plus their history against each other. Should make booking a card feel a lot more informed.
New story events
16 new lore events, including the Masked Challenger, the Deserter, a match fixer who really wants a word, plague in the lower city, an imperial tax assessor, and a boy who won't leave your gates. All with choices and consequences like the existing ones.
Team Photo rework
The War Council team photo is now a proper staged shot. Your house's own arena as the backdrop, champions front and centre with their belts, the rest of the stable in tiered ranks behind, name tags that don't get covered any more, and a plaque with your house name and the year. Take Photo still saves it to your Pictures folder.
The Vault
All 30 relics now have proper icons instead of symbols. The relic drop popup shows the art too.
Music
Three new tracks: ceremony music for lore events and press conferences (these used to be silent), a theme for The Throne and The Vault, and tavern music for the card table.
Quality of life
You can name your saves in The Codex now.
Autosaves clean up after themselves, only the last 5 are kept. Manual saves are never touched. Autosaves show an Auto tag.
New games show a proper loading screen while the world generates instead of freezing on black.
Returning players get a short What's New popup after each update.
The new game popups (tutorial, champions intro, help) now come one at a time with proper transitions instead of stacking on top of each other.
Blood Calendar and War Council now use the full width of the screen.
Text in the game can't be highlighted any more.
Balance
The Blood Chalice fills about 40% slower. It was filling way too fast.
The injury severity setting in The Forge now actually applies to fights you watch. It was only affecting simulated events before, so brutal now means brutal.
Rival promotions are now capped at 6 fights per card, same as you.
Performance and fixes
The download is now around 625MB, down from about 4GB. No quality loss, the art has just been packaged properly.
Fixed the Spymaster tab crashing when you opened it.
Fixed Rival Houses crashing when you clicked a fighter in a house's detail panel.
Fixed The Throne being able to crash the whole game.
Fixed a rare startup issue that could leave you on a permanent black screen.
Saving no longer causes a stutter, and saves can't be corrupted if the game crashes mid-save.
Fighter lists load much faster, roster lag on bigger stables is gone.
Screens load their backgrounds instantly when you move around.
The game's fonts are now bundled, so everything looks right offline.
Loads of smaller fixes: timers that kept running after skipping the intro, keyboard input going to the wrong place while typing, the review link opening inside the game instead of your browser, and more.
Under the hood
Crashes now get written to a log file (logs/crash.log in the game's data folder). If you hit a bug, sending me that file helps massively.
Groundwork is in for Steam achievements and cloud saves. Coming soon.
That's the lot. If you're enjoying the game a review genuinely helps more than anything else.
Cheers,
Jack