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Hoi everyone,
First of all: happy 2026! I hope this year brings all of us plenty of pleasant, innovative indie strategy (or other) games.
A few of you suggested (and you were right) that it’s time for a short recap of the last year, plus a look at what’s coming next. While plans rarely survive first contact with reality, but at least this gives us something solid to adapt from.
Recap: 2025
Unfortunately, indie game development didn’t get any easier last year — quite the opposite. A non-trivial part of my time went into making sure neither my kids nor I starve... but development never stopped. We’ve survived worse.
Over the year, 6 larger updates and many patches went live.
These mostly prepared the community-voted major feature group (siege + advanced occupation mechanics and some vassalage basics), while also adding a lot of concrete improvements, including:
For the warlords
Added some new military units and a fully reworked military edges system, with roughly double the unique traits and new synergies!
Implemented terrain categories that fundamentally affect combat values, enabling more tactical depth.
Enhanced traversability rules, making previously impassable terrain crossable with the right units, promoting new strategies
Expanded rules for winter troop movement further stress the seasonal nature of warfare.
Tile improvements and terrain now affect battles through not only flat modifiers, but they also alter battlefield widths per battle roster, promoting new tactics and more situational army builds.
Expanded virtue rewards for winning battles (e.g. separate rewards for repelling raiders)
Military companies can now claim regions that are not adjacent to your own territories.
For economic masterminds
Fully reworked early-game pacing
New labourers, continuous tweaking of existing economic rules and dynamics based on your feedback
Redesigned population dynamics (major needs, food rations, morale, stability)
Added charts to visualize feudum inputs and outputs, and a wider variety of economic reports.
Added the ability to cycle through past reports of any kind, making it much easier to track what happened while you were away.
Custom labour policies can finally be saved and reused across feudums — even across games (if the rulebook matches)
For schemers and social nobles
private messaging alongside public in-game channels (plus reporting — thankfully rarely needed so far) enables better scheming - or tactical discussions.
Added a gossips & rumours system, so you can learn about important events even outside your influence range. Fair warning: gossip can be inaccurate!
Alliance victory conditions now scale with member count, allowing small but tight alliances to compete with large ones
For quality-of-life enjoyers
Added various accessibility options (toggle flashing effects, depth of field, etc.)
Dozens of new animations, from WYSIWYG workers to chimney smoke and tower flags, plus updated weather effects
Multiple visual enhancements across the map and its UI.
Dozens of UX improvements (e.g. items in a command queue hovers their target, proper cycle-navigation for wasteground tiles, etc)
clearer and more informative tooltips, context-sensitive map highlights, and redesigned problematic commands (such as claiming, manage units, manage company, labour assignment)
200+ bug fixes
...and plenty of other improvements and additions (you can find the past year's changelog at the end of the post).
What Comes Next
Given the current circumstances, I’m not brave enough to publish long-term schedules — but the first quarter is fairly clear. Then I’ll most likely reassess and share plans for the next quarter once we get there.
Realistically, I’ll still need to split my time between game development and projects that actually pay the bills. If that bothers you, any support through Patreon helps a lot — as requested, I’ll also look for options that don’t require another account and are ideally more EU-friendly, as soon as I have the bandwidth.
Q1 Goals
Early February: extended occupation mechanics, including the ability to annex other players’ territories and an updated version of the current claiming process with an open bidding.
Mid March: the new siege mechanics system, with its own phases, items and layouts, finally moving sieges away from the current "battle with some extra rules" resolution.
(Plus pending UX/QoL features continuing on the side)
These features are being developed together, but I want to roll them out step by step and test them with the community, rather than dropping everything at once.
Once these are out, there are a few loose ends I’d still like to wrap up:
The basics of vassalage and enhanced war dynamics (e.g. "war scores")
Further UX improvements, with more focus on in-game tutoring and onboarding / first-time user experience, because these are still pretty rough
Setting up the language files and process for community translators
And then we'll have a new community vote to reprioritize the remaining major features
The story-heavy single-player mode will be slightly sidelined this quarter so I can focus on shipping these major systems properly. Around the voting period, I’ll switch focus to it — and there might be a small surprise as well, but too many things influence that right now to say more.
Okay, I’d like to wrap up this post with a final thought: please keep the feedback coming. Development is fully transparent — the playable builds show exactly where the game is right now and where it’s heading, and your feedback and votes genuinely shape it. I think there aren’t many projects built this collaboratively, but I couldn't imagine doing Feudums any other way.
Thank you for walking this road with me.
- Mat
Previous changelogs for the recap:
View game pageView game pageView game pageView game pageView game pageView game page
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