Diplomacy

• A faction that wants your land writes before it marches. It sends a demand naming a daily tribute, and a war only follows if you refuse or ignore it. Taking your first town no longer means a kingdom declaring on you out of nowhere a few days later
• What a faction demands is now worth having. Its price is set by what marching on you would actually win them, so refusing is a real decision rather than a formality. Pay it and no war comes while the payments are current
• Kings weigh a war in silver: what the best fief they could take is worth, what the campaign will cost them, and what it leaves open at home. A war has to pay for itself before it is worth starting, so nobody mobilises a realm for one hamlet
• A king will not walk out of a war he started with nothing to show for it. Suing for peace the same week is refused, and only becomes acceptable as the fighting drags on and wears his realm down
• A grudge no longer starts a war on its own. Holding a fief that used to be theirs raises the price they put on your head and tips a war that was already close, but a king does not spend more avenging a town than the town was worth

Campaign

• Slight extension to the jobs that the sergeant gives you during the tutorialisation

World

• Settlements muster levies when attacked. Part of the population turns out beside the standing garrison: roughly double the defence at a hamlet, tapering to about a fifth more at a capital. Turnout follows loyalty, so a town you sacked or only just conquered stays behind its shutters. Levy dead are population dead: every man the defence loses comes off the town
• Raiders can only steal what they can carry. A raided town loses exactly what the warband hauls away, most valuable goods first, rather than a flat share of every stockpile. A small band cannot strip a city bare, and a band already loaded with loot takes less
• The wilds hold half again as many bandit camps. The world cap rose from half the settlement count to three quarters of it, camps pack a little closer together, and the map starts fuller
• Lords no longer stamp out every bandit hideout. Small hideouts and small warbands are beneath a lord's notice and are left for sellswords, which keeps the early game stocked with camps worth raiding. A hideout left alone grows fat on its takings, and once it becomes a real camp the local lord rides out to burn it

Warband

• Vanguards are second-tier troops now. They can be raised to lordship, and a captured one ransoms for more, but they cost more in wages and take longer to mend after a battle
• Soldiers cost less to keep, and the gap between a levy and an elite has narrowed. The old rates charged a top-tier man twenty times a peasant when he is worth nothing like that in a fight, so nobody who did the arithmetic would field them

Battle

• The garrison reads the assault and answers it. Ladders on the walls pull the gate reserve up to the fight; a ram at the gate pulls melee back to hold it; and a couple of scouts prodding the doors no longer move anybody. A fixed share used to stand behind an untouched gate while the walls were overrun
• Siege battles run much smoother. Soldiers who cannot take ladders, which is most of a garrison and every rider, spent enormous effort discovering that no route existed to their target, thousands of times a battle. That answer is now instant. In a 500-man assault, time spent on pathfinding dropped 26-fold, from 12 seconds per minute of battle to under half a second, and the worst single stall fell from 15ms to under 1ms
• Aggressive troops chase enemies across stairs and ladders. A unit below the wall climbs up after a target it can see, and a unit on the walls comes down for one, each preferring enemies on its own level first. Garrison defenders are unchanged: they hold their walls and never take a ladder down
• The spoils screen is two panels, the ground on the left and your pack on the right, and moving an item between them is how you take or drop it. Anything you drop lands back on the ground where you can pick it up again
• Dropping what you are already hauling frees the weight on the same screen, so you can make room for the better find without leaving and coming back. Nothing leaves your pack until you confirm

Interface

• Paint your banner at any size from 2x2 to 10x10. Rows and columns are added and removed from the middle of the design, so an odd count gives you a true centre line to build a device around. Your armies fly exactly what you paint, and a bigger banner flies a bigger flag
• Fog of war hides what you cannot see. Enemy hosts, bandit bands and caravans no longer move about in plain view outside your vision. Your own lords stay visible, and a settlement you have found stays on your map
• Unit tooltips show what a man costs to keep, so you can weigh a recruit against his wages
• Upgrade requirements show how many you are carrying rather than how many the upgrade needs, and hovering an item names it
• Hovering Wounded lists who is hurt and how long each has left. Hovering Wages breaks the bill down by rate, the same as the world map does
• The recruit list has the upgrade path button the warband screen has, so you can see what a hire becomes before you pay for him
• The troop readout carries your limit and your wounded: 36(4)/45
• Settlement names stay on the map at every zoom level, including the full political view. Party names appear from further out than before; bandit camp names still wait for a closer look
• The interface scale setting is gone and the interface is fixed at 100%. Any other scale re-drew the fonts and the icon grid at fractional sizes, which is exactly what the pixel art cannot survive. Anyone who had moved the slider comes back to 100%

Audio

• Music is quieter. The slider still runs the same range, but its top end is half what it was, so music sits under the rest of the mix rather than over it. Your setting is untouched

Fixes

• Men no longer fall off walls. A packed battlement squeezed soldiers down the stairs one step at a time, and a crowd pressed hard against the end of a wall could force a man over the edge. Both are fixed, and a crowd on the walkway still shuffles and makes way. A blow that knocks a man down the stairs still can
• Garrison defenders no longer climb down siege ladders to chase attackers. Ladders are attacker equipment; defenders keep to their stairs and gates
• The gate's health bar stays over the gate. It used to wander around the battlefield with the fighting once soldiers started taking damage
• The main menu background no longer shows thin seams or a mismatched corner. Several of the backdrop textures carried empty columns at their edges, and the scroller now tiles continuously instead of butting copies together
• The Controls tab in Settings scrolls. The camera zoom slider sat below the bottom of the panel, on top of the Back button
• Clicking a settlement in the Realm tab no longer sends your warband marching. The click passed through the closing screen to the map behind it