Before diving into anything else, I want to start by expressing our heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of you for being part of this incredible journey. Whether you reported a bug, playtested a feature or map, provided feedback, wrote a review, told your friends about our game, shared a screenshot, joined our Discord, or simply played the game—you’ve made a difference, and we sincerely thank you.
As many of you know, we are hobbyists at heart. We don’t have an office, we don’t work on our games full-time, and our website is as straightforward as it gets. The most "professional" thing we've done is register a custom domain for our email. Yet, despite these limitations, Warlords Under Siege—as janky as it may be in some places, and as incomplete as it may feel in others—has transformed dramatically over the past two years (and a bit).
When we began working on this game, it started as a side project, an evolution of the battle system from Citizens: Far Lands, our first game on Steam. We never anticipated it growing into what it has become today. To be honest, it has surpassed our initial ambitions—and perhaps even our capabilities. That said, this isn’t a confession of defeat. On the contrary, we believe the game is brimming with content, bolstered by modding capabilities for the community to take the reins if they wish. And with your continued support, we plan to expand it even further.
That said, my friends and I can now confidently say that we’re satisfied enough with the game to call it “done.” While there will always be room for more improvements and additions, Warlords Under Siege has become something we’re incredibly proud of—thanks to you.
I'd like to give special thanks to two streamers, Szczurkowski and TacticalFriedRice, who helped raise interest in our game among their viewers, and provided us with invaluable feedback. I'd also like to give a shout out to some of our community members, namely Dusty, Asha Marie, Thrudgelmir, Jakeyyy1999, tross and lewi030 who provided insanely valuable feedback.
Now...
We didn’t keep a detailed record of all bug fixes (and if we had, this post would be a small book). Most of these fixes were technical and impacted a small number of users, but addressing them was vital. Here’s a summary of what’s new:
- New Map: Under Siege. This map is the most difficult so far, and features unique mechanics, along with new achievements
- Modding API
- Map Editor
- Refined some sounds so they're easier on the ears
Let's take a closer look at Under Siege:
This map features two unique mechanics:
- Some building slots are red: you can only build on them ONCE
- You'll gain a FREE card draw every THREE minutes, allowing you to earn a total of 46 cards on this map
Expect this map to feel like the ultimate boss level. You’ll face all enemy types—goblins, orcs, desert fiends, undead, burrowers, harpies, giants, and more. Extra cards will be essential!
For those of you who like to play around with files and game content, there are a few goodies here and there. This is very much a WIP and I'd love to do more, if the community can tell me what it would like to be able to do :)
There are limits to what we can achieve at this very moment. For example unit modding is limited to stats, but it's not impossible that it will be expanded on in the future. But let's focus on what we CAN do.
New Maps
You can create maps from scratch (editing existing ones isn’t supported). A detailed tutorial will come later, but here’s a summary of the process:
- Create the visuals in Unity Editor
- Optional: Create the navmesh in Unity Editor
- Drag and drop building slots onto your map
- Define enemy spawn points
- Define enemy waves
- Optional: Create a unique script
Special thanks to charttyp for generously sharing Unity asset packs to help kickstart your modding projects. If you’re a game dev, check out their work!
Caravans are not supported at this moment, but you can replicate this functionality quite easily with scripts, which we'll get to in a moment.
Unit modding
On release, you’ll be able to tweak unit stats—health, damage, movement speed, attack range, etc. As a fun test, we created turbo zombies with high health, low damage, and crazy speed. It’s a blast!
Map Scripts
We've written a little API to allow you to do some more unique things. For example, you can choose to give cards to the player, display text, unlock sections of the map, spawn enemies, change weather, play sounds and so on and so forth. These are written in C#, and the script is placed inside a map folder. For those of you who are curious about example code, you can check it out here.
If you did check it out, you'll have noticed that you can also add dialogues to the game. You can play these at any point you like, for example when the player's building is destroyed, after a certain time, when an enemy spawns etc...
You can load images and sounds into the game on startup, which you can then use in your script should you wish. For example nothing will stop you from blasting some awful music at the player, if you consider it to be a necessary part of the experience of playing your map.
We're going live on the 20th of January
That's about it. Now that I typed it all out, it feels smaller and less grand than it really is. A ton of work went into moddability, and a ton more is needed, especially on the documentation side. If you're interested in modding the game, please join our discord and feel free to reach out to me directly (Komisarek) with any questions or suggestions you might have.