Your soldiers have faces. Every named soldier now carries a small pixel portrait, shown next to his name in the warband's unit list, on the camp-life event cards he stars in, beside the deadliest-warrior line on the saga pages, and in the pick-a-man lists for couriers and vassals. A veteran raised to vassal keeps his face as a lord, on the hall of the fief he holds. A face is rolled once when the man joins and stays his for life, through saves and promotions, even past his death on the record books. Red hair is rare
Work boards. Settlements post real jobs drawn from the world around them: bounties on actual bandit bands and camps in the area, toll crews squatting real crossings, and lord-posted work from the fief's own lord, including a sealed letter worth ambushing and a rival's messenger worth stopping. Offers appear when the situation exists and vanish when it resolves, pay scales with what the job actually is, and reported numbers are the word of frightened locals, not a headcount
Seventeen jobs on the boards. Beyond the bounties and bandit work, lords post dirty contracts: burn a rival's granary, rob a faction's caravans, fetch a healer willing or not, stop a rival's messenger. Elders want a runaway debtor dragged home, a stolen daughter brought back, prisoners traded at a camp's palisade. A lord will buy trained men his town cannot raise, an eloped son can be returned or recruited, and a grown bandit fort carries a contract worth up to 2000 silver. Meetings on the road play out with a scene line, the speaker's words and a portrait, and the horn sounds when an ambush springs
Boards stay full and turn over. Every settlement fills its own board instead of drawing from one world pool, unaccepted offers rotate off weekly, no town posts two jobs of the same kind at once, and work that rarely comes up takes a slot the moment the world can offer it
The old randomly-offered settlement tasks are retired. Jobs come from the Work board now; tasks already taken continue and finish as normal
Prisoners are people now. Every captive has a name and an origin, listed in the warband's prisoners tab, with bandits marked as such. The reeve's wanted-men board pays a premium over ransom for bandits handed over alive, through the quest itself, not the ransom broker. Quest captives, like a dragged debtor or a kidnapped healer, ride the same list marked with a gold !, and can be ransomed for a pittance if you would rather burn the job
Barracks. Your fiefs can build one barracks each from the settlement's Manage tab: 600 silver and 80 timber in the stockpile (kept, not spent), seven days to raise, and the fief houses 40 more men in its garrison. Garrisoned men draw no wages from your purse, so a barracks is somewhere to keep soldiers you cannot yet afford on the road
Autosaves. The game saves itself each morning on the campaign map and keeps the last three days for each save slot. Hover a slot on the load screen to see its autosaves; loading one carries that campaign on in the same slot, and deleting a save deletes its autosaves with it
Continue and Load Game are separate buttons now. Continue jumps straight into your newest save, manual or auto. Load Game opens the full list
Quest outcomes show their cost. Finishing, dropping or fumbling a job pushes a card naming exactly who thinks more or less of you and by how much: gold for gains, red for the rest
Balance
The captain's chain runs in a sensible order. Hunting a warband on the roads now comes before the camp bounty, and the camp comes after Thirty Swords, so you muster the men before you are sent at a fortified target
Trade margins widened a notch. The price band grew from 0.55-1.45 to 0.50-1.50 of an item's value, lifting the best buy-cheap-sell-dear run between towns from about 2.4x to 2.7x. Early-game trading should fund a warband a little faster
Interface
The skill trees are readable. Skill names ran outside their boxes and over the next column because the layout measured them at the wrong size, rows could land on top of each other, and every connecting line bent at the same place so branches were drawn over one another. Boxes now fit their contents, rows never overlap, and the lines fan out without a single crossing
Each soldier's row in the unit list now carries his own upgrade buttons next to the release button, so you can choose exactly who gets the promotion; the buttons on the type row stay for upgrading your most seasoned men in bulk
Frame rate cap. A new Display setting caps the frame rate at sensible steps from 30 up to unlimited
The pixel font option is retired. The smooth typeface is the one look now
The overworld top bar stays bright above the settlement and warband menus instead of dimming behind them, and the time-control tooltips now draw above the quest tracker
Fixes
Clearing a bandit camp actually clears it. Winning the fight could leave the hideout standing on the map with no silver paid; the camp is now identified by name rather than by its position in a list, so the one you burned is the one that burns
Tracked jobs stay tracked across a save. Board jobs came back untracked after loading and the track button did nothing; tracking now survives the reload and can be toggled again afterwards
Lords no longer clear out the hideouts. Two separate bits of army logic decided whether to attack a bandit camp and only one of them knew that hideouts are beneath a lord's notice, so patrols quietly emptied the map of the small camps meant to be your early work
Destroying a bandit camp no longer risks the books paying out against the wrong camp later. Camp records kept their place by list position, and positions shifted when old camps were cleaned up; a later battle could then destroy and reward a camp you never touched. Camps now hold stable slots for life
Defending your own walls works again. When a besieger stormed a settlement you were defending, the battle loading screen failed to attach and the walls battle never launched; the storm announcement fired and nothing followed
Defensive sieges wait for you. The assault held its ground during your deployment phase in name only: the enemy marched and fought while the deploy panel was still up. The attack now starts when you press Ready
Ordering an attack means fight. An explicit attack order on an enemy now sets the unit aggressive, same as attack-move and charge. Before, units placed on Hold Position would kill their one target, walk back to a new post and stand there, which gutted melee in sieges while ranged kept firing
Units on Hold Position no longer chase a routing enemy back and forth. Holding troops stand their ground and let the runners go; aggressive troops still run them down
Market shelf prices are recalculated the moment you walk in. They were cached from the last economy tick, so goods arriving just before you did could list an item at one price and pay far less the moment it hit the cart. Shelf, cart and demand label now all read the same live market
Market prices hold still while you fill the cart. The haggler discount was rounded into each quantity's total and then divided back out, so the average price column bounced (10, then 9.5, then 9.7, then 9.5...) as you added items. Prices now stay unrounded until silver actually changes hands: the shelf and the cart show the same true average at every quantity, and it only moves when the market itself does
An ultimatum's clock is honoured. Refusing a tribute demand promised war in 14 days, but the faction's own war planning could declare days early over its ultimatum's head. Every road to war now waits for the clock, and paying the demand settles tempers enough that war does not fire anyway
Lords who escape your custody now say so. A held lord has always had a small nightly escape chance; before, he simply vanished from your prisoner list without a word and the captured notice stayed up, which read as a bug
The warband screen stopped stuttering on big rosters. Upgrading or marking a man for release rebuilt the entire screen (about a fifth of a second with 90 men); now only the touched rows and counters update, roughly 30 times faster
Health bars no longer tank the frame rate. Holding ALT in a big siege drew every bar as its own draw batch, which halved performance on older graphics cards. The bars now draw in one batch
Your first vassal no longer declares himself king of your own faction. The world's succession logic saw your faction's empty lord-throne and crowned whichever lord swore to you first; your faction's ruler is you, and the realm screen now says so. Existing games heal on load
Soldiers stopped drawing women's names. About one in five human soldiers rolled a female given name, and elf soldiers could land famous female names too; soldier pools are men-only now, with sixty new male names added for variety. Lords keep their female names
Settlement label icons draw at a clean pixel scale. The little economy and event icons in map labels were stretched to the text height, which fell between pixel sizes and left them uneven; they now draw at an exact double size on whole pixels
Checkboxes draw their full border. The bottom edge of the box could be clipped by the control, leaving three-sided checkboxes
Defending your walls works properly now. Three faults stacked up in defensive sieges: the attackers were secretly given a second, defensive commander that countermanded their own assault (cavalry parked at your gate doing nothing, ladders never raised); your wall garrison fought the whole battle frozen (archers on the walls never shot, units twitched in place); and your own castle was registered as belonging to the enemy, so the besiegers saw no gate worth battering. Assaults now ladder, climb and batter the gate, and your garrison fights back
The defence garrison is yours to deploy. Instead of starting pre-placed on the battlefield, the fief's garrison joins your deployment pool next to your own men, and the deploy zone reaches the battlements so you can man the walls your way. Survivors still return to the garrison, not your party
Caravans turn back from besieged settlements. They already refused to trade at shut gates, but they kept walking right up to them first; a destination that comes under siege mid-journey now turns the caravan around on the road
The breather after a flee no longer locks you out of the world. For several seconds after fleeing or closing an encounter, clicking any party did nothing. That grace now only stops parties from catching you; marching onto one yourself always opens the meeting
An empty warband is no longer stuck in unwinnable battles. A hostile army catching a player with zero troops loaded a battle with nobody on your side, which sat in a stalemate forever. The encounter screen now opens as normal so you can bribe or run, but with no men a flee is a gamble against the pursuit's speed: get caught and the saga ends on the death page, same as choosing to fight. Men staged to fight for you (a garrison, your army's lords) still mean a real battle
Your banner stays on the map with an empty warband. Releasing your last troops left the map marker showing your old men for a while, then erased the flag and all; a lone leader now keeps the flag, and the marker updates the moment the warband screen closes
Raiders think twice before storming an occupied town. Attacking a settlement with the player inside skipped the strength check entirely, so tiny bands would charge a town holding your whole army. They now weigh the walls, the muster and your men, and a real attack announces itself with a moment to rally instead of cutting straight to the battle. Besiegers storming your walls give the same warning