Lord loyalty is an economy now. Summoning a lord spends a little goodwill and each stretch under your banner wears him down; shared victories pay for the campaign, and sworn vassals rest back toward readiness at home. Sacking or burning a lord's own fief angers him personally, past what his court records. Summon-and-dismiss cycling no longer farms loyalty up; it just burns it
Horse archers reworked into skirmishers. Mounted archers and wolf skirmishers now carry a horse bow with a third of a foot bow's reach, and they ride a wide sweeping circle at the edge of that reach, loosing on each pass instead of pelting from a safe standoff. Their horses also cannot turn on a coin any more; they dodge only roughly, so spears, charges and committed chases connect
Battle
Units placed in the deployment phase start on Hold Position. Your line stands where you put it when the battle opens instead of chasing the first enemy it sees; switch any unit back to aggressive during deployment and that choice sticks. Horse archers are the exception: they deploy aggressive so they keep their orbiting style
Move your army as one piece. With units selected, hold ALT and drag any one of them: the whole formation slides rigidly under your cursor, showing every soldier's destination, and the order goes out when you release the button. You can let go of ALT mid-drag and keep dragging
Wheel a formation in place. Hold Z and drag left or right on a selected unit to rotate everyone around the formation's centre. It chains with the ALT drag in one motion: position first, press Z to rotate, release once for a single order
Carry your formation into a new position. Hold ALT while right-click dragging and the drag carries your units' existing arrangement instead of drawing a fresh line. A level drag keeps the formation as it stands; an angled drag turns it with the line you draw
All three respect the ground: destinations landing in water or impassable terrain turn the markers red and the order is refused. Trees and rocks never block a formation move; soldiers flow around them as with any order
Tutorial
New games can skip the tutorial entirely. A checkbox on the campaign setup screen starts you aboard the ship instead, where you still choose your starting men, perk and items
The Retreat button stays locked until the sergeant calls the retreat
Skipping the tutorial mid-battle now sounds the retreat for you once the enemy host arrives, no button needed
Interface
Caravans say where they are from. The barter screen carries the home city in its title with the owner underneath, in the settlement menu's style, so you know whose trade you are about to rob
Fixes
A faction accepting your peace deal now always ends the war. The game kept two war ledgers, the formal wars list and your raw reputation, and peace only cleared the first: with a bad enough reputation you stayed At War with an empty wars panel and no letter able to end it. Peace now settles both and never leaves relations worse than it found them, and sinking a faction's opinion of you past the war line now starts a real declared war on the spot instead of a half-war only one side believes in
Horse archers orbit their targets properly again. The cavalry turning-circle change left two steering systems fighting over mounted archers in firing range, and the orbit collapsed into backing off and weaving; the orbit now has sole control of the horse once in range. They still cannot turn on a coin, so committed pursuit can still cut them off
Units on Hold Position follow attack orders properly now. A held unit sent against a gate or an enemy would start walking, then get dragged straight back to its post; an explicit attack order now releases the post the same way a move order does
Razing a settlement no longer redraws the road network. The roads keep running through the ruins exactly as they did, and they stay that way through later foundings and save loads. Trade caravans still stop calling at the dead town
Summoned lords no longer turn up twice. A garrison sallying out of a besieged town knocked the army records out of step, so a defeated host could be recorded as still alive and come back on load beside its replacement. The records are fixed, and loading a save now cleans up any doubles it finds
Robbing a caravan from your own realm is an internal affair now. The home town loses loyalty when word reaches it, and nobody sends hunters after their own lord. Before, your own settlements could dispatch a war party against you, flying your own colours
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
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
The tutorial camera no longer pans toward the map corner. Off-field reserve units were being counted into the army's centre point, which also had enemy waves aiming behind your line instead of at it