Warlords,
After yesterday's patch, I still felt like something was missing from my original design intent with this game. Way too many players seemed to be ignoring the option to trade with monk factions. I finally realized that this was not because they didn't find it interesting or useful, but because they simply had no idea you could do it! Beta testers were told ahead of time that it was possible, so that raw first-time-user experience was lacking. The only way to discover trading was to get lucky and have your mouse over a temple marker on the map while it was discovered.
This morning's patch is designed to bring this immersive and useful feature to light. I have included a few other improvements here as well. Like I said in the previous post, I will be continuing to monitor for any more growing pains, but honestly, I need to rest today and tomorrow, this has been a crazy week!
When I return from the wedding on the 22nd, I will dig into mid/late game optimization and battle size scaling. These two items are intertwined. Want larger battles in the end regions? Performance must be locked in. So I will take care of these in tandem. Optimization in a full open-world simulation game such as this is very nuanced and risky to fix. I will take my time on this and squeeze every last drop of performance out of this engine!
I am also aware that some users are having performance issues and instability that is abnormal (not just that they are trying to run the game on low specs). This seems to be partly due to NVIDIA RTX 5000 series graphics cards. I will also investigate this issue in the coming weeks and try to come up with a solution. This may be above well my paygrade and could require even more time to fix fully. Please have patience while I sort this out! I want everyone to enjoy the game.
See here for the full list of changes I made last night and this morning. Have a great weekend on Awaji!
Darkmatter
Added trade with nearby settlement button to map screen
Added ability to talk with neutral civilians (monks and peasants) to trade with their settlement
Added note in tutorial about trading with neutral settlements
Adding warning in tutorial to not raze the nearby homestead, as you will need its land points to continue the tutorial right away
Added tooltip names to trade items
Changed trade lists to sort by item cost, more expensive at the top
Doubled gained loot if you choose to raze a settlement and forgo the land points, making razing more viable, this simulates you destructively searching for all items in the settlement rather than taking tribute and leaving
Increased relation gain/loss for retainer and warrior captive options
Increased ransom payouts
Buffed temple, monastery, mansion, and estate garrisons
Removed bush colliders