Once you have founded a faction, you can write to others. A letter is composed from clauses with numbers you set: send or demand silver, peace, a truce, daily tribute in either direction, hand over or ask for a settlement, ask them to declare war on a rival, or offer to join a war of theirs. Your envoy reads the terms before you seal it and tells you roughly how the court will take them
A letter is carried by one of your own men, chosen by name from your party. He leaves the warband while he rides and returns with the answer. Mounted men ride faster, and you can have as many riders out at once as you have men to send
Courts write to you unprompted. They demand tribute when they think you are weak, sue for peace when a war has ground them down, offer to ransom a lord of yours they hold, propose a straight prisoner exchange, and pay you to join a war they are losing. What a court chooses to write follows from its situation and its king's character: a greedy king asks for silver where an honourable one offers an exchange
Tribute runs daily for a fixed term you agree in the letter, in either direction. Miss a payment and the arrangement collapses: the other side remembers it, and any truce between you is void. You can also stop paying deliberately from the faction screen, with the same consequences
Refuse a demand and you may get an ultimatum. The card names their price and gives you the two answers that matter: meet it, or defy them and let the countdown run
Factions keep a ledger of what you have done to them, and it decays over time. Taking fiefs, sacking towns, executing lords and insulting offers all sit in it and make every future negotiation more expensive. Gifts, ransoming lords back, breaking a siege for them and fighting their enemies work the other way
World
The demo plays out on a new map. Two kingdoms, Dunmere and Solmark, with a belt of independent towns between them. You come ashore on Dunmere's coast, so theirs are the nearest holdings and the independents sit between you and Solmark
Warband
Summoned lords ride to you, merge into your host as one force on the map, and fight under your command in battle. Their loyalty decides whether they answer, and a lord who refuses tells you why. The army moves at the pace of its parts, so a large slow contingent holds the whole host back
Promote one of your own veterans to lordship. Any soldier of the third tier or higher can take a vacant seat, and he carries his name, his people and the renown he earned by the sword into it. He leaves your party for good
Meeting one of your own lords on the road now opens his own panel: with the option to call him to your banner or release him. You can no longer attack your own vassals
Battle
Large battles are fought in waves. During deployment you can lay out each wave as its own formation using the arrows at the top of the deploy panel, and a slider on each unit card sets how many of that type go into the wave you are looking at. When your line thins, the next wave marches in from your edge of the map and every unit moves to the position you gave it
Enemy hosts too large for the field fight the same way, sending their best troops first and announcing each fresh wave as it arrives
Small warbands no longer hold troops back. An army of fewer than 75 men commits everything, instead of keeping a reserve too small to change anything that usually arrived after the fight was decided. Larger hosts still hold one, and a big shield wall still keeps its counter-punch
Hold position has some give in it. Men on hold will step out to meet an enemy that comes within a pace of them and walk back to their post once nothing is near, instead of standing rooted while a foe shuffles just out of reach. They will not be drawn further than that, so a retreating enemy cannot pull your line apart. Shield walls are unchanged and keep their rank exactly
Interface
Alerts now arrive as cards down the left edge, ranked by how much they matter. Dismiss one and it collapses to an icon that stays until the situation actually resolves, so a siege or an unpaid warband cannot be lost by clicking it away. Click a card for the detail and the actions that go with it, including reading a letter or answering an ultimatum
Faction territory on the world map is far stronger when you zoom out, and faction names over their land read clearly instead of fading into the terrain
Settlement names in the Realm tab now point at the map: click one and the view travels to it
The game now reads in a smooth font instead of the pixel one. The pixel font is still there under Settings, Display if you prefer it
The pause menu shows the build version, so a screenshot of a problem says which build it came from
Fixes
The demo now runs to three settlements instead of ending on your first. It counts what you hold rather than what you have taken, so a town lost to a counter-attack puts you a step back, and a settlement handed to you in a letter counts the same as one stormed
Bandit camps sent out far too many parties. Each camp now keeps one band in the field at a time, which cuts the number of bandits roaming the world to a third of what it was
A lord whose realm was at war would march on the enemy while an army stood at his own gates. Lords now weigh what is in front of them, and an intruder in their own lands outranks a campaign abroad. A cautious lord in a realm fighting for survival may now stay home entirely
Winning a siege did not always hand you the settlement. The capture is now recorded against the settlement itself, so a won siege grants the town immediately instead of on the next battle
Relief battles no longer draw overlapping deployment zones, the besieging army forms up in ranks instead of scattering across half the map, and a routed enemy runs for the edge of the map instead of vanishing where it stood
The faction screen listed your own realm twice in another court's relations, once by name and once as "You"
Scrolling with the pointer near the bottom left corner scrolled the world event log behind an open settlement or warband screen. The log now leaves the wheel alone while a screen sits over it
Orders aimed past the edge of the battle map are refused and marked in red instead of being obeyed. There is no ground out there, so men sent off the map behaved very strangely. Covers move orders, formation drags and shield walls
Number keys no longer place troops during deployment. Reaching for a control group armed a whole category, and the next click emptied it onto the field. The deploy panel is the only way to place men
Goods taken from a robbed caravan now go into the battle spoils screen with the rest of the plunder, so they count against what your warband can carry and you choose what to take. They used to appear in your pack on their own, weightless and unasked
Trade margins are capped. Buying low in one town and selling high in another could pay five times over, often between settlements a short ride apart. A good run now pays a little over double. Prices also stopped rounding in your favour, which had been quietly widening every margin on cheap goods
A siege survived neither a save nor a battle. Loading put your host back in the open field with the camp, the ladders and the build queue all gone, and being shut inside your own besieged town let you simply walk away. Both sides of a siege are now kept, and an assault that is thrown back drops you at the camp with the siege still running instead of quietly ending it
Seizing a settlement redraws the borders straight away. The map used to wait for the next turn of the world clock, so for a second or two after taking a town it still showed as someone else's