This update gives your empire walls and a voice: forts that shelter whole clusters of settlements from siege, and a diplomacy where rivals can be bought, bound as vassals, or talked out of a war you're losing. Rival powers build forts too, and read yours.
Highlights
Forts: Build one on a village and every settlement around it becomes untakeable while it stands.
Dangerous ground: A garrisoned fort fires on enemy armies crossing its perimeter, and gives nothing back.
Your doctrines build your forts: How many you hold, how far they reach, how hard they hit.
A living diplomacy: Vassals, tribute, gold gifts, ceded land, and peace offers that are actually weighed.
Fog of war is your choice: Turn it off in the lobby and play the whole map in the open.
Plus: AI factions that keep fighting their own wars, cheaper Medieval research, and stronger armies in the later ages.
New: Forts
Build a fort on one of your villages and it shelters every settlement around it. Forts open in the Ancient Age: Writing sits on every realm's path forward, and completing it hands you your first fort slots. From the Medieval Age on, every doctrine pair you finish adds more.
What it protects cannot be touched. While the fort stands, the settlements inside its perimeter can't be besieged or captured at all. An enemy who wants them has to come for the fort first.
The host village is the door. The village the fort sits on stays attackable, so a determined attacker always has a way in. They just have to take the hard target instead of the soft ones behind it. If the host village falls, the fort falls with it.
Forts are permanent. They can only be built on a village, they can't be moved, and tearing one down costs you: the garrison inside is lost and none of the gold comes back. Only the build slot returns.
Where you put one is a real decision. A village with a fort on it stays a village and can't be upgraded to a town while the fort stands. It still counts as support for its neighbours' upgrades.
What you send is what defends it. Garrison a fort the same way you garrison a settlement. A fort's garrison never refills on its own, and a defended fort grinds an attacking army down for a long time.
A garrisoned fort makes the ground around it dangerous. Enemy soldiers at war with its owner take fire the whole time they stand or march inside the perimeter, and the fort loses nothing in return. Once an assault on the host village is underway, the fire gives way to that fight: a fort never fires twice. Marching past a fort costs you soldiers. Camping beside one costs more.
Forts fall, they aren't captured. When the garrison is gone and enough attackers stand at the walls, the fort is destroyed, and the ruins stay on the map for a while so you can see where a border used to hold.
Your war doctrines make your forts. Different doctrines strengthen different things: how many forts you can hold, how large their garrisons grow, how far their protection reaches, and how hard they hit back. Every doctrine pair you finish from the Medieval Age on adds to the total, and the additions stack across the ages and across doctrines alike. You don't have to pour everything into one doctrine to get something back.
You always know what you're committing to. The price of your next fort sits above the fort slots and moves with the ages. Select a fort you own and it shows you exactly which settlements it's sheltering. Tearing one down asks you to confirm, and spells out what you lose first.
New: Rival powers build them too
The AI raises forts on its own villages, garrisons them, and reads yours.
It comes for the fort. Rather than throwing itself at settlements it can't take, it goes after the fort that shelters them.
It respects the fire. Rival armies avoid loitering inside a fort's perimeter, gather beyond its reach, and count the crossing as part of the price of an attack.
New: Diplomacy comes alive
Rival powers are no longer just a wall of war and peace buttons.
Vassals. Win a war with the right goal and your enemy submits instead of dying. A vassal pays you tribute every month, is dragged into your wars, and can't make peace or alliances of its own. It can also rebel when it grows strong enough, and you can absorb it outright once you tower over it.
Goodwill. Every power remembers how you've treated it. Generosity makes them likelier to accept your peace offers and your alliances, and it fades slowly if you stop.
Gold gifts. Send gold to any power, even one you're at war with. Buying your way out of a war you're losing is now a real move.
Territory. Hand a settlement to any power you're not at war with, to buy their goodwill or seal a friendship. A desperate AI goes further and will hand land to the enemy that's beating it.
Peace is a negotiation now. Offers are weighed instead of answered by a fixed rule: how badly the war is going, how many fronts they're fighting on, how they feel about you. A weaker power can talk its way out of a war it could never win, and a proud one can refuse a deal it should probably take.
New: Fog of war is a lobby choice
Start a game with fog of war off and the whole map is visible from the first day.
Set once, for the whole campaign. The choice sits in the lobby next to map size and game pace, and it can't be changed once the game has started, by design. Your choice is saved with your game, and a custom map remembers the setting it was built with.
There's a cost, and it's worth knowing first. With fog off, vision technologies lose their sight effects. Everything else they carry remains: all five are Position doctrine cards, so researching them still deepens that doctrine, which carries movement and, at its deeper levels, more army flags and more forts.
Cards stop advertising what they can't deliver. In a fog-off game the sight effects drop off a card's effect list and the vision total leaves the technology panel's stat rail. Naval Supremacy's faster crossings are unchanged.
The tutorial always plays with fog on.
Balance
Ages weigh on the battlefield and in the treasury. Armies grow fundamentally stronger as they advance through the ages, and economic reforms scale with the era that produced them.
Medieval research asked too much. Judged against the income a realm actually has when it gets there, the Medieval Age's research bill was the heaviest stretch of the whole game, worse than what the Renaissance and Imperial ages ask of the far richer empires that meet them. Medieval prices have come down so the age no longer stalls your advance.
Early Firearms no longer taxes your whole army. The Renaissance firearms technology raised the price of every soldier by more than the Imperial technology above it did, which had the chain climbing out of order. That increase has been cut back. Its damage bonus and its ranged attack are unchanged.
Citadels draw support from a wider area. The supporting cities a Citadel needs no longer have to be crowded into one corner of your empire.
Improvements
Technology cards explain what they actually do to your economy and your armies, in plain language.
Doctrine tooltips now show what finishing an age's doctrine pair would do to your forts, and how far along that pair you already are.
Fixes
The AI keeps fighting its own wars. Once an AI faction declared its first war, its strategy froze there for the rest of the game. Peace could be made and decades could pass; it would never choose a new goal or start another war. AI factions now close out a war, take stock of what it won them, and move on.
No more phantom war declarations. An AI could announce war on a power it held an active peace treaty with. The declaration was refused, the AI never noticed, and it tried the same target again a month later for as long as the treaty lasted. It now respects the treaty and picks a target it can actually fight.
Turning down an offer no longer silences you too. Refusing a peace or alliance offer locked that channel in both directions, so you couldn't make your own offer to that power for months afterwards. The cooldown now falls only on the side whose offer was refused.
Under the hood
Localization: everything the forts add is translated into all six languages, along with the rest of this update's new text: English, Turkish, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Old saves load normally, and they open with fog of war on, which is how they were played. Games and custom maps made in this update carry their forts and their fog setting with them.
Thank you for playing Conqueror's Stage. Raise your walls, choose your words, and let us know what holds. See you on the map!