When three brothers and a close friend make a game together, eventually somebody is going to ask the important question:
Okay, but who won?
For most of Early Access, Folklands was happy to let you answer that yourself.
Maybe you had the biggest settlement. Maybe your economy somehow worked despite all evidence to the contrary. Maybe you simply survived the increasingly unreasonable demands of your Folks.
With 1.0, we wanted to give you some more concrete goals to build toward too.
In 1.0, you can choose which victory conditions are active before starting a game.
There are now five different victory conditions:
Monument Construction is about reaching the point where your settlement can construct one of the available city statues.
Prosperity Score rewards building up the overall strength of your settlement.
Regional Dominance is for players who would rather keep expanding until a large part of the map has their name on it.
Trade Empire gives the economically minded among you something to work toward.
And Alliance Supremacy offers another path for players focused on their relationships with the other empires, by completing the quests that are continuously handed to you from the surrounding kingdoms.
You decide which conditions are enabled when setting up the game, so winning does not have to mean the same thing every time.
You can activate one, several, or you can just ignore the whole thing and keep building.
There is also an optional Time Limit if you want the game to end after a set amount of time, even if nobody has managed to win by then.
Which is probably useful when somebody says, "just one more hour" for the fourth time.
A victory condition is only the destination, but you still have to figure out how your settlement is going to reach it.
As your settlement grows, keeping the right Folks in the right places becomes increasingly important.
1.0 gives you more control over the settlements you are building, including how your Folks are educated, where they work, and how you manage an increasingly complicated town.
That matters because not every successful settlement needs to look the same.
Maybe you focus heavily on production and trade. Maybe you expand aggressively in search of land and resources. Maybe you take on every quest you get. Maybe you carefully build up a huge, prosperous city while your friends argue about who actually owns that mountain over there.
That choice is a big part of what we wanted Folklands to be.
Over the last few days we have talked about new production chains, larger settlements, exploration, raiders, multiplayer trading and all the other pieces coming together for 1.0.
The new victory conditions give all of those systems something to build toward, while still letting you decide what kind of game you actually want to play.
Early Access gave us the opportunity to build that foundation together with all of you.