Campaign, combat and company management
This update expands the campaign's economy and noble-house politics, improves battlefield orders and AI, and fixes a number of interface and save-loading problems.
Starting a campaign: Saves from the earlier map-fixes playtest are not compatible with this version. Start a new company when moving from that build.
Noble houses, raids and contracts
- Expanded noble-house disputes, succession, civil conflicts and dealings with the crown.
- Houses can raid over grudges, seek plunder or launch covert raids. Defending levies respond to threatened estates, and stronger opposition can force raiders to withdraw.
- Added house-sponsored raid contracts, including jobs covering several sites and commissions requiring plunder to be returned to the employer. Your actions affect the victim house's opinion of your company.
- Expanded military employment with negotiated agreements, fixed service terms and consequences for conflicting service.
- Added further political decisions around house dues, payments instead of military service, forfeitures, succession and crown pensions.
- Expanded siege-camp negotiations and contracts tied to shortages, journeys and reported threats.
- Added contract-specific missions under borrowed colours, with pursuit, escape and return requirements.
Economy, caravans and armies
- Reworked realm and house purchasing around their food, equipment and construction needs.
- Added a world market affected by available surplus, demand, relations and delivery distance.
- Trade orders generate caravans that prepare, travel and deliver their cargo. Resource sites send their output in periodic carts.
- You can buy anything a shop holds, down to the last unit, but goods its owner needs cost far more. Owners buy anything you offer, paying little for goods they do not need. Realms no longer list goods on the world market while they are buying them.
- Improved food production, replenishment and construction planning.
- Improved army ration loading, resupply and returns home. Returning house levies deposit their carried goods and plunder.
- Added faction-specific troop templates, equipment preferences and household troops. Available equipment and workshop quality affect what factions can field.
Battle improvements
- Improved battle AI coordination, ranged support, reserve use, cavalry decisions and withdrawals.
- Improved camp sorties and pursuit of horse archers and retreating shooters.
- Reworked melee pushing and movement into openings. The space behind a defender matters when soldiers try to force their way through.
- Improved breach detection and morale pacing, with a separate toggle for breach markings.
- Refined Fresh to Front, horse stamina and rest behaviour.
- Reduced soldiers repeatedly overshooting their formation positions.
- Fixed formations getting stuck while switching weapons.
- Improved enemy counts in briefings for later battle waves.
- Preserved captured pennants' heraldry after their original bearers leave the field.
- Refined weapon proportions and presentation.
- Improved random-battle seed editing with copy, cut, paste and invalid-input feedback. Finished random battles return to the main menu.
Interface and performance
- Added a dedicated dialog for renaming captains.
- Improved localized menus, save slots, campaign commands and loading messages.
- Fixed missing characters during UI layout and hover changes, and improved font sharpness.
- Added a saved VSync option under Display settings. It is off by default, with the 60 FPS limit retained.
- Native Windows builds request the dedicated GPU on supported systems.
- Reduced repeated work in campaign route searches, market updates and company notices.
- Optimized battle target searches and reduced repeated asset loading between deployment and combat.
Other fixes
- Improved settlement distribution and resource placement on campaign maps.
- Smoothed movement between campaign hours while preserving mandatory encounters.
- Rechecked hostility before automatic interceptions.
- Fixed background caravan battles getting stuck when another side joins.
- Fixed save-loading problems involving translated contact names and missing optional political or economy records.
- Fixed missing formation loadouts when saving battle results.
Thanks to everyone sending reports, screenshots and debug bundles. They help track down problems that are difficult to reproduce from a description alone.