Palisade 1.0 adds Eternal Blue Sky, a sixth campaign, a commander skill for every campaign, series play in Skirmish and multiplayer, and a long list of changes to how fights are shown and explained. This post lists every change since the 0.49 update.
Eternal Blue Sky
- Eternal Blue Sky is the sixth and last campaign: six battles of the Mongol rise, from the steppe lakes in 1203 to the Yellow River in 1227. It opens once you have finished the other five campaigns.
- Every campaign now ends on a closing story of its own, with its own music.
- The Choose a campaign panel gets a frame that follows your progress: bronze, silver, gold and, with every campaign won on Impossible, black-gold.
Commander skills
- Every campaign after Northern Saga gives you one commander skill from its first battle. It sits in its own slot on the command bar (key F), shows a green check when it is ready, and recharges after each use.
- Yellow Sky Levy (Yellow Turban Rising): a free host of troops marches onto the front you aim at.
- Tide Turn (The Genpei War): a naval landing for no gold, with a safer voyage and a supply route built three times as fast.
- Chart the Coast (Atlantic Voyage): claims the unclaimed shore along a line you drag. It also works when your realm does not touch a coast yet.
- Great Dike (The Triple Alliance): raises a long earth dike along your own land, up to 40 tiles. A dike takes twice as long to breach and costs attackers 30% more troops. A drag can start on a wall you already have and continue it.
- Steppe Sweep (Eternal Blue Sky): rides along a line and claims the unclaimed land on its way. Cavalry Reach and Ranging Cavalry extend it.
- Each skill has its own glyph, sound and mark on the map. Tooltips give the effect as one sentence and a few labelled rows.
Campaign
- On Relentless and Impossible, rival realms in a campaign are dealt random legacy cards. Alt-hover a rival realm to see which ones it holds.
- Impossible opens once you have completed any one campaign on Relentless.
- There are 19 new legacy cards, 32 in all. Every card is now a single pick, with no levels.
- You can change your legacy until you enter the next battle. Cards you hold wear their rarity colours and show their effect on hover.
- Choosing a different difficulty while a campaign run is unfinished asks whether to finish that run or start a new one.
- Campaign, Practice and Skirmish battles are saved while you play. Continue battle on the main menu picks up where you left off. A save from another game version or a changed map starts the battle over and says so.
- A campaign general moves smoothly between tiles. A defeated general's standard topples where it fell, and its pennant turns grey.
- The practice shortcut is gone from the defeat screens.
Skirmish and multiplayer
- A series is one to eight battles in a row with legacy cards between them, in Skirmish and in online and local network lobbies. In Skirmish the series ends at your first lost battle and is saved between battles, so you can continue it later. In a lobby the host sets the length, everyone picks a card and presses Ready, and a standings table follows the wins.
- If a player drops out of a series, the match waits for them for a minute and then the seat is played automatically. The host can stop waiting sooner.
- Pick a Tactic before the battle: any commander skill, shown with its glyph and a few words on what it does. In a lobby each seat has its own. The host switches Tactics for players and Tactics for rivals separately.
- Skirmish setup remembers your last choices and the game speed you used.
- Random maps draw only from maps that seat the rivals you asked for. When a match uses random starts, rival seats pick theirs after the players have chosen.
- Fires of Yingchuan and Wan Under Siege now seat eight.
- Skirmish setup checks the maps the match will use. When the match cannot begin, the reason shows beside the start button.
- When your realm falls in Skirmish or multiplayer, a window lets you keep watching or see the result. The buildings of a fallen realm go to whoever holds the ground under them.
- A guest who is still receiving the host's custom map has a progress bar under their name in the lobby, and the lobby preview updates as soon as the map has arrived.
- A lobby that could not be created, joined or started shows the reason after the message.
- Players using different languages can join each other's lobbies, and hosting works in Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
- Start Match and Leave stay pinned to the bottom of the lobby, the Steam lobby ID is folded away, and an invite code typed on a Russian layout is accepted.
- A local network match notices a connection that has gone silent. The four multiplayer menu buttons match in size and are named Host online match, Join online match, Host local network match and Join local network match.
Reading a fight
- Battle arrows are drawn crisply and sized by the army behind them. When an attack ends, its arrow shows how: broken against a defence that fights back, worn out by terrain, bled out at a wall, completed, the realm fallen, withdrawn or back home. A cavalry charge stopped at a wall shows its own impact. Only fights you are part of play these.
- Alt-hover a realm to see its reserve troops, troop growth per second and, if it holds a force relic, its attack bonus.
- Alt-hover a rival tile to see what makes it costly to take: the defender's reserve, Castle or Capital ward, Palisade, uphill and fertile ground, and land cut off from its Capital. A closing row gives the tile a Difficulty rating. The rating also shows on enemy tiles away from your border.
- Palisades show breach damage on the timber and topple stake by stake when taken. The troops an army loses holding at a wall float up from it.
- Walls stay visible at overview zoom, and a Palisade drag snaps to a nearby wall.
- A destroyed building of a Scorched Earth holder burns, and the territory fire is fiercer and longer.
- At the start of a battle the new map fades in over the old one, with a wave crest and sounds.
- Battlefield tools that are not available show as disabled buttons with the reason.
- Stone Roads also upgrade the roads at the holder's Capital. The Capital upgrade price shows the gold icon.
Interface and controls
- Escape goes one step back through the menus.
- Alt+Enter toggles fullscreen on every screen. The desktop window remembers fullscreen, its size and maximize between launches.
- Camera keys, build and action hotkeys, the map editor shortcuts and the menu keys work on Russian, Greek and Korean layouts, and the 1-6 hotkeys work on AZERTY keyboards.
- Tribute posts are square plaques with waiting, ready and claimed states, and the reward picker is restyled. Scrollbars and the command bar share one look, and text no longer gets selected when you drag across the game.
- Hover, zoom and border redraws cost less on large maps. Zooming is smoother.
- Many texts are corrected in the nine other languages, and Russian now covers the whole full game.
Rivals
- Relentless and Impossible are stronger. Standard and Hardened are unchanged.
- Rival realms no longer order attacks across water that cannot reach the target, and they brace against a much stronger neighbour. The capital and the objective front expand together.
- Rival realms remember where they raised a Palisade, so a wall that fell is not bought again at the same corner. A realm that can still build or upgrade spends on that before it buys another proactive wall.
Fixes
- Tribute posts and the naval Intercept button no longer miss clicks.
- An attack or voyage can only be cancelled from its own marker, and what was withdrawn is marked.
- Workshop map cards show their name and buttons properly.
- Escape on the first-run prompt no longer skips the lesson for good.
- Row labels in the Alt-hover fit in German, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish, and the Russian multiplayer menu and long realm names fit narrow screens.
- Map editor: replacing an unsaved draft or deleting a saved map asks inside the editor, and resuming a draft after a window resize fits the map instead of showing an empty canvas.