Demo 0.2.0
Cohesion
- Your warband has a cohesion meter, from -100 to +100, shown as a bar in the top of the overworld screen. Zero is the resting point. Hover it for a summary, click it for the full ledger
- Cohesion comes from how you run the band: good and varied food raises it, half rations and hunger sink it, late wages sink it fast, and battle results land as swings that fade over days.
- New levers to manage it, in the Army screen's Cohesion tab: set food rations (half, standard, generous), serve an ale ration (small or large, drawn daily from your stores), set the pay level (half, full, generous), throw a feast, and share a cut of the loot at the victory screen
- Below -10, men start deserting at night
- Resting in a town clears bad feeling faster
- In summer a drought can strike: grain gets drawn for the horses
Tutorial battle
- New games now open in the Old Country, on the last morning of a losing war. You command a full veteran host in a scripted battle that teaches everything: camera, selection, movement, formations, stances, attack move, shield walls, cavalry charges
- The old Tutorial button is gone from the main menu. The war is the tutorial
Decisions on the march
- Life in camp now produces events: a drawn knife over an arm-ring, a gambling debt, a deserter caught on the road etc.
Battle resolve
- A strength bar sits at the top of the battle screen: your side on the left in your colour, the enemy on the right, with live soldier counts at each end.
- The gold notch on each side marks that army's breaking point. When a side's strength drains past its notch, that line routs. High cohesion moves your notch further out, so a confident band fights on where a shaky one breaks
- Garrisons defending their walls show no breaking point. They fight to the end
Reading the battle
- Zoom out and every soldier gains a thin outline in their side's colour, growing stronger the further out you are. Hold Alt for full-strength outlines at any zoom.
- Units hidden behind walls show as a coloured silhouette, and their selection circles draw above the wall, so troops on the far side of a rampart can still be read and picked
- The dead lose their colour. In a press of bodies, the living stand out
- Health bars only appear when a unit takes damage and fade moments later. A new gameplay setting picks the style: while hurt, when taking damage, or never
- Units are easier to tell apart at a glance: archers wear a feather in the cap (white for longbowmen, brown for archers), quivers are bigger with bright fletching showing over the shoulder, peasants wear straw hats, and mounted archers carry a saddle quiver on the horse
Levelling
- A kill now teaches by the quality of the victim
Wages and upkeep
- Wages now scale steeply with quality: a peasant costs 1 silver a day, a knight 20. An army of elites is a lord's ransom to keep, because it should be
- The intended life of a full elite host: it cannot sit in town on trade income, and it cannot pay for itself sacking villages. It hunts strong enemies and lives on their loot and ransoms, and a bad defeat is a real setback you rebuild from
- A mixed band of levies and regulars remains affordable on honest trading
- Ale is brewed in real quantities now: breweries produce more, barrels are far lighter to haul, and towns keep real stock, so keeping the ration flowing is a supply line you can actually run
Your first quests
- The opening quests have been rebuilt around your sergeant. He sets the course one goal at a time: lay in 20 days of food, put aside 20 days of wages, take the bounty a settlement has posted on a nearby bandit camp, then take a settlement of your own and plant your banner. Nothing is staged: the bounty is a real quest on a real camp, posted by the settlement nearest to it, and paid in real silver
- The hints system is gone. Instead the sergeant speaks up once when something needs saying: a unit ready to upgrade, an unspent skill point, prisoners worth selling, wounded men, hungry men, an overloaded warband
Quest tracker
- Tracked quests mark their targets on the map: a pulsing gold ring on the settlement, camp or army, and a gold arrow at the screen edge when the target is off screen
- The tracker itself is wider, always wraps instead of cutting text off, stays visible inside settlements, shows icons for any goods a quest involves, shows only the current step of a multi-step quest, and has a star button to untrack
Recruiting
- Settlements now recruit like the places they are. A tiny logging hamlet offers peasants and a few archers, not a row of knights
- Size and speciality both matter: hamlets field almost nothing, villages raise the basics, towns train their speciality's soldiers, and only cities offer the full roster including noble sons and knights. Forest towns raise archers and longbowmen and no swordsmen at all, mining and smithy towns drill sword and spear veterans, fishing and farming towns muster spear levies, and the horse town is the one place outside a city where knights ride out
Battles
- Two units fighting can no longer stand inside each other. Melee keeps proper spacing again
- Cavalry now have a turning circle. At a gallop they turn in wide arcs and bleed speed in hard turns, at a walk they pivot freely. Horse archers can finally be caught: their escape is an arc you can cut off, not an instant reversal
- Charges now aim. A charging unit bends toward enemies in its path, hitting victim after victim instead of running a ruler line through empty ground, and charges hit unarmoured troops harder: riders scatter rabble the way riders should
- On maps with rocks and trees, group orders no longer secretly collapse the whole formation onto a single point. Units keep their formation slots and route around obstacles individually
- Clicking a rock or water with a move order now sends units to the nearest walkable ground in every case
- Right-click attacks are easier to land: the click tolerance on enemy targets now scales with zoom, so a near miss on a moving enemy attacks it instead of walking to where it was
- Battle zoom is smooth now, anchored to the centre of the screen, with a zoom speed slider in settings
- In deployment your units start facing the enemy and the enemy faces you, instead of both armies staring east
- Stances you set during deployment carry into the battle
- Soldiers no longer get stuck on trees and rocks. (hopefully)
- Custom battles now go up to 500 soldiers a side, up from 250. Above 250 a warning appears
Overworld
- Walking up to a settlement at peace just takes you inside. The arrival menu only appears at war, offering Besiege (or Attack) and Leave
- Laying siege to a town you are at peace with is done from inside the town screen: a red Lay Siege button, behind a confirm that warns when it means declaring war
- Meeting an enemy army now offers Attack or Flee. Fleeing can cost you a few men and lowers cohesion
- After a retreat, the summary only reports deaths that happened. A clean escape says so
- Paying wages and eating have a visible moment each day: the top-bar counters pulse, and the coins jingle as a warning when you hold less than 15 days of wages
- The event log is quieter. It reports your own doings, the wars, your quests and the seasons; far-off skirmishes between lords and bandits only appear when they happen near you
- Fixed: armies and caravans hurrying after someone could be impossible to talk to. You can now hail them from a little further out
- Fixed: the world kept running, and could still be clicked, behind the thank-you screen at the end of the demo
- Merchant caravans no longer overlap settlements. They pass inside at the boundary and re-emerge on the far side, so they can never steal a town's hover or click
- Caravan positions and cargo now survive save and load instead of resetting to their home towns
- Fixed: after loading a save, a garrison that sallied out fought at a fraction of its true strength. Sallies now field the full garrison
- Your move order marker now renders on top of roads and border lines, and clicking a target (army, caravan, settlement) marks it with a gold ring until you reach it
- The speed readout floating over armies is gone. Speed lives in the top-bar tooltip
Marketplace
- Selling a big haul is no longer a click marathon. As soon as you trade any of an item, a slider appears under its row: drag to set the exact amount
- Ctrl+click sells everything the town can afford to pay for, or buys everything you can afford and carry, and Shift+click still trades five at a time. The trade buttons show what they will do: the arrow doubles when holding Shift and triples when holding Ctrl
- When a buy is refused, the reason flashes red: the carry limit if you are over weight, your silver if you cannot pay
- Town and player silver readouts now carry the silver coin icon
Interface and sound
- Unit tooltips now say what a unit is for: Melee, Ranged, Shock, Shield Wall, Anti-Cavalry and so on, alongside race and tier
- Hover the unit count in the Army screen to see how your warband capacity is calculated
- Encounter screens are taller and their troop lists scroll, so a big lord's host no longer spills off the screen, and the prisoner and loot screens have bigger portraits and proper scrollbars
- The Wait Here button in settlements moved to the bottom bar, next to Lay Siege
- Fixed: Army screen unit counts were wrong while men lay wounded
- When a top-bar tooltip and a map tooltip would both show, only the top-bar one does now
- Keybinds now bind to physical key positions, so AZERTY and other layouts get working defaults out of the box, and the settings screen names keys the way your keyboard does
- The recruit screen has been tidied: it says warband everywhere, shows your warband space inline in its panel, keeps a single silver readout at the bottom, and shows what a purchase leaves you with before you click
- The commissions tab pins its total, delivery time and Place Order button to the bottom of the panel
- The enemy-is-routing notice moved to the top right with a glowing border, out of the way of the fight
- Anything clickable on the overworld now shows a pointer cursor instead of the bow
- The overworld top bar has been rebuilt: no more wandering gaps between the readouts
- Menu music no longer follows you into the new game opening or the sandbox
As always, thanks for the reports. Keep them coming.