Hi Everyone,
After incorporating lots of your feedback, the Grand Buildings Update is now out for everyone! If you've got questions, ideas, bug reports, come chat with us on discord: https://discord.gg/kingdomsandcastles, or email us at contact@lionshieldstudios.com (or post on the forums here).
Thanks to all the beta testers, we really appreciate your efforts. And another super special thanks to our translators - a bunch more languages have been added!
Here’s what’s new:
Cathedral
You can now build cathedrals, which are very expensive and provide happiness in a large radius. Cathedrals can also strike awe into invading vikings who get near and convert them to peasants. If this happens you’ll notice a bolt of lightning hitting the viking army.
Great Library
Great libraries are also available to build. They too are very expensive but provide a lot of happiness in a large radius. They also increase the maximum happiness of small libraries within their radius. And perhaps most importantly you can research upgrades to your kingdom from the great library.
Bathhouse
When towns reach a certain size the peasants will start wanting a place to bathe. So once you’ve got a noria and aqueducts set up, pipe some water over to a town center and build a bathhouse! Bathhouses aren’t as expensive as the new cathedral and great library, but provide lots of happiness in a pretty big area.
Happiness Overlay Revamp
Now when you click to show/hide the happiness visuals, you’ll see the happiness of each tile displayed from red to green.
We’ve also reworked the happiness radius and overlay system to feel a little more natural. The happiness provided by wells, churches, libraries, etc is now a gradient.This means a house right next to a tavern will get more happiness from that tavern than a house far away from the same tavern. The overlay visuals now show this as well. While placing or clicking on a happiness building you can see the coverage gradient that type of building provides.
Menacing Dragons
Dragons are now more of a threat. They do more damage and escalate their attacks over time. We’ve added some new burning behaviors and you’ll find them much more of a threat to contend with. Since this makes the game a bit harder, please let us know your thoughts on the tuning here.
Other Improvements/Fixes:
7 new languages (Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian)
Added health bars to ogres, dragons, player and viking armies
Rubble has a button that will rebuild what was once there. (Only works on rubble created after this update)
Added info to show when the next dragon and viking attacks will arrive. This can be turned on and off in the settings.
Taxes collected depend on working tax collectors
Forester is now a prerequisite for charcoal maker
Performance optimizations
Lots of small tweaks and other fixes
VR Update
It’s coming along! Here’s a work-in-progress snapshot: https://streamable.com/86ler
What’s next?
One request that comes up a lot is AI controlled rivals. This would be a big change with lots of new code, design, and possibly art, so our next focus will be investigating how feasible this is and what we can do. If it does turns out to be feasible, it would end up being one of our larger updates, so there could be smaller updates in the meantime, but we’ll keep you posted.
As always, direct chat on discord is the fastest way to get in touch with us: https://discord.gg/kingdomsandcastles
Until next time,
-Pete & Michael
Creative Mode is Live!
Hi Everyone,
Creative Mode is now live! Issues, questions, ideas, feedback, bug reports? Chat with us on discord: https://discord.gg/kingdomsandcastles, or email us at contact@lionshieldstudios.com (or post on the forums here).
Thanks as always to all the people who tried out and provided feedback on the beta. And super special thanks to our translators because we were able to add Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch for this update and more languages to come later!
(City in the cover photo courtesy of @Dizzythepanda of discord)
Here’s what's new:
Creative Mode
You can now choose between standard mode and creative mode. In creative mode you can modify your map before you play, and tweak all kinds of settings and spawn all sorts of things while in game. Note that achievements won’t be triggered when playing in creative mode.
Map Editing
If you’ve chosen creative mode, once you pick a seed you can edit your map however you wish. Use the brushes to paint land, water, rocks, and more.
Tweak and Spawn
During gameplay you can toggle all kinds of settings that will take you as far from (or as close to) standard play as you want, everything from building for free to whether people eat or not. You can additionally spawn things like dragons (I spawned a whole bunch in the screenshot above), vikings, trees, ogres, and resources of any type.
Custom Banners
You can now use your own banners, just add an image file to the banner folder (which you can find when selecting a banner) and chose it. We’ve included a template image file which you can use to make your banners fit correctly.
Other Fixes and Improvements:
Armies can now target ogres
Armies do double damage to ogres
Fix issue where it looked like armies weren't damage ogres at 3x speed
Fixed storage calculation issue with stockpiles/docks
Added option to open or close a dock to foreign merchants
Added new attack tower range indicator
Attack tower ranges stop increasing after 8 blocks high (while you can still build ultra tall towers if you want, this eliminates the degenerate strategy where a super tall central tower covers the entire map)
Re-tune viking invasion progression, will also appear a little earlier
Add Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch localization (thank you translators!)
What’s next?
Going forward we’ll be prioritizing new content for the mid and late game experience. Right now we’re working on some new large buildings for our next update (cathedral, bathhouse, great library).
Until next time,
-Pete & Michael
Merchants and Ports Now Available!
Hi Everyone,
We’re excited to announce the new Merchants and Ports update is now available! Thanks to all the people who tried out and provided feedback on the beta, we could not have done it without you. Also special thanks to our translators!
As always, if you have any feedback or bugs to report, or any trouble post in the forums or come chat with us on discord: https://discord.gg/kingdomsandcastles
Here's what’s new:
Bigger Maps and Deep Water
You can now play on small, medium, or large maps. Medium maps are slightly larger than the original map size, and large maps have about twice the buildable tiles that medium maps do. You can also choose between island biased or land biased maps. There is also now a concept of deep water vs. shallow water. Deep water cannot be built on or crossed except by boat.
We’ve reworked the simulation code so you can now have multiple settlements completely separated by deep water.
But how do you start a new settlement? Try building a...
New Building: Outpost
You can now build outposts on land that is separated by deep water from your original settlement. You’ll find the Outpost in the new Maritime tab. Placing an Outpost is how you start a new settlement, and it comes with some starting wood, stone, and food - much like when you place your first keep.
Note: Outpost are not available on maps with just a single landmass (i.e. all old maps without deep water).
Now you’ve got a new settlement, how do you transport goods between them? First build a…
New Building: Dock
Docks can be placed adjacent to or in shallow water. You can set the amount of resources you want the dock to prepare to ship out (and also lock the resources so other workers won’t take stuff you intend to export).
Once at least one dock is built, you can look forward to…
Merchant Ships
Every so often merchant ships from afar will arrive at one of your docks. You can buy and sell them goods from you dock. Occasionally they will offer special permanent upgrades to your kingdom, so keep a lookout!
Now that we’ve got some docks, let’s get some shipping routes set up between our islands with...
Transport Ships
Once you have at least two docks, Transport Ships can be used to move goods from dock to dock. You can program them with your docks as destinations and what to pick up and drop off. Use them to set up shipping routes to transport goods around your kingdom.
But you’ll want to make sure they can reach their docks, so you may need to replace some bridges with…
New Building: Draw Bridges
These automatically open to allow ships to pass through.
But with all these new buildings, you’ll probably want more control over what workers are doing, so check out the new…
Job Priority System
Re-prioritize jobs per island by dragging and dropping the the jobs in the order you want them filled. Jobs at the top will be filled first by idle workers, or if you have no idle workers, people will leave jobs at the bottom. You can also mass open and close entire building types per island.
Other Improvements/Fixes:
You can now rename any building, just click on the little edit button next to its title
Reworked UI a bit and how resource tooltips are accessed (now you click on them to view the info).
Tax rate is now set on the UI in the bottom left rather than on the Treasure rooms
Lots of new sound effects
You can now specify specific desired amounts of resources per stockpile. Anything above the amount you have specified will be removed by people seeking resources.
Granaries now employ more people, but those people help bring in the grain and can carry twice as much as farmers (much like market workers).
Library, Church, and Tavern provide bonus happiness in a radius as before, but you just need to build a certain amount of them rather than requiring you to provide total coverage. The happiness ui explains more in-game.
Other small tweaks and tuning to worker counts and bonuses
Fixed bug where villagers would sometimes not collect bread from bakers even if they were hungry
Fix for Gates not visually closing when vikings are near
Lots of other small fixes and tweaks
Optimizations to loading time for save games.
Optimizations to many other game systems, most notably pathfinding (and more on the way)
Now that this update is out we’ll working on the next update right away! We’ll announce more soon, but look forward to a ‘Creative/Sandbox Mode’ coming next!
Thanks!
-Pete & Michael
Merchants and Ports Update - Beta Now Available
Hi Everyone,
Hope you're all having a good new year so far! The beta version of our latest update is now available for testing in the next-version-preview branch here on steam. The major features to look for are bigger maps, merchant ships, transport ships, independent islands, and a job priority system.
We've been hot-patching the beta a few times a week and fixing bugs as people report them, but remember this update is a beta so there are likely more bugs we have yet to squash. Thanks to everyone who has tested so far!
Here's how to try it:
Select Kingdoms and Castles in your library, right click it and hit properties.
In the menu that pops up click the "Betas" tab.
Select "next-version-preview-" in the dropdown menu. Your game will update to the latest beta of the new update.
NOTE: No code is necessary
Leave feedback in the forums here or on discord here: https://discord.gg/kingdomsandcastles
Merchants and Ports - Progress
Hi Everyone!
We wanted to give a quick report on our progress with the new Merchants and Ports update. This update is big in scope, with new buildings and some big new systems. We're in the process of finishing some things up and testing internally in preparation for a beta branch release. When the beta branch is ready you'll get a chance to try it out and we'll incorporate feedback.
Chat with us on discord or follow on twitter for more frequent updates.
Here's a quick look at our current progress - keep in mind this is work-in-progress and will likely change a bit before releasing:
Docks, Transport Ships, Outposts, Islands
These are screenshots from our dev build. We're adding deep water where nothing can be built. Only ships will be able to cross it. This creates distinct islands on larger maps that you'll get to settle using a new building called the Outpost. You can then use the transport ships and docks we're adding to link your settlements together to ship resources where they are needed in your kingdom.
Bigger Maps
We're adding the much requested larger map size. You'll be able to play on the old size still if you want, but the larger size has roughly 2x the number of tiles.
And there's a bunch more good stuff coming as well!
Right now we're getting some of the last big features ready (job prioritization, AI merchant ships that arrive from across the sea to buy and sell resources and special upgrades).
We're not sure yet when the update will be ready but it's getting close.
Keep a look out for another announcement when the beta branch is ready!
-Pete & MIchael
Infrastructure Update (v106)
Hello Kings and Queens, we’ve been reading the forums, chatting with you on discord, and checking out all the suggestions on our community feedback page. We’re happy to announce our first free content update.
This was originally going to be part of our upcoming Merchants and Ports update, but there was enough here we thought we’d release it early. We also want to demonstrate our commitment to updating and improving the game.
Huge thanks to all the people who tested it in the beta branch last week!
Let’s get to the changes:
Wooden Walls
You can now build wooden walls. They have a height limit of 3 and cost 7 wood a piece. They can help keep vikings out early, but they are vulnerable to fire and ogres.
Stone Roads
Stone roads are now available to build and can also be placed over the top of existing roads. They increase peasant movement speed 50% over normal roads.
New Statue - Queen Barbara
A new statue is available to impress your peasants. We also added a happiness bonus to both statues.
Noria, Aqueduct, and Reservoir
You can now irrigate the land (soil enrichment)! Build a noria near fresh water to pull water up. Use aqueducts to transport it to your fields, and reservoirs to provide irrigation. An irrigated tile allows you to farm it regardless of underlying soil type and provides a bonus crop yield to tiles that are already fertile. You can chain norias together in the same aqueduct system to push water further across the map.
We've also added the concept of 'salt water' vs 'fresh water' and you'll need place your norias in fresh water.
Fire Changes
Now only buildings with fireplaces can spontaneously catch fire, and if you have good well coverage you can reduce the risk of fires spreading to zero.
Tune Food and Time
We’ve increased the length of an in-game year by 50%. We’ve also re-tuned food production and consumption rates. This has the effect of allowing people more time to transport food, which should reduce the cases where heads of household can’t get food back to the houses in time.
UI Updates
The building information UI is now docked at the left corner of the screen (speed controls are in the top left now) and has received an overhaul. You can now see how much a building is at risk of catching fire if a something is burning nearby. We also added a list of everyone living and working in the building as well.
There’s also a new highlight effect on building selection!
Tweaks and Fixes
Z now pans camera down as well as s, so wazd works now too.
Added more names to the villager pool
Town squares count as roads for house happiness bonus
Pressing Escape closes any visible UI
You can now see and edit your map generator seeds
Added expanded tooltip info for all resources
Added hotkeys (delete for demolish, and c for chop)
Houses now count neighbors across the street
Generals can regen while out of battle
Fix issue where viking raid would always happen shortly after loading a save
Fixed bugs where vikings could kidnap people on the other side of walls
Ogres can now disembark their ships and attack even if your land is completely walled off
Viking ships now have catapults
Fix bug where generals could die before the rest of their army
Running multiple festivals at once yield diminishing returns with each stacked festival
Fixed bug where demolishing an in progress wall section would cause walls below to have strange life values
If you find any bugs or issues you can email contact@lionshieldstudios.com. You can also chat with us on discord, and check out our community feedback site (https://community.kingdomsandcastles.com/), where many of the changes in this update came from.
-Pete & Michael
Patch Release - Version 105r1 - Now Out!
In case you missed it, we released version 105 back on Thursday. While we are still working on a content update, first we wanted to quickly get some fixes and improvements out to everyone.
If you are still running version 104, make sure to restart steam. That should trigger the update.
Improvements
Statues will no longer catch of fire, and tuned fire spreading in general. Still more to do here but it should be better.
When fully staffed, foresters now also replant trees on tiles without trees (instead of tiles only with) and employs one more person.
Added setting for camera keyboard pan speed.
Added v-sync setting.
Fixes
Fixed math bug in food info tooltip.
Fixed issue where ogre and dragon were still moving when paused.
Fixed issue where viking raids could happen back to back.
Fixed issue where vikings and armies would sometimes freeze.
Fixed issue where roads/bridges couldn’t be built sometimes.
Fixed issue where you could get more than three generals by destroying and rebuilding chamber of war.
Fixed issue where you could place a rock removal on top of an existing rock removal.
Stealth update: got a couple more quick fixes in today:
In 105r1:
Fixed issue where heads of household could also erroneously join the army
Fixed performance issue if you had a lot of jobs requiring wages and your gold was greater than 0 but less than the amount it took to page a wage
This is just one tiny step in our continued support of the game. There will be much more to come!
-Pete & Michael
Roadmap and Future Development
Our launch is really just the beginning for Kingdoms and Castles, we’ve got a lot planned for the game coming up! Stay up to date on progress on twitter, facebook, or discord.
We'll be working toward big updates, but will also do smaller patch releases more frequently.
If you want to try the very latest version before it’s released, check out the steam branch called next-version-preview. Nothing is in there now, but we’ll post an announcement when a new build is ready. Keep in mind that the build in this branch is for testing and will likely have some issues and bugs.
Planned Updates
[In Development Now] - Merchants and Ports - build a port and merchant ships will dock to allow buying and selling goods. Sometimes they’ll even offer special upgrades for your town and castle.
[In Development Now] - Twitch Integration - Optional feature to let viewers interact with your game as you play. Viewers will get to vote on special events each year that can befall your kingdom. Perhaps they’ll help by voting for a windfall harvest, or they can make things more exciting by voting for things like fires, invasions, and plagues.
Hero System - A special hero unit you have direct control over. Depending on hero type they can help fight vikings or help your town run more smoothly.
Map Special Features - Maps have a chance to reveal a secret feature for your kingdom to contend with or take advantage of, things like bandit camps, ancient ruins.
VR Support - Play the game in VR! We’re investigating the VIVE right now.
And more - We’ve got a huge list of other stuff we’ll be organizing and updating the roadmap with as they’re ready. If you’ve got ideas or things you’d like to see in the game, come chat with us on discord and head over to the #ideas channel!
-Pete & MIchael
Available July 20th
Had a slight delay, but we're ready to release the game on July 20th. Hope you can wait a few more days!
It's been quite an adventure, this game started as a little project my friend and I tinkered. We're very proud of what it's become with the help of our Fig crowd funding campaign and all our wonderful backers. Thank you!
Of course, this is just the beginning! We're already working on the next big update - Merchants and Ports. We'll be releasing a roadmap soon with more details.
Price will be $9.99 USD.
For youtubers and twitch streamers, please make your key request through Keymailer: https://www.keymailer.co/
Hi Everyone,
