Czech & Slovak Games Week Starts Today, Featuring Lords and Villeins!
We greet you again, Lords and Ladies,
Lords and Villeins has left Early Access recently and we are already receiving tons of feedback from you. Thank you very much for doing so, we will be addressing as many of the reported issues as possible, you can expect a patch during the following weeks!
Meanwhile, we have an important invitation to make. We are proud to have the game featured at this year's Czech & Slovak Games Week starting today at 7PM CET here. You can catch the developer streaming Lords and Villeins at 9PM CET, here on our Steam page or at the event's page, don't be shy and come say hi!
Also if you're new to our community and if you are enjoying Lords and Villeins, don't forget to come hang out to our Discord channel, we will gladly see you there.
Lords and Villeins 1.0 Is Out Now!
The moment you have all been waiting for is finally here! Lords and VIlleins reached the final stage of our original roadmap, and we are so excited to deliver you the v1.0!
Watch the official Full Launch Trailer here:
With this launch, Lords and Villeins will receive a hearty content update which includes:
Assembling The High Council and holding Town Hall hearings
New public celebration event
New ability to perform risky tax evasions
New Opposition Group system that can result in noble coups and peasant uprisings
Personal spy with abilities to gather intelligence and assassinate rivals
Gameplay modules to heavily customise game experience
Overhauled trading system that significantly improves interaction with markets
New underground resources with mineshafts to mine them
Ability to manage storage priorities and new tools to optimise logistics
Full localisation to German, French, Russian, Czech, and Simplified Chinese
Steam Achievements
Performance optimization and fully overhauled user interface
Large amount of bugfixes and rebalancing of game systems
And much more! We have covered the full list of changes extensively in our previous blog posts!
Read here to find out about high council, public hearings, and uprising events!
Read here to learn about customizability features, templates, new trading experience, mining, and more!
This is our biggest update yet, being in the works for over 4 months, working closely with our beta testers, and over many iterations to make sure, that this update is as good as it can be. We are very excited to finally let you play it!
Announcing New Lords and Bards Bundle!
The Lords and Bards Bundle is the most convenient way to get the full Lords and Villeins game and its wonderful, relaxing soundtrack - perfect for those who wish to listen to soothing tunes inspired by the different seasons even when not ruling their medieval village! Get it now with a special discount both on the game and the soundtrack!
Join Our Community Contest To Celebrate The Release!
To celebrate the release, we are also hosting a community contest! Help us reach more audience, spread the word about the game, and get something nice in return! We are giving away Steam keys for Lords and Villeins and Lords and Villeins T-Shirts and mugs!
This update also marks the end of our early access journey. Since the Early Access Release in September 2021, we have come a long way! We improved the game, our team improved their skills as game developers, we have learned about our community and what kind of game you would like, and with each iteration, we were able to realize our vision for Lords and Villeins to be bigger, better and more polished than before.
So to all of you, who were with us during this time, thank you! Thank you for your feedback, for your support, criticism, and for enjoying our game. Thank you for sharing your reviews, for letting your friends know about our game and for just being here and being active in the community.
And big thanks to all of you who are yet to give this game a chance! We hope you will enjoy it! Remember to share your review and if you like it, tell about it to your friends! More eyes on the game will help us reach bigger audiences and supports our work and additional updates in the future!
What Is Next?
Is this the end of Lords and Villeins journey? No! We will be focused on fixing bugs and balancing issues we might have missed during our extensive beta-testing. We will also take a little bit of rest from the development - it has been very active four years of development and we need to rest too!
When we come back, we will see what lies in the future for us. We would love to continue supporting this game, bring you more content, add mod support and further improve the game in all aspects. Right now it remains to see for us, what we will be able to do, but keep in mind the full release does not signify the end. It is only there to tell you, that our original roadmap has been completed!
Now there is only one thing left to say - enjoy the new update and let us know what you think! Post comments here, in the forums, or join our Discord! We will be listening to all your feedback and do our best to improve the game beyond the 1.0!
Lords and Villeins is a part of Fulqrum Publisher Sale!
Greetings everyone!
We are so happy to announce that the Fulqrum Publisher Sale just started and Lords and Villeins is a part of it with an amazing 20% discount! This is the best opportunity to grab the game before its full release on November 10 - did you not know about that?
Besides Lords and Villeins, ALL of Fulqrum Publishing's games are discounted by up to 90% for an entire week!The sale ends on October 27.
For any scifi grand strategy fans out there, we just released epic story driven game The Pegasus Expedition. Give it a look you won't regret it!
Lords and Villeins Leaves Early Access on November 10!
Dear Lords and Ladies!
The long awaited moment is nearly upon us. Lords and Villeins will be leaving Early Access! So mark your calendars and be prepared, the game's full version comes out on November 10!
Watch the release date announcement trailer here:
Full release is a no small thing and we took extra time to bring you amazing content in a polished state! As you may have noticed, the game dons brand-new artwork and logo, to show how far it came during Early Access, but the most important things to come are the new features and content.
What Can You Look Forward To
Assembling The High Council and holding Town Hall hearings
New public celebration event
New ability to perform risky tax evasions
New Opposition Group system that can result in noble coups and peasant uprisings
Personal spy with abilities to gather intelligence and assassinate rivals
Gameplay modules to heavily customise game experience
Overhauled trading system that significantly improves interaction with markets
New underground resources with mineshafts to mine them
Ability to manage storage priorities and new tools to optimise logistics
Full localisation to German, French, Russian, Czech, and Simplified Chinese
Steam Achievements
Performance optimization and fully overhauled user interface and balancing
We have covered these features extensively in our previous articles, so if you want to know more, make sure you did not miss them here and here!
We're almost there! Thank you very much for your ongoing support, for your helpful feedback and most importantly for playing Lords and Villeins! Extended thanks also go to our beta testers, who were providing great feedback throughout the whole Early Access, and our publisher who continues to support us on our journey.
For those of you, who like to bond with other community members on Discord, you are very welcome to join ours. You can also follow us on Twitter for more details and don't forget to follow our publisher on their Social Media as well!
See you soon!
Closer Look: Customizable Gameplay and Community Requests
Previously we took a closer look at features that were outlined in our original roadmap, but in 1.0 we are going above and beyond just that! One of the main reasons we went into early access was to collect feedback and suggestions from our community and this update would not be complete without implementing the most requested features and improvements our players have been asking for!
Customizable Experience
Throughout early access, we have learned about the variety of playstyles our players approached the game with. As we were adding more and more systems, the complexity of the game grew and also became more challenging to understand for newcomers.
In 1.0, we expanded our tutorial significantly, to cover many of the features added past the initial launch, and we are also adding game modules. When you will be launching a new game, you will be able to toggle systems that you would like to keep active!
The modules that you will have available are:
Resource Tax - if you like to hoard all of your wealth for yourself, you can now put a stop to those pesky royal taxes.
Soldier Requests - without this module, royalty will stop requesting soldiers for war. When both resource and soldier tax are disabled, you will be receiving favor automatically every year.
Clergy Donations - clergy will not mandate financial donations to keep your relationship stable. Nobles will also be relieved from those donations and they will never leave the settlement due to their inability to pay.
Criminal Acts - without this module, villagers will grow their empathy and stop committing crimes.
Sickness - there is no place for sickness in this dark world. Remove this module and villagers will never get sick!
Oppositions - do you like to be cruel and face no consequences? Without this module, oppositions will never bother you.
Construction Tiers - if you're not a fan of the new construction system involving tiers and specialized professions, you can now keep playing with the original system where every villager builds for themselves!
Dynamic Terrain - dynamic terrain is a new feature added in 1.0, which lets you deforest areas fully, or create forests where there previously have been none, simply by planting or removing trees. This module also recovers sand on shorelines and turns grass into the clay where villagers walk over it too often (or back to grass when they stop).
Permanent Paths - tied to the dynamic terrain module, you can customize if the paths that you create manually will have a chance to recover automatically into grass over time.
There are also some other modules, that we have not uncovered here. How to get them and what they are you will have to discover for yourself when the update launches!
We have also introduced the ability to preview the generated map, so you no longer have to reload the game multiple times to find a map you like! Even more - we have exposed the random seed, which you can share with your friends to make sure they get the same map as you!
New Royals
In 1.0 you will now have the option to choose who is the royal in charge! We completely redesigned the king's portrait and added the option of a queen! While this change is mostly cosmetic, we wanted to give our players more options to tell the stories they want. We have also overhauled the main menu experience, going with a more modern design.
Overhauled Trading
The current system of trading was very limiting. You could only set a specific amount to sell, which meant that you must constantly update the number as your situation changes. You also had no way to automate purchasing from caravans, so often the only way to get what you needed was manually inspecting every new caravan that comes in. The UI experience overall was quite slow and cumbersome, so we decided to make a big change to address all of this and we are fully replacing the Sell tab with a new Trade tab.
On the left page, you can freely select between any resource available in the game, while on the right page you can manage the intended behavior. For this purpose, we distinguish between three different markets:
Locals consist of any family in your village, peasant or noble.
Caravans consist of any traveling caravan visiting your settlement.
Butchers consist of local families with assigned butchery. This market is only applicable to animals and it is concerned with selling animal corpses or old animals that can be butchered for meat.
On each of those markets, you can decide to be either purchasing or selling a selected resource. You can select a stock-management strategy as well:
All will buy or sell anything that is offered / owned.
Until limit will buy or sell until a certain stock amount is reached.
Until taxed is the same as until limit where the limit is the amount taxed by the royals, or 0 if it is not taxed at all.
Specific is the current system, where you manually enter a number to be sold / purchased.
And finally, you can choose a pricing strategy either for free, one that competes with locals, one that competes with caravans, or a completely custom one. As players were often updating the price to slightly undercut the market, we also added the option to set a % discount, so this strategy can now be automated.
Each of these settings is applied to only a selected market. For example, you can both set to purchase all from caravans and sell it back to the locals for a fixed price. This way you can build a stock of goods expected to be needed later at a time when villagers themselves would not be buying them.
Templates
If we would have to pick a feature that was by far the most requested throughout early access, templates would certainly be one of the first things to think of. As it is quite a big feature to add, we never had the time to do it before, but now it is finally here!
The way they work is very simple. Click on any existing zone to access a new option to create a template. You can decide, if you want the zone tiles also be part of the template, or if you just want to store the structures (which can be useful if for example, you want to use the same construction in different zones).
After that, you simply name the template, and it will now appear in a new template build menu! All of these templates are stored in your save data folder, so they are shared between games and you can even share them with your friends (or come to our Discord and share them with the community!).
Any template can be freely rotated, and even placed over existing structures, which will mark them for removal. This way you can create several tiers of the same house and upgrade them with one click!
Underground Mining
A common issue with any long-lasting settlements was that eventually they ran out of mountains to mine, and players had to rotate out a whole section of the economy, as it was not able to sustain itself. We have now added an underground layer of resources, which you can display with a new underground resource view.
To mine the underground resources, all you have to do is place a new structure - Mineshaft. Mineshafts will regularly increase their storage with resources mined from the underground and then relocated by other miners into nearby ground storage. Each mineshaft can cover a small surrounding while mining in a cyclical outwards-facing direction. We have also created unique bedrock texture variants, to hint if there are any special ores in each location.
By default, villagers will first mine the mountains on the ground, before entering the mineshaft. But you can also mark each mineshaft to be prioritized to change this. Beware that mining from mineshafts requires a regular supply of ropes!
AI Role System
When thinking about priorities for our villagers, certain tasks like cooking or cleaning, or harvesting are very important, so they would get a high priority. This also meant that they would be done often and by everyone in the family so we often had to limit the number of people doing them. This was often sufficient, but you would see people swapping when they got interrupted even if for a short while (for example when occupying a storefront). This approach also did not work with activities where we wanted to scale the number of people with the size of the family in a natural way.
To solve this, we added an AI role system. Families now (secretly) distribute roles between villagers, and each individual will prioritize slightly differently depending on the roles that were assigned to them. So, each family will try to have a dedicated chef, a person to clean, a person to do shopping, a person to manage the storefront, and so on. Other villagers can still help with for example cooking when necessary, but they will now do it only when their other responsibilities are finished.
Passive Private Storefronts
We have also improved the behavior of storefronts built outside of marketplaces. Villagers will manage them passively, meaning they will only occupy them when a customer is approaching them. This frees up much of their time to do other work around the house and made especially small families of two to three people a lot more viable.
Storage Priority System
To optimize the flow of goods in the economy, our AI was always following a simple rule - always empty your pockets to the closest available storage as soon as possible. While optimal in many scenarios, sometimes it was difficult to deal with logistical challenges without having a way to direct this behavior better. So we are adding a system of storage priorities.
In each zone, you will now be able to mark which resources are preferred to be stored within that zone. To maintain efficiency, whenever villagers will be producing new resources, they will still store them in the nearest storage, but other family members will then regularly relocate them.
Custom Family Requests
We saw that the randomness of receiving new professions is sometimes too disruptive. Especially for carpenters or architects, obtaining them in a timely manner could be quite challenging. We have redesigned the favor system and introduced custom family requests. At an increased cost of favor, you will be able to customize the family that you will receive. You will also start with a certain amount of favor to request a single family of your choice before the first taxation happens.
UI Customizability
Finally, we have also done a lot of work to let you customize the user experience:
More Languages - with the launch of 1.0, you will be able to play the game in English, German, French, Czech, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
New Fonts - we have removed the older fonts and replaced them with several options. Depending on the language selected, you can select from up to 5 different fonts. We made sure to offer both stylized and clean and readable options.
Status Monitor - we replaced many notifications with a status indicator. You can now observe in real-time how many people are hungry, cold, low on money, or sick. We are also making more information accessible about people in your demesne and active debuffs about your settlement, like rumors that the place is not safe to visit.
Savegame Screenshots - the save and load game screen has been extended with screenshots of your camera at the time of saving to help you orient which saves is the one you are looking for.
Capture Settlement - in the main menu you will have access to a new button, that will capture the whole settlement in full resolution and store it in your user folder. This way you can share images of your full settlement in high detail, or even create a timelapse!
With 1.0, we also focused on bugfixes, performance optimizations, and balancing to make sure that the full release is the most stable, smooth, and enjoyable version of Lords and Villeins we have ever delivered to you! To note a few major things - we have implemented UI caching, so the population and warehouse book open much faster without an unpleasant stutter, we reduced performance overload for AI, so you can build larger settlements without experiencing reduced framerate, and rebalanced prices of goods, yields of activities and need satisfaction to create more engaging gameplay.
Steam Achievements
For players on the Steam platform, we will also be introducing achievements! They will appear in the library in the future as we get closer to the release, so we are able to fully test them before the launch of the update. So if you notice achievements on Steam, please beware, that they are in preparation for the launch and are not available yet in the game.
We can't wait to have you try the game with all of these changes when the game goes live! We will be carefully listening for your feedback and ready to address any bugs and issues that arise. Stay tuned for the release date, which we will announce very soon!
Closer Look: High Council, Public Hearings and Uprising Events!
As announced recently, soon we are getting to the release of the 1.0! Many of you have been asking what content can you look forward to, and if this means the end of the development for Lords and Villeins. Let's start by addressing that first.
The short answer is: no! We will continue to support this game after the release, fix any missing bugs and release balancing updates for as long as we can, to ensure that our players have a smooth and enjoyable experience with the content we will have on release.
What about additional content? Right now, we are not ready to set any expectations. Since Lords and Villeins is our first game, any future plans to grow it beyond what we've promised in the beginning, are mainly going to depend on the success of the full release.
Official mod support, Steamworks integration, shipyards, trade deals with neighboring towns, and mercenary quests are just some of the current ideas that really speak to us and we are very enthusiastic about the potential to work on them. Rather than promise something we can't deliver on, we stay reserved in setting expectations about the future. If you like our game, and you want to make sure this kind of content will be possible, the best way to do it is to tell about our game to your friends and help us reach as big of an audience as we can! Our community has always been a huge influence to get us where we are today and we are tremendously grateful for it. Thanks to you we have the opportunity to do what we love!
Now, before we get ahead of ourselves too much, let's focus on what is next. The 1.0 version has three main focal points: high council with public hearings, UI with quality of life features, and bugfixes with balancing overhaul. Let's have a look at the first pillar today!
Assemble The Council And Rule!
When the new patch goes live, you will be able to find a new page in the demesne section of your population book - The High Council.
With it, you can recruit your personal advisors and officers to guide you in your effort to rule the land. Each position is designated with unique responsibilities and unlocks abilities to manage your demesne. Many of them you've already had access to from previous updates but by connecting them to the council we want to give them more narrative weight to support you in creating interesting stories.
Master Of Affairs - also known as the right hand of the ruler. They preside with the head of the ruling family during public hearings and recruit the intelligence officer to gather vital information and perform some secret activities.
Master Of Law - with a lawmaker in place, you can hire an executioner and perform public executions.
Marshal - having a marshal is the first step to start training your soldiers and sending them to the war. This position can only be assigned from the ranks of your soldiers, and the more experienced the marshal is, the faster will be training of everyone else!
Master Of Coin - having someone in charge of your treasury grants you the ability to perform tax evasion. Royalty requested something you want to keep? Take the risk and with some clever bookkeeping, nobody will think there was anything wrong.
Bishop and Minister - previously these positions were assigned automatically, but with the high council you now get the option to curate which of the monks will get the honor.
High Council is not just a storytelling flavor. It becomes especially valuable when you want to boost relationships with noble families. Offering them a position at the high council will ensure they remain in your favor and are going to support you in the future. That being said, this decision is not to be taken lightly as removing them from the council has an even more devastating effect on your relationship.
To make ruling even more impactful, people in most of these positions will spend their time walking to the villagers they oversee and motivate them, which can have either positive or negative impact on their mood.
Majestic Town Hall For Public Hearings
Alongside the high council, we have crafted 20+ unique events, that each family and villager are sensitive to and will bring them up to your attention if they become pressing enough. Once you build a Town Hall - a new zone required for the ability to establish your high council - the head of the ruling family together with the Master of Affairs will hold public hearings once a week, the day before the Sunday Service.
During this event, many villagers will gather in the town hall in the audience, and few of them will approach you with a personal request. Naturally, accepting or refusing will have an impact on the relationship with their family.
Information Is Power
Your intelligence officer can be recruited from the ranks of your soldiers, and they are your personal informant and hitman in one. They can perform two main tasks: gather intelligence, and assassinate targets.
In our next post, we will talk about the various improvements to the UI, including the new status monitor HUD, which reveals more information about the causes of bad mood and happiness of your villagers. This is the first way you will be getting more clarity in the situation. To add a little bit of authenticity. we chose for certain things to remain hidden, and Intelligence reports will be your main way to reveal this information.
Pick a family that you want to learn about, and order your intelligence officer to investigate them. For few days, they will follow the family around and finally, prepare a report for you.
In it, you can learn about needs that are serious issue for someone in the family, romantic relationships that may eventually lead to marriages, if there are any families they have a lasting conflict with, wealth status, standing with the clergy, or even their involvement in the revolutionary groups!
Rule Responsibly Or Face The Consequences
An uprising is a new epic event, which can be triggered if your ruling is far too exploitative, villagers are seriously unhappy and all of your efforts to cull the revolution failed. Let's have a look at how this system works!
Whenever villagers are unhappy, they have a chance to become inclined to join an opposition. First villager to do so will become its founder, and every other villager will join it, if they interact with existing members after they became inclined.
This means the opposition grows organically, within families and to people they interact with, but it also takes some time to grow.
With increased members will grow the hierarchical structure within the organization, adding new levels of leadership each time a certain amount of villagers join.
Your goal is to discover the founder and deal with them swiftly, to dismantle the opposition and prevent it from growing further. Though oppositions are like a snake. Cut down its head and new one will soon take its place. As long as the root cause is true, opposition will remain a challenge.
This system is playing out both on the side of peasants, but also nobles - each having their own organization with their own hierarchy. Once a certain percentage of your villagers become part of the opposition, the final event can be triggered.
For peasants, this takes the form of violent uprising. All villagers will gather and march toward the ruling family. If you've been paying your guards well, they will protect you, or join the villagers in their hunt. If you manage to kill enough villagers, the uprising will fail and you may continue your rule, though at a very high cost of losing many innocent lives.
Nobles are far more cunning with their resolution. Beware if a large number of noblemen are suddenly joining your town hall. This can only mean one thing - a unique encounter, in which you are simply given a choice - step down peacefully and go to exile, or fight for your life, person to person with other nobles in the room.
So how do you discover the founder? This is where your intelligence officer comes in handy. The intelligence report will contain information on any involvement in the uprising and give you a lead to another implicated family, higher in the hierarchy. As you continue investigating, you are bound to discover the founding family. Then the only mystery left is the specific person in it. Use your observation skills to get the right answer and then act fast. Throw them in prison, execute them, exile them, or do as you wish!
Disposing of the wrong person may bring you even more trouble, as every execution and exile increases the chances of villagers joining the opposition. So perhaps, you would like to resort to a secretive assassination. This will be performed by your intelligence officer and if successful, your target will be disposed without anyone having the slightest suspicion of your involvement.
You can also prevent the outcome of the revolution by improving the relationships and happiness of everyone who has already joined. When the time to act comes, they may have a change of heart and the uprising event will be over before it fully begins, with its morale seriously hindered and their memberships dwindling.
It should be emphasized, that our goal is to balance this system so that it takes serious efforts and a decent amount of time before any such event occurs, given it's devastating consequences! We have also included notifications that warn players about growing rumors, so they can react and have a chance to turn the situation around.
Word On Customization
We have learned from the feedback in previous updates, that having the ability to customize your game is very important to our players. You may be wondering with these new features, if the game you've signed up for in the past, is still going to be the same you fell in love with. That is not the case! Oppositions will be completely optional, and you can turn them off at the start of a new game, together with many other systems introduced in the previous updates. We will share more about this in our next post, where we will have a look at an overhauled trading experience, zone templates, underground mining, dynamic terrain, new fonts, other customizability features and a significant update to the UI, so stay tuned for more, including the release date announcement!
If you would like to participate in a closed beta and try these features early, please join our Discord for a chance to be invited! We apologize for not extending this option to players outside of the Discord, as we are not set for an efficient way of gathering feedback and bug reports outside of the server, but don't worry, the new update will be soon in your hands either way!
The price of Lords and Villeins is changing as we approach the full release
Greetings everyone,
We are almost there - the full version of Lords and Villeins is heading towards the release! All of the upcoming changes, as well as the release date, will be announced soon, so stay tuned for more details. With that, we have also decided to adjust the price of the game, so that it better reflects its finished state.
Lords and Villeins launched into Early Access back in 2019. We did early access to invite feedback from our community and improve the game with it. Thanks to all of you who adopted the game early, who were with us during this time and your generous feedback, we were able to improve and reach beyond our limits to create an awesome game. During this time, we released three major updates, each adding several new game systems and enhancements, as well as visual updates and new content to play with. The value of the game grew significantly over the years, and we felt that the original price no longer accurately reflects the hard work that we have put into it.
We will be raising the price for the game starting today, September 22, and moving forward you will be able to buy the game for 24,99 EUR / 24,99 USD / 21,99 GBP, which will also be the final price of the full version of the game. If you hurry, you can still get it for the Early Access price, but there's not much time left!
Thank you all for the feedback you keep providing, not only here on Steam, but on our Discord as well (please come join us, there is room for all of you). We can’t wait to deliver you the new update and fully realize the vision that we set for ourselves all those years ago.
Watch the Q&A with the developer now!
We greet you, Lords and Ladies,
Thank you all for attending our Q&A livestream, we were really happy to answer your questions and to get inspiration from your feedback!
If for any reason you were not able to watch us live, a recording is available on YouTube, so feel free to head there and check it out!
Don't forget to join our Discord server where we continuously discuss Lords & Villeins and its development!
Update 0.17.19 Brings Optimizations and Bugfixes!
We greet you, Lords and Ladies,
As you may have noticed, we released a content update for Lords & Villeins recently. Thanks to your ongoing support and your feedback, we were able to identify lot number of issues and balancing problems, which we fixed immediately and are sending the hotfix to you right now!
If you manage to find anything else that should get our attention, please share your feedback with us either on our Discord server or start a discussion here on Steam! Thank you very much for keeping your eyes open and communicating with us what should be improved! We hope you enjoy this update!
Full Changelog:
Functional Bug Fixes
Missing notification about a domesticated animal dying
Added fix that prevents servants to wear jewelry
Added missing ability of caravans to purchase animals from the player
Crash sometimes caused when an arrow was shot
Crash related to storing ground resources after a save was loaded once
Bug preventing bakers to make pies
Bug with wild animals not being generated in correct amounts throughout time
Bug preventing service fees to be paid and subsequently blocking other purchases
Villager getting stuck when charging at an enemy
Crash related to an inventory capacity being violated
Bugs related to relocating and feeding fainted villagers
Bug causing villagers to teleport when running away from crime
Bug causing all animals of certain herd to leave the map after a save file was loaded
Bug with fighting state machine that could cause vandalism to be stuck in a loop after a save file was loaded
Crash related to removing prisoner from jail, possibly preventing them to be freed properly
Reputation gains and losses by imprisoning and releasing were inverted
Crash related to a villager planning to go on a date with a villager that experienced death during this time
Bug causing villagers to be stuck in a loop of dropping repair kits
Bug incorrectly tracking church zones when they are removed
Bug causing villagers to collect fertilized eggs and preventing chicken to reproduce
Bug causing same-sex couples rolling for adoption chance twice, effectively doubling adoption probability over the intended value
Crash that could randomly occur during fighting
Bug preventing regiments to leave after they have been sent to war
Bug preventing construction on certain clay area as a result of faulty map generator
Visual bug of the execution display when rotated forward while executing teenagers
Missing inventory type allocation for pies
Several crashes related to loading a save file
Crash related to expelling a family
Bug causing animals to get stuck when left on a door tile
Bug causing any type of bench being considered as jail bench if placed inside of the jail
Bug causing clergy not purchasing what they need
Bug causing foragers to harvest trees before they are fully grown
Bug causing some items to load invisible
Bug causing ruling family to not study reading and writing
UI Bug Fixes
Create New button persisting through other pages of the population book
UI crash caused by an attempt to remove an animal from market listing
UI crash caused by a person dying when clergy tab was selected in the warehouse book
Incorrect amounts of consumed resources accumulated in the accounting reports
Bug with scrolling the family tree in the population book
Bug caused in tenure selection when a family of already existing last name was generated (we will be expanding the name list in future versions to avoid duplicates further).
Bug of randomly disappearing portraits in the population book
Bug incorrectly displaying cooking ingredient demand in the warehouse book
Bug causing requested soldiers to not be shown in the king report screen when it is first generated
Beehive displaying honey instead of honey comb
Floors were not displaying deterioration status in their tooltip
Fixed visuals of the variations for the good bed and good double bed assets
Overflowing UI element of the structure tooltip in the zone quick build context menu
Updated the king speech bubble text scaling to prevent text cutoffs in certain chapters
Misplaced yellow button highlight during tutorial in the build menu
Optimizations
Improved texture management and disposal to significantly reduce memory usage.
AI now has capacity to better organize among the family members by dynamically assigning roles. First role implemented was the purchaser who will collect all of the money the family owns and will heavily prioritize purchasing until it is no longer possible to buy things or all things have been bought. This should significantly reduce inefficiencies of the market where families would repeatedly go home to drop money and collect more money again because their plans had to change, or swap with another family member who ended up prioritizing it instead of them.
As a downside it is now more difficult to seize money from families because they are keeping them reserved in their pockets for most of the day and during that time they are not visible in the warehouse book. This will be addressed in future major updates.
Balancing Changes
Reduced chance of pregnancy for most animals and reduced also the frequency of procreation to provide more sustainable growth
Resources taxed by the king are now penalized in prioritization for the purpose of eating and refilling the feeder (they may still be used if there is no better option)
Probability of pregnancy for humans is now reduced only by the amount of living children (previously it would also reduce it by all children, including those already passed away).
Removed limitation for servant laborers to pick fruits only by one person. Regular families remain limited to prevent fruit picking to be too disruptive to their regular duties.
Added cap for thieves to not steal more than 5 gold worth of valuables, prioritizing money when stealing.
Rebalanced happiness and mood to provide smoother experience. Main changes include:
Player Reputation plays less of a significant role in reducing the happiness of people
Relationship with families also reacts to happiness a lot less aggressively, meaning it is less likely to drop due to people being somewhat unhappy. This also applies to nobles and it should increase the ability to keep them.
Significantly reduced negative impact on happiness for providing low pay to soldiers and servants (i.e. going lower than the default value).
Impact of the beauty need has been increased to promote the need for better housing of nobles. However, peasants beauty need is still satisfied relatively easily compared to nobles so this change should not impact peasants.
Reduced impact of ruler family members not knowing reading or writing
Increased impact of happiness penalties for nobles when they sleep in a low quality bed or eat normal meal.
In general, as long as peasants have food, heat, some kind of household with furniture and any kind of bed, their happiness should remain relatively high.
Updated balancing of carpenters and architects:
Time to produce repair kits have been doubled to reduce resource consumption and the resulting financial liquidity imposed on these families.
Price for a basic repair kit has been increased by about 150% to reflect the slower time to produce them and make them more profitable in general. Advanced repair kits kept their price since they were already expensive enough.
Updated balancing for military requests:
Reduced sizes of regiments requested by about 35%
The first soldier request will now arrive one year later than it currently did
Reduced the variance in regiment size requested to be more predictable and sustainable
Regiment requests will not increase in difficulty unless the player completes a certain minimum percentage equal to the threshold to receive additional favor points from the royals.
Reduced time for regiments to be away for war before the war outcome resolves to 50 - 70 days (roughly a year from previously 1 to 3 years).
Updated jailors and guards:
Jailors can now feed fainted prisoners so they don't die as a result of hunger.
Freeing a criminal and bringing them to the execution display can now also be performed by guards
Jail benches and jail chairs no longer require carpenter to be built
Increased the size of families generated through the favor point system by an additional generation.
Increased probability of mutual interest and requesting marriage after dating to increase the frequency of marriage requests.
Structures that are built or repaired are set to a random HP between 90-100%. This will space out their deterioration and make it easier to be maintained.
Grapes will no longer be requested by the royal tax since they can not be easily obtained from clergy.
Quality of Life Improvements
Added new Wattle Fence Gate asset that does not require carpenters to be built
Added new Brick and Crude Wood floor assets, costing 1 Brick and 1 Wood respectively
Added new storages
Drawer as a smaller version of the Cabinet
Small Barrel as a smaller version of the Barrel
Ground Depository as a smaller version of the Ground Storage
Small Shelves as a smaller version of the Shelves
Rusty Bookcase as a smaller version of the Bookcase
These storages do not require carpenter and have capacity equal to the existing larger equivalents. The current storages had their capacity and construction cost increased, but they now also require carpenter to be built.
Added storage capacity in KG displayed in the storage tooltip.
Added notification when a monk is initiated. This notification also corresponds with a bishop and minister being assigned as that happens immediately with the first two monks initiated.
Added shortcut button in the storefront context menu, which will open the buy tab with a family operating the storefront selected
Q&A Stream and Development Plans
Since we’ve launched the latest patch, many of you enjoyed the numerous additions and improvements that it brought to the game. From recruiting servants, and hiring builders to training soldiers and capturing criminals, our settlements got all the more lively.
Many of you have been sharing feedback, and reporting problems with the game and we’ve been listening and working hard to fix them. A patch is on the way delivering a large number of bug fixes, balancing updates, and quality of life improvements requested by our community. This patch is currently in closed beta and should be going live soon. Thank you to everyone for reporting problems, sharing your feedback, and remaining patient as we seek to address them!
Q&A Livestream
To address any remaining questions you might have directly and interactively, we will be hosting Q&A livestream! Mark the date in your calendar, post your questions and get ready!
When: Saturday, July 16th, 8PM CEST / 2PM EDT / 11AM PDT
As we’ve been reading the feedback, we’ve noticed few comments that were somewhat critical and expressing disappointment that we are failing to deliver on the premise of Lords and Villeins. We take this criticism seriously and we were thinking what is the best way to address it. While actions speak more than a thousand words and we believe that ultimately to earn solid trust and goodwill with our players, first and foremost we need to deliver good content, these things take time and transparent communication of the development is just as important. So we decided to give you a look behind the curtain. An extra level of detail behind our decisions, what early access means to us and why we chose to make our game this way.
The Decision to Launch in Early Access
It may seem obvious for a city builder genre, but deciding between the launch of the full version and early access was not an easy choice for us! The positives are clear - establishing a tight feedback loop with our community, giving our players a chance to shape the game early on and having a greater impact on what it ends up being while giving us a better insight into who our target audience is, so we can improve our chances to succeed within the limits of our creative vision.
What about some downsides? Building a procedurally generated simulation means that polishing this experience takes a long time. We knew that we will at the very least struggle to make the experience smooth during EA. While some level of roughness is generally accepted during EA, we remained conscious that this is not a free demo - we are charging our customers to access it, and with it comes a certain baseline of expectations and quality, that we will need to maintain throughout the majority of the development. With early access comes a lot of added pressure and extra time on top of an already complex and difficult game. A baseline that as a small team with our first game we may not be able to always meet.
Overall we felt that this is a tradeoff that is going to be a net positive for the game, so we went with it, and we’ve been very happy with our decision ever since the launch. The amount of feedback has been incredibly valuable and the game is simply a lot better for it. It brings the best out of us and makes us work harder and helps us to make a game that we are really proud of. However, the downsides do exist and it is a big challenge for us to manage well. One that we arguably have not always succeeded with and delivered versions of the game more rough than we would like to see.
Requests and Priorities
Another challenge that comes with game development in general, but even more so during early access, is sorting the feedback, evaluating the impact of certain problems, and prioritizing them correctly. We receive many suggestions, feature requests, and feedback about the user experience on daily basis and it is our job to estimate how impactful they can be if they are a good fit for our vision, and what would be the best time to focus on them.
Here are some of the most significant things that we consider with each feedback:
What are the possible solutions and do they overlap with something we are already planning to do?
What part of our player base is impacted by it and how often do they encounter the problem?
Does the team agree with the perception of the problem?
Does it align with our vision or is this a case of a misplaced expectation?
What is the scope of the intended solution?
When can we implement the solution in a way that does not impact the timeline of delivering new content?
Is it worth delaying the new content if there is no such possibility?
When is it the most effective to act? Is it more efficient to solve the problem now or later?
Will the problem last when we implement some of the features planned in later updates?
Are there any simple and creative solutions that are worth doing in the meantime to reduce the impact of the problem?
Answers to these questions are often intuitive, based on feelings or subjective experiences, or driven by the personal motivations of our team. We listen to our players and reflect within the team on what we would like to see achieved with our game as well. While making these decisions, we also make a lot of assumptions about our future, what will happen next and how much of our time will be needed on everything else. All while doing our best to respect our limits, have a healthy working culture without excessive crunch, and take good care of our mental health.
We don’t always make the right call. Sometimes we hyper-focus on minor things, and we run out of time and start making undesirable shortcuts. And each time we do, we make sure to take a step back, improve our process and communication, find things to learn to do better and refocus for the next update. Admittedly problems with our planning led to certain parts of our game being under-prioritized longer than they should have, resulting in issues that were avoidable in hindsight. We are far from perfect, but we always try to learn.
The Compound Effect
In the game development, there is a tendency for features to compound the complexity of everything that comes after them. Every feature, even the smallest one, has the potential to collide with something else, or at the very least increase the scope of the testing cycle we do before each update. This means that as we move throughout the development, it is increasingly more time-consuming to ensure the game is balanced, stable, and relatively bug-free.
The earlier a feature is done, the more time it will take overall during the full development process to be maintained. This is crucial for our planning, to prioritize certain features first. And it means that overly focusing on maintaining a perfectly polished experience during early access would be highly inefficient and if we would, the game would suffer from a lack of content. This is the main reason why balancing and AI optimization takes a long time to get right. Not only because there is a lot of iterations for us to learn and find a sweet spot with feedback, but even more so because they get impacted by nearly everything new added to the game and we have to exert significant efforts to iron out systems that have already been polished multiple times before, while also aiming to improve them every time.
What Is Next?
So how do we plan to approach these issues moving forward? What are our plans for future content? After the minor update goes live, the next thing to look forward to is our last early access major update, what we internally call The Ruling Update. This update will be one that marks the end of the early access and it will focus on the ruling family and expand some of the fantasy and storytelling elements around being a ruler.
We will introduce a high council with important positions such as Master of Coin and Master of Law, but also already existing titles like bishop and minister. You will be able to select privileged villagers from the ranks of clergy, nobles, military, and your own ruling family to sit at the table with you. These positions give you access to new ruling actions, such as collecting intelligence about villagers, ordering propaganda to improve your reputation, or faking the tax reports to the royals so you can get away with paying less.
We will also introduce a town hall with hearings - a weekly event where selected villagers will approach you with problems in a more personal way. This update also focuses on community requests more than others, so you can expect some long-requested features to be added. We are not ready to confirm anything specific yet, so stay tuned for more details later.
Since the Ruling Update marks the end of early access, the amount of new content added in this patch will be smaller compared to the updates released previously, so that we can focus more of our time hunting down bugs, balancing the game, adding community requested features, and improving the AI and performance of the game. We will also take longer than usual to deliver this update, to give ourselves more time to improve the game, though we don't have any specific dates to anounce right now.
Hopefully, with this post, we’ve been able to give you an interesting insight into some of the challenges we face when developing this game. Our goal with this article is in no way to diminish the problems our game currently has and the criticism that our players share. They are important to us and we are doing what we can to address them as soon as possible. We also understand that the game industry is often not delivering on the promises that game developers make and players feel rightly skeptical. This article is not trying to change that.
Sometimes, in all of the excitement for video games, it is easy to forget that video games are made by people that have their limits. The game has been developed by four people, two of which have now moved to new projects as we reach the final stage of the development, and there are a lot of roles outside of making the game itself, that are part of our responsibilities. For many of us on the team, this is our first big game made so we are also making more mistakes and it has been a big opportunity to learn for us. Despite these issues, we are immensely proud of what we managed to make, and we simply hope that players will stick with us for the journey and that our work will sooner or later speak for itself. Many have already found great joy and satisfaction with what we do and we hope to grow our audience further and further for as long as we can!
Thank you for being with us on this wonderful journey! If you have some extra questions or comments, please leave them below or come join us on Saturday for the Q&A livestream!
To end with something more positive, we will leave you with screenshots from a community challenge that we’ve recently had on our discord. These settlements are nothing short of amazing so we hope you will love them as much as we do!
