Statistics
In game statistics and ranking was added. A player can see these statistics after selecting its own lord in the map view and then clicking the new button in the lord info panel on the left side of the screen.
To see this information for enemy lords, one can click the lord name in the quick details window of the army on the map.
The lord stats window that opens will also show if the selected lord is the main or a secondary lord of the player owning it. The main lord, which is the lord a player creates with the character creator, will be referred to as “Sovereign”. Other lords belonging to the same player will be referred to as “… subject of …” followed by the main lord name. This way, a player actions can be traced, even when creating secondary lords.
Additionally, all battle reports have received indicators to show both the value of the troops lost by the attacker and the defender.
New items
Upgrades for the armors available on blacksmith level 1 and level 2 have been introduced. Upgrading these armors can only be done by completing quests for Casian and Myridon. 5 new quests were introduced for this purpose. The upgraded item is (slightly) better then a similar item bought from the next level blacksmith. For example, the upgraded cloth armor is better then the berserker armor. Additionally, the player may choose to specialize the armor. Specialization alters the stats on an item. A cloth armor can have its typically high speed reduced to 1 but have increased accuracy, an ideal option for archers. Or an iron armor can have its armor value reduced in order to be as fast as a cloth armor, and so on. These items, which require substantial work and cost to obtain, can add some extra punch to a lord troops. They are aimed to be used either for doing easy quests, fighting battles you can win without losing a single soldier, or for player versus player engagements when winning is more important then wearing your opponent down.
New quests and quest maps
There are 5 new quest maps, for the 5 new quests. The new quests will randomly pick one of these 5 maps and use it as a template. So, it is not that a quest will always use the same map.
These maps and quests are different for the others in the sense that they have 7-8 groups of enemies on them and you only need to defeat 3 of those. This allows the player to be very selective.
Additionally, some of the items required for quest completion will be spawned randomly on these maps. There will be exactly 3 occurrences of a stack of boxes, containing items that you need to complete the quest.
The player can also select what item wants to get as reward. This happens of course before accepting the quest.
Other then upgrading the gear, the maps offer very little resource value to the player and also the quests give very small experience rewards.
Item presentation
Since a single icon is no longer sufficient to visually identify a weapon, 2 new pieces of information were added to the armor icons. One of these is a small icon showing the specialization of the item. It can be either a heart (red) showing extra hp, an eye (purple) to show extra accuracy, a lighting bolt (yellow) to show extra speed, a shield (black) to show extra armor/defense, or an arrow pointing up (green) showing no specialization, but better stats. In the inventory windows, where the icons are small, these symbols are replaced by small dots of the corresponding color. This is also true for the icons of the troops (showing the main weapon, main armor and secondary weapon).
Additionally, since it is possible to upgrade the same armor twice, the level of the item will now be visible for all items in the barracks, troops information and tooltips. Upgrading/specializing the items will also grant +1 tech level. That means, while a cloth armor is tech 1 by default, when upgraded once it will become tech 2 (same as a leather armor, or berserker cloth) and when upgraded again will become tech 3 (same as a hard leather armor or heavy chain mail for example).
This is very important and useful when fighting neutral armies (NPCs) since the altered stats can give rise to very wild variations of enemies. Having a bunch of cloth armored two handed swordsmen using speed specialized cloth armor means that they will hit first and they will also hit hard. Archers will not be a good idea in this case. Alternatively, accuracy specialized iron armor dressed enemies should not be engaged by melee troops, and so on.
Quality of life changes
It is now possible to toggle the inventory of an army by clicking the button. The button also received a shortcut. You can open/close the inventory by pressing the “i” key on the keyboard.
The spell menu has also received a shortcut. Pressing “s” will open/close it.
Having the chat field open and selected will disable any shortcuts. This eliminates the problem of “space” being interpreted as what it was for the chat as well as an “end turn” command. You can safely chat in battle now.
The skip next deploy round toggle in combat will now remember its setting from one battle to the other. That means, for battles where the player wants to deploy only some if the available troops, clicking on that toggle is no longer necessary. Since most battles seem to by like this, especially for the “command” lords, this should be a very big improvement to the life of the owners of those lords.
The starting screen was removed. The game will start directly in full screen mode on the best available resolution and the player can change the display settings from the settings menu in game.
Performance changes
The meshes of most objects on the map were baked into a single mesh, substantially improving performance.
The buildings in the castle have also had their meshes baked, improving performance.
The trees in the castle view were replaced by 2D billboards to also increase performance. The terrain was also changed to make this change less visible to the eye. The performance increase in this case is really big.
Map units are no longer animated if they are not visible. This is not to big of a deal but it is an improvement none the less.