New AI
The AI has been improved to take into account potential enemy damage and speed.
Archers will now move and then shoot, to get into the safest possible position.
New Quests
The queste have been separated in two categories, repeatable and non-repeatable. The one time quests (which can be one time per account or one time per lord) generally will be harder and give out more rewards on completion. Also, the maps of one time quests will contain more treasure.
Quests do depend on one another, so you should run all of them, even the repeatable ones. The following quest givers received new quests Casian has 4 new repeatable quests, Myridon 4 new repeatable quests, Pippi located north of the starting town got 4 repeatable quests, Ragnar located north of Myridon got 1 one time and 3 repeatable quests, Serena ocated in the far north got 2 one time and 2 repeatable quests. These are located on the starter map. On the barbarian map, all three quest givers have quests now. Nimka, located north of the jump in portal has 1 one time and 5 repeatable quests, Kitsune, located in the far north, behind the mountains, has 2 one time and 4 repeatable quests and finally Michi, located just north of the exit jump portal, has 1 one time and 5 repeatable quests. On the Knight island the quest giver called Temporary will give very easy quests that will upgrade your equipment and open rich maps but the player will be vulnerable to attacks from other players.
It is now possible to attack players while they are doing a quests, or forcefully cancel their quest if they are not inside the map.
Balancing pass for armor and weapons
Leather armor has become specialized and will provide damage reduction (evasion) and extra hitpoints.
Iron armor will provide strong armor, allowing for full damage protection under certain circumstances and just a bit more hitpoints.
Cloth armor will specialize in adding damage and movement speed.
Added some new armor, so that there are one of each type of armor available for each level starting at level 2.
The spear weapons have their armor penalty reduced to 50%.
More skills
Added a lot more command skills. They allow the player to specialize for different types of weapons/armor and can mitigate some of the penalties of weapons. They are an alternative to the heroic skills gained from direct lord combat.
With the introduction of these new skills, the number of troops carried by the lord at the beggining of the game has been severely lowered, and should very very slowly scale up to the original values before this patch.
Overall, with the command skills, players will do pretty much the same as before but with fewer soldiers.
The magic skills have been rebalanced.
New town interface
The town now has hand painted scenery. This also means that the slots in each town are limited and only some buildings can be build on certain slots. There are 3 types of towns, the started one, the barbarian one (a bit bigger), and the knight one (biggest so far).
The siege workshop and mage tower now have max assigned worker limits based on their levels.
Lord combat penalties
The lord will heal for only a certain amount of hitpoints after each battle (one new skill will increase that amount) and another bigger amount after each turn (one new skill will increase that amount). This will prevent the player to only use the lord and abuse the 100% healing ability it had after each battle. When the lord dies, or the battle is lost (player retreats), the player has to wait for one turn so that the lord will recuperate at least some (if not all) of its hitpoints.
Experience and resources
The resource distribution has been rebalanced. Certain quests will happen on maps containing specific resources, giving the player the possibility to farm more of one particular resource. Gold spawn chance has been dramatically reduced, and the player will be forced to get more by selling regular resources and plunder on the market.
The experience will scale somewhat depending on the risk taken into the battle. Battles where there is more contact between the enemy and the player troops will yield a lot more experience (up to 10 times the normal amount, for “close calls”) but battles where the enemy did not even manage to land a hit will yield a lot less, but not less then 25% of the normal value. This way, the player will have the option to choose between no loses and slow experience progress or some loses but quicker leveling.
UI changes
The lord and castle list are now shown on top, not on the right side.
City hall window (town economy report) was revamped so that it will show only the needed info and will not allow for plunder transfer.
When multiple objects are on the same spot on map, there will be a dialogue asking the player which one should be the one it interacts with. This happens to quest markers only at the moment. No other map objects can overlap.