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Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown News

City Builder Fest Announcement


Greetings fair Nysians,

Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown is participating in the Steam City Builder & Colony Fest! Don’t miss out on a 25% off discount, for a limited time only.

If you are into complex city-builders with a rich medieval lore, this is the game for you! Since we launched in Early Access last year, we’ve been hard at work implementing new features and improving gameplay, stability and performance. Some of our exciting quality of life additions include:
  • Visual fidelity overhaul: Textures and lighting in the game now render in 4K, providing stunning enhancements without sacrificing performance.
  • Expanded strategic depth: We’ve introduced militia units, citizen revolts and smarter AI for even more satisfying RTS combat while defending your city.
  • Refined city building gameplay: Trade route improvements, new highly detailed buildings and structures to customize your kingdom, and so much more!
Want to know more about gameplay, combat and narrative mechanics? Jump onto our YouTube channel @ThriveHLTC to check out our videos for in-depth walkthroughs of how to play Thrive.

There has never been a better time to invite a friend into the world of Nysamor for a multiplayer campaign - will you reign together or battle as foes?

The Zugalu team

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Chat with us on Discord about your own journey as you play through the campaign! If you’d like to stay updated with all future developments, be sure to follow us on:

TikTok - Follow us @thrivehltc
X/Twitter - Follow us @thrivehltc
Instagram - Like Our Instagram Page
YouTube - Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel
Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown Website - Official Website

Find out more about PlaySide Publishing on its Official website

To learn more about Zugalu Entertainment, please visit its official website

February Update - New Influence System, Decorative Buildings and more!

Greetings fair Nysians,

We’re excited to share that our next update includes key features that are arriving a full month ahead of schedule (as part of our Early Access roadmap). The Influence System, Decorative Buildings and Improved Wyrmaxa were all completed earlier than anticipated, and rather than holding it back, we want you to experience it as soon as possible. By releasing it early, we’re also ensuring a smoother rollout - our goal is always to deliver the best possible experience and we can’t wait for you to dive into the world of Nysamor and check it out for yourselves.

We also want to say a massive thank you to the Thrive Discord community for their support and time during the update early preview period this week, and to everyone for your support throughout Early Access so far. Your time, and feedback has been truly invaluable in helping us bring our vision for the game to life.

Now is the perfect time for you and your friends to jump in and defend Nysamor together, and experience all the new additions, fixes, and quality of life improvements in Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown!
[h2]New Features[/h2] New:
  • Influence System
  • Decorative Buildings
    • Reduces pollution and increases happiness
  • Wyrmaxa Attack Raids
    • Wyrmaxa attacks your territories when at war.
    • Assaults occur every 5 days and get progressively harder.
    • Small Improvement to Wyrmaxa AI pathing in combat.
  • Updated Wall Placement System
    • Walls place and connect easier
  • Difficulty Settings added
    • Normal
      • Start with higher happiness
      • Increased production speed
      • Less fires
      • Adjusted villager threshold for villager needs
  • Hard
    • Original game difficulty
Fixed:
  • Provinces becoming neutral after claiming
  • De-Sync in multiplayer
  • Unit placement on stone walls
  • Small fixes for influence, initial caravan uses influence, influence tool tip only shows on buildings that cost influence
  • Aqueduct buildings now graphically show whether they are powered or not
  • Entertainment buildings providing happiness bonus when they have no one working there
  • Catapult start position and wall placement amended
  • Towns not surrendering or certain buildings not being able to be attacked
  • Game saves not showing up in game
  • Archers on walls not changing teams with rest of Wyrmaxa on surrender
  • Camera issues on loading game while camera is over a mountain
  • Localization not updating in-game
  • Localization not appearing on the influence tooltip
  • Wyrmaxa destroyed tool tip
  • Military units phasing through walls when in formations
  • Multiplayer save name error bug
  • Homeless people showing up in the houses in the wrong territories
  • Adjust layout of influence & wealth tooltip to ensure German & Russian translations aren’t cut off
  • Disabled localiser on influence tooltip
  • Added destroyed state to stone walls
  • Updated name and description of water wheel building
  • Lag when typing save name
  • Construction ghosts reappearing on loaded game
  • Scholars given as event reward instead of thralls
  • Issue with caravan pathing around tight corners
  • Tech tree repeating research
  • Outposts failing to clear zone when all buildings destroyed
  • Riots always being called
  • Tutorial localization improved
  • Beasts eating
  • Balancing changes to farmer needs
  • Road tiles drawing at node navigation points
[h2]Decorative Buildings [/h2]
We’ve added new buildings and structures so you now have the ability to decorate your cities in a unique way! Not only can you customize your kingdom to make it feel full of life, but each structure counterbalances pollution and beautification, and improves the happiness of your population. They also give bonuses to surrounding buildings such as happiness, taxes, production, movement speed and influence.

Different structures unlock at different points throughout the game with neutral buildings, as well as Benevolent and Tyrannical-specific options as your kingdom progresses down one of the two paths.

Neutral Decorations
  • Trees - 23 Variations
  • Hedges - 3 Variations
Benevolent specific decorations
  • Bench, Flag Pole, Flower Bed, Fountain, Graveyard, Hedge Maze, Pony Ride, Statue, Streetlight
Tyrannical specific decorations
  • Obelisk, Flag Pole, Streetlight, Crypt, Graveyard, Statue, Hanging Cage, Spiked Heads, Torture Rack
[h2]Influence System[/h2]
In Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown, we have created an Influence system that limits the amount of provinces and military units in your game. It acts like a currency that is spent to acquire more of these things!

Once these items are lost or destroyed, the currency is returned. You will start the game with a small amount of Influence and when your population increases, or you upgrade your Keep, you will gain more Total Influence.

You will start with an amount (100) and increase it as your population grows and you reach the next tier. Every certain amount of global population will get a one time boost in Total Influence. The top tier class of each Benevolent and Tyrannical paths, will increase influence at a much quicker rate.

Influence is a permanent currency that when used reduces the amount and when items that used it are lost or destroyed, the currency is returned to the pool. Acquiring more provinces, having alliances with towns or players, military units and caravans spend influence

[h3]Costs of Influence[/h3]
Provinces
  • Large 40
  • Medium 20
  • Small 10
  • Central province Medium 40
  • Central small 20


Military Units
  • Neutral units 2 per
  • B/t units 5 per
  • Special units 10 per
  • Siege 15 per
  • Caravans 5 per


Classes of People
  • Farmers every 60
  • Laborers every 40
  • Scholars every 20
  • Curators every 5
  • Thralls every 100
  • Acolytes every 5
  • Noble classes generate 5 influence per noble.


Global Population Plus 25 per Tier
  • 100
  • 300
  • 500
  • 800
  • 1200
  • 1500
  • 2000



We will have more to share in the very near future, so stay tuned for exciting updates. You do not want to miss out! Now is your time. This is your land. Long may you reign, and long may you thrive.

Chat with us on Discord about your own journey as you play through the campaign! If you’d like to stay updated with all future developments, be sure to follow us on:

Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown Website - Official Website
X/Twitter - Follow us @thrivehltc
Facebook - Like Our Facebook Page
YouTube - Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel

Find out more about PlaySide Publishing on its official website

To learn more about Zugalu Entertainment, please visit its official website

Early Preview - February Update

Greetings fair Nysians,

Our February update is almost here!

We’re thrilled to announce that our next update is exclusively available right now to our Discord community ahead of public release. If you’re interested in checking out all the new additions and accessing it early, you can get all the details by joining our official Discord server.

We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to the Thrive community for their invaluable feedback on our update during last month’s early preview weekend, as well as for your incredible support since we launched Early Access. Your time and input are greatly appreciated and a massive help in bringing our game to life. We’ll be posting more comprehensive blog notes when the update goes live next week, but we’re excited to reveal that we’ve added a new Influence System, Decorative Buildings, plus:

Changes:
  • Improved wall functionality (movement and destruction)
  • Improved Wyrmaxa (patrols, attacks and defense)
  • Fix for conquered Provinces becoming neutral again
Known Issues (Fixes in Progress)
  • Missing translations from Influence System
  • Loading into Co-Op - only the host can see the players names
  • Some minor visual issues

We will have more to share in the very near future, so stay tuned for exciting updates. You do not want to miss out!

Now is your time. This is your land. Long may you reign, and long may you thrive.

Chat with us on Discord about your own journey as you play with friends or through the campaign! If you’d like to stay updated with all future developments, be sure to follow us on:

Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown Website - Official Website
X/Twitter - Follow us @thrivehltc
Facebook - Like Our Facebook Page
YouTube - Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel

Find out more about PlaySide Publishing on its official website

To learn more about Zugalu Entertainment, please visit its official website


New Update - New Militia, Riots & more!

Greetings fair Nysians,

As part of our Early Access roadmap, our latest update is available now!

We also wanted to say a special thank you to the Thrive community in our Discord who have taken the time to be a part of our save and load build testing this week, and to everyone for your support throughout Early Access so far. Your time, and feedback has been truly invaluable in helping us bring our vision for the game to life.

Now is the perfect time for you and your friends to jump in and defend Nysamor together, and experience the quality of life improvements in Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown!

Added:
  • Hired militia units for early-game defense
  • Citizen revolts
  • Optimizations to the Save/Load system to reduce time taken for each action
  • Ability to hover on town to display town name
  • New road rendering system for better performance
  • Notification when the merchant arrives in town
  • Notification for when a player creates a trade route with a different team in multiplayer mode
Fixed:
  • The defeat screen allowing players to go back to main menu and can no longer continue the game
  • How happiness items are displayed in the UI
  • Edicts not activating correctly when loading a save
  • Missing translations for ‘progress’ text during construction of buildings
  • Benevolent Quarry graphics
  • Progress text on Construction module when translated
  • Units now face the proper direction when rioting, spread out more and move more as a group
  • Removed unreachable resources from territory borders so villagers can farm those resources.
  • Baked overworld road pathfinding to have more consistent shorter paths
  • Translations on Onboarding ‘One Off’ Item displays
  • Translations on Caravans ToolTip
  • Texture issues with the building ground decals
  • Improvements to overworld road pathfinding
  • Building loading system
  • Deleting Bridges not updating navigation map
  • Military unit names not appearing in tooltip on multi military unit UI
  • Military hotkey UI to show the proper hotkeys
  • Localisation of narrative event rewards
  • Localisation of secondary onboarding objective titles (such as the ones triggered by fires and disease)
  • Missing information from Bevevolent/Tyrannical classes in stats panel
  • Issues with Tome of Knowledge and Stats panel extending off-screen in 16:10 aspect ratio
  • Bug where a storage would display a negative amount
  • Caravan farmers no longer stuck at loading 9/10
  • 'Caravans' info panel no longer fails to localize in any language in the 'Resource bar' in the top left UI
  • Cinematic Audio settings
  • Resource flag AOI and highlights
  • Z & X keys overriding modified squad controls
  • Onboarding objective display cut off in 16:10 aspect ratio
  • Caravan hot key buttons
  • Crash when host crashes/leaves and a client saves
  • Win/loss display, and scoreboard
  • Switching language from Chinese to English leaves blank boxes for revolt warning
  • Caravan or Military Hotkeys
  • 'Ctrl+C' not functioning in-game correctly to deploy the 'Caravan'
  • Z & X Hotkeys Conflicting with each other
  • Dead units remaining as icons in Barracks
  • Thralls not using happiness goods
  • Issue when camera pans over mountains above the cloud height locking the camera above the clouds
  • Military units no longer get stuck in the center of the map

[h3]Revolts and Riots[/h3]

If the Happiness level of a class of citizens is below a certain threshold for an extended period of time and they do not emigrate or die, the people will find ways to make their voices heard. If 20 or more individuals of the same class are discontent there is now a chance that they may begin to Revolt and eventually Riot.

Revolt Penalties (per citizen class) default: under 45 happiness
  • 25% Penalty on Provincial Tax Income (cumulative, per-class)
  • Associated jobs of that citizen class are ‘Locked’ (citizen cannot be fired)
  • Locked job slots suffer a 50% Production penalty


Riot Penalties default: under 30 happiness
All Revolt penalties plus:
  • Citizens of that class will take to the streets in a large crowd, yelling and waving torches and pitchforks
  • They will start outside the keep or a random building if there is no keep. After a short gathering period they will move on to start targeting specific buildings
  • There will be a chance to set targeted buildings on fire. Mainly production buildings and buildings of higher classes.
  • Thralls have a chance to spawn aggressive units(grimrot) that will attack structures.


Stopping a Revolt
To stop a Revolt, the player can complete an event, or raise happiness back up to safe levels through the provision of Needs, structures, and other means. Once the Needs have been met, the raging population will be satisfied and life returns to normal.

Thrall Rebellions
Unlike the other classes, the Thrall class under the heel of a Tyrant are ready and willing to resort to extreme violence to regain their freedom. When this class ends up in a Revolt they will begin to spawn hostile units that will attack structures, as well as your own military units. The only way to quell these groups is through direct force and fulfilling their needs.

[h3]Hired Militia[/h3]
Before a player gains access to more reliable combat units, they have no way to protect themselves in the event of an attack. To tackle this problem, players are now able to temporarily hire citizens into a militia, aimed at dealing with the incursion.

Units will be hired through the keep in groups of “10” except for the scout as an individual. With a limit of 3 contracts out at time. There will be a 1 day delay in re-upping a contract if one is cancelled. Contracts will cost “x” amount of gold initially and will have a continuous fee per day to be active. If you run out of money and can't pay the contracts are cancelled. If units within the “10” die but not the entirety of the group then they will respawn slowly over time. If the group is wiped out completely the contract is cancelled. These units do not require food to sustain life.

Militia Unit Types

Militia Bowman (Sling or Bow)
Capable of weak ranged attacks. They have a slightly lower range than a Bowman, and inflict a paltry amount of damage in comparison.
Militia Spearman (Spear/Pitchfork)
The standard rank-and-file militia, these fighters lack much of the punch of a higher quality spearmen, but should be able to at least hold off attackers for a brief time.
Scout (Knife)
The weakest overall combat unit, the Scout has a simple purpose: Move faster than anyone else, locate potential threats, and get back to safety. See below.
The Scout
The weakest overall combat unit, the Scout has a simple purpose: Move faster than anyone else, locate potential threats, and get back to safety.



We will have more to share in the very near future, so stay tuned for exciting updates. You do not want to miss out! Now is your time. This is your land. Long may you reign, and long may you thrive.

Chat with us on Discord about your own journey as you play through the campaign! If you’d like to stay updated with all future developments, be sure to follow us on:

Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown Website - Official Website
X/Twitter - Follow us @thrivehltc
Facebook - Like Our Facebook Page
YouTube - Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel

Find out more about PlaySide Publishing on its official website

To learn more about Zugalu Entertainment, please visit its official website

Steam Winter Sale - 25% Off Now

Greetings rulers - and any travellers passing by that plan to visit the kingdoms of Nysamor!

For a limited time only, you can purchase Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown at 25% off in the Steam Winter Sale now until January 2nd 2025.


Immerse yourself in the lore behind Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown which is rich and full of mystery. The characters, the provinces and world bring depth into our medieval city builder, where every decision you make defines the rule of your kingdom. There is no wrong path, only your path, your rule.

Does a Benevolent leadership of goodwill, hope and prosperity call to you? Or perhaps as a Tyrannical ruler you’ll take pleasure in exploitation and torture. Will you rule alone, or with up to four friends?

Plus, if you’re looking for players to join a Co-Op or PvP game, join our Discord community and post in our LFG channels.

If you’d like to stay updated with all future developments, be sure to follow us on:
Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown Website - Official Website
X/Twitter - Follow us @thrivehltc
Facebook - Like Our Facebook Page
YouTube - Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel
Find out more about PlaySide Publishing on its official website.
To learn more about Zugalu Entertainment, please visit its official website.